That Way Lies Camelot

Janny Wurts is the author of several successful fantasy novels including the Cycle of Fire trilogy
(Stormwarden, The Keeper of the Keys
and
Shadowfane)
and
The Master of Whitestorm.
She is also the author, with Raymond E. Feist, of the bestselling Empire series (
Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire
and
Mistress of the Empire).

Her most recent work includes the publication of the first volume of the Wars of Light and Shadows -
(The Curse of the Mistwraith) -
which is to be closely followed by volume two,
The Ships of Merior.
Janny lives in Florida with her husband, artist Don Maitz.

JANNY WURTS

That Way Lies Camelot

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Given that short fiction is not my natural venue; that about every story I ever started on my own grew rapidly into a novel or more, I'd like to acknowledge the following editors, who asked. Because of them, this collection exists.

Terri Windling, Richard Pini, Bill Fawcett, Rosalind Greenberg, Richard Gilliam, Susan Schwartz; and Rachel Holmen and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Wayfinder

The Antagonist

The Antagonist first appeared in The Fleet 2, Counter Attack, Ace Books, © Janny Wurts 1988

Tale of the Snowbeast

Tale of the Snowbeast first appeared in The Blood of Ten Chiefs 1, Tor Books, © Janny Wurts 1986

The Crash

The Firefall

Silverdown's Gold

Silverdown's Gold first appeared in Horse Fantastic, DAW Books, © Janny Wurts 1991

Double Blind

Double Blind first appeared in The Fleet 3, Break Through, Ace Books, © Janny Wurts 1989

The Snare

Dreamsinger's Tale

Dreamsinger's Tale first appeared in Wolfsong, The Blood of Ten Chiefs 2, Tor Books, © Janny Wurts 1988

Triple-Cross

Triple-Cross first appeared in The Fleet 5, Total War, Ace Books, © Janny Wurts 1990

Dreambridge

Dreambridge first appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, issue 19, © Janny Wurts 1993

Song's End

Song's End first appeared in Winds of Change, The Blood of Ten Chiefs 3, Tor Books, © Janny Wurts 1989

The Renders

The Renders first appeared in Elsewhere, Ace Books, © Janny Wurts 1981

No Quarter

No Quarter first appeared in The Fleet 6, Crisis, Ace Books, © Janny Wurts 1991

That Way Lies Camelot

That Way Lies Camelotfirst appeared in Grails, Quests, Visitations and Other Occurrences, Unnameable Press, © Janny Wurts 1992

DEDICATION

To my readers - the magicians who make all books possible

Wayfinder

Ciondo had blown out the lanterns for the night when Sabin remembered her mistake. Lately arrived to help out on the sloop for the summer, she had forgotten to bring in her jacket. It lay where it had been left, draped over the upturned keel of the dory; wet by now in the fog, and growing redolent of the mildew that would speckle its patched, sun-faded shoulders if someone did not crawl out of warm blankets and fetch it up from the beach.

The wind had risen. Gusts slammed and whined across the eaves, and moaned through the windbreak of pines that lined the cliffs. Winter had revisited since sundown; the drafts through the chinks held the scent of northern snow. The floorboards, too, were cold under Sabin's bare feet. She looked out through the crack in the shutter, dressing quickly as she did so. The sky had given her a moon, but a thin, ragged cloud cover sent shadows chasing in ink and silver across the sea. The path to the harborside was steep, even dangerous, all rocks and twined roots that could trip the unwary even in brightest sunlight.

Stupid, she had been, and ever a fool for letting her mind stray in daydreams. She longed to curse in irritation as her uncle did when his hands slipped on a net, but she dreaded to raise a disturbance. The household was sleeping. Even her aunt who wept in her pillow each night for the son just lost to the sea; Sabin's cousin, who was four years older than her undersized fourteen, and whose boots she could never grow to fill.

'A girl can work hard and master a boy's chores,' Uncle
Ciondo had summed up gruffly. 'But you will never be strong enough to take the place of a man.'

Yet the nets were heavy and the sloop was old, its scarred, patched planking in constant need of repairs. A girl's hands were better than going without, or so her mother insisted. Grudgingly, Uncle Ciondo agreed that Aunt Kala would do better if an empty chair no longer faced her through mealtimes. Sabin was given blankets and a lumpy cot in the loft, and cast off sailor's clothing that smelled of cod and oakum, poor gifts, but precious for the fact they could ill be spared.

Her lapse over the jacket could not go unremedied.

She fumbled and found her damp boots in the dark. Too lazy to bother with trousers, she pulled on the man-sized fisher's smock that hung halfway to her knees. The loose cuffs had to be rolled to free her hands. She knotted the waist with rope to hold it from billowing in the wind, although in the depths of the night, no one was abroad to care if she ran outside half-clothed.

The board floor squeaked to her step, and the outer latch clanged down as she shut the weathered plank door. 'Sabin,' she admonished as she hooked a heel on the door stoop and caught herself short of a stumble, 'Don't you go tripping and banging, or someone will mistake you for trouble and shoot you in the back for a troll.'

Except that no one in her village kept so much as a bow. The fisherfolk had only rigging knives and cutlery for the kitchen, and those were risky things to be throwing at trolls in the dark. Given any metal at all, and a troll will someday do murder with it; or so her mother used to threaten to scare out her habit of mislaying things. Sabin sighed at her failure since her jacket was not hanging as it should to dry on the hook by the hearth.

Cloud cover smothered the moon. Past the garden gate, the trail to the sea plunged deep into shadow. She stubbed her toes on corners of slate, and cursed like a fishwife since her uncle was not there to scold. The path switched back once, twice, in tortuous descent. Westward it was faced by sheer rock cliffs, moss-grown, and stuffed with old bird nests in the niches. The moon re-emerged. The pines that clawed foothold on the lower slope moaned in the lash of the winds, their trunks in stark silhouette against silver-lace sheets of spent breakers as they slid in fan curves back to sea. Sabin tossed tangled hair from her eyes. The night was wild around her. She could feel the great waves thud and boom over the barrier reefs even through the leather of her bootsoles.

A night to bring boat wrecks, she knew, the sea in her blood enough now that her ear had attuned to its moods. She hurried as the slate path leveled out and gave way at last to sand, ground of the same black stone, and unpleasant with chill in the dark. The last fringe of trees passed behind and she started across the crescent beach. The moon went and came again. Out on the reefs, the high-flying spindrift carved up by the rocks tossed like the manes of white horses; great herds there seemed to be, galloping with arched necks, the surf-roll becoming the thunder of churning hooves. Sabin forgot the folly of the daydreams that had forced her out of bed. As if someone's voice had addressed her, she stopped very still and stared. For a second the horses seemed
real.
There, the red flare of nostrils in the moon-whitened planes of wedged faces, and now, a ringing neigh on the wind that tore past her ears.

Impossible, she insisted, and yet -

A cloud scudded over the moon. Her wonder vanished and she chided herself. There was nothing. Only the tide-swept sand of the beach and herself, a scarecrow figure of a girl with mussed hair and no sense, gawping at a span of wild waters. The village idiot knew horses did not run in the sea. Sabin shivered and felt cold. The dory lay beached above the tideline a brisk walk distant up the beach. She turned that way, determined to fetch back her jacket without another lapse into silliness.

But before she had gone half the distance, something else caught her eye in the surf. Not a horse, but a dark clot of rags that at first she mistook for flotsam. Then the crest of a wave rolled it over, and she saw a man. He was floundering to keep his face above water, and was only a hairsbreadth from drowning.

Fear and memory drove her. She spun and plunged into the sea. Cousin Juard had been lost to the waves, ripped from the decks of her uncle's boat during the fury of a storm. As the racking, retching coughs of the man who struggled reached her, she wondered if Juard had died as miserably, his body bent into spasms as the cold salt water stung his lungs.

Then the swirl of a comber cascaded over her boot-tops and foamed up around her chest, and her gasping shudder killed thought. The castaway borne along by the tide tumbled under and the weight of him slammed her in the knees.

She dropped, clutching at a shoulder whose shirt was all tatters, and skin underneath that was ice. As the rough sands scoured under her shins, she hooked his elbow, and braced against the drag of the ebb.

Her head broke water. Through a plastering of hair, Sabin huffed what she hoped was encouragement. 'This way. The beach.'

His struggles were clumsy. She labored to raise him, distracted by a chink of metal: iron, she saw in the flash of bared moonlight. He was fettered in rusted chains, the skin of both wrists torn raw from their chafing.

'Mother of mercy,' she blasphemed. He had found his knees, an old man, white-haired and wasted of body. His head dangled with fatigue. She said, 'Nobody could swim pulled down by all this chain!'

'Didn't,' he husked; he had no breath to speak. He thrashed in an attempt to rise, and fell again as the water hit and dashed in fountains around his chin.

She gripped him under his flaccid arms and dragged mightily. Despite her best effort, his head dipped under the flood. He swallowed a mouthful, gagging on salt, while she grunted in tearful frustration. The wave sucked back. He dragged his face free of its deadly, clinging currents with the dregs of his failing strength. His feet seemed fastened to the shoaling sands as if they were moored in place.

Belatedly suspicious, Sabin kept tugging. 'Your ankles. Are they in irons also?'

He made a sound between a laugh, a sob, and a cough. 'Always.'

His floundering efforts managed to coordinate for a moment with hers. Together they stumbled a few yards shoreward, harried on by flooding water. Again the wave ebbed and he sank and bumped against the sand. Panting, Sabin locked her fingers in his shirt. She held him braced against the hungry drag of the sea, desperate, while her heart raced drumrolls with the surf. Something was not quite right, she thought, her stressed mind sluggish to reason. The incoming tide carried no flotsam, not a stick or a plank that a shipwrecked man might have used to float his way ashore. 'You never swam,' she accused again, as he regained the surface and spluttered.

Weak as he was, her sharpness stung him. He raised his chin, and eyes that were piercingly clear met hers, lit by the uncertain moonlight. 'I didn't.' His voice held a roughness like harpstrings slackened out of tune. 'I begged help from the seaborne spirits that can be called to take the shape of horses. They answered and drew me to land, but they could not see me safe. To lead one even once from the water dooms it to mortal life ashore.'

The interval between waves seemed drawn out, an unnatural interruption of rhythm like a breath too long held suspended. Even disallowing for chains his weight was too much for a girl, but it was a spasm of recognition like fear that locked Sabin's limbs and tongue - until those cut-crystal eyes looked down. As if released from bewitchment, she blurted, 'Who are you?'

She thought the wind took her words. Or that they were lost in the grinding thunder of the sea as she scrabbled the last yards to dry sand. But when, safe at last, he collapsed in bruised exhaustion, he answered. 'I am a Wayfinder, and the son of a Wayfinder.' His cracked tone broke to a whisper. 'And I was a slave for more time than I care to remember.'

He spoke nonsense, she determined, and said so. He was a madman and no doubt a convict who had fled in the shallows to hide his tracks from dogs. A denial she did not understand closed her eyes and her heart against the logic that argued for him: that the road ran high above the cliffs, and those few paths that turned shoreward were much too steep for a captive to negotiate in chains. Had he come that way, he should have fallen, and broken his legs or his neck. Through teeth that chattered, Sabin waited. Yet the refugee stayed silent. She poked him in the ribs with her toe and found he had succumbed at last to the beating the sea had given him; either he slept or had dropped unconscious. The wind bit at wet flesh, made cruel by driven spray. The tide rose still, and the sand where he lay would very soon be submerged. Forced by necessity, Sabin arose. The jacket she had left on the dory would have to serve the old man as a blanket until Uncle
Ciondo could be fetched from his bed.