by Janny Wurts
“Where I truly belonged. Rest your case. I have more pressing questions.” Always, his tread was unnervingly silent. When the shutter snapped shut at his hand, Vivet flinched.
Stung by the disadvantage, she hushed Valien and plunked him on the braided rug by the settle. Then she fumbled the striker off the bent nail and snapped a spark to the hanging lantern. The wick flamed and caught. Fitful light exposed Arin, retired to the cedar chest next to her bed. Discoloured scabs mottled his desperate nakedness, covered hastily by a snatched blanket.
“If you’ll wash first, I have button trousers and a smock shirt in the armoire.” Vivet had not traded the clothing his trapper’s coin bought, made to measure.
“I sluiced off at the falls, first.” He sported spectacular bruises, not dirt. Pain hitched his movement as he padded around the bedstead and laid claim to her surprise offering. He dressed quickly, his adamant privacy shielded behind the armoire’s gapped door. The raw rope burns on his ankles unavoidably stayed within view. Nor might he bear proper weight on slashed soles, infected and angry with swelling.
Vivet’s heart twisted with unwanted sympathy. “You’ll need salve for those wounds if you plan to run.” She ruffled Valien’s hair, more for her own comfort as she admitted, “I cannot shelter you from a death sentence.” No one survived the shamans’ retribution, far less escaped as a fugitive.
Arin answered her note of alarm. “The ghouls with the cleavers are beating the brush everywhere else but inside the settlement.” He stepped out, engrossed with lacing his cuff points, and there, bared to light, lay the welted scar burned into his forearm by the Light’s holy avatar. Talking still, misapprehending her flash-point fear, he ran on with disarming gentleness, “Are you coming or staying? You have time to pack. Roaco’s not apt to rush the colossal shame of exposing his toothless embarrassment.”
“The cabal will kill you!” Proof of his secret identity spiked Vivet’s fraught protest. “Valien and I will suffer as well if I stir a finger to help you.”
He looked up. “Your association with me taints your name, regardless.” Preternaturally calm, he measured her jagged terror, unflinching. “At least in my company you’d have to be caught, first. The cabal might gang up against us with clubs, or maybe pitch stones from a distance.”
Which blistering confidence wrenched Vivet up short. “What? Are you addled?” She grabbed her straw broom and attacked the lesser vexation of cleaning up shards and squashed fruit. “Every forsaken bird in their mews will be hunting you down!”
“Well, they would,” Arin admitted, bemused, “provided the sentries still steered their familiars through spellcraft.”
Her palliative clatter filled the stiff pause while Arin perched on the bed. He steadied Valien’s tipsy bid to stand upright, and admitted, “I’ve defanged Roaco’s conclave of serpents. Their poisonous power is broken.”
Vivet’s sweeping stopped with a jerk. “Then you’ve made me a sitting target!”
Arin inclined his head. “Only if you renounce my obligation to Valien. I returned to see both of you settled and safe. But not here. Agree to leave Ettin tonight, and I’ll do all I can to support your son’s well-being until his maturity.”
The assurance just spoken reflected the dread resources of his true heritage. Born to royal authority, also Master of Shadow, the man under her roof never once had displayed the full range of his arcane talent. Not until his defeat of the Ettinmere cabal. Slight in build, unassuming in manner, he seemed deceptively ordinary with his thumbs taken captive by Valien’s unbalanced grip. Always, he had avoided the indulgences that might impair his free movement. Vivet noted the striking change and realized such relaxed self-possession meant her glamour of beguilement no longer affected him. Which set-back ground hurtful salt in the wound since her fate stayed embroiled with his beyond quarter.
Vivet dropped pretence. No choice, in fact, remained to be made. She had ever been a slave to her duty, resigned to play through the terrible end game. “I’ll be packing, then, as soon as Valien’s had something to eat. I gather there’s no time to sleep? Then you might as well shred my bed-linens for dressings and care for your injured feet.”
Summer 5925
Knife’s Edge
Sethvir watched all that moved in Athera, distanced in glass-eyed reverie amid tipsy piles of books in his library eyrie at Althain Tower. Again forced to defer a perilous sojourn into the Radmoore grimward to wrest information from Haspastion’s shade, he straightened at the percussive, first note of The Hatchet’s advance into Daon Ramon Barrens. Prelude to an onrushing disaster, the quick-marched columns cut a swathe of bruised vegetation beneath the enamel sky of midsummer. False comfort, the brief reprieve bought for the besieged mysteries in Deshir’s free wilds: the True Sect host’s abrupt turnabout unleashed a more dreadful array of priorities. Sethvir stared into the eye of a crisis far beyond the scope of the clan losses spent to hold Strakewood’s defence.
For the nexus forecast by the Mad Prophet’s augury strung Mankind’s future above the abyss.
One moment, inevitable, turned destiny’s card like the bell stroke that shattered all hope; or else, like the phoenix birthed from immolation, a spark struck in bright, helpless pain might salvage the cold course of destiny. No way to tell which ahead of the crux where possibility ended, and probability dimmed to opacity. The veiled outcome had been graven in time since the perilous hour Asandir marked his oath to the Koriani Prime by stone’s witness.
Reckoning begat consequence: deferred only, the promised debt at last became rendered due.
The freshly trimmed quill in Sethvir’s hand splayed and snapped. Fingers stippled with sprayed ink, he watched a stain jagged as despair mar his penned line of manuscript.
“Fatemaster’s grief, we’re pinched by our short hairs!” Shaken, he tossed the spoiled nib aside, then pushed back his carved chair, and rose.
The barrage of the earth-link thrummed on, the flicker of heat lightning become distant thunder as he padded barefoot to the north wall. There, the antique aumbry of Vhalzein lacquer held a cluttered cache of stray oddments. The Sorcerer dug his ceramic pot from the jumble of spooled thread, dried ink-wells, and an herbwitch’s charm circlet of mouse skulls. He refilled his mug with raspberry tea, steeped acrid and long since gone tepid.
Althain’s Warden sipped the bitter brew, while the wrens cheeped in their thatched nests under the outside eaves. Around him, statement of obdurate endurance, the tower’s warded stonewalls baked and sweltered, while summer’s ascendant sun shimmered the powder-blue haze of Atainia’s horizon. Sethvir abandoned the barren view, while, from broad-scale trends to minutiae, the bleak pattern tightened.
Air gave him the flights of the temple messenger-birds, winging the thread-tied cylinders with their cryptic reports between High Priests. Movement answered, ponderous, inexorable, as The Hatchet’s orders provoked a deeper reverberation, and writs of alarm mustered the garrisoned men out of Jaelot and Tharidor. Day on day, the dissonance mounted, as jammed roadways hampered the trade caravans west-bound over the Skyshiel peaks. From the notch, down the switch-backed descent to the Paravian marker where the dry course of the Severnir met Daenfal Lake, Sethvir sensed the panic, as pressured supply sowed scarcity in the town markets. Through the forge fires’ tang and the reek of smoked fish, he heard the hungry poor, and in silenced tears, the whisper of Dace Marley’s recrimination: that one choice, enacted, had allowed Lysaer’s edict to turn the Light’s war host southward. Countless lives had been spared in Deshir. But at what dire penalty, sown elsewhere?
“Ah, my dear, may you never bear the harsh brunt,” Sethvir murmured in anguish.
Others, predestined, would not escape the blind grace of moral ambiguity. While portents dimmed the flux like a storm front, the next signal ripple flickered through water: Dakar, Tarens, and Elaira forded the shallows of the Aiyenne by the gleam of a cloud-mottled moon. In their company, Sethvir noted the point of polarized, green fire, and another frigid
as black ice. Bound into the gyre, the enchantress still carried the royal signet of Rathain and Mother Dark’s fearful token of ending, fused into the Biedar’s flint dagger.
Althain’s Warden shuddered with a nascent chill. While his earth-sense, unerring, soared with the revitalized lane forces singing in restored balance through Ettin, his spidery hands started clearing the books and loose manuscripts from the library’s obsidian table. Although Arithon’s spectacular reverse had broken Roaco’s cabal and delivered a triumph to Ath’s white adepts, that victory fell into eclipse as a crystal transmission from the Koriani lane watch informed the Prime Matriarch at Whitehold …
“Your coveted news is confirmed. Rathain’s crown prince has taken flight. While the shamans are vanquished, Ettin’s council rules yet. Their pursuit from the settlement has driven him north. As you hoped, he has chosen to game with live fire: he’s taken the woman and child along under his free-will protection …”
Althain’s Warden paused, aggrieved, as the terrible, incoming torrent interlaced, warp through weft, with the steel thread of his Grace’s fatal determination …
… under cover of night, Iyat-thos Tarens nestled joints of wrapped meat in the embers of a furtive cookfire in Daon Ramon Barrens.
“Why ever would Arithon protect that woman? Her child is not his blood offspring.” The crofter prodded hot coals overtop of the meal just settled for baking. “Further, he knows she’s hostile, steered by a Koriani directive.”
Huddled in misery, her auburn plait wisped with neglect, Elaira jabbed her sticky skinning knife clean in the loamy soil. “He gave his oath of safe-guard, for one thing. Compassion won’t let him abandon an innocent babe to the witches.”
“There’s more.” Tarens shied his charred stick in frustration, while Dakar watched, a tucked owl in his tatty cloak. “Fatemaster’s deathless mercy, what else?”
Her eyes brimmed then, from the sorrow endured since Dakar’s oath of debt had cast her beloved to the Prime’s mercy. “You can’t guess? Arithon hopes to gain the information our proscribed straits cannot give him.”
She paused, face averted, while Tarens fumbled to frame a contrite apology.
Dakar intervened to spare her the agony of the conclusion. “His Grace does not know if Elaira is dead or alive, or whether she’s still bound to the order.” The ghastly pause stretched, filled by the rustle of grass in the breeze and the whistling cry of a night-hawk. “I’d hazard the guess that Arithon taunts the appalling risk to find out. He’ll be staking the sympathy of his bard’s gift, first to win trust from the child, then to wrest Vivet’s loyalty free of the sisterhood’s influence.”
While Elaira arose sharply and left to escape unwanted pity, Tarens regarded Dakar as though sight could flense skin from bone and exact a poisonous reckoning. “You didn’t forewarn her!” he accused, low voiced. “Her poor, steadfast heart’s not fully aware that our mission is useless.”
Dakar hissed through his teeth. “You tell her, then! I can’t slaughter her hope.” Armoured against biting sorrow, he added, “Be most careful if you think to shield her. She’s an initiate Koriani enchantress, and Arithon’s match for pigheaded temperament. Ten silvers against a handful of broom-straws, the lady goes forward unflinching regardless, with both eyes wide open …”
… Sethvir gripped the stone table at Althain Tower, by white-knuckled control curbing an endowed power sufficient to slag the world’s bed-rock. With the s’Ffalenn scion moved outside of his ethical provenance, naught remained to deflect the Mad Prophet’s dire augury. Like Elaira, he must abide the untenable. For Lirenda Prime’s response to the Daenfal sisterhouse set the fatal sequence in motion.
Sethvir ignited the central brazier with the confluent powers of the Third Lane. Hard blue, the reflection sparked in his eyes as he sent urgent summons to Asandir, on the far side of the planet in the alkali flats of Kathtairr, “Don’t look now. The crux laid out by your sealed oath at Whitehold builds towards the final crisis.”
“Davien’s released Elaira,” the field Sorcerer surmised, a cough suppressed behind his sinewed wrist as he beat acrid dust from his leathers. Gaze fixed on the gelid pool where something viciously suspect raised ripples, he concluded on a taxed breath, “Naturally, she’ll be headed for the maw of disaster. I’m wanted on station at Whitehold?”
“Straightaway, once you’ve dispatched that ill-spawned anomaly. I’ve witnessed Prime Lirenda’s unpleasant instructions to the sisterhouse peeress at Daenfal.” Sethvir paused, while the thousandfold threads of cross-woven connection resounded through the world’s weave. “Our margin grows short. You have roughly a fortnight, unless you rush your passage by way of a grimward.”
Davien’s errant stance stayed beneath mention, just as pointless as raw speculation over Ciladis’s continued absence. Asandir’s clipped nod showed the lines in his face scored by more than Kathtairr’s noon glare. Strategy for the end game lay beyond even his capable grasp. Against despair, his steadfast part must be carried through without flinching.
While the midnight stars ruled the zenith at Althain, Sethvir laced his veined hands on the cold, obsidian table. A second call, spoken to water, sped through the ocean deeps in the abyss west of Corith.
Kharadmon swirled alert, a frigid jet of agitation amid the black pressure at the sea-floor. “Ath wept! We are clearing the decks for the bloodbath?”
“Perhaps,” Sethvir poised for the discorporate’s blistering recrimination. None came: for no long-sighted vision yet discerned the scope of the on-coming recoil.
The Rei-yaj Seeress, who might have revealed more, faced skywards in her gimballed chair, enigmatically silent; and the Biedar Crone in Sanpashir divulged nothing, stilled as the bones of the earth in her lair.
And another dawn came, loud with bird-song over the scrub downs of Atainia. In the library, etched by the azure flare of the lane current ignited in the bronze brazier, Sethvir abided the moments as droplets fused into a torrent, and unfolding event underwrote the momentous page of full reckoning.
Farther south, amid pre-dawn gloom, the Light’s advance muster converged for Lirenda’s crowning play at Daenfal; while silent as the arrow shot from the bow, the Teir’s’Ffalenn led a woman and her dependent child in covert flight towards freedom …
Arithon’s bid to shed Ettin’s pursuit was not lunacy. Unlike old blood clan scouts, the folk hounding his trail lacked the refined skill to interpret the flux patterns. Without their bird familiars, a blind chase on foot lost them vital ground in the back-country beyond their closed borders. Rathain’s prince led the hunt northward into the crags, where naked rock thwarted the trackers. Coverless on the slopes past the timberline, he moved through the angled, low sunlight that dazzled observers and slanted shadow over the crevices, or where drifted cloud concealed the high ramparts, blinding the long-sighted archers.
Sound carried at distance with dangerous clarity, a hazard with a toddler testing his first, determined autonomy. Arithon used diversions learned from the clans, when pouty noise risked them to head-hunters. Beneath bent black heads, an unstrung cuff lace with elaborate knots fell apart to Valien’s inquisitive tug. Amid searing noon silence, their game counted the hawks soaring upon the high thermals, then turned to fascination with insects, or finding stray pebbles with holes. Arithon’s tireless contrivance fashioned puzzles from withies and reed, and made a sailor’s tell-tales of thread to snag the boy’s fractious attention.
“What happens if your invention runs dry?” Vivet prodded, tucked up to untangle her red hair in the cranny where they holed up.
Arithon’s smile was sweetness and light, over Valien’s engrossed contentment. “Does imagination or joy come with limits?” He crouched on his heels, shod in uncured hide and perversely unfazed by the stink. “The wide world births wonders beyond mortal measure. One has to be soured, or taught, to retreat into narrow-minded rigidity. When did disappointment shrivel your outlook?”
“Come from Ettin?” Vivet shrugged. “T
here’s stubborn tradition enough to throttle anyone’s frivolous fancies.”
“That’s why we’re leaving,” Arithon reminded, and gently quick, intercepted a chubby fist before Valien ingested a twig. A Masterbard’s nuance stalled the infantile wail of displeasure, the disputed morsel placed at the child’s feet with a flourish. “See here! Let’s build a sentinel’s tower with a bird, and an archer fashioned from lichen paste. Which stick comes next?”
Valien pointed, to Arithon’s mock horror. “Not one that’s round! Let’s finish the construction. Then you’ll knock it down.”
Indignant tantrum, or delighted shrieks, Arithon kept the overtaxed child amused, then consigned him, drowsy, to Vivet while he sought the ridge-top to scout.
Returned as the mist thickened, against stiffening breeze, he signalled the urgent need to move on. “Storm’s coming. We’ll need shelter. The east rim of Baffiel’s Cauldron is a rugged climb into the summer snowpack, but the steam vents will keep Valien warm.”
Vivet strapped on the bundled blankets and supply, while Arithon perched the fretful child on his shoulders. When overexhaustion made the boy squirm, he resorted to song, lulled the mite into a comatose sleep, then bore him slung limp in a cloak.
Against icy wind that watered her eyes, Vivet weighed the motive behind the man’s flawless consideration. He was a sorcerer, well-fitted to expose her covert connections. Sly distrust, perhaps, masqueraded as kindness: his attention to Valien’s welfare conflicted her hostile directive against him. A mother scarcely would provoke harm that might place her child at risk.
