Читать книгу Stormed Fortress: Fifth Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 10

Hard-breathing and furious, Sulfin Evend could not thrash off the light cloth draped across him. Its clinging folds masked his prone body and face. Each breath, he inhaled the barbaric musk left ingrained by its owner. The mélange of strange herbs, ginger spice, and old wood smoke added a vicious kick to his vertigo. He found no recovery. The chill stone where he lay seemed alive with queer flashes of light, while his ears became overwhelmed by the force of plain silence.

His effort to curse entangled a tongue that rejected the habit of speech. Such uncanny malaise had to mean the old woman’s welcoming drink had contained a narcotic infusion. Sulfin Evend regretted his manners, too late. He panted, pressed prostrate by his gravid flesh, while the bounds of his mind came undone, then up-ended, and dissolved his perception into spinning confusion.

He reeled, unmoored, beyond count of time. The earth did not measure by minutes. Magnified senses marked each indrawn breath, then entwined them with those of another man, sleeping. Identity blurred. The Light’s Lord Commander lost track of himself. When his enemy shuddered, gripped by black nightmares, Sulfin Evend felt his own heart constrict. Shared dread rode him, roughshod. He quaked with terror. Tormented shadows that he could not see gibbered and wailed, hounding him into a darkness more vast than the deep. No fight availed him. He could not break free. His raced pulse drummed to his shredding fear, while his staked spirit languished, shackled between his locked limbs.

Far worse than helpless: Sulfin Evend felt as though drawn on unseen wires out of his hapless flesh.

The throes of rank horror would not release. Without training to harness the gifts of his outbred clan blood-line, Sulfin Evend lacked the self-command to awaken. Suffering entrapped him in vivid distress. Every nerve he possessed felt redrawn in flame, until he lost his grip, crushed to madness. Shattered past recourse, he floundered, unstrung, when a lyranthe note speared through the dark.

Its ringing, sweet pitch snapped out of nowhere and sliced the unravelling thread of stark terror.

Another note followed, then another, cascading into a seamless run of ineffable, scalding purity. The graceful progression burgeoned into a chord that engaged formless dread, and from nothing, raised a bulwark of shimmering harmony.

Suspension ensued, upheld by a steadfast commitment that denied the chokehold of despair. Hope danced, forged into melody that rejected insidious dissolution. Where abased torment reigned, beauty unfurled the adamant fire of will.

Lifted free, Sulfin Evend wept without sound, while the cry of the other man’s heart refigured itself in the soaring majesty of music. Fingers wrought light out of silver-wound strings and invoked exaltation through Ath’s gift of unvanquished freedom.

Peace returned. What darkness remained had been cleansed of all stain, reduced to mere shade cast by moonbeams. The master musician laid down his last line. Exquisite, his closing chord faded. The quietude, after, still gleamed with raised power, even when he damped off his strings.

Left with a fragile, cathartic scar to offset an experience of lacerating separation, Sulfin Evend heard the sigh of stirred air as the superb instrument was set aside. A whisper of fabric described movement. Senses torn raw caught the near-soundless step that approached. Through drug haze and dull sickness, the shock of encounter carried an unbearable clarity: the looming fierce presence of the sorcerer took pause, brought short by belated discovery. An explorative touch traced the mantle that masked Sulfin Evend’s prostrate shoulder.

‘Dharkaron Avenge!’ swore the Spinner of Darkness, sharpened to startled annoyance. ‘A bound prisoner? What uncivil trick left you here?’

The robe draped over Sulfin Evend’s gagged form was grasped, then snapped away.

Since nightfall left the cave dark as pitch, the initiate mind would use mage-sense: the Master of Shadow surveyed what lay at his feet. Wide open still, sensitized by his music, he exclaimed in shocked anguish, ‘Ath’s mercy forgive! You’re the same one who maimed Jieret!’

Talented Sight and narcotic trance brought the past to collide with the present: still snagged into unwitting rapport, Sulfin Evend was hurled back into grisly recall, as a red-haired victim’s hot blood splashed from the vengeful cut of his dagger.

He curled on his side, retching, while his enemy recoiled above him.

Barraged, caught stripped of defences as well, Arithon sucked a fast breath. He owned the strength of training to wrestle his unleashed emotion, but not the gush of a far-sighted talent, run irretrievably wild: for he was not yet healed. The traumatic assault on him by dark necromancy still faulted his natural barriers. The breach entangled his crown gift of empathy with flaring aggression and rage.

No less volatile, and just as viciously mirrored: he matched an antagonist also unstrung by deranging hallucination.

Equanimity shattered, Arithon gasped, staggered by the blazing ferocity that reached for instinctive revenge. Brute discipline triumphed. He did not strike to kill. The curbed stress discharged into his auric field and released as a burst of gold light.

But the stripping exposure laid his face bare to the force of his unassuaged grief.

Then darkness resettled. Sulfin Evend braced for a knife in the ribs, or a fist, as such a fury of towering, unexpressed pain triggered reflexive violence.

No mangling blow fell. The stilled, charcoal air gave nothing back. Not a sound, or a breeze, or a footstep. Unable to fight, unable to speak, unable to vent through his helplessness, Sulfin Evend shut his eyes. Strapped hand and foot, teeth clamped against nausea, he feared to breathe lest the tension should break him in pieces.

The touch, lightly trembling, grasped his shoulder again, to a ragged line spoken in Paravian. Met by a flinch, the Teir’s’Ffalenn cursed. Then he said, still distressed, ‘Relax. I wasn’t expecting the Alliance Commander at Arms as my afternoon’s idle company.’ A deeply drawn breath, and his composure steadied. ‘Despite what you’ve heard about my reputation, I’m truly not planning to murder you.’

But of course, Sulfin Evend held no grounds for trust. A confirmed enemy must understand that. Trussed as he was, he could do little but heave and try not to choke on the gag left by the barbaric dartmen.

There came, moments later, the soft hiss of flame: Arithon had rekindled the coal-pot. ‘Drugged and held speechless? No wonder you fear. The flashback similarity to your mishandling of Earl Jieret must sweat you with dreadful anxiety.’ To the whisper of silk, he came close. His agile fingers loosened the knot and unwound the uncouth strip of rag.

Despite nausea, Sulfin Evend twisted his head and glared up at his looming nemesis. ‘I don’t fear death. You won’t hear me beg.’

Slight of bone, neat of movement, the Master of Shadow tossed the fouled cloth aside in distaste. Unfazed, he moved on, then released the rope that restrained the Lord Commander’s numbed ankles. ‘Shall we drop the predictable, boring exchange? The pain my caithdein suffered is past. The same for your uncle, dead at my hand. He might have been saved had he not been so quick to dismiss the goodwill of an adversary.’

As his wrists were freed also, Sulfin Evend discovered he needed an enemy’s help to sit up. Stiff from confinement, embarrassed by shame that thwarted all rational courtesy, he rubbed his gouged skin to restore circulation.

Scrambled wits forestalled even tact. He could not contain reckless bitterness. ‘Where was goodwill, when Lysaer s’Ilessid was tricked into burning his own troops in Daon Ramon?’

The mistake was immediate: mention of that name with hostile intent could not do other than trigger the curse of Desh-thiere.

Arithon froze. Eyes darkened, he transformed on a breath to a mindless predator coiled to spring. Too late for even foolhardy regret, Sulfin Evend stared at death, poised to rend him apart without conscience.

There, the savage moment suspended. The inflicted pattern that sparked deranged madness hammered into an initiate sorcerer’s singular will. The Master of Shadow shuddered. Griped as though body and spirit knew agony, he twisted and rammed his outflung hands against the jagged stonewall. Braced there, hard-breathing, he turned into himself with a focus no less ferociously frightening. His form appeared fleetingly wrapped in white starlight; or perhaps the unearthly effect was another offshoot of drug-birthed imagination.

Watching, transfixed, Sulfin Evend felt his hazed senses flung wide. Gooseflesh raked over him. As though he heard strains of intangible music, or pursued the cry of a thought hurled beyond reach of the mind, he gasped to a burst of wild ecstasy.

Ephemeral, sourceless, the emotion fled.

Arithon’s tension snapped all at once. He sustained a series of disciplined breaths. Then he blotted his face on his sleeve, shoved erect, and crossed to the far side of the fire-pot. There, he sat down with his quivering fingers laced on his drawn-up knees. As though no break had happened; no razor-edged conflict had danced at the abyss to drive him to geas-bent violence, he resumed the brutal interrogation.

‘Should I answer, for Daon Ramon?’ His cool regard assessed his adversary, alert, but without sign of rancour. ‘If you want to pick fights upon treacherous ground, I’ll walk away. The bully can’t punch with no victim to hand. For the dead on both sides, I have no stomach for mud-slinging, self-righteous argument.’

‘I have earned my demand,’ Sulfin Evend declared, shaken. ‘The curse-driven killer did not arrange the acts of piracy that happened at Riverton. Nor its cold-blooded aftermath. Of forty good men, I alone survived your run through the Korias grimward.’

‘The fox called to blame for the huntsman’s demise?’ Arithon laughed. ‘That is a bit specious, since after all, the whim of the Biedar arranged this encounter.’ Aware Sulfin Evend’s suspicious regard sought to measure him for concealed weapons, he stood up, then hooked off his sash. His loose robe fell open. The unclothed flesh beneath served his bitter assurance that he was unarmed. ‘My half-brother hates me because Desh-thiere wants us dead. Tell me, or better, examine yourself: what reason do you have to follow him?’

‘Should I answer?’ Sulfin Evend shot back.

Not large, though endowed with a neat, feline grace, the creature that four kingdoms raised arms to destroy resettled himself, stripped of humour. The thin glaze of flame-light played over his ironic gaze as he added, ‘No just cause exists. No rhetoric can brighten the geas the Mistwraith has dealt, and no redeeming virtue at all can excuse the debacle between us. If this was a lie, you would be cut dead. Not invited to juggle a trying conversation.’

Such stabbing satire strangled reserve.

Sulfin Evend rested his forehead on his marked wrists, while his naked unease battled reason. When he found his voice, he dared a cautious truce. ‘I have seen enough to allow you that truth. My best efforts have failed. I could not make Avenor’s crown regent hear sense or abandon pursuit of his blood feud.’

Green eyes resurveyed him, sharply awake. ‘Ath’s sweet grace! You have tried?’ Through a moment of desperate, excoriating pain, the Teir’s’Ffalenn dropped his glance to his unrelaxed hands. ‘You could gain a knife through the heart, for that risk. We are cursed, and not trustworthy, though we are both served with the gift of such adamant loyalty.’

‘I swore oath to the land,’ Sulfin Evend admitted, too mazed for the sense to withhold the confidence.

‘Caithdein, to my half-brother?’ Now, Rathain’s prince stared, shocked. ‘And the Fellowship backed this? You split your loyalty with the Sorcerers at Althain Tower?’

Sulfin Evend folded his abraded wrists in his lap, too flat tired for subterfuge. ‘No way else could I spare the guiding light of the Alliance from falling to usage by necromancy.’

‘Brave man! Since you have accomplished your victory, you also must know that the aftermath dooms you to failure.’ Neither man courted pretence. The Alliance’s troops were already marching. Towns in all three of the eastshore kingdoms now girded for war to take down this calm, dark-haired criminal. Given a stubborn lack of response, the Master of Shadow laid open his heart and bored in. ‘An end like Jieret’s could become your lot. You might die on the sword of a vengeance-bent clansman, or worse: Desh-thiere’s geas can’t honour your principles.’

‘So Asandir warned.’ A coal popped in the fire-pot, flurrying sparks that blinked into darkness. Sulfin Evend said carefully, ‘My lord’s fits of madness notwithstanding, I find that I still have to try.’

‘Who else has the fibre to shoulder the load? I salute you, and grieve,’ stated Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Before s’Ilessid, you could break my spirit.’ He tightened his sash, perhaps reamed by a chill, though the desert air wafted in through the cleft carried the baked warmth of summer. Then he said, ‘I am glad that you’re with him. His ruler’s vision has become so dreadfully lost. Lacking the disciplined guidance of training, my half-brother has little chance to resist. Past question, such caring as yours could offer the stance for salvation. As Earl Jieret’s did, thrice over, for me, not least on the field at Daon Ramon.’

Sulfin Evend winced, wounded afresh by the genuine absence of anger. Drug-heightened perception made him see too far. Now, the yoke of old enmity haunted, that had led him to cut a courageous man’s tongue; made him part and party to grotesque hatred, waged upon twisted political viciousness and geas-bent misunderstanding.

Nor could this unwanted, intimate encounter do aught to ease his raw conscience. ‘How can you sit there and not break my neck?’

The creature that Lysaer named Spinner of Darkness did not take offence at the outburst. ‘Within Kewar,’ he said gently, ‘I accepted the gift offered up by a centaur guardian.’

Sulfin Evend hauled in a shuddering breath. Fists jammed to shut lips, he stamped down the sudden upsurge of past vision: of a presence and majesty beyond the bounds of his mortal mind to encompass. He had witnessed such wonder: been overawed and crushed to his knees. Every day since, he survived by the sword, and the force of his abject denial.

This moment, as well, he could not match the grace of an enemy’s sorrowful understanding. The drug’s effect heightened their entwined emotions. Set under such stress, Sulfin Evend could not bear the tearing weight of remorse. Not without smashing the foundation that saw him oathsworn to command the Light’s armies.

‘Death can’t restore what’s already been lost,’ the Master of Shadow declared. ‘Does vengeance or blame ease the sorrow of heart-ache? We all make mistakes. Life can’t be lived without harm to others. Worst of all, I have seen Jieret’s path was self-chosen. That sting was the hardest trial to bear. We can’t buy self-forgiveness. Can’t pay for redress through our sorry penchant for guilt-fed lament and self-punishment. I would have you set free,’ said Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, ‘since the man you support with such steadfast care is none else but birth kin, and my brother.’

The tears welled too fast, for that tender release. Sulfin Evend masked his wet face, while the soft voice resumed, and pierced his remorse with compassion. ‘Some gifts of friendship cannot be earned. They exist, beyond price, and we cannot hope to match up to them.’

Never so clearly exposed to the debt he might leave to his liege, as survivor, the Alliance Lord Commander crumpled and wept. Did this adversary not know? Sulfin Evend lost the frank speech to inform that he held the sealed order to raise all of the southcoast to arms, a duty now made insupportable by the perverse strait of his quarry’s free-will absolution.

The initiate master whose work had undone the Kralovir’s deadly incursion, in cold fact, was no prejudiced town’s mortal enemy. A bard of such gifted stature would have loved peace, before the pointless strife of Desh-thiere’s cursed war had upset his natural destiny.

‘What brought you here?’ Sulfin Evend snatched dignity, and blotted damp cheeks. ‘Why do the nomad tribes hold you in reverence?’

That woke wry humour, mixed with vexed irritation. ‘Though frost should freeze water, I can’t warn them off.’ Arithon tucked lean fingers under his sleeves, discomfited and defensive. ‘Their seers claim a prophecy. There, our interests collide, since I won’t endorse the bizarre obligation.’

Grey eyes matched green, across open flame, while the well of earth’s silence extended. No man to retreat, Sulfin Evend chose challenge. ‘They say your fate’s written into the flint knife I returned, that Enithen Tuer loaned on my behalf to spare my liege from the Kralovir’s depredation.’

‘Did they so?’ stated Arithon s’Ffalenn with soft venom. ‘Perhaps you don’t want to hear this. But the knowledge that founded all three cults of necromancy originated with the Biedar.’

‘Three cults!’ Sulfin Evend still refused to back down. ‘With the Kralovir gone, that leaves two more. Carry on.’

‘I see why you were set in charge of the troops,’ Rathain’s prince said in nettled rejoinder. Nonetheless, he had the fibre not to recoil. ‘The seals that stay death were once part of a sacred rite, used to commune with the ancestry. The Biedar don’t write. Their tradition is inherited. They waken their talent through a trial of privation that opens initiate memory. Long before mankind settled Athera, Koriathain used arcane channels and disclosed the content. They catalogued everything. By rights, they claimed, since the dedicate purpose laid out by their founders held a mission of preserving all records of human achievement. The library they guarded was not discriminate, nor was it kept with integrity. Somebody tinkered, mixed forms, and experimented. Dark sources were tapped without wisdom. Sigils with binding aspects were forged. Worse forms evolved later, recombined with blood ceremony, which warped offshoot was leaked from the order. As I understand, the breach happened before today’s stringent oath, which shackles each sister to unswerving loyalty. I have observed the knot tied by their Matriarch, first hand. It is utterly unforgiving.’

Arithon lapsed into silence. Whatever the bent of his personal thought now, Sulfin Evend was loath to disrupt him. Where Lysaer was wont to mask pain behind the trappings of royal deportment, the dark half-brother retreated, inscrutable. One recalled that this creature had endured Davien’s maze at Kewar. He had walked out sane. Mage-taught, and fathomless as a pool of black water, his stillness had walls.

Shortly, Arithon came back to himself. ‘Biedar would not be encamped on this world, but to see a responsibility to fulfilment. They are bound, so they say, to recoup the mistake that brought their sacred legacy into ill usage.’ A rustle of silk, as he shifted the unsettling topic towards closure. ‘Beyond that point, for my own peace of mind, I informed them I’d no longer listen.’

Sulfin Evend digested this statement, well warned. ‘The elder said the Kralovir cult had been cleansed. If so, then the danger posed through the Alliance of Light is now culled. I doubt that my liege would repeat his error, or dare give consent to another pandering ally’s dark ritual.’

‘Lysaer will remember the knowledge exists.’ Arithon exhorted his half-brother’s officer with caustic honesty. ‘Never blind yourself to complacence: Desh-thiere’s curse will not rest. One day, if we cannot find means to prevail, your liege could be driven to use it. Or I could. The pitfalls if I should become cornered might seed a future that dire.’

‘What can I do, except slow down the muster?’ Sulfin Evend responded at tortured length. ‘Though how that could matter, Ath knows, at this pass.’

The devastation left after the Kralovir’s demise had already branded its relentless legacy: the governor’s command struck dead to a man in the scouring cleanse at Etarra would now set all of the north into flame. Sulfin Evend balked at treason. No matter the cost, he would not reveal Lysaer’s picked target as the citadel at Alestron, since the s’Brydion duke’s family were exposed as spies, bound to suffer the brunt of the wrathful consequence. ‘If I resign,’ he said straitly, ‘or if I obstruct Lysaer’s thrust by an outright refusal to engage you, my liege will be left without any bulwark between Desh-thiere’s geas and insanity.’

‘You will not face me,’ Rathain’s prince cracked back. Nor were Lysaer’s martial intentions a well-kept secret, before such piercing attentiveness. ‘Attack the s’Brydion, and nothing you try can draw me out to participate. No alliance exists. I have severed all ties.’

Outfaced by every unimagined complexity, Sulfin Evend gaped, shocked. ‘You? Turn your back and disown your most steadfast supporter? Forgive me, but I can’t believe it!’

Shoved to his feet in sharp rage, Arithon lost his carefully held equanimity. ‘After Vastmark? Tal Quorin? The dead of Daon Ramon? For what reason should I endorse another campaign that cannot but end in red slaughter? By Ath, you’re a fool! No less than Duke Bransian, who would not hear my warning to stand down. Yes, I walked away! The man’s damnable pride in his ancestral seat will bring ruin on all of his innocent holding!’ Flame winnowed, as Arithon paced through the cauterized pain of past anguish. ‘Nothing I know could force me to this! No concept of honour will be made the cause to destroy another clan enclave of women and children.’

Again came that sheet-gold flare through the aura. No matter how brief, the fleeting light showed that Arithon was in fact chafed to exhaustion. His bearing and features were haggard. The nerves that tried his leashed talent suggested the hurt his adamant stance must have cost him. Silenced by pity, Sulfin Evend sat, torn, entrapped by his role as Alliance advocate.

‘How can you sustain this?’ he managed at last, when Arithon’s caged movement threatened to scorch the eddyless air with each passage.

‘I have seen,’ said the Master of Shadow, worn by the cut of his forebears’ wakened far-sight. ‘To the last slaughtered babe, and the tears in the eyes of the women who will be forced on the hour the siege breaks, as spoils.’ He stopped there. Black hair sifted over lean knuckles as he buried his face in his hands. As though applied pressure could anneal his agony, he recontained his emotion. When next he looked up, Sulfin Evend beheld all the terrible depths that victorious passage through Kewar had cost him.

‘I will not live their death,’ said Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Not ever by my willing consent, nor as the Mistwraith’s curse-blinded accomplice.’

‘If you stand out this war, the citadel must still go down in defeat,’ Sulfin Evend felt obliged to point out.

‘I have seen,’ repeated the Master of Shadow. ‘Let the town fall as a monument to stupidity, and not for self-righteous sentiment. Depend on my absence. I will weather the conflict inside the free wilds and assist the escape of survivors.’

Aware the discussion was finished, Sulfin Evend unbent his sore knees and rose also. Weaponless, empty-handed, he had no solace to offer the initiate master who had saved all of Etarra from an insidious corruption. A man of the sword possessed no statesman’s gift, only the steel to admit his threadbare regret. ‘I would give anything except the life of my liege, that we had never been adversaries.’

Arithon returned a grave smile, then offered the wrist clasp exchanged between clanborn. ‘Guard my brother,’ he said. ‘If we meet at blade’s edge, I would have you know: you fight as my nightmare, but never my enemy. This much I promise. Though you should pass the Wheel in pursuit of your duty, my blade will not be the weapon to reap Daelion’s justice.’

Footsteps approached through the underground corridor. With uncanny timing, the dartmen returned to resume the lapsed charge of their vigilance.

‘The Biedar revere courtesy,’ Rathain’s crown prince assured as he released his fingers in parting. ‘Give them patience and calm, they must treat with you fairly, since their code demands no act of redress unless they are shown provocation. Rest well. You are safe. Eat whatever they bring you. When the seer’s herb that opened your senses wears off, the tribesfolk will guide you back to your people unharmed.’

Sulfin Evend stepped back, erect but still sickened with vertigo. ‘You’ve had meetings like this one before,’ he accused.

Arithon’s grin widened with piquant delight. ‘Ath, no! If I had to guess, the old grandame here connives hand in glove with the Warden of Althain. Do you gamble?’

‘Not with arcane powers, or seeresses given to drink,’ Lysaer’s first commander shot back. ‘They both want you alive, depend on that much.’ Startled by movement, closed in from behind, he stiffened as the dartmen grasped his upper arms.

‘We must use the blindfold once more,’ they informed, their quiet insistence as near as their kind would come to an open apology.

Against his grain, Sulfin Evend submitted. He did not resist as they led him away. If masked sight spared him from the sting of regret, the knotted rag did nothing at all to impair his sensitized hearing. Behind, in the cavern, the s’Ffalenn bastard who was not his foe engaged his own style of courage. The lyranthe spoke out of the echoing dark. Notes sparkled, and lingered, lilting an exquisite air, plangent with a beauty to transcend all hopeless sorrow.

Too late, the prisoner recalled the debt still left unacknowledged. Sulfin Evend had neglected to voice decent thanks for his kinsman’s deliverance from necromancy. Now he hoped the lapsed opportunity would stay lost for all time. Strapped by his oaths, burdened by Lysaer’s charge to engage the siege that must raze Alestron’s proud citadel to rubble, the Alliance commander prayed the course of his fate would be kind. Let the Biedar matriarch’s prophetic warning prove to be empty. In life, he wished he might never cross paths with the Spinner of Darkness again.

Late Summer 5671