The Ships of Merior (75 page)

A grave enough obstacle to the transfer of prime power, First Senior Lirenda’s fascination with the Shadow Master must be shielded from added temptation through the polishing phase of her training.

Morriel assumed the knotty burden of tracking the s’Ffalenn prince’s movements since his recent departure from Merior. For this purpose, a coffer filled with blown-glass spheres lay open to her inspection. Embedded inside each fragile globe, suspended in miniature reflection by an initiate whose talents were manifest through air, morsels of live event had been captured by the dawn’s lane watchers.

The Koriani Prime bent in focused intent over each detailed imprint. Hooded in shawls like a fortune teller, she prodded the orbs to and fro and arranged them in patterns by subject. Throughout the past month, the disparate collection of happenstance gleaned from the continent’s east coast narrowed steadily toward a convergence.

Only those subjects charged and weighted with emotion would impress themselves into the lane flow: in Merior only that morning, a tow-headed set of twins had badgered a blind splicer who worked rope for a brigantine’s ratlines. Morriel cradled the glass with their image, sharp in analysis of the spirit and loyalty to Arithon impressed in those paired young faces. Her clawed nail rolled that sphere aside.

Another, captured from close council within the walls of Alestron, showed Duke Bransian s’Brydion and his brothers immersed in fierce discourse over maps. By the patterns of the marker pins under their hands, Morriel gleaned their intent to join their armies with Lysaer’s war host in the campaign to trap Arithon on the sands
of the Scimlade hook. Associated, but contained in a smaller glass, a dishonoured guard captain clad in beggar’s rags hunkered over a stolen bread crust. No less fervent in dedication, this one ached for the chance to claim vengeance. His hatred burned hot against the Shadow Master who had undone his claim to pride and credibility.

Northward, under octagonal towers at Jaelot, merchant guildsmen grumbled over the edict from their mayor’s council that conscripted their fastest galleys and dispatched the fleet northward to serve the allied muster at Werpoint.

Transactions abounded up and down Eltair Bay, where vessels of load-bearing capacity changed hands, or were chartered out for Etarran gold.

Morriel marked one image orb aside for its oddity: a flotilla of derelict fishing luggers moored in a hidden cove off Crescent Isle that should have passed unnoticed but for the curiosity of a passing school of dolphins. Since Lysaer’s affairs were infallibly couched in ceremonious, forthright candour, the Prime tapped the glass that failed to fit in irritable speculation, then moved on with her methodical review.

While affairs on the waterfront transpired apace, the war host itself remained bogged down in Valleygap, low on supplies, and harried by outbreaks of clan raids. The latest trap had sprung a rockfall across the narrow roadway. Reduced under glass like black ants, soldiers laboured with shovels and ox teams, shifting boulders to clear the choked pass.

Of Jieret Red-beard and his clan Companions, the lane watchers had traced no sign. Either their scouts had abandoned the site since the ambush, or they slept by day and no man among them dreamed with sufficient intensity to deflect the lane’s magnetic flux.

Morriel curled crabbed fingers in yet another spasm of stray pain. Eyes bead-bright in concentration, she considered
the last three spheres in the coffer whose meaning lay provocatively obscured.

In the first,
Black Drake’s
wily captain scoured the sailors’ dives at Highscarp, recruiting a disreputable stamp of crewmen even her smuggler’s brig should hesitate to sign for passage.

In the next, a graceful, painted sloop lay tucked in a secluded anchorage by the fir groves of Ithilt. The Mad Prophet curled like a leaf against her headstay, croaking drunken ditties, his pudgy hands clasped around the whisky crock he had nursed since his mishap with the vat in Garth’s pond. The Master of Shadow was not on board. The image trapped under glass replayed its maddening, repetitive cascade of surf; the cove’s crescent beach showed no tracks.

Another sphere garnered a league to the northeast showed a herd of deer fleeing some disturbance. Twinged by impatience, Morriel traced the slick, cold surface of the glass. Tonight’s lane watch, perhaps, could pursue these disparate threads to their origins. The order’s most gifted scriers had been advised to sift events in
Talliarthe’s
vicinity.

Dakar’s presence offered proof: the Prince of Rathain had returned to his kingdom, sure sign he angled for conflict. Outside Elaira’s influence, Arithon’s mind was a maze of subtle intrigues a mere image could scarcely hope to track. Whatever he plotted, incessant lane watch offered tantalizing glimpses, but seldom enough insight to back a forecast. Though Elaira had affirmed that the s’Ffalenn prince had impaired his mage-sight, he had not lost the disciplines of his mastery. A trained awareness and a masterbard’s instincts yet enabled him to batten his emotions in stilled silence. The lane flow picked him up rarely, and almost never when his movements displayed intent.

Balked to a hissed sigh of anger, the Koriani Prime snagged hands as fleshless as bird’s claws in the dark
purple silk of the quilts. How many hours of her life had slipped past in such futile analysis of circumstance? When her order had wielded a grand power focus, events had been drawn direct, causes joined sequentially to consequence by their links of energy resonance. Knowledge had reigned in place of these hours of sifting and guesswork. Dhirken’s unlikely recruiting; the mass of wilted, cut pine boughs in Ithilt that disrupted the foraging deer; perhaps even the derelict fishing luggers would have shown indisputable connection to Arithon’s designs; or they would not.

Perhaps no such ties existed.

Morriel pinched colourless lips. The doubts, the error, the wearisome differences of opinion that evolved as her Senior Council argued out points of probability made a pitiable grasp of world affairs.

Stymied by circling thoughts, harassed by the hyperacute hearing inflicted by the seals to stall death, Morriel longed for the luxury of thick wool tapestries, that just for this hour, might ease the barrage of distractions. A colicky baby wailed through the voice of a house matron, scolding. In the courtyard beneath the arched casements, a boy ward chopped wood for the kitchens. A door groaned open on a lower floor to admit a chattering group of girls sent off to draw water from the well. A servant thumped through the shelves in the scullery, while the cook banged down a tin bucket to catch the wax peelings off a new wheel of cheese.

Morriel wrenched strayed attention from the disparate clamour, stitched by the winds off the bay that thrummed sullen notes through the shutters, and the clear, high peal of an officer’s horn that signalled a galley weighing anchor. Eyelids thin as blue eggshells twitched closed as she sought refuge in the calm of meditation.

The gnawing pain in her body pursued, even through the veils of iron discipline. Stillness brought no peace, but cased her thinned bones in aches that never for a
second relented. Deep sleep in these hours lay beyond reach, and the frail, shallow whisper of each arrhythmic breath seemed to span the very width of eternity.

The day must inevitably come when she would fail to attain the peace of higher consciousness. Between herself and her long-sought release, at every turn of fateful event, hung the spectre of Arithon s’Ffalenn. Elaira’s love had captured his heart well enough, but had failed to win through to his bed; far better for First Senior Lirenda if the cursed prince had succumbed to plain lust.

A knock at the door snapped the threads of conjecture. The Koriani Prime roused like an unhooded falcon, blinked through a quick stab of pain, and in a scraped whisper of signal displeasure, demanded the reason for disruption.

The latch snicked up and the portal cracked to admit an oval face netted in coils of black hair. Lirenda, First Senior, did not step inside, but swept down in an arrowed mass of skirts until her forehead pressed her bent knee.

The contrast struck at odd moments, between this grown woman and a vain young initiate from a pedigree family who had begged to be taken in for training. Even humbled by desire, Lirenda had been too haughty for obeisance. Prodigious talent had burned in her like live coals, almost too wild to contain.

Blooded pride was still there, but tempered now by ambition. The driving desire to win, and the lonely heart that had prompted the girl to affect conceit now lay buttressed by ironshod discipline. Morriel pondered the change, satisfied that the precepts of mercy could be taught. Heartfelt emotion was less biddable, a fearful point of vulnerability in a candidate appointed for prime succession. Against the highest of stakes, Lirenda must be moulded to survive.

Ever testing to expose any trait that might admit loophole for failure, Morriel’s censure cut the fused moment of silence. ‘You dare much.’

Abased in the confines of the doorway, Lirenda did not flinch at the omission of her title. ‘I dare nothing. News has arrived for your ears alone.’

‘What under Ath’s sky cannot be made to wait?’ Morriel Prime contradicted. ‘If you came to say something important, let me hear.’

Lirenda’s frosty poise never wavered. ‘I beg you, reconsider. The subject is too weighty to broach without due precautions.’

Too subtle a creature to show disdain or approval, the Koriani Prime snapped fingers like dry sticks. ‘Rise, then. Admit the one who awaits in the corridor behind you as well.’

At Lirenda’s rebellious catch of breath, Morriel gave a cracked exhalation. ‘Do you think to gainsay my wishes? That’s unwise. I already know the source of your news. Another senior has travelled from Tysan to see me, yes? She was ordered to keep watch on events at Avenor. She would scarcely leave her post for a pittance.’

‘Matriarch, beldame Haltha is here,’ Lirenda admitted through a rustled hitch of skirts. ‘Shall I lay down a ward to preserve privacy?’

‘No. Fetch the news bearer. I shall attend what protections are needed myself.’ While Lirenda withdrew to obey, Morriel Prime veiled the glass image spheres in a shawl. Then she shrugged off her quilts with laborious care and stood upright.

Her lavender robes dragged at her skeletal form like the wings of an exotic moth as she opened a wall chest and drew out the silk bag that wrapped one of the order’s lesser focus jewels. Unveiled, the white quartz burned with caught light, a spike of cold flame cased in crystal. Morriel paid no heed to the movements of her underlings in the doorway. She cupped the gem’s faceted weight in palms like dead leaves, then cast her stilled thoughts into its lattice to enhance her tuned reservoir of power.

Heightened awareness flooded through her.

Brick and mortar, she sensed the framing presence of the mansion, board floors infused like ghost dreams with the tap of women’s steps and the tears of growing children and the trace glow left by past conjuries. Spent fragments of ward seals clung like grit in old plaster. Layered underneath in shadowy lacings of hallucination, Morriel could nearly detect the subliminal groan of over-stressed natural energies. More than ever as her years advanced, their febrile ring teased her consciousness, as though the grain of painted moulding and sea-damp stone walls struck and vibrated, spun into contrary currents by the strictures of time-faded sigils.

Morriel gave such fancy short shrift. To pity the heart of inanimate substance while breathing humanity still suffered was a Fellowship affectation, as ruthless to life as their bloodless, isolate meddling.

She raged alone in bitter knowledge that since the Waystone’s loss, the sorcerers perused her sisterhood’s affairs at their whim. The most potent ward at Koriani command never stopped Sethvir’s prying, or Luhaine’s lugubrious surveillance. At best, Morriel could impose a construct upon the air to lend warning of Fellowship presence. Sealed through the principles of elemental domination, every sound to occur within her chamber could be tracked and confined by scribed runes. The resonance she knotted through her crystal recorded the expanding signature of each event in a shimmer of subliminal blue light.

Should any outside power seek to bleed off a trace pattern, Morriel Prime would know at once, with First Senior Lirenda little the wiser. The old Prime had learned when pursuit of perfection could become a wasting mistake. Serpent-sly, she preferred to discover which facts the sorcerers came to monitor, then tailor her precautions to suit.

Lirenda was dedicated, but she had much to learn of
the strengths to be gained through abstinence. She stood now in a simmer of prim impatience while her Prime rearranged fragile limbs in their closest approximation of comfort amid the quilts.

By contrast, the senior enchantress just in from Tysan presented herself for audience in humbled quiet, her fustian clothes still wrinkled from the road, and her seamed features chalky with weariness.

‘Your will, Matriarch,’ she murmured. Beneath the probing regard of the Koriani Prime, she sank to the floor in obeisance.

‘You have my leave to speak.’ Morriel nested her hands in her robes, her porcelain hair strained through by cold fire in the shimmer of spell-tempered air.

‘My Prime,’ the beldame opened, while the grimy hem of her skirt fluttered to her terrified trembling. ‘A decision of grave moment was given into my hands and I was forced to a choice. For an act of unconscionable independence, I throw myself on your mercy. I closed a bargain with Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid. In exchange for the secret of his half-brother’s interests at Merior, I have his witnessed assurance that the Waystone of our order was never lost.’ In rising, uncontainable excitement, she finished, ‘The jewel is whole still, and held in close care by the Fellowship sorcerers at Althain Tower.’

Morriel raised clawed fingers to stifle a warbling cry. This news was momentous, their vanished grand crystal revealed at long last! Thrilled by a tingling, expansive rush of joy after tedious years of proscribed power, the Prime reached out a shaken hand and traced her seal of blessing above the prostrate senior’s hood. ‘You are forgiven your presumption. Indeed, well done!’