The Ships of Merior (24 page)

Elaira could have laughed at the thwarted defeat on their faces. Her intuition had played them false. Ceded a victory that pierced for its sweetness, she revelled in giddy relief. Wherever the wily s’Ffalenn prince was sequestered, he was no place along the seventh lane.

The enchantresses regrouped in disgruntled frustration.
Governed by discipline, they engaged rituals to disperse their bands of power; but seared through their silence while the spell seals were isolated and banished through strictly set counterwards, the unspoken fact remained: Arithon s’Ffalenn had slipped through their net once again.

Only one rebellious spirit was lapped in the sphere of the Skyron crystal’s influence: Elaira alone favoured the cause of their quarry. She was left defencelessly exposed as the vindictive suspicion of several Seniors burgeoned into open accusation.

‘Desist!’ cried the Prime in flat rebuke. ‘No charge can be called against Elaira. No mere initiate could have sheltered Rathain’s prince from the draw of a grand scrying.’

‘What sorry pass have we come to?’ seconded another caustic peer. ‘Had we not misplaced the Great Waystone, we could have had Rathain’s prince crawling belly-down to find us!’

‘Silence!’ Morriel cracked back. ‘Our efforts are wasted in groundless blame or misplayed regrets for what’s lost. Either the Fellowship itself maligns our work, or the Teir’s’Ffalenn turns his guile in a direction we never thought to search. Whichever reason has balked us, no more can be accomplished tonight.’

Crumpled in abject weariness, Elaira overheard the order for the Skyron crystal to be locked away in its coffer. But even as the appointed Senior moved to gather up the great focus stone, the inexorable turn of time carried the progression of solstice midnight westward. As the moment crossed the sixth lane, the massive aquamarine revitalized in a sudden, unbidden burst of power.

Elaira shared the shock of recoil.

Then all thoughts, all fears, were cancelled by a rolling charge of harmony that surged through the jewel’s unshielded lattice. At one with Morriel’s circle of Seniors, she reeled, blind and dazed, as the sensitized
planes of the aquamarine erupted and blazed, incandescent in song-struck vibration. In Athir, the power focus under its tangled wrack of weeds also magnified that resonance. Its coils blazed to sudden life in a captured peal of joy so pure it kissed earth like the union of desire and perfect fulfilment.

Swept up through the link to her spell crystal, Elaira endured, along with twenty-three senior initiates slammed to witless exultation, as the life-force of forgotten Paravian mystery tolled its wakened chord across the continent.

Morriel alone retained her sense of self-command. ‘Ath’s grace, where is this coming from? We dare not languish in blank ignorance.’

The Skyron aquamarine was not as the Great Way-stone, vanished in the chaos of the rebellion; its lesser capacity could not channel several tasks without one purpose bleeding into another. And so as cold power was retimed into alignment, Elaira shared the vision that emerged, as the flow of the night’s uncanny vortex was traced down to its source. Along with Morriel’s seniors, she tracked walls and stonework torn apart and scattered like straw chaff; chimney bricks rammed askew from rafters, and roof-beams clothed green in budded leaves. She heard the wails of Jaelot’s terrified populace, that had seen half their town come unhinged. There at the core of destruction, exposed amid smoking mosaic and the overset tables of a feast hall, the hands that had unleashed the wild mystery: the mortal singer who had keyed the release of an earth force held mute through five centuries.

He proved a man slight in stature. A disarranged swathe of black hair could not quite mask green eyes, or the steep, angled features that marked the royal bloodline of s’Ffalenn.

‘Ath preserve us all!’ Morriel Prime’s appalled outrage cut like glass through the Skyron link. ‘A city has been
all but destroyed! Innocent people have suffered! How much unconscionable meddling shall this prince be free to inflict upon our world before the Fellowship sorcerers deign to admit their mistake?’ Harsh as scaled iron, she added, ‘Last of his line or not, Arithon s’Ffalenn shall be curbed. Dharkaron as my witness and be damned to the Seven, who would in blind folly preserve such dangerous stock.’

That moment, with scarcely a flicker of warning, the Athir contact cut off.

Released to the scent of summer flowers, and the night quiet of her bed in the hospice, Elaira stifled a shuddering sob against the heel of her hand. The terrible wait was over; her peace irrevocably fled. The Master of Shadow was betrayed, not by her, but worse, by his passionate love for the music he held dearest to his heart.

Awed and shaken and concerned for him, Elaira turned her face to bury her misery in her pillow, and froze, her skin pricked to shivers by a draught.

Her room was no longer empty.

A figure poised by her bedside: not the initiate healer who brought her tisanes for the pain, but the uncanny presence of a broad, bearded man too ghostly still for breathing flesh. His florid features held a frown of thunderous proportions. He stood, fists planted on a belt like an ox collar, his eyes trained upon her as lightless as new sable velvet.

Elaira blinked. The creature she confronted could be nothing less than the wraith of a Fellowship sorcerer.

‘The diligence of your senior enchantresses has been rewarded,’ Luhaine opened, the shyness he held for outsiders girded behind unimpeachable ceremony. ‘Arithon has been found in Jaelot.’

The sorcerer’s portly form looked somehow tired, standing. Elaira started to slide over on her pallet to allow him the space to sit down, then recalled; a
disembodied spirit would retain no need for such comfort. ‘Why are you here?’

Wind from the casement brushed through Luhaine’s image without stirring his wiry beard. To warn and to help.’

‘I can already guess how Morriel plans to use me.’ Elaira was careful to muffle her voice. To be caught in conversation with a Fellowship sorcerer would call down the direst consequences, ‘How are you minded to help?’

Had Luhaine still been enfleshed, he would have rubbed the pink knob of his nose. ‘Well,’ he said, abashed to evasion. ‘Sethvir said you were direct.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Elaira admitted. ‘If the duty-watch chances to see you, I could be broken for treason.’ Her initiate’s ties to the Koriani Order went beyond fleshly obedience; should Morriel exercise the extreme penalty, the vow Elaira had sworn over crystal could be turned to reduce her to a mindless husk.

‘Whoever should glance through this doorway will assume you talk in your sleep,’ Luhaine said, deeply miffed. ‘I was never sent to endanger you.’

‘That’s scarcely flattering, and I’m not reassured.’ The logic seemed sound, that without trouble pending, no sorcerer at all would have visited. Elaira regarded Luhaine’s scowl, her care for the Shadow Master’s safety too burdensome to contain. ‘I think you should worry for your fugitive.’

His lecturer’s condescension back in force, Luhaine stirred an impatient half-step that raised no echo from stone walls. ‘Lysaer’s still amassing his army. Unless your sisterhood informs him, he won’t know Arithon’s been unmasked.’

A pitifully small consolation; Elaira shuddered through a spasm of discomfort, penalty of the crystal’s reattunement. ‘Don’t tell me anything more about either half-brother.’ She averted her face, ashamed as she
admitted, ‘Morriel will use every asset I have, no matter who comes to be hurt.’

‘Not quite,’ Luhaine rebuked softly. ‘Some things you’ll keep for yourself.’ His image never stirred against starlight. But the unseen power he engaged in gentle pity folded the enchantress on the pallet into a painless sleep without dreams.

Elaira gave way to his mastery with a whispered sigh of release. The strain that pinched her eyes and mouth settled and slowly relaxed. Entangled amid a sweep of auburn hair, a nose and chin too angular to be delicate smoothed over like fine-polished ivory. When she was not frowning, Luhaine thought, her allure was mischievous and innocent, touched as though from within by the promise of lyric passion. Determination lent her the illusion of ruggedness; and the burden of betrayal that Koriani service set in conflict with her empathic link with Arithon.

Against the sworn obedience that ruled this woman, Luhaine could do nothing. But the longevity realignment she had undertaken for the sake of Sethvir’s augury: that was another matter. Fellowship intervention had set stakes on the attraction that tied her to Arithon’s fate. For that she would not be left to suffer; nor would his Fellowship colleagues sanction the surrender of her spirit to a second life binding to a Koriani spell crystal.

Elaira was not conscious to feel the warm swell of power that licked beneath her bandaged wrist. Closed eyes could not track the lacework intricacy of the spell-craft Luhaine wrought in her behalf. She would wake in the morning and feel refreshed, and even Morriel would never discern that the crystal’s unnatural attunement had been arrested, then erased, its forced effect of lengthened lifespan realigned to a kinder patterning sourced by the laws of grand conjury.

She would live the same years as Arithon, but suffer no ill effects. If the hour came that conflicted interests
broke her faith with the Koriani Order, the Prime who presided in judgement would gain no further power through the white quartz matrix of Elaira’s personal crystal. Her vows of initiation upon the Skyron jewel alone would hold influence against her.

‘Serve your Prime matriarch as you must,’ Luhaine murmured in words that arrowed across the veils of sleep. ‘But for the sake of your care for the last Teir’s’Ffalenn, the Fellowship may sometimes intercede.’

A second later the apparition left her side, faded with as little ceremony as a star in the grey chill of dawn.

Lysaer s’Ilessid snapped awake with a coarse, ripping gasp. Bathed in sweat and shivering violently, he thrashed off the bedclothes that constricted his legs and chest. Driven nerves and instinct shot him halfway to his feet, one fist ablaze with a halo of light he had not consciously called his gift to raise. The darkness that threatened to suffocate him shattered, and with it, the last, vicious remnant of the dream that had torn him headlong from sleep.

Scalding glare bit flashes of reflection off gilt moulding and from the garish enamels of the cloisonné washbasin his valet had left by the window-bay. Lush woollen tapestries muffled the cries of the sentries, alarmed from their posts on the walls outside by the fiery glare through the casement. Lysaer squeezed his eyes shut. The appointments of the state guest chamber loaned by the Mayor of Erdane mocked him in undisturbed quiet. Subsided to his knees on the mattress, the light still cupped in his hands, he loosened locked jaws and forced in a deep, calming breath.

Memory of his black-haired nemesis hovered still in his mind, secretive, elusive, and maddeningly removed
beyond reach. ‘Dharkaron as my witness,’ he swore to the empty room. ‘By your shadows and fell sorceries, you can’t evade justice forever!’

An instant later, the latch clicked.

Lysaer started sharply. The light in his hands scalded into actinic brilliance before he caught back raw reflex and curbed his fury to a force less likely to ignite the bedclothes. The whipcord tension in him relented a mere fraction as Lord Diegan rushed into the room, his dark hair tousled from his pillow, and his body half-clothed in last night’s crumpled hose and shirt.

One glance at Lysaer, and he snatched an unlit candle from a wall sconce, crossed the carpeted floor, and tipped the wick into the flash-point corona that yet burned between the prince’s palms.

Over the hiss of hot wax as the candle flared into flame, the commander of a cityless garrison said in caustic care, ‘If you dreamed of the Master of Shadow again, that makes the third time this week.’

‘I don’t need you to remind me.’ Lysaer parted his hands, and the light shredded asunder and quenched like a beacon fire doused before an enemy. Surrounded now by soft dark that did nothing but exacerbate his edginess, he launched off the bed and strode to lean out the opened casement.

To the guardsmen clustered in agitation on the embrasure below, he called, ‘Naught’s amiss. Feel free to resume your patrols.’

While they dispersed, Lysaer remained at the window, no longer shivering, but chilled to the bone none the less. He tried to ignore the brisk footfalls as Diegan spiked the candle in a holder on the carved oak table, laid over with the drawings and maps that outlined his new city of Avenor. The flick of wool cloth passed unacknowledged as a cloak was unfurled over his nakedness.

At his shoulder, Diegan said, ‘If the strain’s been too much, at least take Talith to your bed. Your hand-fasting’s
lasted for years. As her brother, I won’t stand on ceremony now if you decide not to wait for the wedding.’

‘She’s to be Avenor’s queen, not my courtesan.’ Distraught enough that it showed, Lysaer scrubbed his knuckles over his stiff face. ‘She’ll have a state ceremony in my rebuilt capital. No vagary of the Shadow Master’s will drive me to consider any less.’

Diegan reached across, caught the frame of the casement, and pulled closed and latched the mullioned panes. ‘If you’re going to talk sedition over mayoral authority in Tysan, at least try not to be overheard.’

‘I won’t need to supplant any trade city’s governance.’ Lysaer straightened tense fingers and blotted icy sweat on the gold-edged weave of his cloak. ‘Once the Prince of Rathain makes his move, his sorceries will drive town loyalty into my hands by itself. I alone will command the resource and the light to combat him.’

Diegan sought out a cushioned chair and wearily folded himself into it. ‘Ath, he’s been hidden for
six years.
If I hadn’t been at hand to witness the slaughter he effected in Deshir, I’d wonder, as your new mercenaries do, whether Maenalle of Tysan was right in her claim that Arithon had no wish for war at all. Man, you can’t gather crack troops, then sit them idle indefinitely!’

‘We’ve been quartered in Erdane far too long,’ Lysaer agreed. He chose not to mention the balance of his fear, nor the dream-image that moved in locked step with remembrance of his enemy’s secretive ways. His thoughts were harrowed in equal measure by the blood that had soaked Tal Quorin’s river banks in the first battle fought against the Shadow Master.