Kitabı oku: «The Wars of Light and Shadow», sayfa 4

Autumn 5653

II.

Infraction

Asandir thumped back the lid of the battered wooden clothes chest, which held the few personal effects he kept at Althain Tower. Craggier, and cross-grained as beached driftwood from the harrowing events that had taxed him to infirmity last season, he chose a formal cloak of heavier wool, a deep enough blue to be taken for black, with borders edged in bands of silver foil ribbon. The rich color brought out his lingering pallor.

To Luhaine, attendant upon his preparations like a cloud of morose, glacial air, the detail became the caustic reminder of a convalescence cut short by necessity. ‘You know you ought to be resting.’

Asandir paused. Recovery had left him just short of rail thin, the creases around his eyes knifed into dry flesh, and the rubbed ivory knuckles of each capable hand embossed through his blue-veined skin. Yet workworn as he appeared, the Sorcerer who shouldered the Fellowship’s field work retained his uncompromised will. His gray eyes held the etched clarity of lead crystal, as he countered, ‘You could have asked my leave when you lent Sethvir the use of my black stallion.’

‘In fact, I could not,’ Luhaine said, plaintive. ‘At the time he departed, you happened to be comatose.’

That line of defense died into an unsettled quiet, neither of the Sorcerers anxious to pursue the confrontation head-on. Though Sethvir spent little time in his private quarters at Althain Tower, the chamber was cluttered as a junk stall. Mismatched chairs had acquired heaps of horse harness. Two marble plinths were piled with snake skins, spancel hoops of oak, a tea canister missing its top. The spare pallet held skeins of wool yarn, brought in to remedy a straw hamper stuffed to bursting with holed stockings. Their odd, distorted imprints came and went in the dance of shadows cast by the candle set on a tin pricket.

Asandir knelt on the scarlet carpet, a lit form against the gargoyle shapes sculpted from the surrounding gloom. Nor did he accept Luhaine’s comment as he rummaged through the bottom of the clothes trunk. ‘Even unconscious, I would have heard you speak. You know that.’ He unearthed an item that chinked metallic protest.

‘At least with no horse we forced you to rest until you regained strength to walk. Do we have to go through this all over again?’ Luhaine huffed aside from the grounding threat of steel as his colleague raised a black-handled hunting knife and tested the edge with his fingertip. ‘If you knew how it felt to live as a shade, you’d stop doing that.’

‘You’re right.’ Asandir snicked the blade back into its sheath. Draft fluttered the dribbled candleflame as he added the knife to his select pile of necessities. ‘Out of body, I’d have small use for skinning a deer.’ The invasive smell of vacancy and dust made petty argument seem a welcome affirmation of life. ‘An unnecessary sacrifice, whatever your case, had you taken a moment and asked the bread mold and field mice to feed anyplace else but the pantry.’

Luhaine snorted. ‘The Prime Matriarch has launched a new plot, and you’re bound in knots for a miserable few rinds of spoiled cheese?’

Asandir stood. Large boned and imposing as an ocean-flying albatross, with the same matchless grace when he moved, he folded one arm and tucked his other fist beneath the clean-shaven jut of his chin. ‘Luhaine?’ he asked with piercing mildness. ‘What under Ath’s sky have the Koriathain done this time?’

Stripped by a glance keen enough to shear granite, Luhaine regretted his impulsive choice to broach that particular sore subject. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he hedged. ‘Once Sethvir returns, I’ll hope to be freed to find out.’

Asandir grunted. Unfazed by his colleague’s transparent evasion, he knelt and bundled his supplies into a weatherproof blanket roll. ‘Whatever unpleasant hunches you harbor, I could venture to Capewell and confront the Prime’s purpose headlong.’

‘That shouldn’t be necessary.’ Rather than reveal the shattering ill turn, that Morriel’s interests had broken Elaira’s retreat at Araethura, Luhaine breezed toward the doorway. ‘Sethvir ought to find his way back before solstice. Koriani sigils can’t trace Arithon at sea. Since his fleet sailed from Innish with provisions to last through midwinter, the matter should bide until then.’

And must, Luhaine raged in concealing silence; with six camps of Alliance armed forces blocking the safe sanctuary of half the clan bloodlines in Tysan, Caithwood’s trees perforce must claim preference.

Blessedly practical, Asandir tied the last thong on his bundle and snuffed the failing candle. ‘Then I’ll enjoy being spared the company of a bedridden harridan with a grudge.’ Faced with a second, urgent transfer by lane force, then an overland journey to be started afoot, the bent of his thoughts swung full circle. ‘Sethvir needs my horse before I do in any case. That stallion’s the only flesh-and-blood creature I trust to stand firm through a flux of grand conjury.’

Luhaine called in droll gloom through the doorway, ‘I’m forgiven in advance if you’re tossed off the back of some clansman’s borrowed hack?’

Asandir straightened, a lank scarecrow in black leathers. His shoulder-length hair shone like loomed cloud in the fading light through the arrow slit, and his sudden, rare laugh shattered echoes off the ancient Paravian stonework. ‘You’re absolved if I happen to fall off a nag.’ He raised a lean leg, kicked the trunk shut, and strode clear of Sethvir’s belongings. ‘But for the rest of the secrets you’re brooding like eggs, I’ll hold mercy under advisement.’

The sundown surge of the lane tide carried the Fellowship Sorcerer southward to Mainmere. The circle that delivered him lay under the gloom of near dark. Stars bloomed like punched sparks on a cobalt zenith, and wind-combed, thin cirrus overhung the ink waters of a restless, tide-roiled estuary. Asandir stood motionless and allowed his reeling senses to reorient. More worn from the transfer than he liked to admit, he sorely missed the warm presence of his horse, and the satin black shoulder that usually braced up his balance on arrival.

He willed himself steady, while around him the raised play of lane force subsided. The bleached, weathered runes laid into rinsed bedrock sparked and flashed as the discharge bled off, actinic white to a whisper of blue, before fading through the spectrum of ultraviolet into the ordinary night.

An owl called, mournful. Beyond the stilled circle, the tumbled-down ruin of the Second Age fortress slept under its shrouding of vine. Past memory ran deep through the rain-scoured granite. Where the wide grasslands of the coast joined the sea, unicorns had once run like braided light on the hilltops, gathered for their seasonal migration. The songs of the sunchildren followed their course, while the joyous feet of the dancers had circled, waking the mysteries of renewal each cycle of equinox and solstice. The coming of mankind at the dawn of the Third Age had woven new thread through that ancient tapestry. From Mainmere, at midsummer, to the landing at Telmandir, the painted boats of townborn celebrants had rowed south under torchlight for the water festival. Each year, humanity made way for the passage of mysteries that were Ath’s gift to this world, their presence too bright for mortal endurance, outside of those families born into the time-tested strength of clan lineage.

Now, no burning torches etched the wavecrests like copper engraving. Nor did the memory of vanished powers linger, except in the unquiet peace of broken stones, and in the leashed sorrow of the Sorcerer who addressed them to settle the trace resonance of his urgent passage. He paid the abandoned fortress his respect. Despite the precision of Sethvir’s kept records, and the writings of the Paravian loremasters, Mainmere wore legends whose truths were no man’s to unlock.

The centaur mason Imaury Riddler was said to have placed a wisdom in each of the megaliths set into the primary foundation. At need, stone would answer, latent power unchained in whispered response to the step of the one who faced the hour of Athera’s most deadly peril.

Tonight, for Asandir, the dark rocks stayed silent. Only the storm-tattered crowns of the beech trees spoke on the stiff inland breeze, the first warning of winter borne on the dying taint of turned leaves.

Nor was the Sorcerer alone in that place.

As he strode from the quiescent white runes of the focus pattern, three forest-bred clan scouts stepped from the brush in cool, unafraid expectation.

‘Kingmaker,’ greeted the erect elder in the lead. ‘My Lady Kellis, Duchess of old Mainmere, bids you welcome. In her name, how may we serve the land?’

Asandir’s arched eyebrows showed surprise for the pleasure of the company. ‘She knew I was coming?’

‘She believed someone must.’ The lead scout reached the Sorcerer, arm extended for the customary wrist clasp. In clipped speech, he explained, ‘The grandmother seer who made simples at the Valenford crossroad was burned last month by the Alliance of Light’s Crown Examiner. She screamed as she died that her vision showed burning trees, and sunwheel soldiers wielding torches that opened the sky to a rain of scorched blood. The duchess was worried Caithwood might be threatened. She set us to watch in case help came.’

‘Daelion have mercy for the wrongful death sentence given that misfortunate seer! I’m here,’ Asandir affirmed, taller by a head, his blanket roll rammed under one elbow. Shock lent a quickened spring to his step as he let the scouts lead him onward.

‘So is Caithwood endangered?’ asked the woman among them, bitter with worry as her lanky, cat’s stride carried her through the maze of razed battlements.

Asandir followed through tufted bull grass toward the steep, crumbled stair to the sea gate. ‘Yes. Though the sealed orders from s’Ilessid were sent from Avenor only this morning. You have horses?’

‘Even better.’ The woman pointed toward the broken-down archway that funneled the hail of another voice, cautious above the muted splash of water off a bulwark of tide-washed stone. ‘We’ve got a smuggler’s boat from the river delta waiting. Her master’s a canny old fisherman who’s moved raided goods out of every deep cove in the forest. Where do you wish to make landfall?’

His descent economical on the mossy, cracked slabs of the stair, Asandir gave his answer. ‘The haven you have nearest a camp with fast horses, if I’m to spare more than green trees. How many refugee families are hiding south of the trade road?’

Just as sober, the scout captain replied, ‘All of them.’

Asandir’s response held barely leashed rage as the small party arrived on the landing. ‘Then thank that seeress’s unquiet shade for our chance of keeping them alive.’ He stepped from the crumbled breastwork into the battered fishing sloop held in waiting by a boy draped with cod-fragrant oilskins.

‘Grace, for your presence,’ he murmured in blessing, then assumed the dew-damp seat by the thwart. The bilge swirling under the boards at his feet stank of fish, and the prow held a heaped mound of trawl nets. To the balding, barrel-round man who surged to loose jib and mainsails, Asandir made direct inquiry. ‘Would you mind being loaned an unfair advantage?’

The fisherman’s teak face split with laughter. ‘Ye’d call down a gale? Toss up yer dinner, don’t come crying to me.’

‘How much can your craft handle?’ Asandir wedged his blanket roll out of reach of chance spray, while the boy and two of the duchess’s older scouts clambered in at his side. The woman stayed behind, her farewell brief as she shoved off the battered craft into the rip of the tide.

The dour helmsman grunted. ‘I’ll warrant my dearie’s canvas and sticks’ll take more abuse than your belly. We’ll do ten knots, if the old besom’s pushed.’

‘So, we’ll see.’ Grim since the news of the witch’s burning, Asandir touched the scout silent. He chose the heading for the helmsman himself, west-northwest, for the cove that lay nearest the trade road, which carved a diagonal scar through Caithwood and the low dales of Taerlin.

The fisherman stared at him, his meaty hands guided by instinct as he hauled in the mainsheet. Still regarding the Sorcerer, he called to his crew, a grandson or nephew by the look-alike stamp of young features. ‘Lad, clew in the foresail.’

His corded shoulders bunched as he made his line fast and hauled the boat’s tiller to port. The bow swung, sheered up a dousing sheet of spray while the headsail and main clamored taut. The hull rolled, settled into a steep heel, bashed and thrummed by the sucking drag of ebb tide. One squinted eye on the set of his canvas, the fisherman spoke at last in mild censure, ‘Can’t keep yon heading until the slack water at midnight. Current’s too stiff, no matter the lay of the wind.’

‘So we’ll see,’ Asandir repeated, his lean mouth pared thin with irony. He tucked his blanket roll under his shoulders, then reclined against the shining, wet wood and shut his eyes.

The older of the two clan scouts huddled into his fringed jacket and repressed the urgency to speak out of turn and disturb him.

Asandir sensed the man’s fretting. His speech came mild against the hammering tumult of wave and wind as the sloop fought the rip for her heading. ‘If your people have no horses tucked away near that landing, rest assured that I can make other arrangements.’

‘That’s well.’ Relieved to the point of embarrassment, the scout shifted aside for the boy, who moved forward, dripping, to find a cranny amid the wadded netting. The scout’s fox-thin features stayed trained toward the Sorcerer, pinched with frowning concern as he strove for politeness and subtlety. ‘In case you don’t know, there’s an Alliance war camp billeted next to the trade road.’

‘No setback at all.’ Asandir seemed removed, even distant, the seamed map of his features written in calm that verged on the borders of sleep.

That appearance deceived. Behind closed eyelids, the Sorcerer extended his awareness. He cast his trained consciousness outward in a web that missed nothing, from the skeined lines of force that guided the winds, to the deeper tie strung between moon and water, which commanded the pull of the tide. His mind tracked each wavecrest. He knew the purl of scrolled sound as salt water splashed into foam, each single event one word in a language his ear understood. He sensed the invisible, lightning tracks of magnetic current where the earth’s lane forces coiled through Mainmere and trailed a cascading signature of charged energy through the deeps.

His listening encompassed the fish in the shoals, and the gulls that bobbed, wing-folded in sleep on the swells. The sands of the seabed were singly made known to him, each grain by Name, their collective chord of existence laced through by streamered beds of kelp and live coral. The breadth of his thought embraced the four elements, and all else that touched upon the path of the fishing sloop’s crossing. To each varied and interlocked facet of existence, he gave solemn greeting, his tacit recognition a gift that awakened acknowledgment in turn. Through the vast stillness his announcement of presence engendered, he made known his need, then asked leave for the sake of the green trees threatened in Caithwood.

His answer came back as a white flood of power that sang through flesh and bone in sweet resonance. On a phrase, he could have bidden the sea to launch from its channel and punch through the sky like a fist. Fish and birds, all would rise for his cause; even the staid stone and sand on the bay floor would unbind in an explosion of volatile force.

Such was his strength, he asked none of these things.

Gentle as a filament spun out of starlight, he aligned his intent: to see one patched Torwent fishing sloop to the far shore, his course a shot arrow of desire that blazed west-northwest and marked the wide cove where the trade road from Valenford crossed under the eaves of the forest.

To that vectored appeal, he set mindful stays of limitation: that no life be harmed, and no bird become tossed or ruffled in flight from the recoil of contrary elements. That the tide’s rush through the estuary not falter, nor the anomaly his need would spin through the world’s wind unleash a stressed vortex that might seed a storm or drought later. He understood the flow of power, from force of element to breathing life, in all aspects of interlocked complexity. Rooted in wisdom, he shaped the offered gifts of the land with a feather touch of clean subtlety.

Nor did he invoke any power but his own to spark his laid pattern of conjury. To an adept of his experience, the charge contained in just one grain of sand could lay waste to the entire planet; therefore, he would not disturb the spin of any one fragment of matter. A single deep breath, a precisely aimed thought, he engaged the quickened awareness of his spirit and plucked, like a harp string, the subliminal current of light and sound which gave substance its material polarity.

Power answered through the greatest recognition of them all, the chime of affirmation that defined his own Name on the loom of unified existence.

‘An,’ whispered Asandir, the Paravian rune one that marked all beginnings since song first gave rise to Ath’s creation.

A ray of touched force flicked the air like a moth’s wing and deflected a kink in the clasp of gravity that linked Athera in her partnered dance with the moon. At Asandir’s directive, the twist became a spiral that touched water and air as a tuned breath might test the highest note on a flute.

Then change threaded through the coils of his conjury. The barest, soft shudder brushed the planks of the sloop as the bay arose in a swell of gleaming phosphorescence and nudged her. Changed breeze kissed her sails to a sullen flap of canvas, and the Torwent fisherman shot straight.

‘Ath’s deathless mercy!’ he gasped, shaken white as the helm went slack in his startled grasp.

Eyes still closed, his face wholly serene, Asandir smiled. ‘Not so far from plain truth,’ he said gently.

The wave at the sloop’s stern continued to build, rolling smooth and green, but not menacing. The small craft sheered ahead like a bead spilled down glass, her course west-northwest, though the tide roiled southward, its flow unimpeded by the loop newly wrought through its ebb. Then that first shifted breeze built into a gust that backwinded the headsail and clapped the main into banging frenzy.

‘Slacken the sheets!’ cried the captain to the terrified boy. ‘Move smart, don’t you see? This unnatural wind’s going to swing dead astern.’

‘Twenty points to starboard, in actual fact,’ said Asandir in mild correction. He opened his eyes, which shone silver-gray as a rain pool touched by the moon. ‘I thought you’d want steerage, since the standing wave we’re riding will bear us on at eight knots. You’ll get just enough breeze to keep headway.’

‘Aren’t like to toss supper, then.’ The fisherman rubbed his rope bracelets, his unsettled nerves transformed to trembling awe. ‘Who could’ve guessed? You’ve made us a passage so smooth a babe wouldn’t roll off the foredeck.’

‘We’ll make landfall by daybreak,’ the Sorcerer affirmed. His seamless act of grand conjury was dismissed as nothing outside of the ordinary. ‘Bucking the tide to windward, my spare clothes would get soaked. No one could have snatched an hour of sleep, besides.’ He folded lean arms, chin tipped to his chest, evidently prepared to take his own counsel in earnest.

The boy hauling lines stood stunned and mute; the seasoned clan scout gripped the rail in queer exultation. His forestborn sensibilities could scarcely encompass the rolling mound of water that propelled the sloop steadily toward Taerlin.

An hour slipped by. The moon rose in the east like yellowed parchment. Asandir dozed, while tide and wind danced, flawless, to the unseen tapestry of his will. The fisherman manned a helm that answered his touch like poured silk, and for him, the resentment cut sharply as grit ground into a wound.

‘How can you sit like a beggar and accept this?’ he charged the clan elder, crouched at the thwart with his hands lightly clasped to his weapon hilts.

The younger scout spun from his contemplation of spelled water with a fierce, quelling motion for silence. ‘Mind your talk, man! Dreaming or not, yon Sorcerer hears what concerns him.’

‘So he does. Should that matter?’ The fisherman jabbed argumentative fingers toward Asandir’s motionless form. ‘If wind and tide can be turned on mere whim, why not act in kind to save children?’ Longtime friend of the clans, he had given passage to the pitiful bands of refugee families who fled Tysan to take sanctuary in Havish. ‘Your people deserve better help in misfortune.’

‘Oh, be careful,’ charged the elder, tense now as the scout, and braced with the same trepidation. He, too, had known the grief of the young mothers, and the misery of small babes displaced and chilled and afraid.

The toll of ravaged lives brought by the Alliance campaign to drive the clan presence from Caithwood showed no sign of abating. Dogged by an outrage too sharp to contain, the fisherman would not stay silent. ‘Why not choose to spare human lives instead of a stand of inanimate trees?’

Asandir turned his head, his cragged features not angered; yet the opened, gray eyes were tranquil no longer. ‘Our Fellowship has no license to use power to influence mortal destinies.’

‘That’s a damned heartless platitude!’ the fisherman shot back. ‘The ships stolen from Riverton will scarcely be enough to stem the inevitable slaughter.’

Wholly mild, Asandir saw past temper to the seed of a deeper, more subtle anguish. ‘I see you’ve met his Grace of Rathain?’

The fisherman responded as though goaded. ‘Our village sheltered him when he crossed out of Tysan. He came soaked to the skin, exhausted from beating a course against head winds. He’d been ill. A blind fool could see he was in no shape to make passage, and the fat prophet with him was too seasick to offer him any relief at the helm.’

Asandir drew a slow breath, the rise of his chest the sole movement of his frame as he marshaled his patience to speak. ‘Arithon of Rathain is safely offshore where the Mistwraith’s curse cannot touch him.’

‘Rumor claims you opened a grimward in his behalf.’ The fisherman twisted the braided, rope talismans that circled his sun-browned wrists. ‘I say, if that’s true, you could have done more, and more still for those families hounded by Prince Lysaer’s campaign of eradication. Folk born with mage talent suffer as well. Not just forest clansmen in Tysan will be dying while you gad about sparing trees.’

The scout gasped. ‘Merciful Ath, we’re not ungrateful! Kingmaker, forgive. Clanblood has asked for no intercession.’

Denial or warning, the words came too late. The Fellowship Sorcerer gripped the thwart and sat up, a stark, lean shadow against the silver-webbed foam sheered up by the sloop’s sped passage. He linked his large-knuckled hands at his knees. His unshaken calm in itself framed a dangerous presence, while the waters off the stern rose green at his bidding, and the winds curved the sails, whisper light and responsive to the tuned might of his will.

‘Our use of grand conjury is not subject to whim,’ he stated. ‘Crowned heirs who bear royal ancestry act as our agents, under the strict terms of the compact our Fellowship swore with the Paravians.’ That intercession spanned more than five thousand years, when sanctuary had been granted to humanity at the dawn of the Third Age. As if that agreement was not all but forgotten, or its tenets misconstrued for the gain of town politics, Asandir resumed explanation. ‘Prince Arithon’s born compassion is our granted legacy, no less than King Eldir’s gift of wise temperance. As rulers confirmed under Fellowship sanction, they have the right to receive our assistance. But they must ask. And then we can act only by the Law of the Major Balance, inside a prescribed set of limits.’

A brief pause, while the Sorcerer’s terrible bright eyes turned down and regarded the linked clasp of his hands. ‘I opened a grimward for the sake of Prince Arithon’s safety,’ he said, steel and sorrow gritted through the admission. ‘Thirty-eight sunwheel guardsmen pursued him inside, driven on by duty and hatred. Of those, only one escaped with his life. Willful pride and rank ignorance brought the rest to their doom. Their deaths were chosen, not forced.’

‘Why could you not save them?’ the fisherman pressed. ‘The power was yours.’

‘The power is mine,’ Asandir affirmed. ‘But not then or ever, the arrogance to enact intervention!’ He sat sharply forward, stern as chipped granite. ‘The compact was sworn on mankind’s behalf, but its tenets were designed to guard the land. Paravians hold our vow against greed and misuse. That grants no authority to impair human freedom, however the trade guilds cry tyranny. We take no license to enact judgment on others, except as the weal of this world becomes threatened. Town councils ignore this, yet the bare facts remain. Humanity exists here on sufferance. Forget at your peril! Your race would be homeless without our sworn surety that Athera’s great mysteries stay sacrosanct.’

‘You’re saying––’ began the fisherman.

Asandir cut him off, ruthless. ‘We who are bound know better than any how a yoke chafes and how spirit can languish without the grace of free will. By Fellowship choice no child born under sky in this place is destined to live as a pawn!’

‘I don’t understand,’ the fisherman whispered, mollified at last by the unsheathed pain he had aroused in the Sorcerer who confronted him.

‘You couldn’t know, but our people remember.’ The gray-headed clansman stirred in the uncanny stillness that locked the air, between the lisp of turned waters and the matchless, steady breath of the wind, which even now held to the intent of Asandir’s unimaginable control. He glanced at the Sorcerer, who granted a sharp nod of leave. ‘The Fellowship of Seven were drawn here, long past, by the dreams of the dragons that no mind in creation can deny. They were charged and tied by a ritual magic wrought from drake’s blood to ensure Paravian survival. That oath taking gifted them their knowledge of longevity. Record among the clans says their lives stay the course of a service that could last to the ending of time, if need be.’

‘The drakes claimed us through the flaw of our own violence, and by the stain of slaughter already on our hands,’ Asandir qualified. ‘We were called as a weapon to destroy the drake spawn that could not be weaned from unconscionable killing. Only when Paravian survival is assured will our lives be set free once again.’

There passed an interval when only the wind spoke. The gruff, weathered fisherman could not bear to turn his head and suffer Asandir’s magnanimous acceptance. Moonlight edged the tableau in metallic, cold lines, and the lisp of the waves carried the salt tang of primordial beginnings. The Sorcerer sat, rock patient throughout, while the occupants of the sloop who still owned their mortality came to terms with the history of his Fellowship.

‘I have never understood,’ the young clansman ventured, made bold by the Sorcerer’s mild tolerance. ‘When the drake spawn were contained, or put down in the wars, were you not given liberty to break the drake’s binding and reclaim your own will once again?’

Asandir looked up, his eyes bleak with remembrance and his shoulders too straight against the moving weave of the wavecrests. ‘We had only the methuri left to attend. They posed a minor threat, and Ciladis, who hoped to transmute their warped offspring, saw no need to hasten their final disposition. We all failed to foresee how our obligation would compound on the hour that refugee humanity discovered this world of Athera.’

Now the fisherman looked puzzled. Perhaps out of weariness, the Sorcerer chose to unveil the depth of the Fellowship’s tragedy. ‘The terms of the compact reinstated the drake’s binding all over again.’

‘But why?’ The fisherman’s incredulity clashed like snarled thread with the Sorcerer’s shaded, soft sorrow.