Fugitive Prince (16 page)

“You claim you would let two lives tear civilized society asunder?” Lysaer laughed, his widened eyes locked on the Sorcerers. “Then indeed, I have no hope.” Honest rage tore through his gritty resentment, for a second upsetting the ironclad duty dunned into him with royal birthright. “Ath, did you think I
desired
my exile to this world? Or that I asked to become your sacrificial weapon against the Mistwraith?”

“The Fellowship has
never
been a force in Athera to take guiding charge of human destiny!” A creature of movement and action, Asandir thrust up from the table. He stalked to the fire, braced an arm on the mantel, while the flames at his feet snapped and flickered. Their light played a moving mapwork of lines over his hard, shuttered features.

Luhaine retrieved the lapsed dialogue. “Our purpose is rather to stand guard for the land, and to this end, you’re being asked some harsh questions. Face yourself!” The entreaty was raised, a knife blade that offered no quarter. “You embark on a dangerous precedent, even beg the ruin of your race! How dare you mask over the miracle that is the prime source! For arrogance, you put yourself on that pedestal in attempt to whitewash a curse-bound directive to end your half brother’s life. True justice plays no part. You veil truth for vendetta, for vengeance and base envy, because Arithon will not be seduced by the evil you seek to attach to his name.”

Lysaer swayed. His glittering shoulders wavered, almost bent.

The adept swept to her feet, relentless. “Unstop your ears and listen, scion of s’Ilessid. Persist on your present path, and you shall gain your desires.” As Lysaer’s blue eyes widened, she pressed him, “Oh yes. Your half brother shall walk in the shadow you create. But not before you stand blackened enough to raise despair of a force sufficient to break him. Every mortal enclave on this continent shall fall as victim to your cause. Your memory shall be sealed in the archives by violence, for nothing in creation can stand or flourish in the absence of love. Let us see, in the hour that Arithon’s blood stains your hands,
whether conviction for your fellowman or overweening pride is your master.”

That bleak forecast raised consternation among the Sorcerers. Unmindful of their stir, Lysaer sank to his knees. Tears wet his cheeks. The light snagged and shivered in his diamond studs as he bent his bright head in defeat. “Have mercy,” he pleaded. “I admit to my wrong. Lend me your guidance to heal.”

Asandir returned to the table and sat, his harsh gaze fixed on his hands. Silence fell, filled by :he tormented sobs of the prince, who
perhaps
had been brought to realize the enormity of his acts. No Sorcerer leaped to mete out the last test of surety.

Kharadmon shouldered that burden at the end, his razored, brief style expressing the inflexible Law and just consequence of the Major Balance. “Abjure your call to arms. Publicly renounce your false tie to divine calling. Then you shall have at your side all the help our Fellowship can command.”

Lysaer pressed his forehead against the patterned carpet. Hair like combed sunlight fronded the hands he held clenched at his crown. He would not look up. Shamed to abasement, he asked of the Sorcerers, “What do I say to ease the grief of the widows and the mothers whose loved ones were slaughtered in Vastmark?”

“Tell them the truth,” Sethvir answered, implacable. “Your mistake should not be permitted to compound, nor be passed to their sons, to die for wrong cause and false sacrifice.”

At that, Lysaer regained the will to stand straight. Through shock-darkened eyes, he perused the stilled faces of five Sorcerers, then the shadowy countenance masked by the hood of Ath’s adept. In tear-stained magnificence, he looked like one of Ath’s avatars, fallen, a sword forged in blood to stand firm against wrongful action. “Ath preserve, you ask me to break my personal, given trust. As I am cursed, so too is my half brother. I can’t leave my people defenseless before him. Bind Arithon first. Then take my capitulation on any terms that you ask.”

“Ath show you mercy,” Sethvir replied. “I am sorry. We now must do more than warn.”

A thin, feral smile seized Lysaer’s lips. “I thought so!” He loosed a jarring peal of laughter. “Here is the truth. Power begets force, did I not say so? What will you do now, if not call me down by straight violence?”

“You mistake us,” snapped Traithe, no longer the listening confidant, but grim as the raven just flown from a field of raw carnage. “Your life in our hands is sacrosanct, and your will, no one’s other
than your own. But mankind’s place in Athera has never been a born right.” This was straight fact. The ancestor of every human alive had first come as a refugee begging for sanctuary. “Settlement here was permitted under strict terms by the compact sworn between our Fellowship and the Paravians.”

“Did you think kingdom law was written at our whim?” Kharadmon sat forward, his trickster’s flamboyance razed away. “The original charters were drawn by our hand, but to the old races’ auspices. Their strictures are not mere rules to be overturned for some upstart mayor’s convenience.”

Not to be outdone, Luhaine plunged on to lecture, “For the acts you have initiated, for setting your seal to chained slavery, and for seeking to supplant Ath’s order and the Law of the Major Balance, you have defied the tenets mankind was charged never to violate.”

“Now you know.” Sethvir tucked folded hands beneath the spilled fleece of his beard. Diminished by sorrow, he appeared to read his next lines from the whorled grain of waxed maple. “Our Fellowship keeps a trust with the Paravians. Each human child birthed here lives and dies on the sufferance of our intercession. We stand surety for mankind, all their works, all their laws. Yes, even for their greed and their strivings that could mar every facet of this world. Understand this. We guard and nurture as we can, but our service is not to our race.”

Althain’s Warden paused. As if the air to drive spoken words bound him mute, he looked aside, the set to his shoulders gone bird-boned and frail. He seemed an old man without mystery, outworn by relentless attention to detail and a shackling burden of care. “There exists no compromise, no quarter. Any man to defy the compact, who breaks the first order set down by the Paravians, must be cast outside our protection. You will leave Althain Tower. None here would misuse grand conjury to upset the fate you pursue. Nor shall we mourn, or answer your cries when the justice of the old races falls upon you and the followers you seduce into blindness.”

“You will not break me by intimidation,” Lysaer said. “I stand as the shield for my people.”

Sethvir bowed his head.

No second chance followed, no gap for reprieve. The image forms of Kharadmon and Luhaine whisked out like gale-blown candles.

Lysaer felt their presence encircle his form in cold air, while the adept slipped her hood and bared features of frost-brittle clarity. “The ways of the Paravians are not those of men. They are not born of earth, but sprung from the prime source itself.” Her upraised finger
accused him. “Woe to you, prince. The wrath of Athera’s true guardians is no light fate to invoke.”

An actinic burst sheared the chamber as a rune seal flamed above Lysaer’s head. The cipher blazed yellow-white, then faded to violet. Sensation followed, a sourceless wind of fine energies that hazed through all the five senses. Lysaer experienced no physical discomfort. But the vibration rocked on through his mind. Something inside of him howled wild protest for the irrevocable step being taken. His awareness became pierced by untenable loss. No grief ever savaged the heart to such depths, as if for an instant he had gazed upon paradise, then plunged for all time into darkness. He wept. Ugly, racking sobs closed his throat as something unnamed and brilliant slipped away and consigned him to friendless desolation.

The hurt sieved and tore him, needles through silk, until he felt nothing but numbness.

Then Asandir was beside him. Firm hands took his arm, drew his faltering step away from the King’s Chamber and into the black chill of the stairwell. Lysaer reeled as though drunk. Plain air turned his head. The stairs felt absurdly hard beneath his feet, and the shadows pooled under the sconces held menace like teeth, lurking unseen to gnaw flesh.

Lysaer called on his gift to blast out the darkness, but no spark answered. His limbs seemed battened in felt. Again he stumbled. A Sorcerer steadied him. The touch was raw power and limitless strength clothed over in gentleness that plunged a dull ache to the bone.

“You are deceivers,” the prince insisted. “Betrayers of your own principle to shield Arithon.” His voice seemed a stranger’s, and his commitment to honor no more than the soulless whine of spent wind.

Asandir pressed ahead, bundling his charge between the stilled ranks of statuary. Their mystery had gone strangely dull; now, the centaurs, unicorns, and sunchildren seemed nothing more than exquisitely beautiful carvings. Lysaer felt remorse, and then wondered in leveled, pure logic why he should pause for regret. The tricks of the Fellowship were evasively subtle. The guiding hand on his flesh was creased by the bridle rein,
ordinary,
no more than a common old man’s. Still the contact was comfort and animal warmth; then even that simple solace was gone as Asandir released him by the trapdoor to the vault.

“Go down.” Winter drafts bit deep where the Sorcerer pointed.

Lysaer locked his jaw, sliced again by a glass-edged sorrow. He spoke fast and bitter to fill the void. “The mayors who fear you, did
your Fellowship disown them the same way?” Steadier now, he seized the giddy nerve to laugh. “I’ve read the musty old records of the uprising kept at Erdane. They speak of retribution and vengeance to be claimed for the blood of the murdered high kings.
Yet five hundred years have passed.
Nothing happened.” The freezing, dry air braced him back to banked rage.

“The Paravians are gone,” Lysaer insisted. “They might never return. Yet you still threaten and raise dread in their name. I say humanity deserves better than empty rules and the coercive threat of your sorceries. I shall spread truth, that your compact has no foothold in present-day governance.”

Asandir still said nothing. At the base of the stairwell he stopped, unnervingly inscrutable. His hands hung still at his sides, empty and large knuckled as a quarryman’s. Lysaer looked away, unbeguiled by that traitorous semblance of humanity. Before him spread the concave Paravian focus, its patterns strung across in mazed chains of ciphers, white quartz embedded in onyx. Then, touched to life by some spark of bound magecraft, the demon sconces blazed into flame. The Sorcerer’s taut face became etched in copper; then that warmth erased to unyielding, struck iron as captured lane force flared the pattern lines active.

“Step forward,” said Asandir. “Your people are waiting at Avenor.”

Lysaer turned his back. He walked in unvanquished pride to the center point of the focus. “I will see mankind released from your tyranny. Justice will follow war. The land will be given a peace free of shadows, with no help from absent Paravians.”

No word came back. Only Asandir’s signal to Kharadmon and Luhaine, who poised, unseen, to engage gathered power for the transfer. Then chaos clapped down, and time came unhinged. All links to the senses dissolved through a fireburst of light. Spinning vertigo remained, slashed once by the twined cipher of a sorcerer’s mark that spanned the whole axis of creation. Through the deluge of static and the keening explosion of channeled energy, Lysaer came aware of a far-off sibilance of speech…

“…say something fast to avert panic,” his captain at arms called out in shrill urgency. “Just name the event as a portent of Ath’s favor, and
hurry.
If the mob’s left to think our prince was abducted by sorcery, we’re going to see mayhem and riot.”

No brave line of pikemen could stand their ground if the dais became stormed by panic. Since the play of uncanny, shimmering light seemed the least of two evils, the chancellor had no choice but
step into the breech. His orator’s shout rose above the crowd’s stunned astonishment.

“There will be alms!” Forced to a desperate semblance of calm, he improvised, “As you see, the Prince of the Light obeys higher forces! He goes where he’s needed upon instant notice. Are we children to pine for his continuous presence? The shadow-banes are blessed. Let them be disbursed by our own public servants, and leave his Grace free to shoulder the burden of our defense!”

Just as the mob subsided from its milling roar, the light of Lysaer’s gift shimmered clean once again. Restored, riled and whole, to his ceremonial dais at Avenor, he was fully exposed to the public eye and the stupefied shock of his officers. The moment was his to recoup what advantage he could.

“I’ve come back with proof!” he announced, his snap of resolve reborn from quenched terror. “Since Merior, I’ve known the adepts of Ath’s Brotherhood were in league with Master of Shadow. Now they and the Fellowship Sorcerers have joined in conspiracy against me.”

Before the stark awe of his ranking retainers, he whirled face about. The crowd in the plaza redoubled their chanting. Cheers pealed and woke to a howl of animal noise.
“Prince of the Light! Prince of the Light!”

Lysaer drank in the adulation. Spurred to fierce exultation, countersurge for a hatred he had long since ceased to resist, he bared his teeth in a laugh. White clad, gold haired, fired by his gift, he raised his fists in defiance of the Sorcerers who had dared to intimidate and censure him.

“Behold!” he addressed the masses in a ringing, exuberant shout. “You and your children shall be saved from shadow! I am called to serve Athera and oppose the Spinner of Darkness! No cause and no power will stop my pursuit until he lies dead, and the allies to his evil works are thwarted!”