Kitabı oku: «Warhost of Vastmark»

I. SECOND CONVOCATION

Sethvir of Althain soaked in his hip bath those rare times when he suffered glum spirits. Lapped like a carp in warm water, his hair frizzled over the sculptured bones of thin shoulders, he sulked with his chin in his fists while the steam whorled up through the hanks of his beard and dripped off the white combs of his brows. Misted and half-closed with melancholy, his eyes seemed to cast their brooding focus on his gnarled toes, now perched in a row on the tub’s rim.

The nails curled in neglected need of trimming.

Of more telling concern to Sethvir, Prince Arithon’s brilliant strike at Minderl Bay had still failed the wider scope of his intent. If the allied northern war host recruited to hound him had been dismantled with lightest losses, Lysaer s’Ilessid’s misled following had not awakened to perceive the stark truth: that what had destroyed their sea fleet at Werpoint had been less a bloody ploy of the Shadow Master’s than the mishandled force of Lysaer’s own gift of light, maligned by Deshthiere’s curse.

The one ship’s captain lent the insight to know differently lay slain, beset in a dingy dockside alley. The footpads who knifed him had been hired by Avenor’s Lord Commander for political expediency, Sethvir knew beyond doubt. As Arithon’s sole witness, and a man who had viewed the unalloyed directive of the Mistwraith’s geas firsthand, the seaman had been killed before he could cast any pall of public doubt upon Prince Lysaer’s judgment in defence. Remanned by a crew of less-questionable loyalty, his benighted brig would sail south with the tide for Alestron, Lysaer s’Ilessid and the pick of his officers on board.

The sorry conclusion weighed like a stone in the heart.

If Arithon had just demonstrated his fullest understanding of the curse that shackled his will, if this second encounter at Minderl Bay had increased his respect for its fearful train of ill consequence, his half-brother Lysaer owned no such searching self-awareness. Misconstrued by the gift of the s’Ilessid royal line, which bound his relentless pursuit of justice, Tysan’s lost prince remained the sad puppet of circumstance. To the root of his conscience, he stayed righteously assured that he held to honourable principles. He believed his born cause was to hunt down and eliminate a confirmed minion of evil.

Sethvir glowered into the soap-scummed surface of his bathwater, then blinked, as if for the barest, fragmentary second he had thought to see stars in the suds clinging about his knobby knees.

Stars’ idle musing sharpened into farsight. The muddled distance in the Sorcerer’s blue-green eyes snapped into sudden, sharp focus. His wet skin stabbed into gooseflesh, Sethvir bolted from his tub. Water splashed jagged stains in his abused scarlet carpet. He snatched up his robe, burrowed it over his wet head, then paused through a drawn-out, prickling shudder as dread raked through him once again.

Grazed against the limits of his awareness, beyond the world’s wind-spun cloak of living air, an event of chilling wrongness carved a line. Its fire-tailed passage jostled the harmonics of the stars into thin and jangling discord.

Sethvir took only an instant to confirm that the upset was bound to an associate Sorcerer’s Name and signature. Kharadmon of the Fellowship was at long last returning from the interdicted worlds beyond South Gate, and an immediate crisis came with him.

The Warden of Althain rushed barefoot from his personal chambers. He slapped wet footprints up the spiral stair to reach the library in the tower’s topmost chamber. Even as his hand tripped the latch and flung wide the oaken door, his cry of distress rang out to summon his disparate colleagues.

Ranged over vast distance, the call roused Luhaine from his sojourn to settle the ghosts drawn back across the veil of the mysteries by the doings of a necromancer, who then abandoned them to winnow in lost patterns over the frost-burned waste of Scarpdale.

Asandir was in Halwythwood, reconsecrating the old Paravian standing stones that held and warded the earthforce; he would ride in driving haste to reach the power focus at Caith-al-Caen, but not in time to trap the dawn sun surge for a spell transfer.

The raven which flew partnered with Traithe sailed on the air currents above Vastmark. Its master tested the fault lines in the slopes, that shepherds too poor to survive losses not pen their flocks through the winter in valleys prone to shale slides. The pair, bird and Sorcerer, were too distant from Atainia to help. No recourse existed. The sense of pending danger grew in Sethvir, sharper and more pressing by the second.

He needed the particulars of what was wrong, and quickly, but Kharadmon proved too beleaguered to send details. The door from the stairwell at Althain had barely slammed shut when Sethvir flung open the casement. Autumn wind sheared fresh chill over his soggy beard and dripping skin, crisp with the musk of dying bracken. The Sorcerer shivered again, hounded by urgency. Before he raised wards and grand conjury against disaster, he could have done with a scalding mug of tea.

The speed of events left no time. An icier vortex of air laced through the wet tails of his beard: vexed as always by the untimely nature of emergencies, Luhaine blew in on a huffed breeze of inquiry.

‘It’s Kharadmon, coming home,’ Sethvir explained. His attention stayed pinned on the white points of stars, strung between flying scraps of cloud. ‘Before you ask, he’s brought trouble along with him.’

‘That’s his born nature,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Like the dissonance in a cracked crystal, some things in life never sweeten.’

Sethvir maintained polite silence, then spoiled all pretence to dignity by gathering his draggled beard and wringing the soggy hanks like a rag. Soapy runnels slid down his wrists and dampened the rucked hems of his sleeves. While the catspaw gusts of his colleague’s irritation riffled the pages of his books, he held his face tipped skyward. Starshine imprinted the glassy surface of his eyes through long and listening minutes.

Then the last tinge of colour drained from his wizened cheeks.

Luhaine’s presence resolved into concentrated stillness. ‘Ath have mercy, what is it?’

Sethvir whirled in an agitated squall of shed droplets. ‘Wards,’ he cried, terse. ‘Two sets, concentric. We must circle all Athera for protection, then ring this tower as haven and catchpoint for a spirit under threat of possession.’

‘Kharadmon! Under siege!’ Luhaine exclaimed.

Sethvir nodded, speechless. Three steps impelled him to the table’s edge. He ploughed a clear space among his clutter of parchments. Two candlestands toppled. A tea mug rocked out into air, spell-caught before it shattered against the stone floor by Luhaine’s fussy penchant for tidiness.

Amid a pelting storm of flung papers, Sethvir set up the black iron brazier and ignited its pan, cold blue with the current of the third lane. Too pressed to trifle with marking his presence with an image, Luhaine immersed his whole being into the lane’s quickened flow, then channelled his awareness through the old energy paths that past Paravian dancers had scribed across the earth to interlink the world’s magnetic flux at each solstice. His task was made difficult by rites fallen into disuse. Everywhere the tracery was reduced to faint glimmers. Many lines were snarled, or severed by obstructions where migrant herders had unknowingly built sheep-folds, or significant trees had been cut, creating sharp breaks in continuity. Meadows long harrowed by the ploughshare’s cold iron contorted the energy flow. The powers Luhaine laced in patterns across the land resisted and sought to bleed from his grasp, to dissipate in useless bursts of static, except in convergence around Jaelot, where Arithon’s past meddling with music at the crux of a lane tide had scoured the paths to clean operancy.

Kharadmon’s straits would not wait for perfection. Forced against his grain to rely upon hurried handiwork, Luhaine was scarcely ready as Sethvir murmured, ‘Now.’

Crowded to the edge of a chair already occupied by a tipsy stack of books, Sethvir tucked his chin in cupped palms. His china-bright eyes glazed and went sightless as he plunged into the throes of deep trance.

Luhaine felt the Warden’s consciousness twine through the lane-spark in the brazier, then beyond to access the earth net. Now interlinked with the broad-scale scope of Sethvir’s specialized vision, he, too, could sense the white-orange fireball which scored the black deeps toward Athera. At firsthand, he grasped the peril drawn in from the worlds sealed past South Gate. The measure of its virulence lay beyond spoken language to express. Whatever fearsome, coiling presence had become attached in pursuit of Kharadmon, it carried a malevolence to stun thought.

Far too methodical for volatile emotion, Luhaine matched effort with Althain’s Warden and cast his whole resource into a call to raise the earth’s awareness into guard.

Not unlike the consciousness of stone, the balanced mesh of forces which comprised the disparate qualities of bedrock, and rich loam, and the fiery heartcore of magma danced to their own staid pace. Ath Creator’s living stamp upon the land owned no concept for desperate necessity. Sluggish to rouse, slower still to catalyse into change from within, the deepest dreams of the earth counted the passage of years and seasons little more than an animal might mark the singular sum of its own heartbeats. Seas and shore noted the trials of men and sorcerers less than the wild deer took stock of biting insects.

To pierce through that current of quiescence, Sethvir and Luhaine rewove the third lane’s bright forces into a chord that framed Name. Attuned to their effort, long leagues to the east, Asandir linked the hoofbeats of the horse who galloped under him into a tattoo of distress. The rhythm struck down through topsoil and stone there, to resound the full length of the fourth lane.

Hours passed before the earth heeded. More minutes, before deep-laid energies quickened in response. In paired, reckless speed, the Fellowship Sorcerers sited at Althain conjoined the roused charge of the world’s two dozen major power lanes.

They took small care to shield their efforts. Any outside mind attuned to the mysteries could not fail to overhear the cry as primal elements sparked awake to the play of meddled mystery. Koriani enchantresses reached for spell crystals to gauge the pulse of change, while mariners shot awake as the winds whined and gusted in unnatural key through their rigging. Sailors on deck cowered and gripped lucky amulets in fear, for across the broad deeps of the oceans, flared lines the blued tinge of lightning sheared beneath the foam of the wavecrests.

In Halwythwood, the grey, lichened standing stones just blessed by Asandir discharged a purple corona of wild power. Along the old roads and on the hillcrests revered in the time-lost rites of First Age ceremony, the spirit imprints of Paravians shone like wisps drawn in silver point and starlight. The bones of forsaken ruins keened in pitched tones of harmonics. An uprooted jumble of carved rock by the fired brick walls of Avenor moaned aloud, though no breeze at all combed through its exposed nooks and crannies.

At Althain Tower, as the last of the energy paths joined, Sethvir pushed erect and scrabbled through his books to find a sliver of white chalk. Within the pooled glow from the brazier, he scribed runes in parallel columns; in circles; in triangles; in counterlocked squares, the symbols of guard and of ward. He bordered the whole with a blessing of protection. Then he added the tracery which framed the tidal surge of life, renewed year to year, century to century, age to age, each thread wound and strengthened to a brilliance of diversity on the natural loom of storm, disease, and calamity.

He sketched the symbols of beginning and ending that, entwined, formed the arc of eternity. He added the patience of stone and the endurance of air, that flowed through all change without resistance; then the blind grace of trees, that reached for the light despite trials of weather and ice.

The widening scrawl of the Warden’s symbols glimmered in pale phosphor against the obsidian tabletop. His fingernails snapped sparks like the clash of flint to steel where power bled through his written tapestry. Minutes passed and stars turned. Nightfall silvered dew on the stems of wild grasses. Sethvir felt these things and weighed them as precious, while his labours tuned and channelled the ozone torrent of raw force; until his wet hair fanned dry, then raised and crackled with static, and the tower’s slate roof sang, each shingle in singular counterpoint.

‘Hurry,’ Luhaine whispered through a thundering gust that swooped in to rattle the unlatched casements. The currents poised between him and Sethvir were fast cresting to the cusp of explosion. To stay them in containment for any span of time demanded more than two Sorcerers’ paired strength. Luhaine dared not slacken his grip. If his control slipped in the slightest degree, the unbalance would trip off an elemental backlash. The rampage of spilled energy could unleash a cyclone of ruin to lash up the ire of the earth. Should natural order be cast into chaos, storms would run riot; whole strips of coastline would be torn into change. Great quakes would shake the dry land and the seas. From the volcanoes that fumed like sleeping dragons in Northstrait to the dormant cauldrons crowning the clouded peaks of the Tiriacs, the great continent itself might crack corner to corner in a seam of burst fault lines, to vent steam and boulders, or spew lava in swathes of destruction.

Sethvir dashed sweat from the tip of his nose and scribed the last flourish on a cipher. ‘Now,’ he whispered into air drawn so taut, the word seemed snapped from strung wire.

Like magma poured from a crucible, Luhaine bent the poised powers of the earth through the construct formed by Sethvir’s rune seals. The ancient stone tabletop rang out like mallet-struck iron. White chalk lines glimmered green, then blazed into light fierce enough to blast untrained sight into blindness.

Sethvir cried out, his outline immolated by a burn of wild radiance too intense for breathing flesh to encompass. He dared not succumb to the flood of bodily sensation. Every faculty he possessed fought to master the influx, then deflect its blind torrent to imprint defence wards in figured arcs across the heavens.

Outside the tower window, the sky flared a fleeting, raw orange. Then lines crossed the stars, tuned in strict mirror image from the arcane markings scribed upon the table. A spiked scent of ozone whetted the winds, and a thunderous report slammed and rumbled above the frost-rimed wastes surrounding Althain.

Then the glow of grand conjury dimmed and faded. Chalked lines of fire subsided to the dull glare of cinders, then dissipated, febrile as blown wisps of ash. Peace remained. The land spread quiet under untrammelled starlight; but to any with mage-sight to witness, the cloak of the night lay patterned across with a spidery blue tracery of guard spells.

Barefoot and rumpled in his water-stained robe, his hair a thatched nest of tangles, Sethvir of Althain regarded his handiwork and muttered a prayer to Ath that his stopgap effort was sufficient. Luhaine was too distressed to grumble recriminations. Already withdrawn from communion with the earth, he weighed the most expedient means by which the wards over Althain Tower could be realigned to aid Kharadmon in his predicament.

Scant seconds remained before the problem came to roost in their midst.

Luhaine demanded more facts. ‘I presume our colleague is beset by wraiths of the same sort and origin as the ones that grant the Mistwraith its sentience.’

Sethvir grunted an assent, his knuckles latched white in his beard. Once again, his eyes were wide open and blank as his awareness ranged outward to track the inbound progress of Kharadmon. A minute passed before he voiced the worst of all possible conclusions. ‘The creatures in pursuit are free wraiths not embodied in any shell of mist.’

Which meant a binding would be needed that was every bit as potent as the one which sealed the jasper flask prisoned inside Rockfell Pit. Luhaine asked a permission, then made a change to Althain’s outer wards that crackled the air beyond the casements. He added in acerbic disapproval, ‘Kharadmon shouldered an unspeakable risk to draw such entities to Athera.’

‘He had no choice.’ Sethvir seemed suddenly as fragile as a figure cast in porcelain as he recovered his chalk stub and scribbled a fresh round of ciphers on the windowsill. ‘Rather, the beacon spell Asandir and I sent to rescue him became the turn of ill luck to force his hand.’

The implications behind that admission were broad-scale and laced with ironies enough to seed tragedy. Wordless in his anguish, Sethvir passed on what he knew: that Kharadmon had heard every call, every thought, every entreaty dispatched from Althain Tower to urge him home. He had been unable to answer, locked as he was into conflict against hostile entities. These had been bent on his destruction from the instant he was recognized for an emissary from Athera, and a Sorcerer of the Fellowship of Seven. The wraiths cut off beyond South Gate desired to assimilate his knowledge of grand conjury for their own ends. In stealth, in patience, Kharadmon had fought to outwit them. Adversity had only reconfirmed the gravity of his quest, to unriddle the Name of the Mistwraith incarcerated back at Rockfell Peak, that its tormented spirits could be redeemed and two princes be freed from its curse.

‘That beacon held the signature map of all Athera’, Sethvir ended in a stripped whisper. ‘We used the very trees to tie its binding.’

Luhaine absorbed the ripples of wider quandary like a thunderclap. Long years in the past, at the hour of the Mistwraith’s first incursion, Traithe had sealed South Gate to close off its point of entry at hideous personal cost. Now, through the conjury sent to recall Kharadmon, the main body of the mists once thwarted from the crossing were offered another means to trace Athera. Until every tree, every sapling and seed that had lent its vibration to the homing spell had lived out its allotted span of days, a tenuous tie would remain, a ghost imprint of the mighty ward dispatched across the void to recontact those sundered worlds. The threat remained in force, that those truncated spirits once a part of Deshthiere’s autonomy might seek to rejoin their fellows still precariously sealed alive in Rockfell Pit.

‘Dharkaron’s black vengeance!’ Luhaine burst out, a shattering departure for a spirit well-known to condemn his colleagues’ oaths as a mannerless lack of imagination. The fear behind his outburst stayed unspoken, that the Fellowship’s covenant with the Paravian races might be thrown irredeemably into jeopardy.

‘Quite,’ Sethvir said in sour summary. Any outside chance of renewed conflict with the Mistwraith meant the Fellowship might need their princes’ irreplaceable talents with light and shadow once again. The scope of fresh setback staggered thought. For as long as the lives of the royal half brothers lay entangled into enmity by the curse, its ever-tightening spiral would drive them toward a final annihilating conflict. The risks would but increase over time.

The Warden of Althain bent a furrowed scowl toward his sprawl of runes and seals. ‘Let us pray that Kharadmon has brought us back answers and a Name for this terror from the gate worlds.’

Luhaine drifted in from a point poised in air beyond the window. ‘Your hope is premature.’ Ever the pessimist, he keyed a seal into power, and, with a flaring crack, a blue net of light enmeshed the tower’s high battlement. ‘First, we have to rescue the rash idiot from his latest tangle with calamity.’

A bone-chilling gust tinged with ozone flayed a sudden gap through the clouds. The wards above Althain flared purple and sealed in a white effusion of sparks. Sethvir laid down his chalk, bemused to dismay, while disturbed breezes settled, riming the windowsill next to his elbow with diamond crystals of ice.

‘Don’t act so virtuous, Luhaine,’ retorted the Fellowship spirit just returned. A peppery insouciance clipped his speech. ‘I recall the days when you did little but sit about eating muffins and leaving smears of butter on the books. To hear you pontificate now, one can’t help but feel sorry. Such windy bouts of language make a sorrowful substitute for the binges you can’t manage as a ghost.’

While Luhaine was left at flustered odds for rejoinder, Sethvir twisted in his seat to face the turbid patch of air inside his library. A pixie’s bright smile flexed his lips. ‘Welcome home to Althain Tower, Kharadmon.’

A riffle like a snort crossed the chamber. ‘I daresay you won’t think so when you see what’s tagged a ride on my coattails.’ The Sorcerer just arrived resumed in flippant phrasing at odds with his predicament. ‘I hate to be the bore to wreck the party, but don’t be startled if the earth wards you’ve set fail to stand up under trial.’

Urgency pressed him too closely to share the premise behind his bleak forecast. In a fiery flourish of seals, Kharadmon configured an unfamiliar chain of runes and safeguards. These meshed into the primary protections already laid over the tower to receive the hate-driven entities he had battled and failed to outrun.

‘As a last resort, the wraiths dislike the stink of sulphur,’ he finished off in crisp haste.

Ever intolerant of his colleague’s provocations, Luhaine retuned the balance of a sigil the sudden change had tipped awry. ‘I suggest we don’t allow the wretched creatures any liberty to need tactics of such flimsy desperation.’

‘Luhaine! From you, an enchanting understatement!’ Kharadmon’s quick turn around the chamber masked a trepidation like vibrations struck off tempered steel. For should the wraiths which trailed him across the deeps of space escape Fellowship confinement here at Althain, they would gain access to all of Athera. Set loose, their potential for havoc could unleash horrors beyond all imagining.

After all, they were an unfettered aspect drawn here from the original body of the Mistwraith, an entity created from a misguided meddling with the Law of the Major Balance. Its works had driven the Paravians to vanish in despair; in defeat, its dire vengeance had twisted the lives of two princes.

While Luhaine’s ghost churned through brown thoughts over Kharadmon’s tasteless humour, the wards crisscrossing the darkened sky outside flared active with a scream of raw light. Sethvir shouted a binding cantrip, then gave way to alarm as Kharadmon’s hunch was borne through. A burst hurtled down like a meteor storm, in angry red arcs curdling holes through every ward and guard he and Luhaine had shaped from roused earthforce.

‘Ath’s infinite pity!’ Althain’s Warden cried, his fingers wrung through his beard.

‘No,’ Kharadmon interjected, his insouciance torn away by exhaustion that verged on impairment. ‘These wraiths won’t fall on the defenceless countryside. Not yet. They’ll besiege us here first. Incentive will draw them. They desire to steal knowledge from our Fellowship. We’ll be under attack, and if any one of us falls as a victim, there will be no limit to our sorrow.’ His warning fell into a dread stillness, since he alone could gauge the threat now descending upon Althain Tower.

‘Don’t try to close with them. Don’t let them grapple,’ he added in hurried, last caution. ‘Their bent is possession. They can slip traps through time. The best chance we have is to keep out of reach, use this tower’s primary defences for containment, then try to snare the creatures in ring wards.’

The mirror-loop spells to entrap a hostile consciousness back into itself were a simple enough undertaking, provided a mage knew the aura pattern of the spirit appointed for restraint. To Luhaine’s high-browed flick of inquiry, Kharadmon showed tart disgust. Td hardly have needed to flee the fell creatures if I’d held command of their Names.’

And then the wraiths were upon them in a swirling, unseen tide of spite. They poured through the casements to winnow the unshielded spark in the brazier, and cause Sethvir’s scattered tomes to clap shut like trap jaws on bent pages and loose sheaves of quill pens.

Through the last battle to confine Desh-thiere, Paravian defence wards alone had been impervious to the wraiths’ aberrant nature. Even as Asandir had once done in desperation atop another beleaguered tower nine years past, Luhaine fired a charge through a spell net held ready. A power more ancient than any sorcerer’s tenancy surged in response to his need. A deep-throated rumble shook the old stonework as the wards over Althain slammed fast.

The pack of free wraiths bent in hate against the Fellowship were now sealed inside Sethvir’s library.

If Kharadmon had resisted their malevolence alone through an exhaustive toll of years, he was now left too worn from his trials to offer much fight to help stay them. Bare hope must suffice that the Paravian safeguards laid within the tower’s walls would prove as potent against these invaders as the wards once reconfigured against Desh-thiere.

Yet in this hour of trial, the attacking entities inhabited no body spun from mist. These free wraiths held no fleshly tie to life, nor were they subject to any physical law. They could not be lured through illusions framed to malign or confuse the senses. Not being fogbound, no gifted command of light and shadow would suffice to turn them at bay. Lent the knife-edged awareness that no power in the land might contain these fell creatures should they slip Althain’s wards and escape, three Sorcerers stewed inside with them had no option at all but to try and evade their deadly grasp. They must seek to subdue and enchain them without falling prey to possession.

The peril was extreme and the risk beyond thought, for should they fail to contain this threat here and now, the very depths of their knowledge and craft would be turned against the land their Fellowship was sworn and charged to guard.

To surface appearance, there seemed no present enemy to fight. Limned in sheeting flares thrown off by the disrupted fields in the tower wards, the metal clasps of books bit corners of reflection through the gloom. The third lane spark in the brazier recovered its steady blue to cast harsh illumination over the massive black table with its scrawled chalk ciphers and its empty chairs left arrayed at jutted angles. As unkempt as the caches upon his fusty aumbries, Sethvir stood poised, his hair and beard raked up into tufts and his fingers interlaced beneath the threadbare shine of his cuffs. His gaze sieved the air to pick out sign of the hostile motes of consciousness which lurked in the crannies and the shelves.

Tharrick

Dakar the Mad Prophet snapped awake from the tail of a nightmare that involved the loss of his best spirits into the gawping jaws of a fish. The lap of wavelets against wood reminded him that he inhabited a musty berth aboard Talliarthe. He cracked open one eye and immediately groaned as light speared into his pupil from a scald of reflection which danced on the deck beams overhead.

‘Is it sunset or daybreak?’ he bellowed, then stuffed his face like a turtle back into the dark refuge of his blankets.

From his place by the stays in the stern, Arithon merely kept whistling a threnody with an odd, glancing dissonance that went ill with the aches of a hangover.

‘Ath,’ Dakar grumped. He shrugged off the suffocating layers of salt-damp wool, his pudgy hands stretched to cover his eyes and his ears, and successfully managing neither. ‘Your tune sounds like a damned fiend bane.’

Arithon nodded. His screeling measures stayed unbroken. He had seen iyats in the waves at the turn of the tide and preferred to keep his rigging unmolested. He had yet to change the ripped shirt he had worn through the affray at Minderl Bay. Bathed in the ruddy gold light that washed the misted shoreline at Athir, where his little sloop lay at anchor, he twisted the cork from the neck of another flask, then upended it over the stern rail.

Dakar screamed and shot upright as a stream of neat whisky splashed with a gurgle into the brine. The nightmare that had wakened him had been no prank of imagination, after all. ‘Dharkaron rip off your cursed bollocks!’ he howled, and added a damning string of epithets that curdled the quiet of new morning. ‘You’re dumping my last stock of spirits into the Ath-forsaken sea!’

Arithon never paused in his pursuit. ‘I wondered how long you’d take to notice.’ That icy note of warning in his tone was unmistakable to anyone who knew him.

Dakar paused in the companionway to catch his breath, take stock, and indulge in a long, thoughtful scratch at his crotch. ‘What’s changed?’

In the days since the discharge of his hired seamen, then Earl Jieret’s landing ashore for return to Caolle and his clans, the Shadow Master’s brittle temper had seemed to ease. With Lysaer’s warhost disbanded, the intolerable mood he had affected since the massive strike at Werpoint had settled out. Left to his preferred state of solitude, the Shadow Master plied the helm and set Talliarthe’s course gently south.

By the drilling intensity his green eyes held now, something had happened since last night’s sunset to upset his plans yet again.

Too sore for subtlety before balking silence, Dakar repeated his question a plaintive half pitch higher.

Arithon stabbed the cork back into the emptied crock, teeth bared in a wince as the movement troubled some hurt beneath a bandage on his forearm. The injury had not existed the day before. ‘We’re going on to Perdith to visit the forges, and here forward you’ll need to stay sober.’

The reference took a muddled moment to resolve through a headache into sense.

‘Fiends!’ Dakar cried, scaring up the gulls who had just folded wings and settled back into the waves. ‘Don’t say. It’s those Sithaer-begotten brigantines again. You promised you weren’t going to arm them!’

‘Complain, if you like, to Asandir,’ said the Master of Shadow, succinct. ‘If I thought it would help, I’d back you.’

The Mad Prophet opened his mouth to speak, then poised, still agape. He swelled in a gargantuan breath of disbelief, and stopped again, jabbed back to furious thought by the stained strip of linen tied over his adversary’s left wrist. ‘Ath Creator!’ His eyes bulged as he exhaled a near-soundless whistle. ‘Asandir was here. Whatever have you done to require a blood oath before the almighty Fellowship of Seven? No such strong binding has ever been asked, and you a sanctioned crown prince!’

Arithon shot back a glare like a rapier, hooked the last crock by his feet, and ripped the cork from the neck.

Dakar turned desperate. ‘Have a care for your health! At least save one flask. It might be helpful, for need, in case that knife wound turns septic.’

Awarded the Shadow Master’s cool indifference at its worst, the Mad Prophet knew when to desist. If he gave in to fury, his head would explode and, from nasty past experience, he knew better than to provoke the s’Ffalenn temper while emerging from the throes of a hangover. He would seek a patch of shade and sleep off the worst before he shouldered the risk of having his own whisky crocks thrown at him.

He awakened much later to the bone-jarring crash of Talliarthe beating to windward. Her topsails carved in dizzy circles against a clouded sky, while winter-cold spray sheeted over him at each rearing plunge through the swell. Green in the face and long since soaked to his underclothes, Dakar groaned. He rolled, clawed upright, and staggered to the rail to be sick. The horizon showed an unbroken bar of grey and the wind in his nose was scoured salt.

The Mad Prophet closed his eyes and retched, too miserable to curse his companion’s entrenched preference for the rigours of deep-water sailing.

At the helm, far from cheerful, Arithon s’Ffalenn whistled a ballad about a wicked stepson who murdered to steal an inheritance. The tune held a dissonance to unravel thought. By the arrowed force behind each bar and note, Dakar resigned himself: he had no case left to argue. The renowned royal temper already burned fierce enough to singe any man in close quarters. To cross a s’Ffalenn prince in that sort of mood was to invite a retaliation in bloodshed.

The wind scudded through a change and blew from the north, and the rains came and made passage miserable. Dakar lay below decks, too wrung to move, while the sloop ran south, her brick-coloured sails bent taut. At Perdith, Arithon concluded his business with the weapon smiths in haste. The respite in sheltered waters was too brief to allow Dakar a proper recovery. Talliarthe was under canvas and bound back offshore before he could prop himself up and crawl on all fours to find a bawdy house.

Arithon manned the helm like a creature possessed, urgent to reach the south latitudes. He slept wrapped in oilskins beside his lashed tiller. Dakar grew inured to the thump of his step on the cabin top as he tied in fresh reefs, or shook them out at every slight shift in the breeze. The clouds loomed lower each day, until the whitecaps seemed to graze their black, swollen bellies. Rain fell in wind-whirled, spitting drizzle, barbed at times with flecks of ice. The season had turned with cruel vengeance. Hammering squalls joined forces and bred gales; in her run down the eastshore, Talliarthe weathered several that howled through two days and nights.

The incessant cold water stung Arithon’s hands angry red. His hair tangled to white ends from dried deposits of blown salt.

Dakar lived like a snail, crawling over the bucking deck from his berth to the sloop’s tiny galley. He brewed peppermint tea to help ease his nausea and nibbled hardtack and salt pork and cheese. When the weather blew roughest, he stayed in a prone sprawl and groaned like a man with the ague.

Talliarthe carved into tropical waters two weeks shy of the winter solstice.

Arithon by then was a scarecrow figure, sea-beaten and haunted hollow around the eyes. Too much wetting had infected his cut wrist. The gash scabbed and peeled, saltwater sores caused by the chafe of linen dressings swelled sullen purple underneath. Shirtless, driven, pressured sleepless by some tie to conscience that involved his recent oath to Asandir, the Shadow Master leaned on the weather shroud, a silhouette against thin, morning sunlight, his hand at his brow to cut the glare.

Emerged from his lair to relieve himself, Dakar noted the strung tension in his adversary’s back. He spoke for the first time in days. ‘What’s amiss? If it’s whales, I wish they’d stove in this filthy bucket’s keel. Since a bath ashore at a tavern is too much to ask, I’m going to wish with all my heart to get us shipwrecked.’

‘Getting skewered on a beach by Alestron’s best mercenaries is by far the more likely fate.’ Arithon drummed his fingers in an irritable tattoo on the sloop’s rail. ‘We should see half-rigged masts by now. What can the labourers in my shipyard have been doing to while away three months’ time?’

Busy with his trouser points, Dakar looked up and realized that the coast of Scimlade Tip loomed off the bow. The sloop would be moored at Merior by noon, and he could get blissfully drunk. A sigh of content eased from him, cut short by the prickling awareness that the Shadow Master glared at his back.

‘No.’ Clear as a glass edge, a masterbard’s voice, like a blade through the calls of white gulls and the softer susurrance of the sloop’s wake. ‘You will not indulge yourself senseless.’

Dakar’s jerk of outrage mistimed with a gust; he swore as he almost wet his knuckles. Stuffing himself back into his trousers, hands shaking as he hurried the lacing, he spun toward the cockpit in a rage. ‘Since when are you appointed as guardian of my fate?’

Back at the sloop’s tiller, Arithon threw her helm down. His apparent attention stayed fixed on the heading as her bow bore up and all manner of tackle slatted loose to a rattle of blocks that defied all attempt at speech. As the headsails caught aback and pressed the Talliarthe’s painted bow past the eye of the wind, the gaff-rigged main slammed taut on the opposite tack. Arithon freed the jib sheets from their cleats. The thunder as thrashed canvas bellied to the breeze finally muted to a driving sheet of spray as he hardened the lines alee.

‘I am master of nothing,’ he answered then on a queer, wrung note of exhaustion. ‘My own fate least of all.’

He spent the next hour on the foredeck with a bucket of seawater, a fish knife for shaving, and soap. While he sluiced himself clean and aired out dry clothes, Dakar blistered his hands at the helm, by turns immersed in sulking, or else scowling as he weighed inveigling plots to slip beer or neat spirits past his adversary’s vigilance.

By midday the weather turned gloomy. Winter rains curtained the beachhead at Merior like dirty, layered gauze and pocked the leaden troughs of the breakers. Soaked to the skin, the twins Fiark and Feylind quiet at his heels, their ebullience subdued by disaster, Arithon s’Ffalenn stood still as deadwood and regarded the wreckage of his shipyard.

Of the brigantine which should have been launched and by now rigged to completion, nothing remained but a straggle of crooked ribs, scabbed to black charcoal by fire. The planked-over hull that lay adjacent gaped like a cave, her stem and forequarter burned away. The stacks of new lumber for her finishing were all charred to ash in the sand. The ropewalk was gone, a snarl of gutted boards amid the puddled runoff shed by dunes tarnished dark with rinsed carbon.

Aghast, his face white and his frame racked to shivers, Arithon looked stricken by a deathblow as he regarded the ruin of his hope to make clean escape to blue water.

Feylind reached up and squeezed his dripping, cold fingers. ‘Mother asked you to come home with us. She made a pot of fish soup.’

Fiark blew plastered blond hair from his lips and chimed in, ‘You can borrow my blanket from the loft.’

Arithon forced himself to stir. ‘Thank you. And thank Jinesse, too, for her kindness. Say that I’ll visit her cottage later. Now go home. She’ll greet me with scolding if she finds out I’ve let you get wet.’

The children hared off, screaming in delight as they kicked and splashed through the puddles.

Ignored where he waited, growing soggy in a tunic that reeked of unwashed sweat, Dakar slapped the crimped locks behind his neck to dam the water that dribbled down his collar. ‘Are we just going to stand here until we grow roots in the damp?’

The chart loft still stood. To judge by the cries of raucous laughter ringing in muffled bursts through the boards, and the woodsmoke which trailed from the chimney, the labourers inside would at least be warm, if the beer that made them blithe had run out.

Arithon’s stillness cracked into a purposeful stride that carried him up to the doorway. He lifted the latch, crashed the panel inward, and stood stiff-armed against the silver splash of runoff that poured off the palm-thatched roof.

Blocked in the entry behind him, Dakar saw the uproarious company of the yard’s workers rock into stupefied stillness. Calloused hands drifted in midair, crockery beer mugs forgotten; bare feet shifted under bench boards and table. Like the rasp of a hornet’s nest disturbed in dry grass, Ivel the blind splicer chuckled in malice from his perch on a nail barrel in the corner. It’s himself come back, and early, too. What else could shrivel the tongues in yer mouths? I’d warrant a visit by Dharkaron’s Chariot would be given a saucier welcome.’

‘I want to know what happened,’ Arithon cut in, his bard’s trained diction never sharper. ‘Let the master shipwright stay and tell me. The steam box is whole, still. So are the tools and the sawpit. If the new wood’s a loss, the one hull not decked yet can be taken apart and used to patch up the holed one. By Ath, I don’t pay any man silver to sit on his rump sucking down beer ‘til he’s witless!’

A galvanic stir swept the crowded tables as benches rumbled back from plank trestles. The labourers arose in guilt-fed haste and pressed to be first to crowd the doorway. Arithon stepped aside to let them pass, his burning gaze merciless on every man’s face. Only when the last cringing layabout had passed did he move to enter the sail loft. Stale air and dampness and the smell of sour lager hung heavy in the stifling heat. Reprieved at last from the misery of the rain, Dakar sidled to the stove to warm his fingers, eyes darting in prayerful search for a tankard and a broached cask.

‘No beer left,’ rasped Ivel from his cranny. Scathelessly smug before Arithon’s flicked glance, and crafty enough to anticipate, he tipped his grizzled beard toward the tread that advanced and shrugged his bony shoulders. His large, seamed hands with their thumbs worn shiny from years of twining hemp gleamed red against shadow as Dakar fiddled open the gate of the iron stove and prodded the embers inside.

‘Rope store’s full burnt,’ the splicer quipped in brassy cheer. ‘Can’t make me work in yon rain without materials.’ He tilted his narrow head, impertinent as a gossip. ‘What’ll ye do? That gold store of yers, lad, she’s bound to be played right low.’

Arithon swept aside a litter of sticky crockery, kicked a bench closer, and sat. ‘I’ll thank you not to comment until the master shipwright has explained himself.’

Ivel leaned aside and shot a neat stream of spit at a bowl on the trestle by his elbow. ‘Master shipwright’s run off. He feared to face yer temper, and some lass in Shaddorn took him in. You want to know what happened, I’ll tell it. Else you can try out yer touch with the wretch who torched the yard. The men hazed him like butchers. He won’t talk.’

Arithon straightened, his wet fingers clenched and his eyes icy sparks in the gloom. ‘One man?’

‘Aye.’ Ivel’s grin revealed gapped, yellow teeth. ‘Hates yer living guts. Hid in the brush till the lads all got drunk, then launched on his merry bit of sabotage.’

‘He knows who I am?’ Arithon asked in a dead, level voice. ‘He told the labourers?’

A cracking, high cackle split from Ivel’s throat. He hugged his knees to his chest on his barrel, a dried-up, corded little monkey of a man who lived and breathed to stir up malice. ‘He told the men nothing, for all the hide they singed off him. What I ken, I got because I took him water when he raved. But your secret’s full safe with me, prince.’

Arithon snapped up a chipped flagon and hurled it. The smash of unglazed crockery against the board floor raised a storm of clay dust and chinking fragments. ‘Secret?’ He laughed in a brittle, thin irony more bitter than the splicer could match. ‘The whole of the north knows precisely where I am, and I find my ships burned to ashes.’

Still by the stove, polished ruddy by the coals, Dakar rubbed sweaty knuckles over his rumpled tunic. ‘You say the man who did this is held captive?’

Ivel rocked off a nod. ‘Aye, he is. Bound and locked in the boiler shed. The master joiner guards the key.’

The wood fire had been lit to heat the steam box again. Aware of the rain as a drummed, liquid trickle off the thatch and the erratic, spaced hiss as a leak dripped onto the hot copper vat, the prisoner curled on his side in abject misery. The damp, sand floor made him shiver. Hungry, thirsty, fevered down to his bones, at first he presumed the footsteps outside meant a labourer had come to fuel the stove.

Since such were wont to kick him as they passed, he wormed into the gap behind the log stores. If he feigned sleep and stayed out of sight, sometimes his presence was forgotten. Today, the mere hope made him pitiful. The sweeping chills that seized through his frame made him unable to keep still.

The footsteps outside came closer, overlaid by agitated talk. Then a stranger’s voice blistered across rising argument like tempered steel through threshed straw. ‘Enough! I’ll hear no excuses. Stay out here until you’re called.’ Keys chimed sour notes through a patter of hurried strides, and the new arrival spoke again. ‘No, Dakar. You will wait.’

The bar in the lock grated and gave; the door jerked open. A flood of rain-washed air swirled through the heat and a small, lithe man stepped inside. He stood a moment, eyes searching the darkness, while the fiery glare from the furnace lined his sharp profile and the lip he curled up at the stench.

Snapped to a scourge of clear anger, he said, ‘You claim he’s in here?’

The master joiner’s south shore drawl filtered back, uncertain through the silvered splash of water. ‘Master, he’s there. My heart’s blood as surety. We’d never let him escape.’

Without any fumbling, the man found the lamp and the striker kept ready on the shelf by the doorway. His hands shook as he lit the spill. The trembling flare of illumination as he touched flame to wick shed gold over finely made knuckles. He raised the lamp and hung its iron ring from a nail in the rafters.

Through vision impaired to slits by bruises and swelling, the prisoner saw him fully, centred beneath the yellow glow. Thin and well-knit, he looked like a wraith in dark breeches, his white shirt slathered to his shoulders by the rain. His hair was black. Wet strands stuck like ink to his temples and jaw. The features they framed were pale granite, all chipped angles and fury, the eyes now shadowed by lamplight.

Wind riffled through the portal at his back. The lantern flame wavered and failed to a spark, then leaped back in dazzling recovery. Swept by a chill that chattered his teeth, the prisoner shrank into his cranny.

The man spun toward the noise like a predator. He could not miss the lashed pair of ankles that protruded from the wood stores, livid and blackened with scabs.

‘Merciful Ath!’ He lilted a fast phrase in the old tongue that resounded with appalled shock. Then in a rage to freeze the falling rain itself, he changed language and commanded, ‘Strike his bonds.’

‘But, my lord,’ protested the master joiner through the sizzle as the leak let fall another droplet on the boiler. The wretch came intending to murder y—’

In fearful speed, the man in authority cut him off. ‘Do it now! Are you deaf or a fool, to defy me?’

While the joiner entered, chastened to cowering, the black-haired man sank to his knees and laid his own icy hands over the prisoner’s roped ankles. ‘Give me the knife. I’ll do this myself. Then send for a litter and some sort of tarp to cut the rain.’ In the same distilled tone of venom he added, ‘Dakar and I will serve as bearers.’

The prisoner flinched in agony as his leg was grasped and steadied and the knife touched against the crusted cord.

‘Easy,’ soothed the speaker in a murmured change of register. As the bonds fell away, the same fingers explored the swelling cuts and burns, gentle despite their marring tremor and the slowed reflex of deep chill. ‘We’ll have to ease him out before I can reach to free his wrists.’

Worked clear of his cranny with the aid of a fat man he recognized, the captive forced open the grazed, bloodied pulp that clogged his eyelids. The presence of the gem-dealing imposter last seen tied for questioning in the Duke of Alestron’s private study cleared his wits. At close quarters the identity of the other could be guessed.

Such sharp-angled features and green eyes must surely belong to the Master of Shadow, who had ruined his name in the duke’s guard and brought him to ignominy and exile.

‘You!’ he ground out, half-choked by bile and hatred. ‘You’re the dread sorcerer who enspelled my lord’s armoury the day it burned. I swore in cold blood to see you dead!’ He wrenched his strapped arms with such force that the stout, bearded henchman scrambled back in sceptical alarm.

‘You see who he is? You’re sure you want him freed?’ The Mad Prophet clasped his fat fists in trepidation. ‘He’s sure to fly at your throat.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn simply sat down. Already white, his face looked like paper soaked over bone from the impact of pity and shock. ‘I said I want his bonds struck. Have you eyes? Ath Creator, the man’s out of his mind with pain, and feverish to the point where a fair weather breeze could knock him down.’

‘At your service, with pleasure, your Grace, except for one thorny problem.’ Dakar’s round face furrowed in sly sarcasm as he accepted the knife to slice ropes. ‘When this brutish fellow gets up and cuts your heart out, I’ll be forced to explain. The Fellowship of Seven will hold me to blame when they hear how your line met its end.’

A small movement; the Master of Shadow turned his head.

Dakar sucked in a sharp breath. ‘You win, as always. Dharkaron show mercy, forget I ever spoke!’

Awash in dizziness and quick hatred, the captive gritted his teeth. Such reversal of fate lay beyond even dreams, that he might snatch back his chance to avenge his honour. He endured the frightful pain as his enemies raised his shoulder and turned him over. ‘I was never careless,’ he ground out in mulish acrimony. ‘Your black sorcery allowed you entrance to that keep. A vixen’s cunning got you out alive. Ath’s Avenger bear me witness, you shall get what you deserve.’

Behind and above him, Arithon s’Ffalenn regarded the older grid of scars that marked the captive’s naked back. ‘Your duke made you pay sorely for what was, at most, a lapse of attention. What brought you here? A need to strike back for injustice?’

Stubborn in pride, the exiled guardsman held silent, his cheek pressed to damp sand until his cuts stung. The grate of broken ribs stitched his side in red fire and spasmed his muscles at each breath. He squeezed his eyes closed, clinging to patience, but the close heat and the sweat that ran from him in his agony made him light-headed and sick. His senses upended into vertigo. Long before the ropes that tied his wrists were sawn through, his awareness had unreeled into dark.

He awakened raving, deep in the night. A vision tormented him, of clean sheets and the astringent scent of poultice herbs. He thrashed against the touch that restrained him and railed aloud at the woman’s voice that implored an unseen demon for assistance. Then he cursed as other hands reached down in diabolical force to restrain him.

‘Is there no end?’ someone cried in distress. ‘He’s started the bleeding again.’

Over his head loomed the face of the antagonist he had ached and endured horrors for the chance to kill. He shivered. His nerves an inferno of thwarted rage, he tried to strike out with his fist.

Bandages stopped him; then the sorcerer’s features, haggard with an incomprehensible pity.

‘Mountebank,’ gasped the guardsman, reduced to frustration and tears. His enemy’s dread shadows and his darkness were real enough. They spun him in their web once again and swallowed his struggles. Pinned helpless and moaning, he lost his thoughts into starless, lightless night.

Later he heard someone weeping his name. The harsh accents sounded like his own. Sunlight burned his eyes and branded hot bands at his naked wrists and ankles. He remembered the prison and the post. Again he tasted the fire of the whip, as Duke Bransian s’Brydion’s master-at-arms flayed open the skin of his back. ‘I’m no traitor, to beg like a dog to be forgiven,’ he said, and then retched, sickened by his weakness. ‘Why can’t you believe me? I opened no doors. I met no Master of Shadow!’

But the whip fell and fell. The accusatory voice of Dharkaron Avenger seemed to roll like thunder through his dreams. ‘If you suffered a flogging harsh enough to scar for failing to secure a locked passage, then what shall be your lot for setting fire to the ships of a sorcerer?’

The bed where he lay underwent a mad spin, like the turn of Daelion’s Wheel. The pain in his flesh swelled and drowned him. He heard water splash from a bowl and then music. Notes tapped and pried against his fevered senses like slivers flung off breaking crystal. Their sweetness conspired to weave a rolling pattern of freed beauty that scalded a breach through his hatred. Again he wept. The purity of song left him chilled like white rain, then threatened to break his laboured heart. He fell back, gasping against a soft pillow that swelled around his head until he died.

Or thought so, until he opened his eyes, limp and lucid, to a gloom gently lit by a candle. Rain chapped against the shutters of a cottage which smelled of oiled oak and dried lavender. He moved his head, aware by the softened prickle beneath his cheek that someone had washed and trimmed his hair. The strands were tarnished gold again, and shining on the linen, combed neat as in the days before his beggary.

‘He’s awakened,’ said a woman in a shy, cautious whisper.

Someone else in the shadows responded. ‘Leave us, Jinesse.’ Light steps creaked against the floorboards. A man’s outline swept across the candleflame, etched in brief light before he pulled up a wicker stool and sat down. ‘Your name is Tharrick?’

The guard captain condemned to an unkind exile opened bruised eyelids and discovered his enemy at his bedside.

He swallowed, whipped dry from the aftermath of fever and a pathetic, languid weakness that required all his will to turn his head. Echoes from delirium rang back out of memory to haunt him: What would be his lot for setting fire to the ships of a sorcerer?

Terrified by the kindness that had nursed his cruel injuries, he swept the stilled features of his benefactor with a scorching, searching gaze. ‘Why?’ he croaked at last.

Restored reason could no longer deny the compassion in the man, whose very hands had bandaged and poulticed, and whose masterful playing upon the lyranthe had spiralled tortured thoughts into sleep.

‘I came here to kill you,’ said Tharrick. ‘Why not make me suffer?’ He reddened at the memory of the curses he had uttered to speed this man’s spirit off to Sithaer.

Arithon stared down at his fingers, loosely cradled on his knees. His calm was all pretence. His masked spark of urgency lay so perfectly damped, his presence became a statement wound in patience. Whatever had unnerved him in the boiler shed, the emotion had washed clean and passed.

A faint frown tucked his upswept brows as the Master of Shadow weighed his answer. The lacings at his cuffs hung still as pen strokes, unmoved by the draught that teased the candleflame. ‘When a man has been handled like an animal, it should come as no surprise when, from mistreatment, he’s finally driven to desperation. What happened at Alestron was no fault of yours. The spell that brought the keep’s destruction was not mine, but your duke’s, that I was sent in by the Fellowship to help disarm. The plan went sadly wrong, for all of us. But I am not as Lord Bransian of Alestron, to hold you to blame out of temper.’

‘Temper! I wanted a sword in your heart!’ Tharrick gave a riled push at the blankets. Only sour luck had let him strike at a time when the victim he came to assassinate had been absent on business in the north.

‘Don’t.’ Arithon caught the guardsman’s shoulder, pressed him back. ‘Your broken rib could be jostled to nick a lung. The leg wound is serious. If you stir, you’ll restart the bleeding.’

‘I burned your brigantine!’ Tharrick gasped, anguished. ‘All your cut timber. Your ropewalk.’

Quiet on the stool, Arithon released his hold and looked at him. He said nothing. His face showed regret, but not anger.

Tharrick shut his eyes. His bruises throbbed. Under the ache of linen bindings, he felt as though his chest would tear and burst. Then remorse shredded even his last hold on pride. He wept, while the Master of Shadow stayed at his bedside and withheld comment like a brother.

‘Get well, with my blessing,’ said Arithon finally in that tone that could hurt for its sympathy. ‘Jinesse will give you shelter in her cottage while you heal. After that, by my word, you go free. Return to your loved ones and live out your days without fear. For if in truth I were the sorcerer you believed, your life in my hands would be sacrosanct.’

But Tharrick had no family, nor any place left to call home. His post in the duke’s guard had been his whole life until this man, who meant no malice, had ruined him. Desire for revenge had sustained him ever since. Denied that, he was an honourless exile, lost without purpose and cast adrift.