Stormwarden (22 page)

Oblivious to the fact that his thoughts were influenced by another, he imagined he stood with his sister on a grassy hillside above the village. Summer breezes fanned her black hair across her cheeks and the gray wool of her shift blew loosely about her while the small brown goats left their grazing and nosed her hands, begging for grain. Taen tangled her fingers in their rough coats, a smile of joy on her face. Watching her, Emien could almost forget her lameness and the innocent vulnerability which had permitted her to believe Anskiere's lies; but now she was dead, drowned in a storm like his father. Never again would she play with the goats in the meadows of Imrill Kand.

Though her memory held nothing but tragedy, in the dream she would not stop smiling. Through the window of her gift, she regarded her brother with eyes of clearest blue and said, "But Emien, I am alive."

Emien tossed on the bed, struggled to free himself from a torment he now recognized as nightmare. Taen had died; Imrill Kand was forever barred to him. Fevered and sweating, he fought the vision of his sister, insistent in his hatred of Anskiere. The dream would not release him; he could not make himself waken.

"Emien, no." Taen's voice battered against his isolation, seductive with compassion. "I survived the storm when
Crow
foundered. The Stormwarden protected me. I am with you now, can't you see? Oh, why must you believe Tathagres' lies? Don't you know she uses you?"

But her words failed to soothe. The kindness Taen intended brought Emien nothing but anguish, poisoned as he was by his own guilt. For if his sister had been preserved at the Storm-warden's hand, every act he had committed in the cause of her vengeance became evil beyond question.

He tossed on the bed, sobbing aloud with misery. "You're
dead,"
he accused, and when the image of his sister's presence failed to leave him, his voice went ugly with rage. "Leave me!"

"But why?" Taen searched his face, her light eyes suddenly flooded with tears. "What could make you turn against the Stormwarden who once protected you? Did you believe the Constable, that he murdered the folk of Tierl Enneth? Emien, Anskiere was innocent.
I can show you."

Confident of his trust, Taen gathered her skills, assembled dream images to prove to her brother how her gift had enabled her to know beyond question that Anskiere had not caused the drowning of helpless people. She touched her brother's mind with truth, utterly unprepared for the fact that her message brought him nothing but guilt.

Emien's voice split into a raw scream of denial. "No!" Condemned beyond pardon by the vision she wove, he lashed back, set the poisoned dregs of his own warped reason against his sister in attempt to restore the dignity he had lost when he first accepted Tathagres as mistress.

The dream link reversed itself. Caught in the meshes of her brother's passion, Taen felt herself tossed headlong into clouded skies and the savage, storm-whipped seas of a gale. To the battered, emotionally torn mind of her brother, this tempest seemed more than a natural contest of elements. A squall had taken the life of his father. Hammered by thunderous, foam-laced swells,
Crow
had foundered, and above the demented howl of the gusts Emien heard once again the screams of drowning slaves and the cries of his lost sister; and with the pinnace's tiller clenched once more in his blistered hands, he watched, helpless, as the seas stripped the lives of the survivors with passionless cruelty. Soon scarcely a handful remained. Always the sea lurked at his back, a tireless, insatiable enemy. Humbled over and over again by its might, and by the powers of the sorcerer who controlled it, Emien wept in frustration.

Inflamed by the need to retaliate, he raced down a rocky beach on the isle of Cliffhaven. Drawn along by the dream link, Taen felt the icy air ache in his lungs with each breath, through his ears heard the crash as the breakers creamed white against the shore and the shrill calling of gulls. Ahead, cliffs rose like a wall against the sky, lofty stone tiers encased in crystalline sheets of ice. The raw cold of a sorcerer's enchantment reddened Emien's skin, but he felt no discomfort; beyond that bastion of frost lay his enemy, and his obsession for vengeance permitted no rest. He would pierce Anskiere's defenses though he broke his hands trying, and with a separate thrill of horror, Taen realized the glassy abutments of ice imprisoned the Stormwarden who once had protected her from harm.

She tried to break free, to wrest control of the dream from her brother's maddened grasp. She had to know more concerning the Stormwarden's fate. But Emien's hatred was too strong to resist, and her presence itself threatened his existence. Even as Taen reached to manipulate the fabric of his image, her brother drew the sword from the sheath at his side and lifted it high overhead, point poised for a killing blow.

"No!" Taen fell back, spreadeagled against the ice, unable to believe he would strike. "Would you murder your own sister? Emien!"

But the words failed to deter him. Emien seemed not to see her at all, and with a pang of awful horror Taen realized the fury which drove him was directed solely at the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer. Emien would drive the sword home, and never notice she stood in his path.

Just as his wrist tensed to engage the downstroke, a shout rang out down the beach. Hooves thundered like war drums over the sand. Emien whirled and saw one of the Kielmark's mounted patrols bearing down on him at a gallop. Steel sang through the air as he twisted, white-faced and frightened. But before he could ready himself for defense, a force like white-hot magma closed over him, and he felt himself ripped into transfer by the powers of Tathagres' neckband.

The dream link carried Taen along with him. Even with her senses overwhelmed by the rush of strange forces, she heard her brother scream aloud in terror, for the memory of his transfer from Cliffhaven to the palace of Kisburn's court recurred to him only in nightmare. Ripped away from the solid ground beneath the ice cliffs, he felt himself suspended as before, in a place where darkness reigned. The air he breathed held the metallic tang of a blacksmith's forge, and dizzied by its heat, his grip upon his own self-awareness wavered. As if torchlit against a backdrop of dark, Emien beheld beings whose features contained no trace of humanity. While the forces of the transfer held him locked and helpless, the black-skinned, red-eyes visages of Kor's Accursed leered down upon him from a high dais of stone.

Trapped in his frame of reference, Taen also noticed the demons. Powerless to intervene, she stood by as they conferred among themselves, weighing the poison in her brother's soul. And with a horror as great as Emien's own, the girl watched one of the demons rise and point, and pronounce her brother's name as one chosen.

Revulsion tore through her. The dream link unraveled under a lightning burst of negative force, and flung across distance by an explosion of emotional rejection, Taen shivered and woke in the dell on the Isle of Vaere. Sheltered once more within the grove, she huddled with her arms clenched around her knees. The place seemed less than secure. Taen glanced about her with dream-haunted eyes. Although the link with Emien stood severed, she sensed the resonant echo of her brother's screams as he woke from nightmare on the silken coverlet of his bed in Kisburn's palace.

Never in Taen's darkest imagination had she guessed her brother might stand in such peril, even when fear and anger had sometimes made him cruel. Troubled, she hesitated to confide her findings to the Vaere. Though quick in his perceptions, Tamlin could often be dispassionate concerning events beyond his island sanctuary. If Emien was to be helped, he would require the care and the compassion of one who understood his difficult nature; one who knew, as his family did, that he had never been able to forgive himself the error which tangled the net and began the inexorable string of circumstances which resulted in his father's death.

Alone with her dilemma and confined to the Isle of the Vaere, Taen knew only one on all of Keithland capable enough to restore her brother's trust. Without pausing to ask Tamlin's permission, she gathered the battered remains of her dream-sense around her, and launched her awareness in search of Anskiere of Elrinfaer.

Fragile as fine silk thread, her probe unreeled across the void. Though the Stormwarden's mind had largely stayed closed to her, Taen recalled every nuance of his presence. She searched for the constant rhythm of surf against the beaches of home; the wild, keening song of the first north wind of autumn, and the sure power of the solstice tides; Anskiere was all that and more, changeless as the renewal discovered each year in the gentle showers of spring. Confident the Stormwarden would recognize her, Taen strengthened her sending and presently located a thin glimmer of daylight. Hurrying now, eager to reach her goal, Taen rushed through the gap, into a reality far distant.

She was greeted first by the solid boom of breakers and the sigh of breezes combing windswept heights. A moment later, the darkness parted around her, and her dream-sense ached in the glare of sunlight thrown off the sheer, impenetrable heights of the same ice cliffs she had encountered in Emien's dream. The sight dismayed her. Pierced by the plaintive cries of the gulls, Taen felt daunted by unanswerable sorrow. She surveyed that desolate vista, unwilling to believe her search would end here, in a place of deserted wilds. With the care Tamlin had taught her, Taen focused her dream-sense and sounded the place for traces of life, or any clue which might reveal the Storm-warden's presence.

Almost at once the resonance of Anskiere's power surged through the gate she had opened in her mind. Constant and strong as storm tide, the warding forces he had set forth in that place sang across the channels of Taen's sensitivity. Reassured of his presence, the girl gathered herself and turned her dream-reader's skills to tap the ward's source.

Darkness met her, deep and vast as night, and seemingly solid as a wall. Taen gasped, unable to orient herself. She delved deeper, sought to thrust the suffocating blackness aside and reach the Stormwarden's awareness. But her meager skills would not answer in that place; the shadow refused to part. Tossed about like a moth in a downdraft, Taen floundered and struggled to reorient. But the wards restricted her, making progress impossible.

Taen persisted. Cold savaged her flesh, cut deep into her bones until it seemed her very thoughts would freeze in place.

Her dream-sense labored, suddenly burdened by an overwhelming weight of earth and ice overhead. Taen persevered, striving to fathom the hidden center of the wardspell, but it was not Anskiere she found. High and thin with distance, she caught the whistling echo of a cry. Strange creatures lay imprisoned beneath. The eerie harmonics of their wailing chilled Taen even more than the terrible cold, for the sound touched her dream-sense with a feeling of lust and killing beyond the capacity of violence to assuage. Held fast by Anskiere's wardenship, the creatures she sensed could not win through to freedom; but here, at the vortex of his powers, where she should have encountered the Stormwarden's living presence, Taen found silence and frost and the impenetrable stillness of ages.

Discouraged at last she withdrew, returned to awareness of her own body. But the grove of the Vaere seemed strangely comfortless after her sojourn, its unbreakable quiet a constraint upon her ears. Grieved for the fate of her brother and distressed by the loss and the loneliness created by the Stormwarden's absence, Taen bent her head and wept. With her face buried within her crossed arms and her shoulders shaking with misery, she did not notice the thin chime of bells as Tamlin appeared at her side.

He seated himself on the rock by her feet, his forehead creased by a frown. "I warned there might be risks, child." He paused to puff on his pipe. Blue smoke rose and braided on the air currents around his hair, untouched by any hint of a breeze. "Now, why not tell me what troubles you so."

Taen lifted her head, embarrassed by the tears on her cheeks. She dried her face with her sleeve while Tamlin waited with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, his beads and his bells strangely silent in the silvery twilight of the clearing. Slowly, carefully, Taen described what she had experienced of her brother. Her phrases were clumsy and halting, but Tamlin did not interrupt. With bearded lips thinned with concentration, he puffed furiously on his pipe, now and again touching Taen's mind directly to gain a detail left out.

Her tears began again as she described the plight of Anskiere, but she hardly noticed. Tamlin's eyes became piercing and his pipe hung forgotten between his teeth. Yet he spoke no word until she lapsed, faltering, into silence, her tale complete.

"You bring me sad tidings, Reader of Dreams." Tamlin sighed. He raked stubby fingers through his beard and twirled the pipestem thoughtfully between his hands. At last he stirred, and regretfully studied the tear-stained face of his charge.

"The demons of Keithland grow overly bold, I think. Mankind must not be left defenseless. If the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer is no longer active, your training and your skills become a matter of urgent importance." Tamlin paused as if weighted by an impossible quandary. "After I have held council on the issue, the Free Isles must be warned of the danger. For if I read the matter correctly, the demons prepare an assault against Landfast. There are records there, in Kordane's shrine, which must never leave the care of humanity."

He did not add, as he could have, that much of the burden of mankind's defense might fall on the slender shoulders of the girl who stood before him. Soon, of necessity, she must confront the supreme test of her abilities.