Читать книгу Traitor’s Knot: Fourth Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 15

Three hours before dawn, Lord Commander Sulfin Evend returned to the mayor’s palace. Rumpled and chilled, his rapacious mood fit to stamp an impression in pig-iron, he bowled past the butler with four trusted officers, on the pretence of holding a war council. His party mounted the carpeted stair in a muffled thunder of boots. Their stubbled faces and ready steel brooked no protest as the Lord Commander set them on guard in the ante-room of the state guest suite.

‘I’m going inside. No one follows! You’ll prevent any servants from leaving.’ His wolfish review permitted no questions. ‘Whatever you hear, whatever you think, I rely on you to stand firm. No one, I don’t care who, or what rank, will cross over this threshold behind me. If I don’t reappear to relieve you by dawn, your orders will proceed as follows: set fire to these chambers. Burn the contents, untouched. Let nothing and no one attempt any salvage until this whole wing has been razed to the ground! Am I clear?’

Shock stunned the men silent. Lest they bid to question their commander’s sanity, the senior officer requisitioned from Etarra spoke fast to quash stirring doubt. ‘He’s testing our nerve, you limping daisies! The Prince Exalted’s beyond that shut door. Do you honestly think the immortal Light born as flesh could be harmed by a paltry house fire?’

Still hooded, and masking the burden he carried under the folds of his cloak, Sulfin Evend doused the conjecture. ‘Hold my line! On my word, if you fail, we shall see the day evil triumphs.’ Forced to the grim crux, he tripped the latch and slipped into the royal apartment.

The closed air within was stuffy and dim, cloyed with the herbs the distraught valet was using to sweeten the closets. At the commander’s arrival, he abandoned his fussing, while the officious chamber servant shot to his feet, and the page-boy napped on in an overstuffed chair, snoring beside the lit candle.

Against the appearance of indolent normalcy, the unconscious man stretched on the bed lay ivory pale, and too still. Lysaer’s blond hair gleamed on the tidied pillow, shadowed beneath the rich hangings. Devoted hands had tucked away his marked limbs, then raised the satin-faced coverlet up to his chin to lend the appearance of natural repose. Past one surface glance, the fallacy crumbled. The imperceptible draw of each shallow breath was too sluggish to be mistaken for regular sleep.

Sulfin Evend shoved back his hood. Hard mouth pressed to a line of distaste, he flung off the cloak, which still reeked of clogged smoke from the seeress’s fusty attic. Then he shed his swathed bundle on a marquetry table and addressed the fidgety staff. ‘Roust up the boy. Then, get out, every one of you.’ Jet hair dishevelled, a steel gleam to pale eyes, he forestalled the least opening for argument. ‘My armed men will not allow you to leave. You’ll have to bunk down in the ante-room.’

The scared servant shook the logy page to his feet, hushed his grumbling, and steered for the doorway. The valet did not stir a finger to help. Gangling arms clasped, his grey hair fashionably styled above his immaculate livery, he stuck in dapper heels and refused.

Sulfin Evend met that obstinacy with frightening resolve, an uncompromised fist closed over his sword grip, and his unlaced, left sleeve flecked with blood-stains. ‘Stand clear!’

‘Someone should stay,’ the gaunt servant insisted. ‘Whatever foul work you intend to commit, my master will have a witness.’

‘That’s a damned foolish sentiment, and dangerous!’ The Alliance Lord Commander crossed the carpet, cat quick, prepared to draw steel out of hand. ‘You have no idea what vile rite’s to be done here. Nor have you the strong stomach to last the duration.’

‘I daresay, I don’t,’ said the man with stiff frailty. ‘Nonetheless, I will stand by my master.’

Shown threadbare courage in the face of such trembling fear, Sulfin Evend took pause with the blistering glance that measured his troops on a battle-line. Then he sighed, moved to pity. ‘Why under Ath’s sky should you ask this?’

The valet swallowed and shuffled his feet. His manicured hand gestured toward the bed. ‘For too long, I have watched something evil at work. You are the first who has dared to react. If your trust proves false, then I fear nothing else. His Divine Grace may be saved or lost. If I share in his fate, come what may, I will know that one steadfast friend remained at his shoulder.’

‘Have your way, then, but be warned: I’ll have no interference.’ Sulfin Evend released his weapon, his level, black eyebrows hooked into a frown as he moved past and snapped the curtains over the casements. ‘Fail me there, or breathe a word of loose talk, and I’ll have your raw liver for a league bountyman’s dog-meat. What you’ve asked to observe can’t be done clean, or dainty. If you lose your nerve, or if I fall short, this room’s going to burn, taking every-one with it. My captains won’t pause, or shirk the command. Leave now, and I won’t fault your bravery’

The valet backed a step, rammed against the stuffed chair, and sat as his spindly knees failed him. ‘This time, the command not to speak is a blessing,’ he said, in a quavering voice.

Sulfin Evend had no second to spare and no words to acknowledge such staunchness. Dawn approached, far too quickly. Fingers flying, he stripped off spurs and boots. His surcoat came next, then the corded twill jacket that had masked his mail shirt at the feast. His studded belt clashed onto the pile, followed by his baldric and several sheathed daggers. Stripped to gambeson and breeches, he crossed the chamber and peeled back the carpet. Somewhere downstairs, a kitchen dog barked. A door banged, and a shrill voice berated a scullery maid for returning late from a tryst. Sulfin Evend bit back a harried oath. The household servants were already stirring, no favour, in light of the trial lying ahead.

He built up the fire. Without the oak logs, he used only the birch, split into billets for kindling. As the flames crackled and caught, hot and sweet and fast-burning, he rifled the night-stand, set the filled wash-basin onto the floor, then cracked open the curtain and whacked the bronze latch off the casement. He used the snapped fitting to stub ice from the sill. The chips were dumped in the bowl, where they melted, settling a fine sediment of gritted soot and caught mortar. Hefting the iron poker, he crouched by the hearth and hooked out a smouldering bit of wood. Both coal and hot metal were doused with a hiss, then laid, steaming wet, on the floor-boards.

Pinned by the valet’s dubious eyes, the Lord Commander plucked the wax candle from its pricket. Stuck upright, it joined the array on the floor. Snatched light cast his movement in fluttering shadow as he stripped off his gambeson, then advanced to the bed.

He tore off the blankets. Lysaer’s night-shirt was sacrificed, next, yanked away from his wasted frame with a snarl of ripped cloth and burst laces. All but unbreathing, the victim remained slack and pale as a day-old carcass. Careful, so careful, not to brush against skin with even a glancing touch, Sulfin Evend jerked the tucked sheet from the mattress and bundled his stricken liege into his arms.

Lysaer weighed little more than a parcel of sticks. His golden head dangled. Poked from the wracked linens, his bare feet showed blue veins like the crackled glaze on antique porcelain.

Sulfin Evend ignored the valet’s incensed glare, for what must appear callous handling. Enithen Tuer had been adamant concerning her detailed list of peculiar instructions. Charged not to skip steps, the commander knelt. He spilled the Blessed Prince in a naked heap on the stripped surface of the parquet. Vulnerably thin, his muscles were wire, the joint of each bone pressed against parchment skin, and each cadaverous hollow a pool of jet shadow.

No life seemed in evidence, beyond the reflex as the ribs rose and fell to the draw of each shallow breath.

The lit profile alone kept its heart-wrenching majesty, pure in male beauty as form carved in light, envisioned by a master sculptor. Sulfin Evend shrank away from sight of Lysaer’s face. Already savaged by inchoate dread, he refused to give rein to the rending grief that suddenly threatened to unman him. Braced against worse than the horrors of war, he swathed his grip in a wrapping of sheet and tugged the seal ring from Lysaer’s limp finger. The sapphire signet was cast aside, a tumbling spark of scribed light as it fetched up against the rucked carpet. Still shielding his hands, Sulfin Evend grasped Lysaer by the wrists and tugged his yielding frame on a north-to-south axis. The arms he extended out to each side, at right angles to torso and shoulder. He straightened Lysaer’s bare legs from the hip and arranged a cloth yard of space at the ankles. A towel scrounged from the bath pillowed the unconscious man’s head.

Lastly, the wadded bed-sheet was burned. While the flames in the hearth consumed the spoiled cloth, Sulfin Evend addressed the valet. ‘Move your chair. Turn your back. You can’t watch what happens. Whatever unpleasantness follows, you can’t help. My life, and Lysaer’s, will hang in the breach until this foul rite is completed.’

The old servant bridled, outraged protest cut off by the officer’s ice-water eyes.

‘I don’t have better remedy!’ Gruff with dread, Sulfin Evend fought to master the requisite note of authority. ‘If harm overtakes us, you’ll have to trust that the powers that wreak ruin will be none of mine. The last steps will be harrowing. You can’t intervene. Stop your ears. Use a blindfold if you can’t keep your nerves in line through the worst.’

The valet reversed the cumbersome chair. Shivering, he reassumed his perched seat, then fussed his sleeves smooth from habit. ‘If you lie,’ he said, ‘if you darken our world with the death of the avatar given to save us, I will watch you burn with a sword through your heart, I so swear by the grace of the Light.’

Sulfin Evend shoved erect, scalded to running sweat in the glare from the dying fire. ‘As I am born, if I have misjudged, my own captain will do that work for you.’

Past chance to turn back, Sulfin Evend retrieved his wrapped bundle from the table-top. He laid it alongside the poker and basin, then slipped the seeress’s knife from his waistband and discarded its deerskin sheath. The stone weapon was hung from a thong at his neck. Lastly, he peeled off his breeches and hose. The ritual of excision required him barefoot. Since the act of unbinding would invoke a working of air, he could not wear metal, even so much as an eyelet. Stripped down to his small-clothes, Sulfin Evend sucked a sharp breath, wrung by a spasm of gooseflesh.

He knelt at last, swallowed fear, and shoved back his soaked hair, then picked the knotted cords off the bundle. The first layer held numerous ceremonial items given by Enithen Tuer. Beneath, still masked by the fabric of Lysaer’s purloined shirt, were the unclean clay bowl and the bone-knife, wrought to waylay the spirit by the dark workings of necromancy, then raised active by acts of blood-sacrifice. Sulfin Evend left those covered objects untouched. The seeress had assembled two packets of herbs. One, he emptied into the fire. Laced in the fragrance of sweet-burning smoke, he ripped open the other and spilled the contents into the basin. Next, he took up the quill from the wing of a heron, long and grey as a blade, and whispered the Paravian word, An, for beginning.

Power spoke through Athera’s original tongue, a tingle of force that sharpened his gift of raw talent. Brushed by the lost echoes of an ancient past, before mankind had trodden Athera, Sulfin Evend clamped down on the ancestral instincts that whirled his mind toward a blurred haze of vision. He focused his thought to define his intent, then drew the circle of Air with the feather and arranged it, point outwards, at east. West, he painted the circle for Water with a finger dipped wet in the basin. Birch charcoal, soaked cold, scribed the circle for Fire, beginning and ending at south. North, he laid the iron poker, also with the point faced out. The last ward, for Earth, must be written in blood, using the tip of the seeress’s flint knife.

Now committed past help, Sulfin Evend gripped the obsidian handle and cut the dressing off his marked wrist. The blind woman’s instructions rang still through his mind, their cadence exactingly wary. ‘You will make the last circle, beginning at north. Reopen the wound that you made to swear oath. The rite bound you to the land for a term of life service. Used rightly, its virtues will answer.’

Sulfin Evend traced out the glistening red line, for the fourth and last time surrounding himself and the comatose prince, stretched naked as birth on the floor-boards. Then he recited the time-honoured words that called the four elements to guard point.

‘The necromancer’s victim will regain his awareness, about now,’ the elderly seeress had cautioned: and Lysaer had. His sapphire eyes were wide-open. His pupils, distended, were bottomless black, and his limbs, bound in iron possession. First focused by pain, the Divine Prince encountered the horrid discovery that he was utterly helpless. Deadened nerves denied him the power to move or cry out in furious protest.

‘He will feel the halter of power laid on him, but not recognize you as his saviour. Stay vigilant, young man. Set one foot awry, displace any of your circles, and all your protections lie forfeit. Fail here, and you will fall prey to the uncanny forces that bid to break through. The necromancers whose binding is threatened will strive to reaffirm their disturbed ties of possession. You stand in their way, your work seeks to defy them. They will strike you down, if a slipshod step shows them the least little sign of a weakness.’

Lysaer would be terrified. His irate stare reflected no less than the wracking shock of betrayal. His most-trusted field officer surely appeared in league with a shadow-sent sorcerer.

Unwilling to suffer that stark, anguished gaze, forbidden to speak the one kindly phrase that might mend broken confidence, Sulfin Evend ripped the silk hem of the shirt into strips. Wedded to his unassailable purpose, he knotted a cuff around each of Lysaer’s slack wrists. Then he bound each slender ankle in turn. He soaked the dried sea sponge the seeress had given, and using the cloth to avert a chance touch, washed every last patch of bared flesh with the herbal brew in the basin. He had no time to make his ablutions tender. Lysaer s’Ilessid lay supine throughout, unable to offer resistance. His birth gift of light would not rise through the bindings laid down by the knife-cut circles.

The defences were holding firm, a back-handed blessing: even minor instruction in arcane knowledge would have allowed Lysaer to snap the stay set on his will. No such knowledge informed him. Bitterly helpless, shamed beyond pride, he suffered the cavalier handling. Those gemstone eyes burned with a cognizant rage that would have raised scorching light on a thought, and blasted his tormentor down to a cinder.

Silenced by the demands of the ritual, Sulfin Evend could ask for no leave; could not for decency’s sake beg understanding or forgiveness. He gathered the four copper nails from the seeress, then the granite stone pried from her hearth. His heart closed to mercy, he pierced the tied knots in the cloth and fixed his liege’s cuffed limbs to the floor-boards.

Lysaer’s outrage drilled into his turned back as he hammered. Sulfin Evend held steadfast. The seeress’s dry voice instructed from memory, ‘You must break the bowl, next. Ah, no! Foolish man, you will never unwrap it! Those sigils incised on the rim channel power. Harm could strike at you, through your unshielded vision, or worse. The unclean powers engendered by necromancy might open a portal within your defensive circles. Keep the bowl veiled. Use the stone. Crush the clay through the cloth. Now, be warned. The act will cause pain, for the resonance of shed blood on that vessel will harbour far more than residual spell-craft. As the sigils are shattered, their forced bond will release. The matrix that shackles the spirit will break, and Lysaer will feel the unpleasant shock as it happens.’

Sulfin Evend braced his nerves. Rock in hand, black hair soaked with sweat, he groped through the masking layer of cloth and sorted the ugly contents by feel. Then he aimed for the bowl and brought the rock down with all of his war-hardened strength.

Pottery smashed with a muffled thump, and Lysaer s’Ilessid screamed. High and thin as a wounded rabbit, his keening note sawed the stark fabric of silence and extended beyond all endurance. Aching, Sulfin Evend crashed the stone down again. Blow after blow, he hammered into the cloth, and pulverized the burst fragments. Lysaer whimpered and cried. He howled in agony. Contorted spasms wracked his splayed form. His back arched. The ties that entrapped him tore his fine skin, as his vibrating heels drummed the floor-boards.

Horrified, Sulfin Evend pressed on. Lysaer’s distress would not ease, while he faltered. Reprieve could not happen before he enacted the full course of the banishing ritual. His hand shook. His eyes blurred with tears. He exchanged the stone for the black-handled knife, and rinsed the blade in the basin.

Enithen Tuer had warned of worse yet to come. Back in her attic, Sulfin Evend believed that she mocked him. Now all but unhinged by the force of his pity, he realized she had exhorted him out of heart-felt compassion.

A wiser man might have listened and walked free: more than a life debt attended this balance. Yet the choice of that moment was forfeit, and the hour too late to turn back.

Sulfin Evend lifted the flint dagger point over his liege’s navel. Lips sealed, throat locked, he cut swiftly. The small flesh wound welled scarlet: the indented scar that once tied the cord to the mother filled and ran with the blood of the child. Sulfin Evend pronounced the birth name of his prince, then phrased the Paravian invocation for prime power. He capped his appeal with a plea that was mortal, common to all of humanity.

‘I demand this man’s freedom! By right of birth, by right of life, by right of spirit, by the right of the undying light that sources his greater being, let him reclaim the pure truth of his wholeness. He is, himself, sovereign, alive by free will.’

‘You will then cut the cords,’ Enithen Tuer had instructed. ‘By your born talent, one by one, you must feel them. Leave the one you will find at his brow! You must not touch that tie! If you slip, brave man, if you strike that last bonding, even by chance, you will do worse than destroy the victim you have set your very self at risk to preserve. Not only would you bring yourself under attack, you would call forfeit Lysaer’s first claim to autonomy. His will would be lost, forever enslaved through your act to the undying web of the necromancers.’

Sulfin Evend cleaned the stained knife. Left hand raised, fingers spread, he sounded the space above Lysaer’s straining body with testing intent. Where he detected the invisible threads of resistance, he slashed the stream of energy crosswise with the black flint. At each cut, the air thrummed with vibrations past the range of his natural hearing. Lysaer shuddered and cried. Tears streaked down his temples. He recoiled, flinching, as though each encounter that disturbed the cords left him burned. Sulfin Evend barred his torn heart. Beyond mercy, he quartered the prince’s stretched flesh, up and down, across the torso, at each ear, and over the crown, then down every strained limb. Each methodical pass, he nipped the bands of spelled energy, however small and fine.

Dumb exhaustion set in, then shivering nausea. Sulfin Evend persisted, while Lysaer’s sobs dwindled. Long before the finish, the flesh he worked over subsided to a flaccid chill. Taut skin shuddered and streamed poisoned sweat, while the pounding pulse in the stretched veins of the neck raced as though the victim was set under torture.

Sulfin Evend swiped back his drenched hair. Thread after thread, he tested and sundered, until only the last tie remained. By then, Lysaer’s breathing was broken and harsh, beaten down to the verge of extremity.

‘You may think your liege is near death from shock,’ the seeress had said of this jointure. ‘As you love life, if you care for his spirit, I charge you not to be fooled!’

Set back on his heels, Sulfin Evend regrouped. Weariness wracked him. Every nerve in his body felt sickened. The hearth-fire had subsided to a bed of dull coals, painting the chamber in textureless shadow. Inside the cut circles, the close-woven air seemed as the walls of a tomb, rippled with sullen heat and cloying with blood smell, wet charcoal, and herb smoke. The single man, striving, sensed the trembling web of the cult’s powers coiled tight through the gloom. Sweat burned through his lashes and scoured his eyes, and fear coiled cold in his vitals. Come triumph, or ruin, the dread crux was upon him.

Direct touch at this stage could not be avoided, a pitfall of consummate danger. Enithen Tuer had told him, unflinching: the salvage he staked his life to complete was all but predestined to fail.

‘There is no recourse,’ she explained, unequivocal. ‘The necromancers snared Lysaer by willing consent. Consciously, he must revoke their foul hold. Your prince has to wield the knife by his own hand. His free choice alone can release the last binding.’

Sulfin Evend braced for the final contest. Straddled across Lysaer’s helpless, stripped body, he reached for the left wrist to slice away the silk binding.

‘Your loyal heart will lay open your defences,’ the wise old seeress had cautioned. ‘Since the first moment you severed the auric streams tapped by the cultists to siphon vitality, you will have unsealed a self-contained line of spell-craft. Touch the victim, and the imbalanced conduit will affix to you. Until the remaining cord is destroyed, your strength will be drained to replenish Lysaer. Each moment thenceforward will sap you, brave man. Your prince will revive, and you will diminish. With no effort at all, the bound victim might bring the enemy’s work to completion. He need do nothing more than outlast you.’

Sulfin Evend had met her concern with his fixed choice to go forward. ‘I’ll trust Lysaer’s innate gift of justice will lend me the opening to prevail.’

Yet words were not action. No stringent warning prepared: first contact ignited a welter of pain.

Hard resolve could not reconcile the chain-lightning jolt that slammed through mind and senses. Hurled headlong into vertigo, Sulfin Evend reeled, cut adrift, as the explosive shock flayed his awareness. On blind fear, he grappled. The parasitic evil that leached life and breath could bring him down just as fast as the rush of arterial bleeding. He could not pull back. The die had been cast. Mulish courage was not going to save him. Lysaer would be lost for his fatal mistake: the spelled creature whose savage, blue eyes reviled him would never accept a clean death, far less comprehend the chance of a self-claimed redemption.

Tonight’s ruin would seed a future of ashes.

The paragon who wielded the power of Light would become a puppet, possessed by the will of reanimate shades. His suborned majesty would destroy the very Alliance whose cause was to banish the oppression of Shadow and tyranny.

Sulfin Evend locked down his jagged scream. Beyond help or resource, he cut the silk restraining his liege’s left hand. Pain slowed his reflexes. With humiliating ease, Lysaer’s bone-slender wrist twisted free of his sweaty grasp.

The commander deflected the fingers that jabbed at his face. War-trained to fight, he discarded the knife. A feint, a wild snatch, and he snapped a fresh hold. His two-fisted grip bore down on Lysaer’s forearm, while the spells of the necromancer sucked at him like a lamprey and snapped his live tissue to agony.

Lysaer bucked under him. With one wrist and both ankles still constrained, there should not have been any contest; except that vile craft-work fuelled his manic strength, and likewise sapped his beset opponent.

‘Your treason won’t take me,’ Lysaer gasped, enraged.

Whipped to tears, panting through lancing pain, Sulfin Evend could not snatch the resource for answer. Without words, against hope, he must mend shattered trust, before the fell forces his meddling had unleashed drained off his life and claimed both of them.

Where muscle failed, he used leverage and weight, jammed the murdering fist to the floor. He knew where the nerve ran, and jabbed, as he must. Through Lysaer’s snarled curses, Sulfin Evend bore in. He matched that incensed blue stare until the wrist that he savaged went limp in his ruthless grasp. He groped, one-handed, recovered the knife.

Fury whipped through his liege’s taut frame. Sulfin Evend grappled drawn wire and steel. He held on, while faintness sucked at his balance. His stomach felt yanked inside out, while his hands and feet came unravelled and dissolved into substanceless air. Every skilled art of war, all his tricks of in-fighting, ebbed away under roaring vertigo. Rushed witless, he fell back on expedience, and gouged a knee into Lysaer’s exposed groin.

The prince curled, caught short by the cruel restraints. The pinched breath in his nostrils passed, whistling.

He gasped, while his officer hefted the knife. Grainy flint blade, and sweat-printed obsidian handle: the weapon seemed made for no purposeful good. Yet its foreboding appearance could not compare with the obscene shard of knapped bone that Lysaer had used to enslave himself. The Lord Commander levelled the dagger before his liege’s wracked face. Reeling, he waited. Through surge upon surge of debilitating torment, he held on until those gemstone-blue eyes showed the flicker of restored comprehension.

Moving slowly, he reversed the keen edge, then laid the stone handle in the slack fingers of Lysaer’s pinned hand.

He relaxed his grip slightly, sensed the impulse to kill, and locked his fist down once again. If the venomous, stinging pain was receding, a numbing fog now invaded his being. Sulfin Evend battled its deadening lethargy. He would persevere; even failing, he must. He released his clamped hold on his liege’s bruised forearm.

Lysaer’s fingers, too willing, stayed clenched on the knife.

Wrung to reeling faintness, Sulfin Evend tried release.

The blade dived for him, glittering. He parried with his forearm, felt the grazed burn of flesh meeting flesh. His instinctive counter-response proved too brutal: Lysaer’s hand released, skating the weapon in a clattering spin over the wax-polished floor-boards.

Sulfin Evend hurled sidewards, pinned the flying blade before its slide escaped the protective circles. Hard-breathing, his raced pulse a roar in his ears, he battled his up-ended senses. Despair struck: he was not going to rally. The hesitation as he tried to regroup would only sink him, unconscious. He rolled again, used dead weight to bear Lysaer backwards. Lose his hold now, and the other, bound arm would wrestle free of the silk wristband.

Couched on straining flesh, gut-winded and sick, Sulfin Evend placed the haft of the knife into Lysaer’s slack palm once more. The wrist he crushed to submission was scuffed raw, congested with bruises from brutal handling. Beyond pity, the commander grappled his ebbing strength. Each second he succumbed, Lysaer rebounded. The next strike of the knife would be lethal. Exposed beyond recourse, Sulfin Evend locked stares with his liege, all the mute will in him pleading. He forced the awareness that he foresaw his own murder. As his grasp weakened, he stood down, unresisting, while his loosened hand grazed in an unvoiced apology over the welted scars marking the length of Lysaer’s forearm.

The ritual joined in the circle still ruled him. Sulfin Evend sensed the imprint of his own touch. He recorded each unpleasant, tingling snap, as his fingertips grazed the healed lesions. Lysaer felt the sting also. Hazed into recoil, he must know the intrusive sensation was nothing natural. The man in him had to acknowledge the queer, creeping wrongness that suffused his intimate flesh. If his s’Ilessid lineage ran true, he would respond through his forebear’s gift of true justice.

The demand of the ritual disallowed speech. Shoved hard against the last rags of awareness, Sulfin Evend mimed the cut through the air that would sever the tie set by necromancy. Propped, shivering, on his spread hand, he pointed to Lysaer’s damp brow, then repeated the gesture, just short of disturbing the unseen cord that rooted the source of vile conjury.

Strapped logic could not find a second approach. Win through, or fall woefully short, the commander could do nothing more. Crouched on his tucked heels, he waited.

The knife thrust at his leg. Sulfin Evend flung himself clear. Design, or plain accident, as he sprawled, his bent elbow rammed into Lysaer’s exposed thigh. The blow shocked the nerve. While his liege moaned in spasm, Sulfin Evend dragged himself back upright. Reeling, he caught the freed forearm. Again, badly trembling, he hefted limp weight and laid Lysaer’s slack knuckles in place. The dropped knife seemed beyond him. Twice, he fumbled before he managed to capture the obsidian grip. Rocked by shuddering gasps, he pressed the weapon back into Lysaer’s clasp.

By then, the hardened blue eyes showed recovery. Taut fingers closed. The flint edge of the blade jittered red in the hellish glare of the embers.

Light-headed, unmoored, Sulfin Evend owned no last stock of resource. He braced, streaming sweat, wracked hoarse by the rush of his breathing. Throughout, the victim of necromancy watched him, deadly and poised as a predator.

Naught else could be done, except tip back his chin, shut his eyes, and invite the quick strike to the throat.

Caithdeinen offered their lives to test princes, if no other means lay at hand.

Stung by that edged truth, the doomed man might have laughed, had the irony not robbed him of dignity. Chance ruled the moment, as he embraced his fate in sacrificial surrender.

Through that last, drawn second, while risen darkness choked down swimming vision, Sulfin Evend tracked the pattern of Lysaer’s forced breaths, brokenly rising and falling. His own chest ached to bursting. Every joint hurt. The spurred beat of his heart stabbed pangs through his breast, while his ears rang with the memory of his own voice, swearing the time-worn oath by which every sanctioned prince of the realm had been tested. He clung, while life trembled upon the snapped thread of a mad prince’s forgotten mercy.

Crippled, exposed as bait for a necromancer, Sulfin Evend felt the cold ribbons of sweat stripe his back through fast-fraying awareness. He measured the acid-etched stir of the air, as Lysaer firmed his grip on the knife. No coward, the commander opened his eyes and welcomed the stroke that would take him.

The aimed point of the dagger snatched short in mid air. Sulfin Evend stared full into Lysaer’s face, while the tears he could no longer contain spilled and ran down his cheek-bones. His terror could not be masked, or his pity, sustained in the locked stare between them. He bowed his head, waited, and again sensed the move as the knife settled trembling. Razor-edged flint pressed the side of his neck.

Sulfin Evend lost his will to move. Resigned beyond even wrenching despair, he could no longer endure the crazed light in his liege’s eyes. Nor would he reason with suborned insanity. Undone by weakness, trembling with terror, he swayed under the dissolving pull of the spells. At the last, the frail stay that kept his upright posture was the bruised and tenuous trust he owed for the discharge of life debt and service.

The blade moved. Sulfin Evend lifted his chin, just in time to see the black knife drop down. The stroke followed through and slashed across the last binding, rooted at Lysaer’s forehead.

An electrical snap sheared the air. Pain followed. The tearing onslaught as the spell sundered arched Lysaer violently upwards. The knife left his contorted grasp and flew wild, while Sulfin Evend ripped in a cramped breath and gasped the Paravian word, Alt! His scraped whisper finished the ritual, one split-second shy of disaster.

Then the hurled knife crossed the fourfold line of the circles. Dimmed hearing rushed back, shot to crystalline focus. The embers in the grate seemed the blaze of a holocaust, and the chamber, hurtfully solid enough to confound the overstrung senses.

Yet the peril was over.

Sulfin Evend felt the crushing weight of dissipation lift away. Retching, still dizzy, he raised his marked hands and caught Lysaer’s thrashing head. If his strength was spent, he could still lend support. Weeping, he could muffle Lysaer’s fraught screams against his shoulder and chest.

‘Here!’ he pitched his hoarse command toward the chair, where the valet presumably still kept his vigil. ‘Fetch dry towels and a blanket.’

As the commander’s battered awareness slid back into focus, he flexed his left hand and picked at the knots confining Lysaer’s right wrist. Holding the Blessed Prince propped upright against him, he let the valet assist with the cloth that collared the bone-slender ankles. Then he waited, recovering, as towels were brought, one thoughtfully soaked in cool water.

‘Make up the bed,’ Sulfin Evend ground out, while a competent touch wrapped the prince’s flushed forehead in soothing folds of wet cloth. ‘I’ll help attend to his Exalted Self. He is freed, but not likely to stay conscious.’

‘You don’t look much better,’ said the servant, distraught. He shuddered, exclaiming, ‘Merciful Light! Just what manner of foul apparition did you banish?’

The Alliance Lord Commander stared back, battered blank.

Wordless, the valet struggled with his wrecked poise. His large hands were shaking, and his chattering teeth hampered his stumbling speech. ‘There were things, icy cold, crowding outside that circle. Unearthly, ill spirits, and Sithaer knows what else.’

‘You didn’t bolt,’ Sulfin Evend pointed out.

The prince’s serving-man brushed off the praise. ‘His Blessed Grace has been unwell for some time. What else could I do, except stand by your word, that those horrors were sent here to claim him?’

‘Well, they failed!’ Jabbed to vicious distaste for the fact he could not subdue his own trembling, Sulfin Evend realized the prince had gone limp. The gold head lolled, hot and damp, on his shoulder, while the skin cut he had made at the navel dripped blood with sullen persistence. ‘Your master’s ill, now. He requires our cosseting. Meantime, I don’t wish to burn for a sorcerer’s workings in Erdane! We’ve got this chamber to set back to rights. No one must see what’s occurred here.’

While the anxious servant took charge of Lysaer, Sulfin Evend untangled his legs, stood erect, and forced his unsteady feet to bear weight long enough to rub out the spent circles. Next, he recovered the spoiled silk that contained the bowl shards and bone-knife, scrounged up a coffer, and dumped out its load of state jewellery. After he had secured the ill-fated bundle under lock and key, he towelled himself dry and wrestled back into his breeches and shirt. The valet was no slacker. By then he had the unconscious prince bathed and groomed, and installed in warmed comfort on the bed.

Lysaer himself remained senseless throughout. Until he roused in his collected, right mind, his keepers could do nothing more than watch and guardedly wait.

As the windows were thrown open to dispel the herb smoke and the rug was spread over the scuffed flooring, the valet exchanged a tenuous glance with the Alliance Lord Commander. Neither man spoke. The next trial was inevitable. Until Lysaer recovered, they would have to fend off the mayor’s house staff, and worse, the inquisitive pressure applied by Erdane’s ambitious officials.

For that, Sulfin Evend chose to rely on the battle-trained wits of his field captain. ‘No one else will come in,’ he assured the stressed servant. ‘There’s not another damned thing we can do but try our utmost to maintain appearances.’

Wrung out and tired enough to fall down, the Alliance Lord Commander left Lysaer’s bedside and unbarred the shut door to the antechamber. No help for the fact he looked washed to his socks; raked over by the avid, curious eyes of the men under orders to keep vigil till dawn, he could but hope that the room at his back revealed nothing more than the brushed gold head of divinity, lying at peace on the pillows.

Still alert, his ranking officer stepped forth, expecting the word to stand down.

Sulfin Evend spoke fast to stall questions. ‘Send every-one back. The crisis is over. We’re into convalescent recovery, but for that, the prince must have quiet.’ He finished his orders in a lowered voice. ‘The page and the chamber servant must stay here in seclusion. I won’t have them abroad to spread idle talk. Let your day sergeant assign that detail. He’s capable. You are not excused, meanwhile. I plan to sleep here in Lysaer’s close company. This door remains tightly guarded, throughout. Not so much as a rumour slips by you. Have I made my needs understood?’

‘No one comes in?’ Honourably scarred from a dozen campaigns, the grizzled veteran flushed with dismay. ‘Plaguing fiends, man! I’ve no glib tongue, and no stomach for mincing diplomacy.’

‘That’s why I need you.’ Sulfin Evend returned his most scorching grin. ‘If the petitioners get testy, let them try your sword. Since when has the Grace of Divine Blessing on Earth been required to answer to any-one?’

Dawn arrived, pallid grey. Light through the fogged casements spat leaden glints on the mail shirt and sword, still draped on the chest by the armoire. Its unflinching candour also traced the gaunt face and dark hair of the Lord Commander, who watched at the bedside with steely, light eyes. Aching and sore, awake by the grace of a tisane mixed by the self-effacing valet, Sulfin Evend watched the new day expose a divinity no less than mortally fallible. Left burning with questions he had no right to ask, he guarded his charge with the dangerous calm of a falcon leashed to the block.

Morning brightened. The watch-bells clanged from Erdane’s outer walls. When the rumble of cart-wheels racketed echoes from the cobble-stone yard by the kitchen, the Blessed Prince still had not stirred. For the first time that any man could recall, Lysaer s’Ilessid slept soundly past the hour of sunrise.

Westward, the velvet shadow of night was just lifting in Tysan’s regency capital at Avenor. There, Cerebeld, High Priest of the Light, attended his custom of daybreak devotion. A florid man with a dauntlessly focused intelligence, he sat, knees folded in meditation, the drape of his formal robes like sunlight on new-fallen snow. Four alabaster bowls on the altar before him contained his daily offering: of clear water, sweet herbs, and a wool tuft infused with volatile oils, commingled with a drop of pricked blood just taken from his lanced finger. Now immersed in deep trance, he waited for the ecstatic communion with the Divine Prince of the Light.

Yet this morning, the contact never arrived. No distinctive presence invoked his true visions. Cerebeld received nothing, while the minutes unreeled, and the flood of cold fear filled the vacancy.

‘My Lord, my life, why have you forsaken me?’

No answer followed. Only an empty and desolate silence that reduced him to anxious distress.

‘My Lord!’ he appealed, shaken. ‘How am I to enact the work of your will?’

Aching, Cerebeld hurled his mind deeper. He extended his awareness through the limitless void, but no bright power rose up to meet him.

Instead, something other stirred out of the dark. Alone, driven desperate, Cerebeld embraced the encounter that, after all, was not threatening or strange, but offered his name back in welcome.

Then the rapture struck in a welling, sweet wave, as always. Cerebeld shuddered, swept up in sublime content, as he had each day since his investiture.

He surrendered. Swept under, he shivered and gasped in the silken rush of a pleasure that ranged beyond reason. The moment of joined exaltation sustained until sunrise, then peaked, and faded away. The High Priest at Avenor tumbled backwards, recalled to himself. Ahead, he faced the dull framework of duty: petitions from council-men, and charitable dispositions, and the ongoing difficulty posed by an absent princess, still missing.

Cerebeld opened his eyes to the shearing, intolerable pain of his solitary awareness. He arose from his knees. No witness observed him. The oddity passed without pause for question that, today, the Prince of the Light had not spoken.