Stormwarden (16 page)

* * *

Emien slept. Dreams rose and burst in his mind like bubbles from a well's black depths; he saw sun, and sky, and the swells which rose green and mild off the coast of Imrill Kand. His hands were smaller, younger, less callused, and he struggled with a child's strength to stow the soggy brown twine of a net.

"No! Emien, not like that!" Drawn out of memory, his father's voice rebuked him, gruff and annoyed, yet still filled with love. But in the dream, as on the day during his tenth summer, the warning came too late. The net tumbled overboard.

The child started, pulled his hand back, but not fast enough. A coil snared his wrist, whipped taut, and jerked his arm across the gunwale. Wood skinned his elbow. Emien cried out in pain. Yanked off balance, he lunged awkwardly, but failed to recover the snarl of weights before they tripped overboard and splashed into the sea. The drag on his arm increased. Emien braced his weight, tried frantically to tug free. But the twine tightened, hauling him inexorably after the net. He slipped on the floorboards, bashed his side against the thwart. Crying now from hurt and fear, he saw his father lean over him and slash once with the fishing knife which hung always at his hip. The twine fell away, swallowed by the sea.

Emien tumbled limply against his father's chest. Though the man's huge hands cradled him the boy could not stop weeping.

"There, son," soothed his father, impossibly close and warm; his comfort was only an illusion born of troubled sleep. Though the boy stirred restlessly, the dream continued, brutal for its clarity; for Emien yearned to erase this moment from memory. The burden it had left upon his heart was unbearable.

Familiar fingers ruffled his hair. "Little harm is done, child. You're too young for Event's work, I know. When he gets well, the net can be replaced. Dry your tears. The weather will soak me well enough without you adding to it, see? I think a squall is coming."

Emien looked up, saw the clouds which rolled like ink across the windward horizon. He sniffed and rubbed his chin on the grimy cuff of his tunic, old enough to understand the loss of a net was no slight misfortune. Illness had kept Evertt ashore for nearly a fortnight and the coppers were nearly all spent. His mother and small sister might go hungry until his father brought in a catch. And now under the threat of storm the sloop's sail must be shortened. Already the loose canvas slapped and banged against the sheets. Emien made a valiant effort to master himself.

His father squeezed his shoulder and smiled. "Good boy. Take the helm, could you? I'll not be long with the sails."

Emien moved aft, rubbing skinned wrists with fingers still stinging from the twine. He perched on the wide sternseat while his father uncleated the main halyard. Gear rattled aloft. The mainsail billowed, nearly ready for reefing, and the boy curled small hands over the tiller. A gust hissed out of the north, raking his hair and clothes. Canvas smacked taut, and the sloop heeled steeply. Spray boiled over the lee rail, ragged as frayed silk. Emien tried to steer, but strangely the helm would not respond.

"Head up!" his father shouted, impatient, for the boat yawed on an unsafe heading.

The boy pitched the sum of his strength against the wooden shaft. He strained until his muscles ached, but the rudder had fouled, caught in the twisted coils of the net recently lost overboard. With tiller stuck fast, the sloop reeled, sails thrashing thunder aloft. Tossed by rising crests, she bucked under cloud-darkened skies.

Emien's father abandoned the reefing. Slapped by fresh gusts, the sloop's patched canvas flogged with a fury no man could subdue; short of slashing the halyards, the choices left were few. Huddled miserably in the stern, Emien watched his father through a moment of agonized indecision. Green as he was, the boy understood; cut the sails down, and without steering, the boat would be abandoned to the violence of the squall. An unlucky wave might broach her, and everything would be lost. But if the rudder were cleared first, the sails could be brought safely under control. The net might be recovered as well. Emien saw his father assess the waves, the wind, and the oncoming weather with experienced eyes. Then he reached for a spare line and knotted it securely around his waist. The older, dreaming boy wished desperately to cry out, to freeze that moment in time and reverse its fatal outcome. His father would dive only to drown, entangled by the nets as the storm's contrary winds jibed the rudderless sloop again and again and again.

Yet the nightmare granted no respite. With cruel clarity Emien watched his father spring over the gunwale, never to surface. The boy screamed, jerked the unresponsive tiller until his palms blistered and split. Blind, bestial panic overturned his reason as the boom and thunder of the squall savaged the ocean. Rain fell in whipping sheets. Winds keened through the rigging, unravelling the whitecaps into driving veils of spindrift. Buffeted by the elements and trapped in stormridden meshes of horror, Emien lost all sense of continuity. The sloop's crude, hand-hewn timbers smoothed under his fists, transformed to the slim lines of Crow's pinnace. Emien leaned over one thwart, nails gouged deep into vanished spruce. Showered by blown spray, he strained to reach a brandy cask which bobbed just out of reach in a trough.

He licked salty lips, shouted. "Taen!"

The cask and his sister's fate were somehow entangled. But Emien's need was not great enough to abandon the pinnace and follow her. In the desperation of his dream, he snatched up an oar and stretched outward, trying to hook the cask and draw it to the boat. But a white tern appeared out of the mist. Ringed by the harsh aura of a sorcerer's craft, the bird dove at his face. Blinding light burst upon Emien's retinas. Then someone gripped his shoulders and shook him painfully. The brilliance vanished, muffled in darkness.

* * *

"Emien?"

The boy woke with a start. He blinked, momentarily disoriented. Tathagres bent over him, her white hair enhanced by the pearly glow of dawn.

"You must get up," urged his mistress. "We travel at daybreak."

Emien braced himself awkwardly on one elbow. "I dreamed." He paused to steady the shake in his voice. "I saw my sister Taen floating in a brandy cask after the wreck of the
Crow.
She was under a spell by Anskiere. Could this be so, Lady? Should she be alive I-"

"No," Tathagres interrupted. "You saw nothing but a nightmare."

She released the boy and turned her face away. "Rise at once, Emien. If we're to cross the heights of Skane's Edge before nightfall, we'll require an early start. And I would prefer dinner and a bed in a tavern."

Emien clambered stiffly to his feet, too preoccupied to observe the glint of speculation in his mistress's eyes. He banished all memory of the dream, forgetting in his grief his island heritage, that any vision he had experienced could hold more truth than any word of Tathagres'.

* * *

Far south of Skane's Edge and well beyond the farthest archipelago under the Alliance's charter, the cask which had sheltered Taen since the wreck of the King's war fleet at last neared its destination. It rolled gently, unmolested by the surf which broke and creamed whitely over the coast of an islet never marked on any chart. Drawn safely to the shallows by Anskiere's geas, the cask grounded with scarcely a bump. The tern perched on the rim stretched slender wings, and a wavelet arose, curling under its tail feathers. The cask lifted on the crest, and was propelled shoreward, and the water receded, chuckling over dampened sand, its burden delivered to firm soil.

None came to greet the Stormwarden's protege upon her arrival. Breezes rustled through serried tufts of dune grass, and tossed the boughs of cedars whose majestic growth had never known the bite of an axeblade, nor any other abuse of man's invention. The tern hopped to the sand, head cocked to one side. It pecked at the barnacles which crusted the side of the cask. Taen stirred within, roused from her enchanted sleep.

The Stormwarden's spell released her gradually. Protective as a mother's embrace, the warmth which cradled her limbs faded gently away. Wakened by the light which leaked through the bunghole in the top of the barrel, Taen stretched. Though she recalled taking refuge in the cask while Tathagres held her captive in
Crow's
dank hold, she felt no fear. She heard the boom of surf muffled by the staves, and the solid stillness of the land beneath reassured her.

Taen shifted into a crouch. The bunghole let in a cloud-flecked view of sky, and the smells of tide wrack and cedar. Intently she listened, yet heard no sound but waves and the shrill cries of sand swallows; as far as she could tell, the beach outside was deserted. The girl hammered her fists against the top of the barrel. Barnacles grated, then yielded their grip on the seams. Sunlight flared through a crack and the weathered boards loosened and fell aside.

Blinking against the glare, Taen stood upright and clung to the rim of the barrel. Except that her shift was speckled with mildew, she seemed little the worse for her journey by sea. Anskiere had delivered her from Tathagres' hands, she was certain; her acceptance of his stewardship went deeper than childish faith. In a manner which had disturbed the villagers on Imrill Kand, Taen often perceived things no youngster should have known. She was fey, her peers had accused in whispers. Their taunts had quickly taught her to value silence. Graced by recognition that the Stormwarden had not taken her destiny in hand without reason, Taen braced her elbows against the raw ends of the staves and gazed about.

A tern pecked the sand in the barrel's shadow, but there all sense of the ordinary ended. The islet was as beautiful as a dreamer's paradise, uncanny in its perfection. Daylight shone with transcendent clarity upon beaches bejeweled with crystal reflections. Taen raised her eyes to the spear-tipped ranks of the cedars beyond and felt her skin prickle with uneasiness. She had landed on a northeast shore. Raised where life was tyrannized by the moods of weather and sea, she knew the fury of storms from that quarter. Yet if the trees on this shoreline had ever known the brunt of a winter gale, they suffered no damage. Their symmetry was faultless. The place where they grew seemed possessed by a presence older than man's origins, brooding, silent, and eerily sentient.

Taen's fingers tightened on the barrel staves. She intruded upon territory tenanted by powers which resented mortal trespass; this she understood by the same intuition which had shown her Anskiere's innocence the day Imrill Kand had betrayed him. Now as then she did not strangle her gift with logic as her brother would have done. Though to set foot on this beach was to challenge the isle's strange guardians, Taen swung her good leg over the rim of the barrel and leaped down. The Stormwarden had chosen this site. Confident of his wisdom, Taen was unafraid.

Her movement startled the tern into flight. Light exploded from its wingtips, blue-white and blinding. The energy which bound its form unravelled, whining like a dead man's shade as it fled into the air. Overhead the sand swallows wheeled and dove for cover.

Taen landed, stumbling to her knees in warm sand. A feather drifted where the tern had vanished. Sorry the creature had left, the girl caught the quill in her fingers as it fell. Someone had crumpled it once,; the delicate spine was creased again and again along its snowy length. The resonant violence of the act tingled through Taen's awareness; pressured by a sudden urge to weep, she buried her face in her hands. Imrill Kand lay uncounted leagues distant. Reft of all security, the girl longed to be released from the fate Anskiere had bequeathed her. Yet tears were a useless indulgence. Inured to hardship, Taen drew upon the resilience of spirit which had seen her through Tathagres' threats and the horrors of the
Crow's
pestilent hold.

On Imrill Kand, she had felt inadequate, a clumsy child with a lame leg unfit for work on a fishing boat's deck. Forced to remain ashore, she had resented her place with the pregnant women, the arthritic and the elderly. Here at least she could escape the widows in their musty wool skirts who had scolded her often for hasty stitches and girlish pranks; here she did not have to sit silent and straight on a hard wooden chair, knotting tedious acres of netting. No longer must she endure while the gossip of her elders veiled sorrows which Taen sensed but dared never to mention. Steadied by peace she only knew when she was solitary, the girl uncovered her face and discovered her inner sense had erred. She was no longer alone.

IX
The Vaere

Taen blinked, unable to believe her eyes. On the sand before her strode a man little taller than a grown person's thigh. Clothed in a fawn-colored tunic and dark brown hose tucked neatly into the cuffs of his deerskin boots, he walked with a step as fluid as quicksilver. He stopped abruptly before Taen. Beads, feathers and tingy brass bells dangled from thongs stitched to his sleeves; their jingle reminded the girl of the chimes which hung from the eaves of the houses on Imrill Kand for luck against unfavorable winds.

The little man planted his feet. Black-eyed, bearded and wizened as a walnut, he folded his arms and regarded her with an intensity made disturbing by the fact her inner awareness detected nothing of his existence. Always she sensed when others were near.

"Who are you?" Taen demanded, irritable rather than bold.

The creature stiffened with a thin jangle of bells. He ignored the girl's question. "You trespass. That's trouble. No mortal sets foot here who does not suffer penalty."

"What?" Taen tossed her head, and a black snarl of hair tumbled across her brow. "I was sent here by Anskiere."

"Surely so. Anskiere is the only mortal on Keithland soil capable of the feat. But this changes nothing." The little man drummed his fingers rapidly against his sleeve. Taen noticed his feathers remained oddly unruffled, though brisk wind blew off the sea.

Uncertainty made her curt. "What do you mean? I don't know what land
this
is, far less any place called Keithland."

"Those lands inhabited by men were named Keithland by your forebears." Suddenly very still, the man smiled in grim irony. "You have landed on the isle of the Vaere."

Taen tucked her heels under her shift, sat, and gasped. Had she dared she would have sworn like a fishwife. According to stories told by sailors, the Vaere were perilous, fey and fond of tricks; few people believed they existed outside of fable. Confronted by a being which showed no resonant trace of humanity, Taen chose to believe. If the tales held true, the Vaere were guardians of forbidden knowledge and also the bane of demonkind; the unlucky mortal who encountered them invariably vanished without a trace, or returned unnaturally aged and sometimes afflicted with madness. For all their perilous wisdom, rumor claimed the Vaere had one weakness; the man who discovered what it was could bring about their ruin.

Stubbornly insistent, Taen rubbed sweat from her palms. "The Stormwarden delivered me here for a reason."

The Vaere disappeared. Astonished, Taen scrambled to her feet. She stared at the empty place where the creature had stood but an instant earlier.

"Did he so?" replied a voice at her back.

Taen whirled, discovered the Vaere behind her, now seated comfortably on the rim of the brandy cask.

Bells clashed softly as he leapt down. "There was a purpose? Well then, we shall find it."

"Find it?" Annoyed by the Vaere's oblique behavior, Taen scuffed the sand with her foot. "But I don't know how. Anskiere never told me."

The Vaere laughed, and his bells released a shimmering tinkle of sound. "Nonetheless we shall find it. But you must come with me."

Taen stepped back, reluctant to leave the beach. She knew little of Vaerish sorceries, except that they frightened her. The thought of following this peculiar creature to an unknown destination made her distinctly uneasy.

The Vaere sensed her hesitation at once. "I cannot permit you to stay here. Come as my guest or go as my captive, which do you choose?"

Taen swallowed and discovered her mouth was suddenly dry. "I'll come."

The Vaere clapped his hands with a merry shiver of bells. "You are a most unusual child. If Anskiere sent you here, perhaps he chose rightly."

But Taen felt less confident of the Stormwarden's guidance than she ever had previously. As she faced the dark loom of the cedars, she considered changing her mind.

"No. You mustn't." The Vaere stamped his foot with a dissonant jangle. Taen heard an angry whine. Energy suffused the air around her body; her skin prickled, then burned, as though stung repeatedly by hornets. With a startled cry of pain, she stumbled forward. The pain ceased at once.

"Don't lag," the Vaere admonished. He shook his finger at her, and knotted the end of his beard with the other hand. "You must abide by your choice, for the wardspells which guard this place are not forgiving."

The Vaere skipped ahead. Very near to panic, Taen followed up the steep face of a dune. Slipping and sliding as dry sand loosened under her weight, she noticed with foreboding that the Vaere left no footprints. But she had no chance to wonder why. The creature vanished the moment he reached the crest of the dune.

Taen scrambled after, saw her guide reappear at the edge of the wood. Quick as a deer, he darted between the trees. Taen broke into an ungainly run to keep up. She flailed down the slope, then crashed into the cedars on the far side. The wood was dark, a matted interlace of trunks and branches unbroken by any path. Dead sticks clawed at her and her shift snagged on a briar. Yet the Vaere moved without a rustle through the same undergrowth, a faint jangle of bells the only sign of his presence. Taen pursued. All sense of direction forsook her. Sweat pasted her hair against her neck and her game leg ached without respite. Yet the Vaere kept going. The sound of his bells drew the girl onward like the fabled sea sprites whose songs were said to lure unlucky mariners to their doom.

She ran on, through forest so dense daylight seemed to have been forgotten. Finally Taen saw a gleam through the branches ahead of her. She stopped, panting, at the edge of a clearing surrounded by oak trees grown lofty and regal with age. Grass grew beneath, fresh as the growth of early spring, and tiny flowers spangled the turf. No sun shone, only a changeless, silvery glow, like the deep twilight of midsummer.

Before her lay the heart of Vaerish mystery, beside which her own mortality seemed brief and shadowy as a dream. Time held no meaning in this place, and nature's laws seemed usurped by another less malleable power. No frost would blight the blossoms here; nor had winter burdened the limbs of the evergreens with snow for countless centuries of seasons. Taen balked at the clearing's edge, trembling. To step forward was to yield herself to the magic of the Vaere, and no mortal who did so could escape the consequences.

The little man reappeared, seated on a low stone in the grass. A soft glimmer of light haloed his slim form. His beads clinked as sweetly as the wind-borne chime of the goat bells Taen recalled from Imrill Kand as he reached into his pocket and drew forth a carved briar pipe. He struck no flame. But when he puffed upon the stem, smoke twined in lazy patterns around his cheeks. He crossed his legs, blew a wobbly chain of rings into the air, and regarded Taen with sharp black eyes. All urgency seemed to have left him.

"Once a Prince of Elrinfaer paused where you stand now." The Vaere's tone was not unkindly. He blew smoke and continued. "The boy had been delivered here by a mage of great power, who promised he had -the potential talent to ward weather."

"Anskiere," Taen said softly.

The Vaere nodded, drew deeply on his pipe, and released three more smoke rings in rapid succession. "Yes, Anskiere. Child, many seek, but few of your kind ever find this place. Fewer still receive the training that only the Vaere can offer. None leave without forfeit. Knowledge, like every thing of power, brings about change. If Anskiere sent you, he did so knowingly. Better you choose with a willing heart, as he did, though he renounced both crown and inheritance, with no more assurance than the faith he held for his mentor."

Taen bit her lip, uncertain how to reply. And in the instant she demurred, the Vaere vanished, leaving only spent smoke rings to mark the fact he had been there at all.

Taen twisted her hands in the limp cloth of her shift. The early brash courage which had first prompted her to follow Anskiere dissolved, leaving her desolate. There could be no turning back. She thought of her brother, recalled how Emien had met adversity with rage and hatred; how Tathagres easily had turned that anger to her own advantage. Taen wondered whether the Stormwarden would use her loyalty in the same manner. If she followed the sorcerer's guidance her choice might later set her against her own kin. But any other alternative was impossible to contemplate. Burdened by sorrow and a heavy sense of loss, the girl chose the way of the Vaere. She stepped into the clearing, unaware the powers which guarded that place had keenly observed her struggle.

Nothing happened. Partially reassured, Taen moved with increased confidence. Worn by the pain in her bad ankle, she perched on the same stone the Vaere had used and waited.

Silence surrounded her like a wall; the wood sheltered no wildlife, and the leaves remained still as stone in the half-lit splendor of the grove. The fragrance of the flowers lay heavy on the air and the light never altered, blurring any concept of time. Shortly the girl's head nodded drowsily. Instinct warned her not to rest in this place. She struggled to keep her eyes open, but soon, weariness overcame her. Lulled by well-being, she stretched out on the soft ground.

Snared by the magic of the Vaere, she fell dreamlessly asleep as many another mortal had before her. Presently an alien vibration invaded the clearing. A circular crack sliced through the turf where she lay. Blue light spilled through the gap, jarringly bright against the rough bark of the oaks. Slowly, hydraulic machinery beneath lowered the platform of soil where Taen slept, conveying her below the ground. A specialized array of robots bundled her limp form into the silvery, ovoid shell of a life-support capsule which once had furnished the flight deck of an interstellar probe ship. When her body was sealed inside, the lift rose and settled flush with the outside grass. No trace remained to betray the fact that a high tech installation lay concealed beneath the island.

Busy as metallic insects, servo-mechanisms completed cable hook-up with the capsule, that the girl within could dream in concert with the Vaere. Though her stay might extend for years, she would never discover the nature of the entity which analyzed, nurtured and trained her. For the electronic intelligence known as the Vaere never disclosed itself to men. Several life forms remained who yet soug
ht vengeance against the descen
dants of the crew who once had manned the star probe
Corinne Dane.
The Vaere took every possible precaution that those known as demons never discovered how desperately vulnerable was the primary power which guarded mankind's survival. The hope of their star-born forebears must never be lost, that one day this band of castaways could be reunited with their own kind.