Fugitive Prince (37 page)

From below, a ruddy flicker in the stairwell arrow slits warned of another imminent arrival. Mearn hunkered down against icy granite,
amazed to have stumbled upon a clandestine conference between Lysaer’s trusted inner circle. He listened to their exchanged greetings, and by names and accents identified the realm’s Lord Justiciar, Avenor’s High Gate Keeper, and Lord Mayor Skannt of the headhunters’ league. Tysan’s ranking seneschal was away with Lysaer in the east, but his appointed seat was not empty.

Another man with soft, fruity vowels assumed the authority to officiate. “Where’s Gace?” that one snapped. “He’s late. Does anyone know why?”

Gace was Prince Lysaer’s household steward, a closemouthed, stringy wisp of a creature who tended to slink. Mearn misliked the man’s habit of lurking in dim corners, unblinking and watchful as a rat.

“If Gace is delayed, he’ll have sound reason,” Vorrice made grating objection. “We need his goodwill. As the Prince of the Light’s closest servant, it might be politic to trust him.”

A whining blast of wind obscured the reply. Mearn braved the brunt, given no other choice. Meeting or conspiracy, he needed to tell which, then make clean his escape. Cold and inactivity were now deadly adversaries. Prolonged exposure on a north-facing ledge would soon impair his reflexes. He dared not linger beyond the point where he became too chilled to climb.

“Our man has arrived,” announced the fatuous spokesman. Inside the chamber, the door from the stairwell opened to a decisive click. Pressed to the casement, his breath fanning frost rime across rippled glass, Mearn snagged the newcomer’s name from the brisk exchange of introductions. A frown nicked his brow. What breeding mischief would lead a rich trade minister to leave his plush comforts in Erdane to convene with Avenor’s cabal of power? Mearn gave the quandary ferocious thought. He had never met Guild Master Koshlin, but clan rumor from Camris linked the title to a bullish, short man with sly eyes and a penchant for endowments in gold to further the headhunters’ leagues.

While chairs bumped inside, and the cozy assembly settled itself down to deal, Mearn chafed stiff fingers, riled to slit-eyed concern.

“Your welcome is accepted here only because of your overtures to support Prince Lysaer’s alliance against evil,” the man in authority addressed, his peach-syrup inflection at chilling odds with a bluntness that ran contrary to the ingrained town penchant for stylized manners and ceremony.

“By all means, let us speak plainly.” Lord Koshlin’s ruffled suavity trailed through a considering pause. “Your prince shall have gold in
support from a faction in Camris I have been asked not to name. The moneys will come with no strings attached. If your self-styled savior can bring more than folk at Miralt Head to hail him as an avatar, no one of us will denounce him.”

That raised a bristling rustle, as someone of size roused himself to take umbrage.

Ever smooth in diplomacy, the High Chancellor intervened. “Let us not quibble over unfounded truths, Vorrice. We few are privileged. Elsewhere, the awareness of Lysaer’s blessed heritage has not been made common knowledge.”

“Divine will shall triumph, but the time must be right,” a supporter chimed in to placate Erdane’s minister. “His Grace has promised each man must find faith and belief for himself. Until he wins due acclaim, our prince poses as mortal.”

Lord Koshlin pressed on, impatient. “Why waste any breath on theology at all? Let your prince inspire the whole world to bow to his moral righteousness. Every conversion he makes serves our need, in turn. We are dedicated men bound to break the constraint of the Fellowship’s compact. Our followers in Camris already have instructions. They’ll serve your Alliance of Light in coin and information, and even raw resource. By whatever means, they want sorcery suppressed and the old clan lineages eradicated. The s’Ilessid claim to immortal birth is not germane. We view his criminal charges against the Shadow Master’s allies as a powerful political convenience.”

While Mearn battled the rise of his gorge, Vorrice raised abrasive opinion. “Your hatred of Maenol’s barbarians runs deep. Do we also surmise you fear the restoration of the Paravians?”

“Don’t mistake, we fear nothing.” Koshlin paused through what felt at second hand like a lingering, oily smile. “Let me suggest, any force in Athera who stands for the old ways poses a dangerous impediment. We wish the Second Age mysteries forgotten.”

On the sill, tucked and bitter, Mearn squelched seething fury, while Koshlin’s bland monologue expounded upon the self-blinded creed of the townborn.

“Those bygone beliefs stunt the interests of trade. Why should a hidebound adherence to past ritual disallow more seaports and better roads?” A fist thumped on wood, to a flickering splash of leaked flame light through slitted curtains. “Since the Paravians abandoned the continent, mankind should claim rightful use of the land.” Koshlin cleared his throat. “The faction I speak for will back Lysaer’s cause. In secret, we’ve labored to abolish the compact since the over-throw of the last high kings. Those of our heirs who incline toward
religion will scarcely care which name they invoke when they mouth their prayers to a deity. Once humanity is free to reap this world’s wealth, society will flourish. You wish the Prince of Rathain brought down and his supporters suppressed to save the peace. We wish to escape the Fellowship’s tyranny. Our ends lie along the same course, won’t you see?”

“You want the slinking barbarians dead,” Lord Mayor Skannt observed in his drawling, perpetual contempt. “For that end, I’ll take in any man’s gold. But first, I’d hear your conditions.”

The proposal branched into particulars and questions, while Mearn shivered and fretted on the ledge. The moment had arrived to press on, or jeopardize all of his success. Against the murmured backdrop of debate, then the Lord High Justiciar’s scathing accusation to the realm’s chancellor for fence-sitting, the clansman eased his tucked stance. A second he lingered, heart torn into conflict by blood loyalties.

“Damn all your shortsighted bickering!” Vorrice burst through in surging vehemence. Mearn started tense. Inside, a chair rasped back from the table. He flattened against stone as crisp footsteps carried across the chamber. An angry hand snapped the curtains aside and bared the centermost casement. Time froze. Cramped against the adjacent lintel, Mearn stopped breathing, pinned down a fatal handspan away from the executioner’s suffused profile.

“Barbarians or sorcerers, their twisted nature is the same.” Vorrice jabbed passionate fingers toward the gathering behind him. “The sooner they’re exterminated, the better.”

Escape was not possible. Mearn clamped his quivering sinews into rigid stillness. If he moved, if capricious luck left him now, he would be caught as a spy. All Vorrice need do was glance sidewards.

Unblinking, Mearn memorized the man’s jowled features. If by Ath’s grace he came through unscathed, he determined to know this new enemy.

Vorrice’s pale eyes fixed unseeing upon the frost-sharp sweep of the rooftops. He worked fleshy lips, pinched to tight discontent at the corners. His stance seethed with nerve-fired agitation, the stalker’s impression intensified by a thin nose, and eyebrows napped like wet burlap. He wore his hair cropped. The thoughtless clench of his fist to fringed velvet contrasted a manic neatness. White robes and gold band of office hung stainless and straight, glittering with the golden sunwheel device.

“We should take the Lord Master’s offer, believe this.” His adamant diction flecked spittle as he gestured his conviction. “Let his
coin help rout out the canker of sorcery. What should we fear? Prince Lysaer will shine as our maker intends. Let the faithless beware. The light of his presence shall banish corruption wherever man’s works embrace evil.”

“Vorrice,” admonished the unseen authority, his fulsome voice glacial with command, “this is not an inquisition. No sensible gift will be spurned by this gathering. Not if the coin and the services offered are being presented in good faith.”

Vorrice made no reply, but snapped shut the curtains to a sliding clash of yanked rings.

Veiled in safe darkness, Mearn loosed his pent breath. Moisture plumed from his lips, whirled away by another keening gust. The cold at his back seared down to the bone, while rage hazed his mood to fierce recklessness. He seized a short moment to steady his mind, then quit the ledge, athletic and sure as he groped the next handhold higher up. His mind stayed unsettled, each circling thought struck from a mold of hot fear. Erdane’s guild ministers had not forgotten their history since the uprising which dethroned the past high kings.
They knew the clan bloodlines were an irreplaceable legacy.
To judge by Koshlin’s least sinister insinuations, they understood the connection between the oldest and first ruling families, and the guarded liaison once maintained between mankind and lost races.

For few spirits were born with the tenacity to withstand the living presence of the Paravians. Mearn knew as much from the chronicles preserved in Alestron’s archives. Those moldered histories read with the fierce ring of legend. Mortals who survived the experience of contact quite often went mad, driven distraught by their limited human perceptions. The fortunate who were stricken found solace with Ath’s Brotherhood. Most others simply wasted away, reft witless by a thirst for a splendor too majestic to sustain reason. Daily cares, kin, the very necessities of survival fell into eclipse before Paravian presence, which reflected unsullied the grandiloquent grace of the power which sourced Ath’s creation.

For this, the Fellowship in their wisdom had sworn and sealed the great compact. Their act of intervention took charge before the grief of more limited human awareness could tear the fabric of society asunder.

Men like Koshlin still fueled the misunderstanding which gave rise to the slaughter of the high kings. Sunk in dangerous resentment, nursed by ignorance and hate, they mistook the clans’ past rule for repression, when in fact charter law compelled bygone sovereigns to a guiding burden of defense.

S’Brydion clan record said Melhalla’s twelfth high king had set seal to Alestron’s original city charter. Like many another chosen family, the new overlords made their residence in an abandoned fortress. The old races had forsaken walled keeps after the binding of the drake spawn whose marauding had ended in defeat in the middle of the Second Age. Every duke since then swore himself to life service, and the peril as acting intermediary between his demesne and the consecrated wilds inhabited by the free Paravians. They held vested authority, but only in trust. Forests were never to be cut down for fields, nor were fences and roadways ever built, except by grant of permission. Mankind had settled Athera on sufferance. Their works and their governance had been cautiously allowed, that the great mysteries maintained by Paravian wardship should remain in perpetual harmony.

Rule was not based upon power or privilege, but on the fraught perils of sacrifice. The pitfalls were documented. Lords and crowned high kings most often died young, heart torn between dedicated care for their own, and the terrible, exultant conflict of spirit as they treated with beings who formed the living bridge across the veil.

Mearn hugged his shivering body to the granite, groped a toe into the next crack, and shoved upward. The whispered scrape of his shirt over stone, and the moan of the wind through the gulf of starry darkness left him too much space to brood. A natural gambler, he measured the odds and concluded that fate dealt the clans a bad throw. His brother the duke had initially backed Arithon for matters of family honor. But as politics and greed built on the grand impetus of Lysaer’s cry for armed justice, that chosen loyalty could well become an act of desperate survival.

Five centuries past, a misguided war cast off crown justice. Dissenters had seized the protection of the towns to wrest Athera’s unexploited wilds from the sway of the Fellowship’s compact. Now Lysaer’s bright new Alliance of Light lent a glove for the hands of those factions who still sought to raise mankind into dominance. The sinister purpose which first launched the headhunters’ leagues regained its original impetus: to exterminate the link preserved in clan bloodlines and end the resurgence of Paravian mysteries.

Mearn reached the next windowsill winded, his knuckles and fingertips raw from the granite. The chamber inside was curtained and dark, its purpose impossible to fathom. If a living princess was held captive above, sleeping guards or attendants might be quartered here. Mearn shut his eyes, listening. Small sounds drifted up from the street in diminished, wind-snatched fragments: a slap of hurried footsteps,
then the head falconer’s surly phrasing in complaint of a dishonest scullion. Between oaths and blasphemies maligning the oaf’s character, the reference to stolen pigeons surfaced in recurrent disgust.

“Daelion Fatemaster’s almighty debts!” harangued the falconer. “If your duty as Avenor’s royal steward won’t see the miscreant punished, who in creation’s going to act? Should the Captain of Avenor’s Royal Guard be yanked in to box the ears of a feckless boy? Well, kiss my dead granny’s arse, if that’s what you think! Bedamned if I’ll show my face at his door to say why he has to roust out.”

Mearn twitched narrow lips, his soft snort of laughter damped by his sleeve as the brangle destroyed the night quiet. Echoes bounced, multiplied, through the tower entry. The theft in the dovecote seemed the cause of Gace Steward’s delay, a setback to nettle his weasely temperament into a snarling row. The falconer refused to give back any ground. Delighted to seize on the chance-met diversion, Mearn s’Brydion nipped from his niche and embarked on the grueling last ascent of the upper battlements.

The watchtower’s turret had a crenellated guard walk, inset with drains to gutter rainwater. These offered the climber a precarious left handhold while he unslung his grapple and line. He timed his throw between gusts, lest the wind spoil his aim. The carrying, metallic chink as the hooks slid and caught prickled his nape into gooseflesh. He could not shake the unnerving conviction that an archer took aim between his shoulder blades. Imagination harried him on through the moments he was forced to trust his weight to the rope. Eyes shut, sweat branding the acrid taste of salt on his lips, he swung out over air and scaled the line hand over hand.