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Early Winter 5922

Afterclap

Dawn came in a pallid wash of grey light, to the scratch of straw brooms and excitable chatter. The stable-lads swept piled snow from the cobbles and whisked the last of the spilled grain and debris the past night’s searchers had strewn in the aisle. That industry brought the ominous bent of fresh gossip to the ears of the fugitives hidden beneath the bull’s manger. The beast had not been collected at daybreak. Because Shadow’s rogue minion had not been found, nor any trace of the accomplice murderer, a True Sect decree extended the curfew that locked down the surrounding country-side. Only the head-hunters’ league moved abroad, out in force to beat the brush along with their mute packs of hounds, their trap-setters, and their skilled trackers.

The failed man-hunt whetted the unresolved air of menace, all the more since the new snowfall yielded the searchers no trace of a human footprint.

‘Uncanny, that,’ the head hostler declared, ducked in to throw butcher’s scraps to the mastiff. The horse-boys chewed over the scared round of talk overheard from the stranded travellers, or else fretted through their chores with naked unease. The curfew stultified the unsettled mood, with the Light’s lance captain stationed in wait, his hard-bitten company poised under the grim instructions to ride down any person who left the premises.

Within the white chill of the stable-yard, or huddled indoors around a roaring hearth, the whisperers spoke in haunted dread of the Darkness and revisited horrors from the ancient massacres; the grisly atrocities at Tal Quorin, or the grim battlefield at Dier Kenton Vale that had seen thirty thousand brave spirits struck dead in a day.

The war hosts slaughtered at Minderl Bay and Daon Ramon perished again, recounted in heroic ballads sung by itinerant minstrels. Past evils received the lurid embellishments of bar-keepers and wrinkled elders, until hearsay carried the stature of myth, and wilder fancy described the Master of Shadow as a vile being with raven skin and monstrous features.

Others claimed his fell presence passed over the land as a wind, reduced over centuries to a bodiless haunt. A resurgence would turn the untrustworthy mageborn to minions and sow all manner of savage destruction. The riveting stories claimed Darkness himself snatched newborns from their cradles and leached their heartsblood in hideous rites of live sacrifice. If no one actually had lost a child, true relics remained from the campaigns fought against the servant of evil. Rusted swords were still kept enshrined, or sheaves of browned letters bundled in string, which told of the Light’s standard raised for divine cause under the avatar, Lysaer s’Ilessid. Everyone honoured a forebear who had marched and died in heroic defense of the Light.

Woven into the fabric of folk-tales, or indoctrinated by the temple canon, the factual events that drove past and present had become lost in the welter.

But not everywhere. As morning brightened, both the frenzied stress of the leagues’ stymied dedicates and the crippling discomfort endured by their cornered quarry drew the concern of another formidable power.

The Sorcerer who bore title as Warden of Althain might have appeared drifty and daft, immured in his tower eyrie amid the remote dales of Atainia. Yet his owlish stare masked a stature that soared. Sethvir had served as Athera’s archivist for close to nine hundred years. Ink stains on his spare knuckles and the frayed shine on his cuffs bespoke tireless days spent inscribing quaint script onto parchment.

But the hour did not find him sunk in rapt industry, among the emptied tea-mugs nestled between the detritus of leather-bound journals and dog-eared old books. Instead, burdened with the world’s most intractable problems, Sethvir had tossed aside his quill pen with fierce intent to tidy his cupboards.

Cobweb smudged his creased cheek where he knelt, swamped in clutter: tatters of silk ribbon and ancient strap buckles, the variegate egg-shells of song-birds, a grey wasp’s nest, and a jam crock inhabited by a live spider lay heaped with a clutch of old river stones, boxes of corks misplaced from his ink flasks, two hawk feathers, and a flagon with a cracked crystal stopper. The Sorcerer regarded the shelf just raked clean, apparently lost in bemusement.

That innocuous vagary was deceptive. Sethvir’s piercing acuity remained without peer the length and breadth of five kingdoms.

All events on Athera crossed the lens of his subtle awareness: from the doings of snails, to the hatreds of men, to perilous marvels unfurled like the pleats of a fan by the dreaming of dragons, both living and dead. Sethvir sensed the footsteps of the enchantress, Elaira, descending from the frozen heights of the Storlains by way of the white-water gorge which thrashed into the port town of Redburn. He knew the Queen of Havish was dying. Her frail breaths reached him, as his colleague, Traithe, kept the vigil to ease her final passage. Alongside the hibernation of bats, and the first rickle of ice that closed Northstrait, he also followed the tracks of the desert-folk, erased by the winds from the volcanic sands of the black dunes of Sanpashir. He heard even the gibbers of Desh-thiere’s captive wraiths, sequestered within the enspelled deeps of Rockfell Pit.

The extraordinary range of the Sorcerer’s sensitivity could trace the overlaid patterns unique to the vitality of each individual consciousness, and from them forecast the ripples of probability that streamed towards the manifest future.

When the Fellowship colleague just returned from the field found Sethvir’s cloud-wool hair tufted up into snarls, the sight raised a signal flag of distress.

‘You look like a sheep that needs carding,’ Asandir ventured carefully. He still wore his leathers. Pungent from his arduous sojourn abroad, he brought the fust of horse and the smoke scent of camp-fires into the bookish miasma of ink and antiquity. ‘Should I lay the blame on Davien, or the Koriani Prime Matriarch?’

Sethvir clipped off a shockingly filthy word: one better suited to embarrassed young men caught aback by the pestilent itch noticed after a toss with a harlot.

‘The witch brood is hatching up a fresh plot,’ Asandir surmised. But his rare laugh stayed silenced, and his chilly regard kept the bite of edged steel as he folded his tall frame into the squashed upholstery of the chair by the hearth. ‘Which arena?’

‘Where are they not meddling?’ Sethvir laid down a ribbon fastened with tiny bells, once worn by a Paravian dancer. His disgusted sigh seemed heaved up from the soles of his feet. ‘Like a plague of spelled rats, their Prime’s got the Light’s armed faithful scouring Taerlin and Camris to smoke out a minion of Darkness.’

Asandir steepled chapped fingers. ‘Arithon’s rediscovered the depth of his mastery and accessed the keys to grand conjury?’

‘No!’ Sethvir clutched his smutched temples, as if frantic to stem the torrent of disruptive images: of zealot lancers, and grim-faced league trackers with hounds, who avidly quartered the grey-on-white fields and scrub oak for two heretic fugitives: quarry in fact huddled inside a cold stable, with one of them battered half-senseless and terrified. ‘I would bless the good news, if his Grace had recalled even the glimmer of partial awareness.’

‘He hasn’t?’ Asandir probed with delicacy.

Sethvir dashed the forlorn hope, that the infamous s’Ffalenn temper may have singed the order’s ranked Seniors into embarrassed retreat. ‘By my accurate count, his Grace has recalled nothing, yet. He’s worked no craft at all! Beyond a bard’s turn of phrase with a flute, and the resonant notes to move iron, he’s carried off his friend’s rescue by straightforward subterfuge. A few darts made of tinker’s pins, aimed with effect, and the mischievous instinct that knows where a strategic bonfire will raise tempers and draw in stray iyats.’

Asandir frowned. ‘Then Arithon hasn’t yet tapped the force of his born gift for Shadow?’

‘No.’ Sethvir lowered his fingers, limpid turquoise eyes widened by acute distress. ‘Last night, his Grace moved at large in the yard of a travellers’ inn with no more protection than a burlap bag used to hood his face.’

‘It was snowing?’ Asandir observed, thoughtful. A seasoned winter traveller, he knew that grooms often sheltered their heads with grain sacking under a pinch-thrift stableman. ‘You don’t feel the prince was cautious by restraint, in line with his sly touch for cleverness?’

The reluctant pause lagged. Sethvir picked up the gold-and-black hawk’s quill with fidgety care, and said presently, ‘Earlier today, a temple high priest claimed to have sensed an act of dark spellcraft disturbing the flux lines. But actually, no such deflection took place. The True Sect’s examiner at Kelsing conducted the search of an innocent’s home under that falsified testimony.’

Asandir raised straight eyebrows, coarse as steel filings on his weathered face. ‘Ah.’

Sethvir’s anger acquired a dangerous spark of leashed rage. ‘More, that brazen lie marked an honest crofter for the scaffold and saw his family stripped of their landed inheritance.’

The logic required a beat to unravel. ‘No craft was used. The lane currents were silent. Else we’d have had Koriathain themselves drawn to Arithon’s refuge like crawling lice.’ Asandir sat very still, sensitive to the myriad threads of inquiry sorted by the vast range of his colleague’s earth-sense. ‘Then whose poisoned suggestion tipped off the prying diviner?’

‘A snitch with a rumour,’ Sethvir answered, too tightly succinct. ‘One inept, rebuffed suitor informed the temple those crofters had sheltered a ruffian.’

‘Quite a long leap, to peg a mere beggarman sight unseen as an affirmed minion of Shadow.’ The knifed lines of Asandir’s frown intensified. ‘How did Arithon raise undue attention?’

‘The deep empathy he evolved to appease Marak’s wraiths has entrained him to hear the nuanced pitch of emotion. A neat trap,’ Sethvir said, ‘exploiting the fact he still is quite defenseless, without a haven, and left with no secure route for escape.’

With all recourse hobbled in Arithon’s behalf, the old set-backs festered like thorns in the flesh, that the temple’s sway over Tysan remained absolute. The canon’s long-standing doctrine of fear kept the ports and the borders locked under a Light-sanctioned chokehold. Which ironclad security had been what prompted the Koriathain to locate Arithon’s spelled term of captivity at the ruined earl’s court at Kelsing. If their brazen connivance also used the false faith as the sleeve to flush out their fugitive, the move seemed an ominous excess.

Asandir gauged Sethvir’s raw nerves and probed gently, ‘Prime Selidie cannot fear the s’Ffalenn penchant for vengeful fury at this pass.’ Not if Arithon had yet to recall why he should bear the initiate witches a capital grudge.

Sethvir folded the sleeked hawk feather into a silk cloth, then picked up the gaudy flask. The indigo glaze, emerald vine-leaves, and scarlet birds glinted with gemstone brilliance as he raised the vessel up to the light and peered askance through the flawed glass stopper. His colleague knew not to press him. When the Warden chose to deliver bad news, his word often struck like the fall of a hammer and smashed every alternate option past salvage.

‘The thrust has changed,’ Sethvir allowed. ‘Since Selidie’s settlement rests our oath of noninterference, the Prime’s decided she has the leeway to spin wider plans. I’m loath to suggest that Arithon may be of more use to her, now, as a gambit.’

‘They’re angling for Lysaer?’ Asandir snapped point-blank.

‘Let’s hope I’m mistaken.’ Sethvir tapped the flawed crystal. His finger touch sparked a blast of raw light. When the flash cleared, the crack that gave the glass character stayed: but the chip was erased, which impaired the stopper’s integrity. ‘Lysaer cannot be other than compromised.’ Either by the roused influence of the Mistwraith’s curse or through the born drive for justice instilled into his royal lineage, the Prime’s exploitive stake in high temple affairs must engage the attention of its forsworn founder.

With the sinister upshot that the delinquent avatar well might fall prey to that lure. The sisterhood yet bore Lysaer’s entrenched enmity. To thwart their machinations, and to wrest Tysan’s religious populace free of their corrupt influence, he might well step in and resume his lapsed charge as the divine figure-head worshipped by the Light’s faithful. Should the affray in the westlands push him to try, he would flirt with a peril beyond his means to defuse: Desh-thiere’s insidious geas never slept. Its subtle pressure would warp any action he took and distort even the most altruistic morality.

‘Is Lysaer yet aware he may face a fresh trial?’ Asandir ventured at length.

‘Oh, yes.’ The frightful back-lash could not be disowned, that Arithon’s restored freedom inevitably renewed the murderous compulsion to destroy his half brother. Sethvir granted the proof of that horror without words and shared a fragment of image: as nightmares had broken Lysaer’s sleep, and wrung him to cold sweat and dread before daybreak. The vicious dynamic resurged beyond quarter, with his cursed nemesis once more at large in the world. Already, the sterling strengths of true character staged the potential for a tragic relapse.

‘We face a bad call regardless,’ Sethvir admitted in gloomy assessment.

If, against weighted odds, the s’Ilessid sustained his avowed course and renounced his former posture of divine importance, he would leave the religion’s false doctrine intact, ripe for other arcane exploitation. Lysaer’s absence ceded the Prime a wide-open field to keep steering the True Sect’s high priesthood.

Which naked threat made Asandir bristle. ‘No chance the Matriarch won’t pounce on the choice to leverage the Light’s canon as her ready weapon against us.’

‘The Paravians’ return could shatter that web,’ Sethvir murmured, deceptively wistful. But the diamond gleam behind his veiled lashes bespoke tears before dreamer’s bemusement.

‘Check, then, if not mate,’ Asandir finished, tart for the venomous irony. For of course, with the old races lost to the world, the chore of house-cleaning such meddlesome spiders fell under the Fellowship’s purview.

The Koriani Prime would launch her ambitious assault, with the impasse bought by Arithon’s term of captivity broken at last. Marak’s invasive wraths might be banished, but the Fellowship’s hands remained overburdened. The dis­corporate Sorcerers Kharadmon and Luhaine yet laboured to dismantle the mighty wardspells, once fashioned to separate the rogue horde into single entities whence a masterbard’s song could transmute them. A grand construct potent enough to dim the world’s sun must be unravelled, each coil of energy harmlessly dispersed before the onset of explosive attrition. More, the life-web of two other afflicted worlds required to be mended and rebalanced.

Asandir’s practicality never minced words. ‘Either the Koriathain turn the might of the masses to shatter the compact, or we rend our own solemn oath by desperate means to prevent them.’

Sethvir picked a napped thread off his cuff. ‘We’re all too conveniently hobbled.’ Cheerless, he placed the repaired vessel in a niche where sunlight would fire the vibrant enamels. If the gesture brightened the cloud settled over the library, no rainbow might ease the gloomy predicament that Lysaer s’Ilessid had been formally outcast from the protective grant made by the Fellowship for mankind’s lawful settlement. An unmalleable point the Prime Matriarch planned to mine for her ruthless advantage. With Arithon’s survival also bound under Asandir’s pledge of noninterference, both of the princes stood at the cross-roads of deadly risk.

‘Davien,’ said Sethvir, ‘would be having a field day if he were at liberty to offer comment.’ Not least, for the back-handed reverse, that the traits instilled into Athera’s crown blood-lines had bred so perniciously true. But, of course, no one dwelled upon Davien’s hung fate, wedded to the perilous whim of a dragon.

The bleak pause after that might have gathered the dust displaced out of Sethvir’s cupboard, but for the shuffled step on the outside stair, and the cursory bang at the library door that forewarned of another arrival.

‘My unfinished business come flocking to roost,’ the field Sorcerer observed, beyond tried, as the latch tripped.

A plump, brosy man with a salt-and-ginger beard shoved over the threshold with a laden tray. He wore a sober brown tunic, neat as a clerk’s but for the haphazard knots that snarled his laces. The inquisitive dart of cinnamon eyes picked up Asandir’s presence and narrowed.

‘I wasn’t told you returned!’ the fellow accused, while several fortnights’ freight of injured offence precipitated a minor disaster. Something crunched under his left-footed tread. Then he tripped on Sethvir’s chunks of river stone and escaped falling flat by a hairbreadth.

‘Hello, Dakar,’ greeted Asandir. ‘The bluebirds will lay a fresh clutch by next spring, and your stubbed toe will recover. Before you waste further breath in complaint, we could use a tranced prophecy telling us where the Prime Matriarch plans to wreak her next round of havoc.’

Once, the rebuke would have flustered Dakar scarlet. But tempered living and wisdom, painfully gained, at long last had established decorum. The tea-tray came to rest on the table without the crash of unbridled pique.

‘Could I offer an augury without knowing the facts?’ The spellbinder also known as the Mad Prophet snatched up a cloth napkin, bent his stout frame, and scooped up the pulverized egg-shells. He slid the offended rocks to one side with a genuine word of apology, then accosted the sore point headlong. ‘You didn’t invite me to the Koriani summons at Whitehold! Neither would Sethvir share what occurred or tell me the terms you relinquished to win the Prime Matriarch’s appeasement.’

Asandir extended lean legs and answered the gripes in strict order. ‘I didn’t. He won’t.’ Reclined with his capable fingers locked behind his tipped head, the field Sorcerer trampled the incensed retort. ‘You stayed here because, on formal terms at the time, you were no longer subject to my apprenticeship.’

Dakar shut his gaped jaw like a fish revolted by a distasteful morsel. Appalled, then suspicious, he shot a glance sidewards.

Sethvir answered, his air of innocuous innocence absorbed as he poked through his displaced belongings. ‘You were signed off and sealed as your own master before Asandir ever left to square the debt held against the Crown of Rathain.’ The crock with the spider was removed from harm’s way. Benignly agreeable, the Warden added, ‘Enjoy the autonomy. Pursue your own fate. All your Fellowship ties have been sundered. The parchment was formally entered in record, which means by my count, you’ve been free-loading here for two months and a day.’

A mild turquoise eye peered askance as though startled to catch Dakar dumbfounded. ‘Do you wish,’ Sethvir mused, ‘to question the surety of the star-stamp I placed on the document?’

The high flush of fury drained fast as the impact struck home: Dakar faced his discharge from an eight-hundred-and-fifty-year term of formal apprenticeship. More, the severance came vouchsafed under Sethvir’s titled standing as Warden of Althain.

Dumped unceremoniously on his arse, the Mad Prophet leaped to pick a fight with his erstwhile master.

‘No one informed me!’ he fumed to Asandir. ‘Why the blatant surprise? Is this some new test? Or, dare I suggest, a secretive manipulation?’ Stung beyond sense, Dakar renewed his festering grievance. ‘Since I stood for the oath you just brought to closure, in fairness, I should have witnessed the finish.’

‘Oh, you started the dismal affray, beyond question!’ Steel eyes half-lidded, Asandir let his former protégé squirm. ‘If you thought I’d be lenient, Sethvir doesn’t forget.’

Denial was futile. Dakar’s maladroit usage of Fellowship auspices indeed had saddled Rathain’s crown with the ruinous obligation to the Order of the Koriathain in the first place.

Asandir was not finished, though the accusation lay over two hundred years in the past, and nary a word since had broached the disgrace, or faulted the spellbinder for prior misconduct. ‘The discharge of your jumped-up initiative at Athir has set Athera’s future on tenterhooks and cost a gifted woman her life through an ugly act of self-sacrifice. Don’t trouble to add the misery that a sanctioned s’Ffalenn prince has endured, caged in conditions of inhumane horror throughout centuries of captivity!’

‘He’s survived to win free,’ Dakar argued, jaw set. ‘You assured me that Arithon’s mind was not broken.’

Sethvir’s retort produced three succinct images derived from the earth-sense bestowed by the Paravians. The first replayed the ancient memory of a bereft mother’s tears as her only daughter left Althain Tower at three years of age, by adamant free choice bound to swear service to the Koriathain; the next displayed the terms of Asandir’s oath, lately sealed by stone’s witness at the Whitehold sisterhouse as surety for Fellowship noninterference on the matter of Prince Arithon’s life. The third image, concurrent, wounded the most: of the world’s most brilliant born talent, sanctioned as the last living heir to Rathain. That view showed Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn huddled under an ox manger, bereft of the natural recall of his identity.

‘What else could I have accomplished alone, that dark night when the crisis faced me at Athir?’ Dakar blurted, culpable and defensive for his role in that ruinous past string of betrayals. ‘You’ll recall, at the time, your crown prince was dying! When Elaira, or I, tried to contact Sethvir, we were granted no shred of grace! No response came in that hour, and no succour arose from any other Fellowship Sorcerer—’

‘What made you think that we could?’ Asandir snapped across vain protestation.

It fell to Sethvir to respond to the Mad Prophet’s interrupted appeal. ‘Elaira wished me to secure Arithon’s survival, a call that was not mine to make. Clearly so, Dakar.’ Calm, ink-stained fingers carefully lifted the paper wasps’ fragile nest. ‘His Grace’s free will was not compromised! Only his choice to live hung in question, and by the Law of the Major Balance, mortal death is not a matter under our jurisdiction.’

Dakar paled again, hurled backwards into the agonized recall of the untenable crux thrust upon him, hard on the heels of the ghastly defeat that ended the siege of Alestron. ‘Don’t claim your Fellowship planned to do nothing! Not after you held Arithon’s blood oath to live, no matter the cost or the consequence.’

‘We expected the Biedar would step into the breach,’ Asandir corrected, ungently. ‘And the tribe’s eldest did that. But after you had taken rash action first, with the sorry result that the options thereafter were limited.’

Dakar looked worse than weak at the knees. His desperation found no handy place to sit down. Sethvir’s displaced sea-shells crammed the cushioned window-seat, and stacked books occupied every chair. ‘You might explain why I’m being tossed out! I may have created a grievous set-back, but I promise, my botched efforts stayed within form. No one who was conscious had their preferences compromised. I took care to secure the consent of all parties before the first ritual was undertaken.’

‘Did you?’ Asandir sat forward, quick as a coiled snake.

‘I made sure!’ Dakar insisted, tinged sullen by stress. ‘You held the power to stake Arithon’s survival. Therefore, I did not turn on him without grounds.’

‘Then who is responsible for what happened at Athir?’ Asandir probed like struck iron.

The silence turned suddenly dense as poured lead. Dakar floundered, aghast, while Sethvir blew the dust from the paper wasps’ confection and restored its frailty to the cupboard. As softly deliberate, Althain’s Warden listed the damning facts from a memory impartially flawless. ‘Who hounded Elaira to make her decision? Or did you not make a sly pact first with Glendien, whose unborn child’s betrayed trust in due course paid the ultimate price? Teylia was forced to salvage the brunt of your maladroit chain of ill consequence. Who else might suffer in further forfeit remains under question.’

‘Merciful Ath!’ Dakar exclaimed, trembling. His diligent years of rapt study could not be dismissed at a stroke for the sake of one bygone grievance. ‘Why wait so long to bring this to light? What raised the issue at this hour?’

His anguished question stayed brutally dangling.

‘The disastrous choices have been made already,’ Asandir declared, un­equivocal. ‘My oath, set in stone, forbids further action on Arithon’s behalf for the future. What you do hereforward is your own affair. You have been released to walk away, or to find the conscience to seek a redemption.’

Dakar accepted the severance, granted no chink for appeal. He was not crushed pithless. On his way out, he paused only to fling back a cruel dart of his own. ‘Forget my thankless service! Best for you to fall back on your king-making touch to appoint the throne’s shadow, in fact!’

At Asandir’s startled glance, which all but cracked a legendary demeanour, Sethvir said in arch calm as the door slammed, ‘On that count, no one is joking, dear friend. After all, Tysan is legitimately threatened. There, actually, Fellowship auspices can snatch the initiative and declare the next successor to the s’Gannley title.’

‘Which branch?’ quipped the field Sorcerer, too astute to be surprised twice on the subject. ‘Or can you mean both at once?’

Sethvir’s eyes gleamed with the suspect sparkle of paste, buffed to pass as a swindler’s trifle. ‘How far can we bend the dictates of old law and strain the frayed cloth of tradition?’

‘Far enough,’ cracked Asandir, ‘to scald the naked pink flesh of our arses!’ He reached to fortify himself from the tray. To one who knew him, the sadness and grief afflicted by Dakar’s mean departure were poignantly visible. In truth, his return had been most tenderly expected: with faultless care, his discarded apprentice had catered to his personal preference. The delicacies of hot bread, and fresh fruit, so often missed in rough travel, accompanied Sethvir’s pot of steaming tea. The congealed plate of sausage and pickled eggs, Dakar would have arranged for himself.

The light meal Asandir wished, while at leisure, would scarcely stand him in good stead as he braced for another hard journey. Already expected to crown the new heir on the death of the High Queen of Havish, he understood Tysan’s explosive woes could not rest, shadowed under the deadlier threat of the Mistwraith’s resurgent influence.

Asandir sliced a thick slab of bread, wrapped it over the plump link of sausage, then tucked in, determined, and ate. While the Warden fleshed out the rest of the news, he chewed fast, driven by need to commit his strength to two winter errands, one nearer at hand, and the other at extreme long distance. Both added tasks must be handled at speed, without rest amid inclement weather.

For Dakar, the harsh temper of training would hold; or else break down, to the waste of centuries of unstinted effort. Today’s abrupt severance had been nothing less than a pitiless act of expediency. Every frail thread of advantage must be seized in the heat of the moment. For if a stop-gap net could not be spun to foil the Prime Matriarch’s ruthless intentions, the Fellowship Sorcerers had no other avenue left to deflect the hurtling course towards ruin.