Читать книгу Traitor’s Knot: Fourth Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 17

On the unsteady moment when he had sworn his guest oath, the Prince of Rathain had not realized the extent he would need to rely on Davien’s hospitality. The safe haven offered within Kewar’s caverns gave his exhausted faculties time to recoup from the devastating trials of the maze. Soon enough, he encountered the unforeseen changes stitched through his subtle awareness. After years of blank blockage, the healed access that restored his mage-sight required an interval of sharp readjustment.

Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was not the same man who had crossed Daon Ramon shackled by guilt and the horrors of loss and bloodshed.

Nothing was as it had been. With each passing week, he encountered the odd rifts shot through his initiate awareness. His waking thoughts tended to stumble without warning, unleashing a mind-set that was not linear. The least supposition, no matter how trivial, might touch off an explosion of thought. He saw, perhaps, as the Sorcerers did, in vaulting chains of probability. The sudden shifts became disconcerting. Overcome, seated at breakfast one day, his inward musing upon his borrowed clothes showed him vision upon vision, overlaid.

Arithon viewed himself, using knife and needle to shorten his oversize sleeves; then observed Davien, who could sew as well as Sethvir, poking fun at his sail-hand’s stitching. In future imprint, he watched as he was offered a green-velvet tunic edged with ribbon and emblazoned with the leopard of Rathain. That raised his hackles. The jolt of his visceral rejection became an electrical force, impelling him into chaos…

… even as he thrashed to recover himself, Davien laughed again, while his unruly mind raced on and leaped to reframe his adamant preference: of simple, dark trousers and a loose linen shirt. Unreeled thought patterns streamed past all resistance. Left no choice, except to close down his mage-sight, Arithon tumbled back into the confines of his five senses. Even as he wrenched himself back in hand, he heard echoes: the loom in a weaver’s shop, and behind that, like crystalline imprint, the singing of country-folk, pounding raw flax into fibre…

Reoriented, gripping the edge of the table, Arithon sat, hard-breathing and deeply disturbed. He clung to the moment: as though the smells of bread and honey and fresh fruit could reweave his form out of something more solid than air.

Across the breakfast nook, an inquisitive Sorcerer regarded him, arms folded and dark eyes amused. ‘My shirts are too large?’ Davien raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve been remiss? I’m expected to see you reclothed in state?’

‘If you’re offering, I’ll take plain linen,’ said Arithon. ‘The simplicity would be appreciated. It’s the cloth of my mind that won’t cut down to fit.’

Davien suppressed laughter. ‘Not if you try to cram yourself, wholesale, back inside the same vessel. You have much more than outgrown your past, Teir’s’Ffalenn. I daresay the puzzle enchants me.’

Fast enough, this time, to check-rein the surge of another spontaneous trance, Arithon reached for the bread knife. He buttered a crust, as though that one act might anchor the spin of turned senses.

‘You can’t live, shut down,’ the Sorcerer prodded.

The faintest of smiles bent Arithon’s mouth. ‘I can’t starve, overset by unbounded visions. That would demean your hospitality’ He bit into the morsel and regarded the Sorcerer, who watched him, each move, with tight focus. ‘I intrigue you that much?’

Davien found the jam jar and shoved it across the table, unasked. ‘Wrong word. You amaze me. But that’s the least point.’

Arithon set down his bread crust. ‘Why do I sense this discussion is verging on dangerous?’

‘Words are dangerous,’ Davien agreed. ‘Thoughts, even more so. That’s why, when mankind first came to Athera in need of a haven, I stood opposed to the compact.’

‘Your one vote, cast against your other six colleagues.’ Arithon accepted the preserves. ‘That fact is on record at Althain Tower, and truly, I’d prefer you kept out of my mind.’

Davien’s interest expanded. ‘You read into my history?’

Arithon regarded the enigmatic being before him, wrapped in the fiery colours of autumn, with a wolfish, lean face and the shadowed eyes of a creature that had lived for too long by sharp wits. ‘I saw enough to realize you wished to guard against the horrid expedient, should the terms of the compact break down.’

‘Expulsion, before enacting humanity’s extirpation from Athera,’ Davien summed up with steel-clad dispassion. ‘You believe what was written?’

In fact, the historian had condemned Davien’s stance: that twenty thousand refugees should be left to perish, before risking the reckless endangerment posed by the acts of their future descendants.

‘The suppositions on paper were damning.’ Arithon retrieved his knife, slathered his bread crust, then halved the unseasonably ripe peach set before him. ‘Doubtless your own words cast a different light. I don’t think you rejected compassion.’

The Sorcerer blinked. ‘I voted to replenish the refugees’ supplies and send them onwards, before risking the potential abuse of Paravian territory’

‘Send them on, to what fate?’ Arithon said gently. ‘“Frightened, in darkness, what would they find, but more fear and more darkness to hound them? What world will they desecrate, in their sore desperation? What innocent life might be trampled? Send the refugees elsewhere, and we will have disowned the problem, as well as washed our hands of all hope of a reconciled solution.”’

‘You quote Ciladis.’ Davien reclaimed the jam, thoughtful. ‘Once, our Fellowship was that frightened, that dark. No. We were darker. Without the drakes’ binding, we would have gone mad when first we encountered the Paravians.’ Bread slice in hand, the Sorcerer expounded, ‘You have traversed Kewar. How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?’

‘The touch of a centaur guardian uplifted me,’ Arithon allowed. ‘Without that grace, I would surely have perished.’

Davien’s dark eyes flicked up and bored in. ‘You say? Then who admitted the centaur in the first place? Teir’s’Ffalenn.’

Arithon’s gaze turned downward, abashed. He could not disown himself; not again. The infinite presence that had touched and absolved him of itself demanded self-honesty.

‘Whose will broke the wards on the maze?’ Davien pressed. ‘You plumbed your self-hatred and demanded your answer, prince. Then you followed up with the courage to acknowledge your own self-worth. There is your grace. You are my fit weapon, to champion the cause of humanity’

Arithon’s knife slipped through his nerveless fingers. He stared, transfixed and horrified. ‘The Mistwraith’s curse is mastered, Davien. Its hold upon me is not ended!’ When no reply came, he said, tortured, ‘Your weapon? You expect me to salvage the compact and drag humanity back out of jeopardy?’

Davien’s answer came barbed. ‘I expect you to live out your life, Teir’s’Ffalenn. To make choice in free will. That you have endured Kewar’s maze, and survived, has well fashioned you for your destiny. You have broken the mould and stood forth on your merits. Mankind’s hope of survival will come to rely on the consequence. Either way’

The ominous ambiguity behind that soft phrase smashed Arithon’s tenuous hold on awareness. He perceived the forked path of his resolve in simultaneous split image: either he would rise to assume royal heritage, and rule with intent to heal the eroded tenets of the ancient law. Or he would adhere to his preference, and abjure his born charge, and let Rathain’s royal lineage die, crownless.

The irony cut with piercing clarity: how readily he might force Paravian survival by enacting the lawless alternative. The curse wrought through his being might slip even his most vigilant grasp. He might err out of weakness, or misjudge the impact of his active or passive presence. Such forceful power as he carried might in fact precipitate the last crisis that brought town politics to sunder the compact. The dread consequence of that course was not revocable: the Fellowship of Seven would be charged to eradicate mankind from Athera, ruled as they were by the terrible binding set over them by the dragons.

Aware of Davien’s regard, which acknowledged his shocked grasp of the vicious train of repercussions, Arithon shivered, bone deep. ‘No one should dare try to fathom your motives,’ he addressed the Sorcerer point-blank.

‘Inside the Law of the Major Balance, our Fellowship cannot determine your future,’ Davien corrected with acid clarity. ‘Before that fixed truth, my motives are moot. For the ending, on our part, is certain. We are bound to our fate. Paravian survival will be enforced, since our Fellowship has not found the means to break the binding the great drakes laid over us.’

Understanding unfolded, a wounding epiphany. ‘Would you try?’

The Sorcerer did not respond to that question.

Caught in the breach, the man who was Masterbard surveyed the being before him. Davien stared back, his black eyes intense. He was not smiling. The shifting patterns of his inner thoughts could not be read in the depths of his silence. His driving restlessness could only be sensed, pattern upon pattern, behind entangled pain that was not caprice; and a genius vision whose brilliance was such that it would not brook any fixed boundary.

Arithon was first to lower his gaze. After meeting a centaur guardian, just once, he could begin to sense the grave weight of the Fellowship’s intangible burden. How could man or sorcerer wish to live in a world so darkened, it might forfeit the esoteric gift of the Paravian presence? Which binding tied the heart with more fierceness: the blood charge of the dragons, to stand guard at all cost; or the bright exultation of the harmony that walked, living, in the form of Athera’s blessed races?

One dared not, in this case, press for answer.

Yet as Arithon curbed that line of reeling thought, Davien crossed his arms, prosaic. ‘Ciladis would willingly speak on that point, if you should ever chance to encounter him. Whatever he might say, the primary issue was never in doubt. Paravian survival is paramount.’

Arithon valiantly picked up his bread crust. ‘It’s the pernicious question of mankind’s right to upset the balance that enables this world’s greater mysteries. That is what fractured the Fellowship’s unity’

Unblinking, unmoving, Davien stated outright, ‘That is also what threatens the compact.’

Arithon regarded the Sorcerer, hard-braced. ‘I am mortal, and human, and initiate to power, and cursed by Desh-thiere’s geas to seek violence. Therefore, I also embody the potential of the wanton destruction you speak of, but on the grand scale. My doom in the maze could have simplified things.’

‘You survived, in complexity’ Davien grinned outright. ‘Cursed or not, you are also the living exception.’ His confounding nature seemed to find delight in the quandary of razor-edged paradox. ‘Proved fit to rule, and honest enough to acknowledge your conscience. Have you a gambler’s addiction for risk? You have set yourself to cast the one loaded dice throw. How will you choose, Teir’s’Ffalenn?’

‘Not to kill.’ The words, lit to burning, hung on the air with an oath’s indelible clarity.

Davien leaned forward, detachment quite gone, and his face pared to riveted intensity. ‘The most dangerous path, and the most difficult, my friend. Strive for that, and the Mistwraith’s curse will be left no other avenue except to destroy you.’

The warning struck Arithon with splintering force. A barrier snapped. Inside him, the tissue-thin veil of reason gave way. Torn across by the scale of future event, strung through an obstacle course posed by his own sequence of cause and effect, he experienced a cascade of scalding awareness that unmoored the centre pin of his being.

Sight hurled him too far: the course that abjured violence with such visceral need must inevitably carry a terrible, wide-ranging impact. Arithon reeled, eyes newly unsealed. Each decision he weighed engendered a seed, which leaped, branching, into sets of probable outcomes like an unfolding tienelle vision. His senses opened in all directions, tumbling him into an uncontrolled state of bewildering simultaneity. Cast beyond the frail shell of his flesh, he became as a light-beam split by a prism, shattered headlong down the posited avenues of overlaid future projection.

He perceived with a clarity that scattered him, until he lost himself into the infinite.

‘You could use a crystal to anchor your focus,’ Davien stated, bridging the chasm with words. The Sorcerer in his wisdom did not use touch. Compassionate restraint stayed him, and respect for crushed dignity, as his guest folded against the table-top, sickened with vertigo, and fighting nausea as his body rejected the upset frame of its balance. ‘I don’t recommend this, since you would not live self-contained, but create your stability in codependency’

Jaw locked, running sweat, Arithon gasped back, ‘There are, of course, precedents?’

Davien’s mercuric chuckle implied more than wry sympathy. ‘Oh, my wild falcon, there are not, in this case. The path you now walk is uncharted. You must find the way to temper your gifts.’

Recognition followed, provocative, that a facet of Davien’s piquant interest desired to witness the on-going experiment.

At the earliest, right moment, the Sorcerer did rise. He rounded the table and closed a firm hand upon Arithon’s shoulder, steadying him back erect. The contact soothed down his unsettled aura, for the roiling sickness subsided.

Davien added, in dry and astonished rebuke, ‘You are a s’Ahelas scion gifted with far-sight, and wakened. How novel, that you should be shocked or surprised. You are suffering visions in multiple overlay?’

‘Prismatic conscience,’ Arithon agreed, still enraged. Too plainly, he could not temper the back-lash set off by his loss of stability. Nor could he quell the riled suspicion that, like the skilled surgeon, the Sorcerer had lanced the latent pressure of his unconstrained talent deliberately. Cornered too deftly, he had to acknowledge the scope of his savage predicament. ‘The full range, from horror to exalted redemption.’

‘I thought so.’ Davien’s smile turned wicked. ‘Oh, I thought so! My wild falcon, you have found flight. Now you must master the currents. Know this: each of the futures you see holds a driving thread of intent that is personal, and quite real. Those probabilities that are dim, you must defuse by withdrawing your stake in their outcome. Those that are bright, you must align and nurture. Choice will prevail as you focus. You will redefine the depth of your mastery. But to do so, you must constantly sharpen your self-honesty to discern. Each moment demands that you build on your strengths. You can no longer afford the false haven of hiding behind your shrinking weakness.’

No course remained but to integrate the altered perceptions until their wild force could be reconciled.

Arithon leaned upon Davien’s strength, eyes shut, his strained face white to the bone. ‘Just don’t expect me to finish the meal,’ he said, taxed to desperate humour. ‘If I try, at this stage, no doubt I would slight your exemplary turn of kindness.’