Читать книгу The Ships of Merior - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 21

The sparrows who scrapped over the breadcrusts on the windowsill stopped pecking after crumbs and flurried away on startled wings.

Their shadows flitted across the work table, cluttered with its melee of opened herb jars, powdered roots, and tied bundles of dried flowers that burdened the air with thick scents. Determined to ignore whatever spurred their panicked flight, Elaira, initiate Koriani enchantress, continued to brew the poultice paste she hoped might treat the lame shepherd; one whose leg had mended awry from a fall through a rockslide, and whom the hospice healers had tried to turn off because his need was not urgent. Though his fused joints made him limp, he could walk enough to manage, if never to scale steep slopes of Vastmark shale to drive his flocks to summer pasture.

No stranger to poverty, Elaira often shouldered illogical causes. Confirmed as a misfit, she was left by her peers to pursue her studies in a niche between the stills and the herb stores. There, in solitary, contented untidiness, she fed songbirds on crusts that were not mouldy, and concocted obscure remedies as she pleased. A loosened coil of auburn hair licked a cheek streaked yellow with powdered groundsel. Steadily swearing in gutter dialect, pale eyes level in concentration, Elaira strove to balance the conjury laid like ghostly embroidery across the heated air above her crucible.

The delicate forces flickered and twined, scorched thin at the edges as crux points strained to spin awry. To reshape a mangled bone and contracted knots of scar tissue took more than astringents configured with seals of forced growth. Renewal of any deformity required a death-spell tempered with runes of rebirth, contrary and difficult fluxes for the most gifted healer to balance; an energy binding Elaira knew better than to try while her mind was tormented to distraction.

She bit her lip, pressed by a reasonless urge to throw a glass flask just for the need to hear it shatter. The alternative was to break inside; to turn to face whoever had raised her door latch and scattered the timid songbirds. Elaira shut her lips in fierce denial, while the filigreed energies she had wrought through the course of an unspeakable morning collapsed in tangles and bled away.

She could bury herself in the pages of musty herbals and brew tisanes until she rotted away into dotage without lifting a jot of her misery. Her arcane sensitivity to water made the sea tides ring in her blood. Awareness of the spring equinox was ingrained in her being, alongside the scrying twenty-one enchantresses had undertaken on last night’s lane surge, to hunt down and locate one man.

Merciful Ath, Elaira begged silently, let the Koriani Senior Council not have found Arithon s’Ffalenn.

Her plea with fate went unanswered.

‘The Prime Enchantress requests your immediate presence,’ the intruder in the doorway announced in a clear-edged child’s treble.

No such summons would come to her if Arithon’s position was not compromised. Elaira moved, stood, acknowledged the blond pageboy who looked young for his eight years in the order’s quilted violet livery. ‘Lead me to the matriarch.’ Through a miracle, her voice came out steady.

Since the ill-starred battle at Strakewood, she had endured the years as best she could, hedged and dogged by the surety that Arithon’s anonymity could not last; not when the Koriani council had named his wild talents a latent threat to society and her knowledge was their bridge to understand him.

Elaira stepped into the corridor on the heels of the page, vexed with her superiors enough to pity his adult composure. On impulse, she said, ‘Let’s take the short cut through the service vaults.’

‘You want to?’ The child grinned around missing front teeth, then raced ahead and nipped through a dingy, arched postern.

The ancient hospice abandoned to Koriani use by the initiates of Ath’s brotherhood was an ungainly, rambling edifice, drilled like a battered honeycomb into the limestone scarps south of Forthmark. Its crumbling warren of storerooms harboured perpetual, clammy humidity, fed by damp, porous rock that seeped from the flow of underground hot springs. The spacious outer chambers used to house the sick were less oppressive, spared by the beat of clean sunlight through south-facing casements. There the pervasive must of mildew was scoured off by boy wards wielding buckets and holystones to earn their keep.

Elaira’s mood better suited the cavernous back staircases and circuitous, low-ceilinged tunnels that twined through rootcellars and storage cells. Cobwebs streamed in the draughts, glistening like shot silk in the glow of widely spaced torches. The air reeked of tallow smoke and corroded metal, and the walls wore patinas of old soot.

Elaira hurried. Her step made no noise, despite hardsoled boots and a stone floor that threw back sharp echoes. Orphan of a street whore, raised from infancy by beggars until an unlucky brush with the law had bound her into Koriani fosterage, she kept the sly habits of her childhood. Yet no matter how unobtrusively she passed, the silver-blond fairness and amethyst silk tunic of Morriel’s personal pageboy drew notice from every peer and scullion dispatched on errands to the cellars.

Ones who did not merit summons before their Prime, and who were the happier for it.

Elaira shrugged off the speculative whispers that hissed in the wake of her steps. Already marked apart for a worldly entanglement she was helpless to alter or break, she took perverse pleasure in watching the Prime’s pageboy spoil his formal grooming. Past the steam-choked laundry, where red-cheeked junior novices gossiped across their washtubs, through a chattering procession of boy wards who hauled in wood for the kitchen, Elaira’s cavorting escort was remarked. Aware to a fine point of the Prime Circle’s use for her flaws, she dared to ignore the huffy senior taking inventory, who brandished her tally slates and scolded.

In breathless vindication, Elaira grabbed the child’s hand and tugged him to refuge in a pantry. A hidden door at the back opened through the annex by the wine stores, to the boy’s smothered gasp of delight.

‘Didn’t know about this byway, did you?’ Elaira grinned, scraped cobwebs from her hair, and cupped the crystal that hung from the chain at her neck. ‘You’ll like it. The floorboards are infested with cockroaches.’ As the power she focused brightened through her hands, she said, ‘Go on. Catch a few if you want. Just don’t let me find you tweaking off any legs or wings. You can horrify your dorm mistress all you like. But if the insects take any harm from your pranks, I’ll blister your tail with a spell.’

The page stifled a whoop and fell to, dirtying the knees of his hose as he scavenged beneath an old grape press. Elaira watched his deviltry in sad silence. The male children selected as Morriel’s pages led proscribed lives, chosen tools of Koriani higher purpose. But unlike her, whose vows constrained for life service, the boys regained freedom at puberty.

She helpfully offered her handkerchief to net and secure the live contraband, then doused her spell and hustled up the timber stair with its rickety rope and tackle, originally strung to lower filled vats, before Koriani tenure had uprooted the vineyards to grow herbs.

Elaira opened the stairwell portal. Someone had smeared lard on the hinges, probably a scullion sneaking off for assignation with a milkmaid. The enchantress shut her eyes, swept by unbidden association: of long, musician’s fingers flicking dry stems of hay from her hair. Whether the tenderness in that memory had arisen from instinctive s’Ffalenn compassion, or some deeper need that touched the heart, she might never determine. Her order’s inflexible codes of conduct disbarred her from amorous pursuits. Elaira shook off forbidden thoughts, while the page reassumed his lapsed duty. He preceded her down the corridor to the columned atrium Ath’s initiates had originally used for their devotions.

Before the casements had been paned with stout glass, the chamber had been a terrace garden open to the sweep of mountain breezes. Marble toned like fine, blue-veined flesh had lain under snow through winter’s freezes. In the hot, amber days of Shandian summer, flowering vines had laddered the pillars, shedding sweet fragrance and petals. Now, the cracked stone planters were planked over as tables, or else spell-sealed as vault space to preserve rare scrolls on arcane practice. The fountains and pools were all mortared in, their scars masked under purple carpets sewn in silver with Koriani seals of ward and guard.

Older sigils carved in the walls and the roof groins channelled more potent powers still: a captured resonance of earth song, or the clear, high vibrations spiralled in sympathy with the constellations along the ecliptic. Except for a poignancy instilled by time and death that marked its brotherhood creators as mortal, the currents ran similar to the ghostly, faded harmonies left imprinted upon the land by the mysteries of the vanished Paravians.

But no past solace imparted by Ath’s initiates could bring comfort to the future. Elaira pressed leadenly forward, into sunlight and space.

Unchanged by the grand turn of centuries, a ceremonial fire burned in the squat bronze brazier set. in the chamber’s centre. Nested in the cushioned chair behind, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani order awaited audience. She was old, emaciated as a dry stick. The scrappily withered features above her winged collar seemed fused with the porcelain bone beneath. Morriel wore her cloudy hair netted in diamond pins. The lavender and purple mantle of high office enveloped her torso like a calyx, and fine knuckles reduced like storm-stripped twigs rested loose in her lap.

‘I heard you clearly,’ she was saying, her voice the reedy scrape of dead leaves against granite. ‘Your point does not signify in this case.’

The tall, graceful Senior she addressed raised her chin. Eyes of tigerish, tawny brown flashed under the silver-wired band of a high initiate’s cowl. ‘The girl is weak and unsuited. Dare we entrust such responsibility to a vessel twice proven to be flawed?’

Morriel Prime gave a breathy scrape of laughter. ‘Are you befitted to judge?’ She folded clawed hands, then restlessly laid them separate since neither position eased their pain. ‘Take heed and look inward, First Senior. Your view could well be as muddled. For a fact, your speech is unwarrantedly careless.’

Quick instinct made Elaira break habit and allow her next footfall to grate.

First Senior Lirenda whirled at the noise. ‘You!’ A flush stained her aristocratic cheekbones, vivid above the pleated robe that yoked her trim shoulders. Her ebony hair was sleeked back in combs, no single strand out of place. ‘Given the nature of your origins, I should expect you would lurk your way here through the cellars.’

‘It’s quicker,’ Elaira provoked in the street drawl of her girlhood. Unrepentant, she hurried her curtsey of obeisance to the Prime. ‘Your will, Matriarch.’

The crone watched her arise with eyes black and colourless as rubbed glass. She did not speak, but studied, ruthlessly practised in the Koriani arts of subtle observation and analysis. Elaira bore up, the more fiercely determined since street-wise bravado could never face down Morriel’s weight of years and experience. As if her very thoughts were stamped into live flesh, the Koriani matriarch could read the question that grieved her; would measure the assault against pride, that eventually must crumple before need to ask outright for the results of last night’s scrying.

Stiff to her toes before the urge to bolt outright, strained to her limits before a truth that held infinite capacity to wound her, Elaira scarcely heard the words Lirenda used to scold the page. Powerless, now, to assume the blame for the grime on his livery, the young enchantress endured while the hidden handkerchief was discovered and shaken out, to the First Senior’s redoubled annoyance as its six-legged cargo scuttled to shelter under her skirts.

A glint too cold to be humour touched the depths of Morriel’s eyes. ‘But our scrying was unsuccessful, girl. We haven’t yet managed to discover the refuge of Rathain’s last prince.’

Elaira could not quite stifle her shuddering sigh of relief. ‘You summoned. How must I serve?’

‘Sit.’ Morriel accompanied the command with a gesture clipped short by exhausted tolerance and sore joints. ‘Coir efforts were bent awry by chance interference from the Fellowship. The timing in fact lent us insight and our order has gained in the counterplay.’

Past the edge of the carpet, First Enchantress Lirenda pulped a last fleeing insect beneath her heel. Intuitively sure the creature’s swift demise was impelled by more than harmless mischief, Elaira clasped her hands in sweating dread.

‘Show her,’ Morriel commanded.

Lirenda dismissed the chastised page. Lips compressed in capitulation that marred her air of hauteur, she stalked across the carpet. The sun at her back scythed her shadow over figured argent sigils and quenched their surface glitter as she knelt in a crisp sweep of skirts before the burning brazier.

Where Elaira’s elemental affinities predisposed her to conjure through water, Lirenda used fire for alignment. At one with the will of her Prime, she closed her eyes and settled into a light trance.

As the matriarch’s successor in training, her powers were impressively tempered. Grazed by a thrum of current across her nerves, Elaira struggled to quell her apprehension. Too soon, the red gold blaze of the embers changed character, became charged to cold blue that threw neither light nor warmth. Across the fire’s altered energy, ethereal at first as the spell-thread stitched into the rugs, a pattern formed, fused, and blazed into a fixed configuration. Revealed in clear focus through Lirenda’s consciousness, Elaira viewed a mesh of visionary artistry, then ironies complex enough to storm through will and reflex, and arrest her heart between beats. She recognized the strand pattern analogue of Arithon s’Ffalenn’s living aura, exposed in the fullness of Fellowship perception.

She gasped. In uncompromising lines, the man’s hidden self lay mapped out in a nuance that damned. As never before, she saw how vision and compassion, power and sensitivity, strength and pity lay paired beyond compatibility. Morriel’s fear was real, that the added burden of Desh-thiere’s curse might anneal the whole into a laceration of spirit with tragic potential to seed madness.

Since the order’s responsibility had never condoned power with any latent bent toward destruction, the Prime would act before threat became reality. Elaira’s rooted faith, that the Master of Shadow was resilient enough to retain his grip on self-command, became exposed as baseless conviction, too likely the blind offshoot of personal feelings held against the wisdom of her seniors.

‘Dharkaron Avenger!’ Elaira blinked through a rising well of tears. ‘How could any man support such a tangle for more than a natural lifespan? Or am I mistaken? Isn’t that arc and counter-seal an imposed pattern for longevity?’

‘Your insight runs true.’ Morriel snapped dry fingers, signal for Lirenda to relax her discipline. The development caught us off-guard, but shouldn’t have. Both Lysaer and Arithon came to this land by way of the Red Desert’s World Gate. Our natural assumption should have followed, that they drank from the Five Centuries Fountain and succumbed to Davien’s geas.’

That’s why you’ve summoned me,’ Elaira said, relieved as the pattern’s cruel quandary erased at last from the embers.

She blotted streaming cheeks on her sleeve, and so missed Lirenda’s transition from trance to waking consciousness. A jealous, unguarded expression crossed the First Senior’s face, and a glare like distilled venom drilled through the younger woman’s back.

The Prime watched with hooded eyes as her chosen successor masked the lapse. Grim as steel, she held to her purpose. ‘You were called to serve, initiate Elaira. Since we now know the conflict seeded by the Mistwraith will afflict more than one generation, you are asked to submit your crystal for enhancement. You won’t be forced. Consider carefully. The fate of outliving your peers is not always happy or desirable.’

Lirenda maintained an elegant, stiff silence. Only the hands pinched in fists beneath her sleeves expressed her depths of resentment, that a privilege reserved for proven seniors was being offered to a girl who flaunted propriety.

Rough-edged as a hoyden by comparison, Elaira confronted the emaciated crone in her bulwark of robes and the ice-point shimmer of her diamonds. Morriel’s life had extended well past a thousand years; centuries reckoned for in joints worn eggshell thin, and flesh racked and drawn to a husk of brittle fibres by powerful spells of preservation. Unlike the Fellowship of Seven, whose direct grasp of grand conjury could engender lengthened life in concert with physical law, Koriani methods were limited to energy resonance enhanced by a power crystal’s lattice.

There is pain, at first,’ Morriel continued, ‘but only until the body reaches primary equilibrium with the stay-spells. After the first six months, degenerative ageing is reversed until well past seven hundred years. Since Davien’s mark holds influence for only five centuries, you need not live on to endure the afflictions of secondary interference.’

Surrounded by the chipped majesty of the initiates’ ancient carvings, never so aware of the fall of clear sunlight, or the chirp of nesting martens in the cornices outside, Elaira hugged her arms across her breast. The warning of her Prime and the antipathy behind Lirenda’s cool façade lost all impact before trepidation from another source.

Once in dusk by the seaside, a Fellowship sorcerer had offered her counsel in secret. ‘I was sent to you,’ Traithe had said, ‘because an augury showed the Warden of Althain that, for good or ill, you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.’

There was no decision to be made, Elaira understood in bitter calm; and so her voice did not shake as she said, ‘I accept the bidding of my Prime.’

Silk rustled. A breath of eddied lavender twined on the air as Morriel inclined her head. ‘So be it. Surrender your jewel for attunement.’ A wrist like bundled withies lifted from her lap, its claw-skinny hand cupped to grasp.

Elaira freed a clear quartz pendant strung on braided chain like a teardrop frozen in mid-fall. Small-boned and light-footed and trained to dissemble as a pickpocket, she displayed a courage that embarrassed as the jewel changed grasp. A charged understanding passed between the crone and the young woman who consented to a fate that might ruin her.

Then Elaira’s lips bent into an insolent smile. ‘I wish this course of change, as well.’

‘The more fool you,’ snapped the Prime. ‘You have virtues, but wisdom isn’t one of them.’ She snatched the relinquished chain and jewel to her chest and said in querulous, point blank demand, ‘Tell me. Where do you suppose the Shadow Master is hiding?’

Shocked and stonily defensive, Elaira had no choice but to answer. ‘Where is Lysaer?’

Lirenda bridled in affront.

But Morriel judged the query was not impertinence. ‘Tysan’s prince is marching for Erdane to claim his right to Avenor’s charter.’

Elaira’s stillness turned brittle. In that same forbidden meeting, Traithe had assured her that obedience to her Prime would cause no additional threat to Arithon. Against her deepest inclination, but bound by the perilous nature of her Koriani vows, she answered, ‘Then look for the Shadow Master in any town that borders the eastern sea. He’ll be found, I should guess, as far from Avenor as the confines of dry land will allow.’

‘A sensible deduction. At solstice, we shall scry the seventh lane and test the truth of your theory.’ Worn from the interview, Morriel flicked a terse finger in dismissal.

‘You too,’ the Prime rapped to Lirenda, who lingered, poised to argue further over Elaira’s longevity privileges. Distressed by an emerging flaw in her First Senior’s character no longer too slight to ignore, Morriel tugged her robes around the thin knobs of her knees. I would meditate for an hour undisturbed.’

Lirenda curtseyed and swept out on Elaira’s heels, the swish of her silk sending draughts shimmering across the brazier’s live coals.

Alone with disgruntled thoughts, the Koriani Prime tightened pallid lips. She lacked the time to wait for a more qualified heir; if the current First Senior had flaws needing discipline, she possessed an extraordinary talent. In truth, Morriel conceded, the temptation in this case was not slight. Stamped bright in recall, she held every angle and line and counter-swept curve that configured the s’Ffalenn prince’s aura pattern.

The strength in the man was frightening.

Were she not old, and aching, and daily yearning the release of natural death, she might have wept as Elaira had.

Instead her frail fingers clenched over the spell crystal surrendered to her in forced trust. Her eyes gleamed baleful as arctic night as she muttered, ‘Curse you, son of s’Ffalenn.’

If by his mere existence Arithon of Rathain came to corrupt more than Elaira’s impulsive heart; if his character upset the discipline of the First Senior chosen to be groomed as prime successor, Morriel vowed by the cold fire in her joints that she would see him suffer in full measure for her misery.

Should Lirenda fall short in her training, should she fail to survive the trials of Koriani primacy, the added century Morriel must cling to breathing life to select and mould another candidate yawned frightfully cruel and dark.