Traitor's Knot (15 page)

Summer 5670

When the Fellowship Sorcerer Kharadmon appeals to Althain Tower for help to curb an invasion of free wraiths that threaten Athera, Sethvir must defer the request, since Luhaine cannot leave the Peaks of Tornir before restraining the Khadrim who fly and slaughter the caravans bearing relief supplies into Camris…

Snapped awake from a vivid nightmare, the acting steward of Etarra, Raiett Raven, discovers the priest dedicate of the Light lurking next to his bed and muttering queer lines of incantation; ‘A guarding ward to defend against Shadow,' the robed man declaims, brazenly insisting the irregular intrusion should not merit an instant expulsion…

Daybreak at Avenor, in distant contact with the same Etarran acolyte, High Priest Cerebeld receives the private sequence of passwords to access Raiett Raven's established network of spies; immediately after his morning devotions, he applies that suborned resource to his thwarted search after Lysaer's runaway princess…

Summer-Autumn 5670

O
nce Lysaer s'Ilessid recovered his strength, he applied his state influence with muscular will and accessed the vault housing Erdane's old records. The mouldering texts he perused showed how narrowly close he had brushed with disaster. A friend's desperate courage had spared him, unscathed. If that depth of loyalty warmed his cold days, his icy resolve only hardened.

As Prince Exalted, for the common trust, he would see such dark works cleansed from the face of Athera.

Past solstice, as the flooding rains scoured the fields, and the north winds howled unabated, he took the rote steps that must guard his onward journey to Hanshire. He learned to frame lines of intent by clear thought and to bind his innate autonomy through affirmations. Fear gnawed him to doubt. The power of his naked word felt inadequate as he tired, and the vivid freight of his own memory closed in. Distorted faces sometimes appeared to gibber and leer from the shadows. He memorized Paravian cantrips to stave off the menacing nightmares that shredded his sleep in the chill hours past dark.

On sobering terms, Lysaer saw where his pride had led him to blinded folly. Sulfin Evend's insistence on arcane defences had never been empty advice. While the Blessed Prince held his council in diamonds and silk and received the reports from his couriers, the cultists who coveted his influence would not rest. Lysaer brooded less on Shadow and sorcery and more on the treason that stalked his state hall at Avenor.

He answered correspondence and leaned without mercy upon Erdane's
treasury to regroup his campaign-shattered companies. When the roads dried, and the drays could be moved for supply, he was hale enough to wear armour and sword, and ride, surrounded by the hand-picked cadre of guards Sulfin Evend had detailed to attend him. Protected at night by herb-scented candles, he began his staged journey to Cainford, and thence to a borrowed manor at Mainmere. There, his officers mustered new recruits. Lysaer placated trade ministers, heard the blustering Mayor of Barish, and arranged for state galleys to transport last year's surplus grain stores. As Tysan's regent, he invoked martial law to ease shortage as blighted crops failed from the damp.

If folk blamed the weather on the Master of Shadow, no voice arose to gainsay them. Lysaer dispatched his idle troops to mend washed-out roads, and offered his powers of Light to cure the cut hay threatened by billowing rain-clouds.

While affairs on the mainland trod their mundane pace, the Lord Exalted sweated in his sheets each night. He resisted the acid-sharp prod to seek after the Master of Shadow. He paced, drained hollow, and assayed no more scryings, though the craving urge wracked him like recurrent thirst. The grey months slipped past without any word of the half-brother sequestered under the Mathorns.

Arithon himself seemed content in retreat within Davien's impregnable sanctum. The caverns beneath Kewar blurred dawn and dusk. The underground deeps spoke of silence and dark, and the wisdom of timeless reflection. Stone measured itself, tuned to the magnetic spin of the earth, a spiral carved by orbit around a star, which itself trod the harmony of the grand dance amid the white whirl of a galaxy.

A man attuned to the depths of those mysteries might lose the boundaries of himself. For days, sometimes weeks, Davien disappeared on odd errands and left his royal guest unattended.

Rathain's prince did not object to the solitude. The radical shifts that rode his awareness made even light conversation too difficult. Since complex thought also unchained the wild reflex that invoked his matrilineal talent, the books in the library were too steep to assay until he had reforged his quietude. Arithon began by reviewing the disciplines learned as a child novice. The exercises of mind and body, precise arts that eased contemplation toward the resharpened focus of mage-sight, let him plumb the new depths unveiled in the wake of his ordeal in Kewar. He encountered the patterns that sparked his rogue farsight and gradually learned not to tumble into the scattering current.

As though veils had been torn from his inner senses, his vantage point straddled the volatile interface between mindful will and expansive thought. Activity prompted reaction too suddenly. Emotions exploded with juggernaut force. Arithon found refuge in the blindfold repetition of sword forms using a practise stick. He slowed down his movement until he was able to fuse the balance
between his mercuric inner senses and the encumbrance of his earth-bound flesh. He progressed. Atonal sound let him test each vowel, then each pitch, until he understood the flowering charge awakened by note and by cadence. Since music invoked the octaves beyond eyesight with overpowering vividness, he tried poetry. The result, more often than not, lit and burned him. The lyrical joy in Ciladis's verse could drive him unconscious with ecstasy. As his eye tracked the beautiful script, unfolding in ancient Paravian, he sensed the power and force in each word
and saw their structure
as ruled lines of infinite light.

The snug chamber where Davien housed his collection was a haven of carpeted silence. Carved shelves lined with leather-bound books towered over the wrought-iron sconces. Arithon sat, curled in a stuffed chair, while the architecture of the lost Sorcerer's thought refigured the frame of his mind. He bathed in that radiance. Touched by grace that showered the air into sound, and refined form to exalted geometry, he embarked on a waking dream that trod the far landscape of the grand mystery beyond the veil.

Arithon shivered, lifted dizzy; overcome. He paused with closed eyes,
and still saw.
The cry of raw light poured through his skin and sang in the depths of his viscera. Beyond hearing, the Sorcerer's art struck the heart like the shimmering peal of tuned bells.

Immersed in harmonics, wrung speechless with ecstasy, Arithon could not have been more ill prepared for the voice, charged with hatred, that spoke from the air at his back. ‘
We are well met, brother
.'

Exposed, wide-open to mage-sight, Arithon recoiled out of the chair. The book tumbled, forgotten. Before it had thumped in a heap on the rug, he mapped the invasive presence: the electrical touch of an auric field that matched the imprint of his half-brother.

Hackled, the Master of Shadow met Lysaer, who faced him over the edge of a drawn sword. No shielding space spared him. No thought might respond. The curse of Desh-thiere awakened like chain lightning. Enmity surged to throttle free will, a ruthless fist in the gut.

‘No!' In the drowning, split-second before reflex forced violence, Arithon snatched back lost discipline and tuned his mind to the chord once raised by Paravian singers to Name the winter stars.

Grand harmony snapped all chains of compulsion. The ungovernable impulse to murder checked short, leaving him trembling and weaponless. Light-bolt or sword must take him defenceless: the blue eyes fixed upon him held murder. Still, Arithon sustained his adamant choice. Shielded in sound, he suppressed the brute drive of the Mistwraith's geas and did not lift his hand to strike out.

The next second, the fair form in front of him shimmered. Live flesh dissolved, undone by a tempest of subtle light. The auric field changed, shifted upwards to frame another pattern of frequency. Blonde hair became a roguish
tumble of red locks, laced through with silver-grey. The wide shoulders lost their elegant white velvets. Reclothed in a jerkin of sienna leather, the frame of the intruder become ascetically thinner and taller. The Sorcerer, Davien, stood in Lysaer's place, his baiting stare devilish, and his smile a satisfied tiger's.

Arithon bit back his explosive curse. Nerve-jangled, he stepped backwards, turned his chair, and sat down. ‘That was extreme,' he managed, unsteady. His hands stayed locked to subdue helpless trembling. ‘Another test?'

‘Perhaps.' The speculative glint in the Sorcerer's dark eyes implied otherwise.

Arithon released a shuddering breath. ‘Your books stood at risk,' he said mildly.

Davien's smile vanished. ‘Did they, in fact?'

‘I wouldn't rush to repeat the experiment.' Three months had changed little: Arithon was far too guardedly wise to expect he might sound this Sorcerer's deeper motives.

Davien's curious nature kept no such restraint. ‘I thought you should harden your reflexes.' He surveyed his guest. The informal shirt, tailored breeches, and soft boots clothed a wary poise, and the wide-lashed, green eyes were anything else but defenceless. ‘You don't care to ask why?'

Arithon stared back in mild affront. ‘Whatever's afoot, didn't you just peel my nerves to prove I could handle it?'

The Sorcerer laughed. He spun on his heel as though to pace, then vanished from sight altogether. The instantaneous transition was unnerving, from embodied man to ephemeral spirit. As closely as Arithon had observed the phenomenon, he still gained no whisper of warning. Trained awareness yet showed him the Sorcerer's presence: a pattern of energies fused with the air, just past the limit of vision.

‘You may not thank me, now,' Davien stated, nonplussed. ‘Later, you'll realize you'll need every edge to secure your continued survival.'

But Arithon refused to rise to the bait. Instead, he retrieved the dropped book, smoothed mussed pages, and traced a longing touch down the elegant lines of inked script. ‘Ciladis was a healer?' he inquired point-blank.

‘Beyond compare.' Davien permitted the sharp change in subject. ‘I have copies of his notes, and his herbals. Are you asking to see them?'

‘Begging,' said Arithon. ‘Is it true, that small song-birds flocked in his presence?'

‘Near enough.' The chill that demarked the Sorcerer's essence poured across the carpeted chamber. An ambry creaked open. ‘Here. The texts you will want are bound in green leather. Of us all, Ciladis was the least shielded. More than finches found joy in his presence.'

Davien's essence hovered a short distance away. When Arithon made no immediate move to accept the offered volumes, he added, ‘No traps, no more tests. Where the memory of Ciladis is concerned, the deceit would be a desecration. Any knowledge he left is yours for the taking.'

Arithon considered that phrasing, struck thoughtful. ‘Your use of past tense was what caught my attention.' Then he added, ‘Though you don't think your missing colleague is dead.'

‘No.' Davien moved, the fanned breath of his passage too slight to displace the flames in the sconces. ‘The bindings laid on us by Athera's dragons transcended physical death. As you've seen.'

The pause lagged. Moved by bardic instinct, Arithon stayed listening.

Then Davien said, ‘It is not spoken, between us. But the fear is quite real, that something, somewhere, may be holding Ciladis in captivity'

The beloved colleague: who had searched for the vanished Paravians and who had never come back. Since that disappearance cast too deep a shadow, Arithon again shifted topic. ‘I do realize I can't stay in hiding, indefinitely. Nor do you act without purpose, even if your style of approach might be mistaken for devilment.'

Davien rematerialized, no trick of illusion. This time, he wore boots cuffed with lynx and a doublet of autumn-gold velvet. Beneath tied-back hair, his tucked eyebrows suggested uproarious laughter.

By contrast, his answer was tart. ‘There are factions who would play your quandary like jackstraws.'

‘The Koriathain have already tried,' Arithon agreed without blinking.

‘Would I take the trouble to harden your nerves for that pack of hen-pecking jackals?' Davien showed impatience.

And Arithon felt the grue of that sharpening ream a chill down to the bone. ‘Now you imply they're no longer alone in their chess match for royal quarry?'

‘Were they ever?' Davien's manner shaded toward acid bitterness. ‘The compact permitted mankind to seek haven on Athera. By its terms, subject to Paravian law, the Fellowship could not limit the freedom of consciousness. Therefore, well warned, we let in the dark fears. Such things always come with the narrowed awareness that is inherent in human mortality. The imaginative mind can be dark or light. Its storehouse of terrors can spin shadow from thought. These will find fallow ground, on the fringes, and there, the compact as well as the dragons' will binds us. Our Fellowship must continually stand watch and guard. No easy task on a world where Paravian presence demands that the mysteries remain expressively active!'

Again, Arithon sensed the subliminal chill. ‘You don't fear for me, but my half-brother?' As silence extended, the thin breath of cold worked its invidious way deeper. ‘Show me.'

For he did understand: if Lysaer's convictions fell to ill use as a tool, Desh-thiere's curse could become a weapon of devastating destruction. ‘Who else wants to play us on puppet-strings?'

‘My library might offer you certain suggestions,' said the Sorcerer, in glancing evasion. ‘Though I can assure in advance that you won't find such things written in the fair hand of Ciladis.'

Yet Arithon had little choice but to place the implied warning under advisement. He knew well enough: the stays just established to check-rein his farsight were too tenuous, still, to withstand an unexplored threat. ‘If there's news, you can tell me,' he informed Davien.

The Sorcerer's parting smile was wolfish. ‘You cede the permission? Pray you don't regret, Teir's'Ffalenn.'

Through the following weeks, Arithon pursued rare texts on healing. Discoveries there prompted a deeper study of Athera's flora and fauna, then more texts on lane tides and fault lines. He studied fish, maps, and the astonishing arcane insights revealed in a folio stuffed with Sethvir's patterns of geometry. As promised, the Sorcerer who sheltered him brought updated word of outside events. Arithon was informed of Dakar's and Fionn Areth's safe arrival at Alestron, and of the pressures of famine harrowing lands to the west. In snippets of vision, shared with an eagle, he saw the
Evenstar
sail, laden with stores of relief grain dispatched for Havish.