Stormed Fortress (73 page)

But the Fellowship
'
s field Sorcerer, entrapped within, tied yet to his failing flesh, and another, an unshielded spark stripped discorporate, must establish themselves by their own Voice. Seshkrozchiel could grant the safe escort inside, but not guarantee safe return.

Once any being touched into the fabric spun by a ghost dragon
'
s insanity, contact triggered a chain of live interaction. Quickened awareness would meet the stuff of raw chaos, and engage an explosive response. The corporate mage held the anchor of his breathing flesh, for as long as life might sustain him. But not the one borne inside as pure spirit: Davien lacked substance, at risk of melding into the mad one
'
s inchoate pain. The stakes were not malleable, or tame. The two Sorcerers called into service must secure their own Name against the fury of a drake shade
'
s last reckoning.
If they could.

Early Winter 5671

War Camp

After two days of brutal riding, and one night
'
s snatched rest, demanded by reeling weariness, Sulfin Evend closed the last stretch of road on approach to Alestron. The snowfall had lifted, replaced by a north wind that scoured the air clean as paned glass. Five hours before dawn, the blanketed landscape gleamed, polished to silver and shadow beneath a moonless sky spattered with starlight. The Light
'
s Lord Commander rode yet without escort, down a swathed thoroughfare bearing no traffic.

The way seemed too eerily empty, in fact: snow masked the road, unmarred by cart ruts. No trampled trails left by couriers
'
mounts rumpled the pristine drifts. If the pervasive desolation sprang from the arcane flood of melody first noted as he by-passed Kalesh, the working strengthened with each passing league. On approach to the citadel, near to the perimeter of Lysaer
'
s encampment, the surging harmony tugged at the mind with ever-more-insistent urgency.

Sulfin Evend rode as though wrapped in a dream. The music sustained him, moment to moment. The refined strains soared beyond hearing, alive to the seer
'
s talent bred into s
'
Gannley descent: a true gift, once latent, now called into flower by his oathsworn tie to the Fellowship. If the uncanny resonance did not arouse visions, he stayed in the saddle by rote, his hand on the rein insubstantial.

The reliable gelding ploughed onwards, trail-wise enough to make its own way back to shelter. Quiet reigned over the frozen terrain, except for the crack of burdened snow sliding off smothered branches. The jinking tracks left by the tumbled-off clods seemed all the movement left in the world.

Sulfin Evend had stopped counting the sentries absent from check-points and watch sites. The uncanny allure of the conjury sapped any purposeful drive to make war. The beguiling song was not a compulsion; no man had been lured by main force. The summons cried peace, until longing seeded an ache to pursue a life of deeper meaning, and fear dispelled through the release of laughter. Into the night, the mystical weave raised the beauty of bare trees to a presence that tried mortal senses to witness.

Sulfin Evend heard his true self in that call. He did not serve here as commander at arms, but as a man sworn to the weal of the land, and a friend, devoted to Lysaer
'
s protection. Almost, he felt lifted with joy for a homecoming, but for the wistful pull of regret, that he had no beloved woman awaiting, and no children to grace him with welcome. Desire beckoned, that he might shift his course, and steer his feal obligations to closure. Infused by such hope, he descended a slope and rounded a bend in the trade-road.

Ahead lay the site that the caravans dreaded, and a crossing the more-experienced couriers took pains to avoid, after dark. A thicket of young oaks shadowed the thoroughfare where the winding Paravian track from old Tirans merged with the approach to Alestron
'
s snug harbour. Ghosts from the past often haunted that place, confections of lit floss and moonbeams that might tease the unguarded mind into madness. No such apparitions walked the night, now. Sulfin Evend saw only the vista of snow, painted in mystery and wells of deep shadow beneath the ice glimmer of starlight.

He forged ahead, while the gelding crashed through the drifts, eager to reach oats and stabling.

In the swale, where the grace of Paravians had trodden, ecstatic memory still lingered. Formless, the poignant loss tore the heart, enhanced by the present, belling cascade unleashed by the tones of grand conjury. One step to the next, the effervescent whisper swelled into a deafening cry. Sulfin Evend gasped, reeling, as Sighted vision welled up and crashed over him. He moved, wrapped in light. The singing echo of exalted passage remained: stamped into the ageless recall of stone, laced through the frost-layered black soil, and even stitched like a ribbon of silvery quiet into the blanketing air. The very elements shouted remembrance: a burst of lilting, ecstatic elation, as if sun-children played their crystalline flutes just past the reach of a thought, or the ranging call of a centaur
'
s spine horn still rang bright harmonics through Atwood.

Sulfin Evend clung to the neck of his mount, shameless with need to steady his wheeling senses. As the horse crossed the hollow and topped the next rise, the view opened ahead, the rolling hills of East Halla spread under a sky deep as indigo silk. The guarded shore of Alestron
'
s harbour unfolded, serene, ringed by the ancient signal turrets, with the citadel sited above the dark water, notching the crest of the promontory. No torches burned there. The siege imposed cruel privation. By contrast, the Alliance tents would be lit, with hot food to offset chilled exhaustion. Anxious and tired, Sulfin Evend approached the shack that marked the far boundary of the encampment.

The wooden shelter loomed at the roadside. No posted sentry called challenge. Another deserted check-point among many: yet on instinct, Sulfin Evend reined the horse in. A prickling pause awoke chilly foreboding. Though nothing untoward met his searching glance, an indefinable
something
stitched discord across the night
'
s flawless fabric of harmony. Where the fresh horses for the outriding patrols should be picketed, not a groom was in evidence, nor even one living animal: no change, from dozens of other positions, left understaffed or abandoned. But the gelding beneath him snorted, uneasy. It pawed, reluctant, when Sulfin Evend dug in his heels.

Then his Sighted vision snagged on the subliminal
wrongness:
a faint, clogging haze coiled into the air, streamered like wisps in a current. Sulfin Evend rode into that creeping fog, rocked to a shudder of dread.

Then the gelding broke stride underneath him and stumbled, brought to its knees by a buried obstruction beneath the thick snow. Sulfin Evend pitched from the saddle and sprawled headlong into a corpse.

Stiff hands, hoared with frost and hardened with rigor, and frozen glass eyes stared back from the caved-in drift.

Sulfin Evend shouted in jolted recoil. No scout came running. No enemy archer fired from ambush. The eerie, unnatural quiet persisted, unbroken by bugle or drums. The night was
altogether
too still for a war camp that should have roused to his alarm.

Sulfin Evend shoved upright, his frayed nerves back in hand. He had seen enough battle-field carnage; men torn apart by the uncanny predators in a grimward, and whole companies burned to wracked skeletons by Lysaer
'
s cursed fits of destruction. He had helped dispose of the ghastly, hacked dead, with entrails picked over by vultures.
Why should this sorry casualty prompt such a harrowing rush of revulsion?

These butchered remains were beyond human suffering. The flesh was frozen to marble, and the blood, congealed from the gaping wounds. This man had been cut down from behind, slashed and stabbed in a frenzy of slaughter.

The Light
'
s Lord Commander was not squeamish. Yet he felt unmoored as he reeled erect. When his spur snagged on another pathetic rag bundle, he realized: the odd humps strewn about in the snow entombed other soldiers: every hapless wretch once assigned to the check-point had fallen here as a casualty.

'
Dharkaron
'
s Black Spear!
'
Rage laced him, charged by the awareness:
that the blued film of haze clinging over this place was the shocked essence of life, released by the untimely slaughter.
As if the sprawled dead continued to bleed, subtle ether protesting the violence of their sundering.

Unmanned by that taint, Sulfin Evend gave way, hands clutched to his belly and retching. While his horse blundered off with its fallen reins trailing, he wept, unable to grapple the dichotomy imposed by his ancestral talent. Not set against the ethereal chord that still embraced his refined senses. Spun gold and crystal, such pure exaltation should
not
coexist alongside this visceral wreckage: men whose vital hopes and camaraderie had been torn to ruin, untimely.

Suspicion struck hard: that the unearthly draw of such beauty
might have been
unleashed for just such a cold turn of treachery.

'
Ath above! Teir
'
s
'
Ffalenn, you will answer for this!
'
If the Master of Shadow had played him false, and spun fair lies at Sanpashir, the Light
'
s Lord Commander would never rest. Nor would any soldier under his captaincy forsake arms, before just pursuit brought a reckoning.

Whipped on by anguish, Sulfin Evend groped for his sword. He would swear his vengeance upon killing steel. Yet the instant his gloved hand closed on his weapon, the harmonic chord that suffused his awareness lanced his mind and woke dazzling light. He crashed to his knees, overset as a Sighted vision poured through. The unstoppable torrent was impelled by his blood-sworn obligation. The
caithdein
'
s
line bred to serve Tysan
'
s throne was not endowed with prophetic foresight. The seers of s
'
Gannley unveiled the
past,
illumined by truth fit to partner the
s'Ilessid
gift of royal justice . . .

. . . the blizzard had not yet rolled in off the Cildein, and the guard stationed at the Alliance check-point had been diligent when the mystical chord of grand conjury first unfurled across the cold, morning vales of East Halla. The effect did not maze the wits of the sentries, or unstring their mindful initiative. Instead, the note sounded the key to the heart, and refined their innate discernment. Men who longed for their families laid down their weapons. Ones who craved peace left their posts. Others, whose dedicate will embraced warfare, remained dutybound without faltering. Day passed, while the war camp divided itself: some to abandon their commissions and leave, and others, to pursue the validation they sought amid conflict. The exodus was conducted with calm. No officer raised accusations for derelict duty or gave chase to prevent the desertion.

As night fell, the snowfall closed in like a shroud, blurring the distinction between clan refugee and town-born aggressor whose faces turned homeward. The departing procession of ox drays and wagons ploughed through the rutted drifts. Laden galleys set sail down the estuary, while fishing craft and small tenders slipped from Alestron
'
s closed harbour, towing more burdened, oared boats. The mismatched flotilla rode the ebb tide, unmolested by hostile action.

Dawn brought the marauders. They came with an errant, inbound war fleet, crewed by men rendered deaf to the burgeoning song. They landed like wraiths on the bank of the estuary, masked by the rampaging storm. Parrien s
'
Brydion would seize his revenge: strike a fierce blow, and tear into the flank of the enemies who had killed his older brother. Sighted vision hid nothing. The scintillant wrongness shrilled through, that the anger driving the foray was warped. Parrien
'
s natural rage had been skewed. The horrific taint also twisted the men he commanded. Each one drew his weapon and slew, befogged by a clouding red haze that whipped their ambush into an aberrant slaughter.

Hanshire born, Sulfin Evend had witnessed Koriani workings enough to recognize his perception: the driving spells of compulsion laid here had been forged by the sisterhood
'
s sigils . . .

The horrific vision became swept aside by the urgency of one thought: that if Arithon had tried a masterbard
'
s intervention to disarm the cursed threat on the warfront, then Selidie Prime had spiked his brave effort with an unconscionable sabotage. After the massacre done in cold blood, outraged troops would leap to retaliate. The next to fall victim was going to be Lysaer, as the cursed pawn of Desh-thiere
'
s design. Sulfin Evend aroused, wrist deep in cold snow, seared back to resharpened focus. He shoved to his feet, ran and caught his loose mount, then vaulted astride, and abandoned the dead to their forlorn unrest. For the sake of the living, he dug in his spurs to reach the Alliance war camp.

The hell-bent course of the Light
'
s Lord Commander was not the only purposeful movement abroad on the dark, snow-bound vales. Wadded up in three cloaks, and puffing through the ice in his beard, the Mad Prophet closed long-suffering eyes and swore like a bull-trampled meat-packer. Frustration found him mired thigh deep in a gulch.

'
Bollocks sucked up tight as burrowing rabbits?
'
The insolent teen in scout
'
s leathers beside him flashed a grin, all bright teeth underneath a draped mantle.
'
Get used to the misery. We have company approaching. He
'
s alone on the road. Mounted, and moving west at grim speed on a horse that
'
s already spent under him.
'

Which assessment was altogether
too
accurate for a town-raised sprig of a boy: even one sniping sharp, and bred up to serve Alestron
'
s warmongering field-troop.