Traitor's Knot (51 page)

‘Who are you?' he slurred through his unruly tongue, while Glendien's touch nursed a bruise on his jaw he did not remember receiving.

‘Friends,' said an accentless, baritone voice, ‘though at the moment, you might not think so.'

Through swimming vision, Kyrialt picked out two forms: an armed, grey-haired man with the build of a mercenary whose sleeve bore a factor's insignia, and a slight, refined blond, who filled his lace and prime velvet with the poise of a merchant who knew the price of the dye in each elegant thread.

Brows raised, the town-bred pronounced with freezing asperity, ‘The man would not be here, who thought today's plan could succeed in the face of a fool's interference. Did nobody warn you? Lysaer's new acolytes are hand-picked for keen talent. The wise of your kind would steer clear of them.'

Flushed anger burned through Kyrialt's clogged senses, that his wife had snatched her ill-gotten triumph. The band that had netted them out of the street had been dispatched by no less than Prince Arithon's shoreside factor. The warehouse guard would be the man's stepfather, Tharrick, a former captain at arms who had trained for the sword at Duke Bransian's citadel. The towhead had to be Fiark himself, a rank embarrassment, since Glendien would spit nails before she confessed that her wiles had landed him here in the first place.

Nor was her rampant curiosity abashed. ‘Talent? Do you say these new zealots are clairvoyant?'

Fiark sighed, sparking light through his sapphire earring. ‘Past doubt. They'd have noticed the taint of your ancestral lineage and seen you skewered on faggots by sundown. If you crashed the gates as a prank, let me tell you, the by-play is serious.' His chill frown scarcely thawed, he watched Kyrialt's wince. ‘Do you ache? I hope so! That's no less than your folly deserves.'

‘Well, your thugs might have spoken before they attacked.' Kyrialt pushed to rise, grimaced, then fell back as the move spun him dizzy.

‘Should I take such a chance?' Fiark looked outraged. ‘Tharrick's men are not thugs, and I dare not allow my affairs in this town to be compromised. Too many innocents stand to be hurt if the wrong faction suspects my loyalty. May I ask what mad impulse possessed you?'

Kyrialt shot a venomous look towards his wife. ‘Curiosity was the mistake that got the cat skinned.'

Fiark's quick perception caught the exchange. Insight shattered his mood to an outburst of laugher. ‘My dear man,' he said, all at once gently cordial, ‘Let's make sure your woman never meets my twin sister, who is thankfully not in home port.'

That moment, yanked from their slow toil uphill, the yoked oxen dragging the remaining wagon were seized by a uniformed guard and two fellows bearing halberds. ‘No drays pass up-town.'

The cheeky, fat driver reshuffled his reins. ‘We're turning,' he stated, head jerked to the left. An avenue branched alongside the spiked wall, lined with the white pillars and neat courtyards of the quarter's pastel mansions. ‘This lot's for their excellencies o' the Light, under high town, an' they'll not tip me a penny for lateness.'

The guard waved them on. The dray ground across the scored cobbles and passed the servants who polished the street-lamps. The air wore the syrupy scent of gardenias, tanged with the birch coals the wealthy preferred to brew their tea at mid morn. The corpulent carter reined his team beneath a raised gateway hung with a sunwheel emblem. Stopped, he placidly tied off his reins. Jumped down from the box, he strode to the painted doorway and banged to announce his arrival.

The liveried servant who cracked open the panel was displaced by an irritable head priest. ‘The kitchen entry is around the back,' he began, then noticed the tailor, untying the tarps protecting a load of sparkling, damascened cloth.

‘But this is a mistake!' the priest pronounced with asperity. ‘These are uncut bales of white silk you have brought. We expected to have finished vestments dispatched from the shops of the Capewell craft-guild.'

The carter returned a disinterested shrug. ‘Not my problem, your Splendid Eminence. Check the tags for yourself. The seals are Avenor's, and genuine.'

The cleanly fellow with the tailor's kit stepped forward and bowed at the waist. He assured that his services had been procured to begin the initial fitting. A busy fellow, not minded to wait, he raked a glance of haughty contempt over the crude, ochre emblem painted over the chest of the florid priest's current tunic.

Plainly anxious to have his promised silk and gold thread, the religion's new envoy wrestled his irritation. ‘By grace of the Light,' he complained, ‘This is bothersome! We've had our measurements taken once over, already'

The tailor backed down with a charming smile. ‘Then would your Excellency care to inscribe a clear statement cancelling Avenor's commission?'

‘No, no.' The priest waved the man through the door. No help for the mishap, he directed his anxious servant to help carry the baled cloth inside. Meantime, the housemaid scuttled to retrieve the rest of the Light's enclave from their leisurely breakfast.

The emptied ox-wain rolled on its way, while the tailor unpacked pins and
measure. He had just set to with his shears and chalk when the eager acolytes jammed into the parlor to claim their promised new vestments.

They encountered, instead, their red-faced superior, draped like a ghost on a kitchen stool. Arms outstretched, he endured the stiff tedium of a first fitting, barely in progress. The garments just hacked from a raw bolt of silk draped his pink form like a tent.

Innish's devotees stopped short in dismay. ‘By the Light Everlasting!' cried one. ‘You look like my grandame's best table-cloth!'

‘Must match the bias,' mumbled the tailor around a mouthful of pins. His impatient beckon prompted the servant to procure additional stools. His Excellency's valet was commandeered to fold up each set of doffed clothes. Soon a pedestalled row of naked young men stood regaled in tucks of pearl silk. The tailor's shears clacked. The carpet lay strewn with a welter of clippings and scraps. While his victims posed in statuesque helplessness, raw hems and pinked seams stitched with pins, the tailor ransacked his satchel.

‘I plead your forbearance,' he murmured, contrite, ‘I'm afraid I've mislaid my thread.' He bobbed with apology. The error would be rectified. On the promise of just a moment's delay, he nipped out through the back pantry.

The abandoned priests grumbled sour complaints. They ground their teeth, and waited. Stiff as draped fence-posts, shiny with pins, they fidgeted in their welter of darts, while the Innish day heated towards noon.

The obsequious tailor never returned. Worse, their piles of shed clothing had been removed by the overly efficient housemaid. Plaintive shouts towards the kitchen failed to roust any servants to remedy their foolish predicament.

Incandescent, the head priest became first to crack. ‘How can the laziest servant we have be sleeping, amid all this noise?'

For in fact, the street beyond the dagged curtains suddenly seemed to be packed full of hooting revelers. The commotion masked worse: in brazen fact, the waylaid house-staff had been tied up and gagged by a foray launched through the garden.

Cautious of his pins, a pudding-faced acolyte waddled onto the balcony. There, yanked up short and yowling with fury, he backpedalled, tripped, and sat on his unfinished hem-line. Torqued around to nurse his stabbed arse, he yelped again as he skewered his armpit.

Through the subsequent stream of unlovely language, his fellows deduced that the lower-town whores had broken the record for outrage. The head priest ventured a tender descent from his perch. Trailing pale silk and a scatter of pins, he reached the casement and parted the curtains. The view dropped his jaw. Dancing on rouged feet, a parade of belled harlots regaled him with blown kisses and smiles. Covering each splendid, seductress's curves was a sunwheel robe, its emblem jiggling against unbound breasts, while the trade-quarter shopkeepers, reeling drunk, clapped and shouted to cheer on their antics.

One of the prostitutes screamed in delight. ‘Dharkaron bear witness, you
fat, pious saint!' Bosom out-thrust, her attire skirled above lissome thighs, she ran on, ‘Here's Ath's perfect justice! We're twins!'

The priest flushed puce and roared, indignation drowned under the roisterers' shrieks of hilarity.

There followed an infamous chase through the streets, in which eight naked priests in flapping silk held by pins bolted outside to fetch the town-guard. Armed men were conscripted in the cause of the Light, then dispatched to wrestle the belled tarts of Innish to recover their desecrated sunwheel finery.

The ladies wore nothing but paint underneath. Amid the rough play and licentious jokes, all of Innish dropped prostrate with laughter.

From the safe seclusion of Fiark's locked warehouse, Kyrialt heard the wild tale of the fisticuffs to stand off the embarrassed town-guard when the perfidious tailor came to report. Since the clansman ached too fiercely to roll on the floor, he buried his chuckles against his wife's neck until he was gasping and paralysed.

This was the southcoast, where scandalous gossip was awarded the status of legend. Years might pass before any priest in white robes would escape being the butt of snide comments. The water-front tarts would wage their mean feud. For the suppression of trained herbalists, they would seize the incentive to re-enact the obscene celebration at each anniversary.

Early Summer 5671

Arrived with all speed at the hidden encampment tucked in the Thaldein Peaks, and scarcely able to pause to acknowledge a home-coming deferred for sixteen years, Ianfar s'Gannley relates the urgent word sent by a Fellowship Sorcerer: ‘Forge an iron blade for a ritual death. A sunwheel priest rides the trade-road from Erdane who's become the slaved shell for a necromancer…'

Late night, at Avenor, a breathless courier disembarks from an inbound ship and demands an immediate audience with the Blessed Prince; the sealed casket he bears holds the packet of dispatches rushed at speed from the far east, to be opened in private by no less than the hand of the avatar himself…

Awake in his chair under soft summer moonlight, Sethvir of Althain senses a wrongness with the pulse of the stone near Etarra, and
again
tastes the tang of an innocent's let blood; as a shudder of horror disturbs his gaunt frame, the adept by his side overhears his grim plea, ‘Let Asandir achieve his swift return from resetting the grimward at Scarpdale…'

Summer 5671

U
nder the sheer blue sky of summer, the noon sunlight beat down, burnishing the raw gold of Lysaer s'Ilessid's blond hair. The black rag he wore tied over his eyes wicked up a darkening ring of perspiration.

‘You look hot,' Sulfin Evend observed, prepared to stand down and unstring the long-bow gripped in his hand.

For answer, the Blessed Prince snapped his fingers in peremptory command to fire off another arrow.

No straw target had been set up on the greensward that sweltered beneath the gauze film of the midday haze. The shots dispatched throughout the morning had been random, each shaft launched to a different point of the compass. They hissed in flat arcs, or sailed into slow volleys, all directions including straight up.

‘You've only missed eight out of ninescore and six,' the Lord Commander pointed out with dry irony.

Lysaer's head turned. The bright hair that wrung longing sighs from the maidens lay wilted against the drenched blindfold. ‘That's eight times dead by some wretched clan marksman, should I show myself in the free wilds.'

Sulfin Evend dutifully hefted the bow. He yanked a fresh arrow out of the sand bucket and set the fletched nock to the string. ‘You might not be tired; but the sweat and the blisters aren't serving a thing but your angry, perfectionist pride.'

The sealed dispatches just arrived from the east an on-going bone of contention between them, he drew and released. The shaft leaped out, its whining flight
intercepted by a needle-thin flare of sent light. The wood lit incandescent and burned, trailing an acrid taint of scorched feathers on the sluggish stir of the sea-breeze.

Today's show of inexhaustible accuracy gave Avenor's ranking war officer little cause for celebration. Not while his piercing inquiries kept on being deflected with oiled consistency. Years of experience in s'Ilessid service left Sulfin Evend ice-cold: he well knew when that charmed pattern of reticence brewed up the most wrenching campaign surprises.

Balked on one front, he turned his assault against the more volatile impasse. ‘If you won't restore trust with the Fellowship Sorcerers, or try other means to engage the latent talent passed down through your mother's lineage, trust me. The safest course would be to return to Hanshire and drive through a brutal bargain with the Koriathain.'

‘Filthy tactics!' Lysaer s'Ilessid declared. ‘You won't cozen me to soften my stance. The ladies can brood on their sour disappointment. I will not let them barter my sworn men for studs or play with lives as political bargaining chips.'

His stilled pause served back as an ominous warning, Avenor's Lord Commander at Arms had made no move to string the next arrow.

Beneath the soaked rag, Lysaer's abrupt smile held a poignancy to seize mature heart-strings. He forewent his ill humour, aware that beguiling charisma could not soften resolve: the past months had proven he could not bend the will of his adamant, right-hand retainer.

Day upon day, they clashed verbal horns. The need to confront the incursive corruption that endangered the Light's governorship of Etarra also blazed into fierce disagreement between them. More than once, they had bruised themselves sparring when the sore issue edged onto the practise floor.

Now Lysaer unburdened, his honesty scathing. ‘I already gave you my word not to rush. We've agreed that Avenor's security must come first. I can't leave Tysan's capital exposed as it was, or have the trade-road through Westwood left at sufferance of errant Khadrim.'

‘The last escaped predator has been recontained!' Unwilling to play coy with the least taint of falsehood, Sulfin Evend jettisoned tact. ‘That was Fellowship business, and better left to their knowledgeable hands and experience. If I can entrust them with my uncle's life, why can't you leave matters that are outside of your depth in the provenance of the Sorcerers?'

‘Because I fear,' Lysaer stated, reasonable. ‘The citizens of Etarra are my given charge. They cannot be abandoned to contend with the horrors that just cost you the lives of three officers. Nor will I knowingly cling to my safety. Not while a body of Sorcerers whose affairs are
all suspect
leave the common populace to live in ignorance. These people are wide-open to harrowing risk!'

Sulfin Evend bit back his urge to retread the same, tired arguments: that luck and surprise timing could not hope to prevail against a second incursion. Not with the cult's secretive masters forewarned and still smarting from the
resounding defeat given to the late cabal installed at Avenor. Etarra had no ancient Paravian circle to focus the force of the lane flux, a fact that eliminated the powerful backing once granted at need by Sethvir. Worn from the heat, chafed snappish with worry, Sulfin Evend left the next arrow untouched. Instead, his gaze measured the latest disturbance to impinge on the site of the tourney-field.

A contingent of indignant figures marched across the hacked turf, resplendent with the flash of fine jewels and burdened down in state finery.

‘Well, you can't deal with this matter blindfold,' he said, caught aback by startled amusement.

For the dignitaries had abandoned their haughty decorum. Undaunted by the fly-blown manure heaped by the cavalry's picket lines, they hiked up their ribbon-trimmed robes and pressed on like a covey of disgruntled quail. To judge by their militant strut and stiff chins, and the flush on their scowling faces, their pointed reception was going to make a close afternoon all the hotter.

‘Could I guess?' Lysaer mused. ‘The seneschal's persnickety secretary has been overset by the justiciar's packet from Shand?' The firm line of his mouth also twitched with curbed laughter. ‘Bring the man on. Then just watch me.'

Prodded by impulse and evil delight, Sulfin Evend notched a fresh shaft to his string. He pulled to full draw, then released.

The arrow arched out. An etched sliver under the broiling sun, the deadly missile whined upwards. Slowed as the shaft reached the peak of its arc, the shot lost its impetus over the hats of the contingent of approaching council-men. Sulfin Evend saw movement as one of them pointed. Several heads swivelled. Another peered skyward, eyes shaded by visored fingers.

The flustered officials were all male, in douce accord with the bias of town law, and the rigid practice of westlands propriety. No voice in Tysan would raise questions of gender. Yet Sulfin Evend was privy to Lysaer's private nightmares. He knew of the damage incurred by betrayal: a mother, a beloved wife, and now, Ellaine had abandoned this s'Ilessid prince. Since each one had crossed without shame to an enemy, Lysaer's distrust of women would not suffer the opening to tear at the deep-buried scars of such wounds.

Above the greensward, the trembling arrow tipped, then spun point down and rushed earthward.

‘Should I presume you are also displeased?' Lysaer remarked with stripped humour. Awake to the prank just barely in time, he launched the razor-thin flash of his gift into the arrow's sped course. The shaft torched. Its residue puffed a roil of black smoke over the poleaxed council-men.

Hazed to a sharp halt, Avenor's crown governance collectively bristled. Then, their state velvets snagging up dust, the shark pack regrouped, determined to vent scalded nerves on the grace of the divine presence.

The beak-faced trade minister shoved in first. ‘This storm of dissent that's inflamed the far south shows no sign of abating! There have been debauched acts—'

The surge of declaiming interruptions lost wind to the rotund minister of the treasury. Annoyed by the ruin of his best calf-skin shoes, he elbowed in front, moist chins quivering. ‘My scribes are accounting our losses
twice weekly.
We've had recruiters' tents shredded by riots, stolen wine and mislaid stores, never mentioning the tally of damaged—'

‘The missing white silk for the new priest initiates!' a red-faced crown acolyte burst in, at once shouted down by his beak-faced superior, ‘Oh, that's scarcely the worst! Today we've had word that the gilded fittings for the new temple at Ishlir have gone missing. Every one of our inventoried wagons arrived filled by crates crammed with rocks! The stone for the marble facing's been lost under still more nefarious circumstances—'

‘It sank, actually,' the palace accountant upbraided in stuffy correction. ‘A bridge collapsed on the trade-road. Four drays tumbled into the river. The carters were forced to go swimming to rescue their floundering oxen.' He sniffed, then concluded, ‘Barbarian work, surely. Their pillaging raids have increased.'

Sulfin Evend stayed poised behind Lysaer's shoulder, primed for the moment his blindfold liege would be hounded from regal complacency.

Lysaer snapped imperious fingers, instead. ‘Next arrow,' he commanded.

Straight-faced, Sulfin Evend bent his yew-bow, while the yammering council-men stumbled awkwardly backwards, still ticking off points on their fingers. ‘Four strayed shipments of gold, the tribute chests lifted from a company of guards, not to mention the pestilent scourge of indecent ballads and satire—why have we no edicts to curtail the bards? Their lying tongues are a galling obstruction!'

The bow cracked in release. Its launched shot sheared upwards into the blue, where a snapped burst of brilliance destroyed it.

Coughing out the taint of singed fletching, Avenor's justiciar clung yet to the rags of diplomacy. ‘We have thefts going unpunished, and desertions applauded by riff-raff.'

Here, the gifted clairvoyant who trained for the high priesthood thrust forward to cite the fresh case. ‘Last fortnight, a temple's newly blessed floor was
defiled
by a crofter's escaped herd of swine! The doors were barred shut. No muddy pigs could have entered unless a malingerer herded them in.'

The justiciar restrained the fuming priest by the shoulder, and strove to restore court decorum. ‘Our efforts to bring justice to bear on that incident turned your most competent officers into a laughingstock. Serious inquiries could not be held while jeering hecklers turned every magistrates' hearing into an act of low comedy! The dock-side at Shaddorn foments open insurgency. An outbreak of mud-slinging begun by the whores was abetted when waterfront craftsmen opened their shops and let the guilty escape the town watch.'

Beneath the gleaming, fair hair and rag blindfold, Lysaer's mouth showed no change of expression. ‘Arrow,' he stated in peremptory calm.

Sulfin Evend well knew when to follow an order. He nocked, drew, and released on demand, then observed to see how s'Ilessid ingenuity would field the mounting unpleasantness. There would be a design: Avenor's self-styled prince always played his tensioned lines with tenaciously brilliant resolve.

The next shaft whined aloft.

‘How do you suggest the Light should respond?' Lysaer flicked his wrist. The seemingly casual gesture released a burst of ball lightning. The explosive energy consumed its frail mark, wisping another pall of spent carbon.

Avenor's shrewdest trade minister cleared his wattled throat. ‘Lord Exalted, your losses are happening. The longer we deliberate, the more chance we'll be faced with enforcing a drastic solution.'

‘Your Divine Grace.' Avenor's crown steward ventured his case, his prudish, tucked hands ill at ease with the new-found mantle of his authority. ‘Since the spring, the holy treasury has been robbed of twenty-eight
thousand
gold royals. Thrice that in hard silver coin weight. That's not accounting for vandalized property or the fines that are, daily, being waived by south shore officials whose moral fibre has been swayed by malicious sabotage. We are losing hard-won support by the hour, and to what? Indecorous behaviour, malign gossip, and life-sworn men-at-arms shamed into defection. I suggest that money and resource don't vanish by accident. Rumours on this scale do not sprout unsown. We know the bards who are singing the satires don't answer to the same description, however, the Spinner of Darkness has a most subtle hand. Surely this must be his work?'

‘Arrow,' said Lysaer. ‘A high, ranging arc, aimed for drift and wind, due south-west.'

A cold-blooded order, most softly spoken: yet the crack of its emphasis cried challenge. Sulfin Evend stilled his pricked conscience, bent his powerful bow, and sighted the shot's angle above the flagged towers of the palace.

When he loosed, the shaft arced upwards without interruption. It slowed, losing impetus at the height of its arc. A needle of sunlight glanced off varnished wood. Then the point turned, and gravity took charge. The missile plunged, aligned towards the heart of Avenor's inhabited court plaza.

As though no hapless bystander risked being skewered, Lysaer turned his masked face towards the cluster of dismayed council-men. ‘You think I should act?'

The arrow whined earthward, its lethal broadhead a distant twinkle of steel nicked through the blanketing haze.

One fretful council-man moistened parched lips. ‘Your Blessed Grace, for the Light's justice, you must.'

No one moved. The shaft's flight sped unchecked, raising stifled gasps from the onlookers.

‘Must?'
stated Lysaer s'Ilessid, and this time, his held fury lashed his governors a cringing step backwards.

‘Innocents are suffering!' The acolyte priest sank to his knees, broken to desperate pleading. ‘Intercede. I beg you, my lord. For wanton cruelty, would you chance an innocent's death as the price of our forward presumption?'

‘You would not forget at the cost of a burial.' Lysaer's forefinger flicked. Light erupted. The explosive blast slammed the dead air like a thunder-clap. The descending arrow was annihilated, and more: the guildhall roof peak showed a smoking scar where melted lead had scoured through to expose the underlying support beams.

As dreadfully edged, the Divine Prince's restated question:
‘How do you suggest that the Light should respond?'