Читать книгу Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 15

On the morning that Arithon’s brigantine rounded up and backed sail off the wind-blasted sands of the far continent, the Fellowship Sorcerer who was Warden of Althain perched in a sun-baked window seat. He could have held that pose for hours, or even days, hunched like a ruffled gray pelican in the comfort of his moth-eaten maroon robe. The lined, ivory knuckles of one hand clutched a sheaf of curled parchment. The other wielded a black swan’s quill, fussed sharp as a dandy’s rapier point. The pot last used to dip his nib nestled between his braced knees, a tipped fraction shy of a spill. Stray stains and a threadbare shine to his velvets showed Sethvir’s small care for vanity. Mere ink could be left to run where it would while his provenance spanned all the world.

Through the gift of the Paravian earth link, Sethvir sensed the distant, salt splash as the Khetienn’s anchor plunged to bite into the pearlescent sands of the shallows. Amid myriad sounds, just one patterned resonance of changed air: he heard shouted orders from a half a globe away, to brail tanbark sails to squared yards at the end of an arduous passage. Caught between lines of small, precise script, the Sorcerer furrowed his seamed brow. Then the poignancy of the moment overcame him.

He laid his temple against the old stonework and wept.

If the sea gave the Shadow Master a temporary shelter from the hatred raised among townsmen against him, his cherished hope of finding a haven on Athera’s far continent was misled. Sethvir knew as much, aggrieved by the secrets necessity had forced him to keep. Kathtairr, the far land, was familiar to him as the creases grained in his own flesh. Distance offered no obstacle. The grand earth link bequeathed him, moment to moment, its endless, weary vistas of ocher and gray. Sun scorched and blasted by the elements, the continent fanned like a snag of singed cloth cast on the jewel-toned sea. Its rivers were dry, or ran poisoned and alkaline. Its shoreline extended, league upon league, as blank, rippled dunes and swept desert.

Sethvir ached for the tragic truth. To the last sand grain and rock, from the cracked, dusty summits of each nameless mountain to the seared, crumbled fissures of the valleys, the land mass beyond Athera’s vast oceans was naught but a lifeless waste.

Even in the early centuries of the Third Age, at the height of their power and ascendancy, the Paravians had shunned the place.

Arithon would find no reprieve in Kathtairr from the bane laid on him by the Mistwraith. If he gained brief escape through the time he spent searching, for each year that passed, Lysaer s’Ilessid would breed more killing sentiment against him. The longer the Khetienn’s absence extended, the higher the stakes laid against the Shadow Master’s life.

Between Sorcerers, the issue had already been thrashed to exhaustion. In desperate truth, their Fellowship dared not spurn the smallest borrowed margin of time. They would, and had wrested from Arithon’s blind need that span of uneasy peace. Trapped themselves in a race to stave off disaster, they labored to avert an unmentionable peril, compounded since the hour of the Mistwraith’s confinement.

Sethvir straightened, blue-green eyes grown airy as mist. His fingers draped loose across the unfinished last paragraph on his parchment. The quill slipped, forgotten, to drift on a whisper to the floor. Amid his sprawl of opened books, stained tea mugs, and his cluttered, stray oddments of feather and stone scavenged from excursions through the meadows, he looked for all the world like a beak-nosed little grandfather, abandoned to senile daydreams.

In contrary fact, the Sorcerer’s trained focus ranged far beyond his tower library. Immersed in the broadscale vision of the earth link, the split train of his awareness encompassed all things, from the mighty pull of Athera’s riptides, to the rustle of solitary grass stems. The busy tracks of ants reached his ear, and the singular signatures of sand grains banked in the gullies of the deserts. Sethvir could count at whim the cries of the owl and the albatross, riding the wind’s thermal currents. He sensed the grind of polar ice, north and south, and the thundering shear of each floe calved into the briny arctic seas. The planet itself played its living chord through his consciousness. He knew, like a heartbeat, the molten toss of core magma and the eerie, static pulse of its array of magnetic power lanes. Amid the vast, milling chord of flux and event, two precise notes snagged in dissonance. Sethvir narrowed his sight to frame these, his brows tugged into worry like muddled crochet.

A listening minute later, the Sorcerer moved on. Past the world’s motley cloak of spun cloud, he traced the wheeling arc of the moon through deep vacuum, then left its grand dance to encompass the thin, singing tracks carved by stars.

The deeps of the void in between were not lifeless. A massive, near-complete ward construct spread for arc seconds in space. In fan curves, through ruled lines and joined angles that transected time, an intricate chain of seals spindled taut in lace point and sapphire, their phantom imprint a gemstone’s planed facets cut intaglio on the dry dark. To the paired entities who labored to close the last gaps in the symmetry, Sethvir sent word, ‘Arithon’s made landfall on the far continent.’

“Past time,” Kharadmon’s brisk comment flung back. Discorporate since mishap overcame him in the course of Second Age violence, the ghost Sorcerer added his usual caustic fillip. “He’s Torbrand’s trueborn descendant, with the same nasty temper when his dignity’s rankled, or his principles. When he sails back empty-handed, will you have a ready answer? He’s bound to demand why our Fellowship never warned him that Kathtairr’s seared lifeless by drakefire.”

“Mind well, Kharadmon,” a fruity, morose voice admonished. “If you fritter away words restating prehistory, there won’t be a living land left for anyone’s ship to return to.” Luhaine’s gloomy nature had scarcely improved since his body had perished in defense of a deposed high king. Once a corpulent scholar who preferred cautious order, in five hundred years, he had yet to savor his free-ranging existence as pure spirit. Nor had his tart rivalry eased into shared commiseration as a shade. “In case you’ve gone drifty, we’ve work to complete before the advent of solstice.”

“Oh, dance on it,” Kharadmon retorted. A ripple of energies shot through by stars, he set to in exuberant relish. “You scold like some humorless grandmother with nothing to do but knit mufflers and roust up windy criticism.”

Luhaine chose to ignore him. “Do I surmise we’re summoned back to Athera?” His prim query was presented to Sethvir alone, the inflection all plaintive acid. “The timing’s a gross inconvenience, as you see.” The earth link would show that one last charge of power drawn from the lane tides at winter solstice would see their long labor complete. This first stage protection was urgent, and indispensable, against perils too dire for delay.

‘You’re needed,’ Sethvir insisted. ‘The moment can’t be helped. Lysaer s’Ilessid just condemned his first clan captives to chained slavery. Ath’s adepts have sent their appeal to invoke our duty to the compact. We have no choice but to confront him. In addition, Morriel Prime and her servant are about to camp on my doorstep. I might as well have your company in support when she knocks to air her fresh grievance.’

Luhaine huffed his contempt. “Those witches should be coming to offer their help, and not wasting themselves in frivolous resource to cap volcanic vents whose existence but serves the earth’s balance.”

“Now see who’s nattering,” injected Kharadmon. “I’m not for watching you argue the stupidity of inviting Koriathain to mix their meddlesome sigils in our works! If Sethvir wants an interview with Prince Lysaer, I’ll just be off to string the energy paths.” A mercurial laugh and a swirl of sourceless current marked the Sorcerer’s precipitous departure.

“Irresponsible jape,” Luhaine grumbled. “Always flitting out.” In sour eddies that flowed like rippled oil over a backdrop of stars, he capped a precise flourish to a dangling knit of spell seals. “As if no loose ends remained here that shouldn’t be stabilized first.” His unseen touch launched a spiraling array of circles and helixes to bridge a crucial expanse of deep vacuum. “Trust Kharadmon to duck like a truant, and meet ugly threats with light raillery. I can’t imagine why we put up with him.”

Luhaine listed each shortfall he saw in his colleague’s character, then plowed on to include notable past instances when he had been abandoned to tidy disagreeable details. No answer came back. Only the impersonal, high chime of remote constellations. Already, Sethvir had moved on, his listening presence retuned to Athera, and thence, across the long leagues into Shand to make contact with another Sorcerer.

The discorporate presence of Kharadmon breezed into the royal chambers at Avenor a comfortable interval before noon. His entry raised no notice, passed off, perhaps, as an errant winter draft breathed through the swagged velvet curtains. The room was appointed in rich carpets and gold. Wax candles shone from glass sconces. Against the satin glow of varnished hardwoods, the young valet who served the Prince of the Light fussed to set Lysaer’s last diamond stud.

“How right you were, your Grace.” Head tipped, the servant stepped back to measure the dazzling effects of his handiwork. “Gold trim was excessive. You shall shine like a star in full sunlight.”

Lysaer laughed. “Here, don’t feed my vanity.” He flicked the last pleats in his cuffs into place, his form all pale elegance, and his features cut marble beneath a molten ore cap of combed hair. “I don’t need such show. For the gift of my bullion, the beggars will be suitably awed.” Then he smiled at his valet, his unearthly, pure beauty transmuted to intimate warmth.

The boy blushed. He bobbed a clumsy bow, then stammered an apology as his elbows jostled the palace officials who waited, clothed in stiff-faced magnificence. Each one wore a new sunwheel tabard, cut of shining champagne gold-and-white silk.

The realm’s chancellor and the Lord High Justiciar forgave the boy’s gaffe in cool tolerance. They advanced to attend their prince in full ceremony, paired as if cued to a stage drill. The dense, beaded threadwork on their garments somehow looked soiled beside Lysaer’s stainless presence. In his shadow, they swept toward the doorway. There, four silent guards dressed their weapons and joined them, two ahead, two behind. No man looked askance at the unseen arrival which breezed on the heels of the royal train.

A second, more tangible obstruction awaited to waylay the prince. The young boy who served as the royal bannerbearer could scarcely take position while a willowy form traced in sparkling jewels blocked off the arch to the vestibule. She had the prowling smooth stride and rich coloring of a lioness, and for today’s prey, she stalked in chill rage.

“Princess, Lady Talith.” Lysaer touched the foremost guardsman’s shoulder as signal for him to keep station. Hunter’s spear to her unsheathed claws, he eased past, on an instant the solicitous husband. He clasped his wife’s hand, drew her into the light, and lost his breath a split second, as he always did.

First sight of Talith’s beauty unfailingly stunned a man foolish. She had finespun, tawny hair, and features refined to the delicate texture of rubbed ivory. Her dress skimmed over her devastating curves, for this meeting, a calculated, flowing confection of damascened silk and jet buttons, cross-laced at wrist and bodice with silk ribbon.

“My dear, you look magnificent.” The words framed an effortless courtesy, since his glance significantly avoided the cascade of yellow citrine which sparkled like poured honey into the tuck of her cleavage. Her smallest move and breath chased teasing reflections over her pearl-studded bodice, until the eye became trapped, then arrowed downward into a girdle fitted tight enough to hitch the air in the throats of Lysaer’s waiting attendants. “I’m delighted of course, but won’t your need keep? I promise I’ll see you directly after I’ve finished my appearance in the plaza.”

Lady Talith narrowed dense, sable lashes over eyes like razor-cut bronze. “The beggars can wait for their alms without suffering.” Risen to the challenge, she smiled. Her flawless, fine skin flushed for the joy of a stabbing duel of wits. “Better still, let your chancellor dispense the day’s coin in your stead. Dismiss your train. Now. I’ll never settle for begging court appointments, or standing in line for an audience.”

“I can’t dismiss my train. My chancellor is no fit replacement.” In grave, caring tenderness, Lysaer clasped her wrist to draw her clear of the doorway. “If privacy matters, we’ll save our discussion for an hour when I’m not committed.”

“Bedamned to privacy.” Talith tested his hold, felt the steel in his fingers, and laughed in a sheared peal of scorn. “Why play at pretense?” She aimed her next barb with all the sugared venom her Etarran background could muster. “My pride wasn’t stung by three months in Arithon’s company.” She smiled, digging him with threat and innuendo, even daring his temper, since he had not shared his shameful secret with his courtiers at Avenor. They were never told that the Master of Shadow was in true fact begotten when Lysaer’s mother cuckolded her marriage in liaison with his father’s most hated enemy.

Gratified by the vengeful jab of his fingers through her sleeve, Talith lifted one porcelain shoulder in a shrug. At her throat, the jewels flashed, enticed, trembled in liquid invitation. “Why not say aloud what every servant in your palace already whispers behind your back? That time enough has passed since my ransom. A year and a half gone, and all your court watching my belly like a pack of starved midwives. What pretense is left? My time in captivity was innocent of dalliance.”

Unlike your faithless mother, her swift, weighted pause suggested. Locked eye to eye, his arctic blue to her molten amber, Talith said, “Since you can’t claim avoidance for a nonexistent bastard, what keeps you from sharing my bed?”

Lysaer stroked a light finger beneath her chin, while a frown of consummate puzzlement came and went between his brows. “My love, you’re distraught.” By an act of brazen sympathy he behaved as if they stood alone, though the guardsmen behind exchanged discomfited glances. They knew well enough his nights were spent in the royal suite, since their ranks supplied the watch set over the prince’s apartments.

“No doubt, you have cause for distress,” Lysaer temporized. “I realize how desperately you desire to conceive. But chasing me about in a lather is unlikely to help your fertility.”

Talith hissed out a breath at this vicious twist. “How dare you!” Her lashes swept down, a black veil for a murderous flare of hatred. “You’ll never be able to bury your lapse with state excuses, or claim I am flawed or infirm. If I’m barren, my ladies-in-waiting all know, it’s because your elaborate show of appearance masks the fact that you won’t couple with me. Tell me, your Grace, what are you hiding? A mistress? Boy lovers? Revulsion on the chance I fell victim to incest?”

“Here, I’ll be late. Your troubles must bide for a little bit.” As she snapped breath to sink her barb of victory, Lysaer cupped her face, slipped a quick kiss on her lips, then handed her off to his ranking man-at-arms. His low, rapid orders cunningly disarmed her most brilliantly raking response. “See my lady to a healer for a posset to soothe her nerves. Say I’ll return to check on her the earliest instant I am free.”

She threw him a withering epithet.

In pained sorrow, the prince shut his eyes: as if by flat denial he could pretend for a heartbeat such beauty did not harbor so vile a contempt. Then he roused himself, straightened. Every regal inch of him contained into painful, mannered sympathy, he reassumed his place with his chancellor and Lord Justiciar. Despite Talith’s glare like an auger at his back, he expanded the circle of his confidence.

“I’m sorry for the scene.” His hushed voice carried backward as his party advanced through the echoing, high vaults of the hallway. “The loss of her brother at Dier Kenton Vale so soon after the months she was kept in duress by the Spinner of Darkness have left Talith strained and unsettled. We must all be patient. Give her care and understanding. I’m certain the moment we manage to conceive our first child, her usual staunch nature will prevail.”

The chancellor murmured banal commiseration. Less suave, the guardsmen showed pity, while the red-faced valet who watched from the dressing chamber gave the princess the gawky, bold stare that admired for sheer, brainless loveliness.

Talith swept off with the appointed guardsman, chin raised in smoldering rebellion. Born a pedigree Etarran, she was too well seasoned to the ways of court infighting to augment Lysaer’s strategy with protests. If he sought to discredit her as a woman undone by harsh circumstance, he had to know, the new-forged, burgeoning spite in her heart would admit no defeat while she breathed.

“On my life,” she called after her royal husband in a tone like dulcet poison, “I’ll birth you an heir to make the s’Ilessid name proud, even as your lady mother did before me!”

Appalled by the sharp, sudden pallor that blanched his prince’s face, the Lord Justiciar of Avenor’s state council tipped his gray head in assurance, “Give her time. She’ll weather her disappointment over children. Women do.” He pursed his lips, prepared to continue his fatherly advice.

But Lysaer raised a hand and touched him silent. “Not here.”

The royal train reached the outer postern. Composed and brittle as an artwork in glass, the Prince of the Light mastered the short ceremony while a heavy box of coins changed hands from Avenor’s Minister of the Treasury into the care of his chancellor. He stepped with his retinue through the outer doorway into the blast of winter wind. The cold nipped his cheeks back to color. Against the luminous, aquamarine sky, his hair gleamed like the tinseled weave shot through a ripple of Atchaz silk. His poise, now restored, was steel masked in felt as he dealt his justiciar a swift and shaming rebuke. “A year and a half is criminally soon to say whether my lady’s unfit to bear an heir. Discretion is called for. Her Grace’s distress will fare all the worse if unkind rumors start to circulate.”

Beside the bronze finials of the palace gate spread the circular plaza which centered the city of Avenor. This site retained its design since the Paravian ruin underwent Lysaer’s restoration. His master masons had found the proportions and placement too pleasing to disrupt. The facades of the formal state buildings had arisen on the rims of Second Age foundations. The ancient worn slates, with their cracked channels of queer inlay, were now paved over in amber-and-white block incised with a sunwheel pattern. The vista with its innate grandeur presented the ideal setting for Lysaer’s noon practice of dispensing largesse to the poor.

Since the crushing defeat in Vastmark, the coins struck for this purpose were embossed with the new order’s blazon upon one side, and stamped on the other with a sigil of ward against darkness. Dubbed shadow-banes by their recipients, merchants in Tysan took them in trade, then resold them as amulets for more than their value in gold.

No edict was signed to curtail the practice. “Why sap the foundations of the common people’s hope?” Prince Lysaer gave instruction to his council. “For as long as the Shadow Master lives at large, their terror is real and justified. Let folk grasp whatever comfort they may. Suffering and losses could harm them soon enough. Folk will fare better for not feeling helpless in their worry.”

Speculation became rooted into belief. The name of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was anathema, and feared, and the coins, dispensed with the blessing of Lysaer s’Ilessid himself. They could not be other than talismans infused by his blessed gift of light.

Prince Lysaer never walked in the public eye without due presence and ceremony. His daily custom of charity became a dazzling display of royal pageantry, while the poor and the downtrodden elbowed forward to claim the trinkets which held the reputed power to protect them.

This day, the plaza was packed to capacity, despite the bracing wind that snapped the fringed banners on their poles. The out-of-town merchants and the bored rich who thronged to observe from the balconies clutched their caped cloaks and furred hoods. Below, in jostling chaos, the waving, cheering supplicants pressed to catch sight of their savior. More than the city poor and village crofters shouted and surged against the guardsmen’s cordon. Petitioners now traveled from far-distant cities to receive Avenor’s royal alms. A second row of pikemen ringed the central dais to keep order, their polished buckles and appointments backed by white silk bunting tied up with gilt cord and tassels.

Lysaer stepped through the gateway just before the advent of noon. The wind’s icy buffet ruffled his ingot gold hair. His white-clad person seemed etched into air, set off from the commonplace sea of dark woolens like a mote struck into incandescent purity by the silver-ice fall of winter sunlight. The welcoming roar which greeted Prince Lysaer rocked echoes off the high, amber brick of the watch-towers. Engulfed in a mounting crescendo of noise, he ascended the dais stair, his honor guard and high council ministers a parade pace behind him.

The thronging stew of voices grew hushed as Lysaer s’Ilessid took his place. He accepted the bullion coffer from his chancellor, then addressed the adoring crowd. “Hail the Alliance of Light! Through the dedication of all people, moral strength shall prevail against darkness!” He tipped up his face. As though his appeal was presented to heaven, he summoned the powers of his gift. A dazzling shaft speared down from the zenith to lend grand display to his beneficence.

Yet this time, the flaring, fired brilliance which answered was not completely his own.

The two officers nearest sensed something amiss: as if the light were too fine, too potent, charged through by an effervescence of force outside the range of mortal senses. They called in consternation, saw their prince jerk up short. His calm shattered before irritation and astonishment as his frosty, white finery spun awry in a flux of uncanny, cold air.

Unseen, unheard, the Sorcerer Kharadmon linked his subversive conjury to the tide of the solstice noon. An actinic blast of heatless illumination exploded over the dais. The ranking royal bodyguards were rocked back and dazzled. They strove to reorient, unsure if they should draw weapons, or what form of enemy might manifest. Through an inrush of winds like a rip in clear air, they heard the crash of the coin chest, fallen from the prince’s grasp. Then the cascading treble as the shadow-banes burst free, clanging and scattering across the dais. Plucked off the boards like a captured chess piece, Lysaer s’Ilessid no longer stood among them. The circle of light just made manifest shimmered empty, while his chancellor and bodyguard gaped in terrified astonishment.

For Lysaer, seized fast by a presence that disallowed protest, the upset plucked him bodily and hurled him through the howling eye of chaos. He felt torn in half, upended, spun. Nausea threatened to rip up his guts. He battled to cope in riled anger. Led once before through a spell transfer across longitude, he recognized the forces of outside conjury just before the disembodied voice of Kharadmon informed him, “You are bound at this moment for Althain Tower in answer to summons by the Fellowship.”

Then transition ended. The wheeling cascade of disorientation snapped away. Lysaer felt his person restored to firm stone, but not in the plaza at Avenor. The smells in this place were ozone and dust, coiled through an elusive, dark tang of oiled metal. He shielded his eyes, made out a black onyx floor underfoot. The fierce play of light streamed from inlaid strings of ciphers, arrayed in disquieting patterns, concentric circles and interlocked rune lines yet limned silver-white in the fast-fading shimmer of spent energies. He recognized he stood at the apex of the power focus laid out in the keep’s lower dungeon. Its seamless walls were pale marble. Gargoyle sconces crouched leering at the major points of the compass. Lysaer’s flesh crawled with chills, gift of Luhaine’s nearby presence; then that cold intensified as Kharadmon flanked him as invisible escort to prod his stiff step toward the stairwell.

“You won’t get away with abducting me,” Lysaer ground out in low fury. “Nor can raw power absolve Arithon’s bloody crimes, nor the secret of your dirty liaison.”

“You’re no one’s prisoner,” Luhaine said, unperturbed. “As for keeping propriety, this meeting you attend shall be bent outside time. Your absence at Avenor will last no more than the wings of an instant.” He led up the stair shaft, his spirit reclothed as a courtesy in the image of a corpulent bald man from whose dimpled chin hung a cataract of silver beard. His stooped shoulders were robed in the dusty slate cloth favored by scholars and clerics, and his sandals fussed to a waxed shine.

Behind, manifest as a slim, dapper form cloaked in extravagant green velvet with slashed sleeves and linings of flame orange, Kharadmon showed his foxy smile. “Nor need you waste effort maligning your half brother.” He wore a black mustache twisted to raised tips like crossed scimitars. His beard was a spade-point goatee. The rest of his hair fell loose and long to his collarbones, argent combed through jet at the temples. He surveyed Lysaer’s pique with eyes a sardonic, pale green. “The only man’s fate held at issue today will be yours, scion of s’Ilessid.”

Every inch the born prince, Lysaer stayed unruffled by the Sorcerers’ cavalier handling. His tread on the worn, concave stair was assured, his bearing never less than a masterpiece of cool statecraft. He filed after Luhaine through the trapdoor to ground level, into the fragrant tang of cedar and the polished, frozen ranks of Paravian statuary. Though past high kings before him had cried aloud for sheer wonder at the antlered, stone majesty of the centaurs that raised hooves and towered above human height, Lysaer would not turn his head. Royally assured, he displayed no catch of breath. Nor did he marvel at the unearthly, stopped splendor of the unicorns, posed in dancing steps, with their spiraled horns struck soft pearl in the muted gleam through the arrow slits.

That veneer of indifference soon became forced. The willful, steel nerve he sustained throughout taxing state councils in this place chafed thin, made brittle as a mask of varnished paper. Lysaer fought the poignant, swift tug at the mind that moved prior visitors to weep. He refused for staunch pride to unbend. The Spinner of Darkness was the Fellowship’s minion; moral duty compelled him to stand strong. No matter the price, he dared not let the unworldly grace of a dead past beguile him into weakness. He walked as a man sealed deaf to temptation, while to the right and the left, the joyful, inspired artistry of the smallest ones, the sunchildren, ripped his heartstrings and begged him for laughter.

Ahead rose a staircase of stark, chiseled granite, blackened with centuries of torch soot. Althain Tower had been raised in beleaguered haste to safeguard the records of the Paravian culture. Its library held the chronicles of the First Age, when the ravaging hordes of creatures raised to life by the drakes’ dreams had led the world to near ruin. Sealed vaults and storerooms contained old weapons from those times, rare artifacts of Paravian craftwork. Young by comparison, the heirlooms recovered from the plunder of the high king’s halls shared shelf space.

The grim stairwell between levels still reflected the primary function as a fortress. Stark, unfinished stone made a wrenching, grim contrast to the grandeur of the commemorative statues. Here, even the most unflinching pride could not evade the imprint of despair. The moan of the drafts and the squeal of a loose shutter bespoke desolation, undying reminder of tragedy and losses endured since the departure of the old races. Lysaer set his chin. He refused to give way to emotion or embarrassment, and that hardened determination to stand down Athera’s past was not missed by the Sorcerers who escorted him.

They ushered him across the first landing, past the chamber where the Koriani Waystone had been held secure since the first chaotic hour of the rebellion; they ascended to the next, where Althain’s Warden kept his living quarters. On the third level, Sethvir himself awaited, the dusty, threadbare garments he preferred put aside for state formality: a robe of maroon velvet interlaced at sleeves and collar in black cord, and belted with a girdle stitched with river pearls. His beard had been tidied. Silk cord looped his hair at his nape, and his glance of greeting came sharp as a catchlight on fired enamel. “Welcome to Althain Tower, Lysaer s’Ilessid.”

The prince’s crisp nod offered civilized replacement for the bald-faced accusation, that in his hall at Avenor, hospitality did not include being snatched off by force.

Sethvir met that unspoken fuming with a note of disquieting, pure pity. “Beware how you think in this place.”

“I fear no one’s censure,” Lysaer said, and despite his best care, the pique showed.

“Perhaps not today, but the future’s not written.” Sethvir unfolded hands like gnarled twine and flung wide a door of iron-strapped oak.

Inside, the tower’s rough stone had been paneled over in linen fold patterns of golden maple. A carpet of Cildorn weave graced the floor of a comfortable, warm chamber. The furnishings included a table of waxed ebony, standing lions back-to-back as its pedestal, and chairs upholstered in dark leather with exquisite, chased ivory finials. Beeswax candles burned, both in tall stands and sconces. Rowed beneath the paned, lancet windows, and lent the rich depth of choice dyes, the banners of Athera’s five kingdoms hung from bronze tapestry rods. The ambiance held a grandiloquent, trapped weight of history before which Lysaer paused, amazed.

“Behold, the chamber of the high kings. Here, your ancestor, Halduin s’Ilessid, knelt and swore oath to the Fellowship. That blood vow he gave became binding on his progeny, for the length of his line, and all time. No light matter.” Sethvir’s gesture encompassed the cleared space before the table, no invitation, but strict command. “Through the duration of this audience, you will stand.”

Lysaer bridled, mocked at once by Kharadmon’s mercuric chuckle. “You forget yourself, bantling. Your forefathers were crowned kings on Fellowship authority. Any claim you have to royalty originated here, ruling power granted in accord with Tysan’s founding charter.”

An added voice gruff in the grain as old bedrock lent that statement full weight. “This is not the world of your birth, to acknowledge right of arms or direct ancestry.” Unnoticed until he straightened, another Sorcerer moved from his quiet, leaning stance against the ebon pilaster that flanked the fireplace. “You walk on Athera, in the hall at Althain Tower, where blood inheritance is fully revocable!”

Tall, worn to leathery leanness by centuries of life in harsh weather, Asandir was not clad for travel. The flames’ ruddy glow touched and drowned in the velvet of robes the deep indigo of midnight. Sleeves, hem, and collar were sewn in silver braid, matching the glint of his hair. Named Kingmaker in legend for the royalty he had crowned, he looked the part: clean-shaven, with sable brows angled in lines like slashed pen strokes, his cheekbones and nose as rugged as if notched by an axe out of hardwood.

“What brings your complaint?” Lysaer assumed his place in prideful, combative challenge. “I refused Tysan’s crown. The sovereignty I shoulder is none of your making, but springs from city law and a writ drawn by Karfael’s mayor.”

“Is that how you claim your right to set chains on free men, then subject them to branding and lifeterm of forced labor on the galleys?” From the doorway behind, Sethvir sighed. “I think not.” He added, “We’re all here.” Although he moved not a finger, the iron-strapped panel slammed closed.

Lysaer gave a start, but refused to acknowledge the arrivals who filed behind him. He took their measure instead as they assumed their seats at the table. The lead figure was hooded in a full-length white mantle. The face stayed shadowed and genderless despite the sharp brilliance of candles. Lysaer recognized the collar yoke and linked runes in silver and gold which denoted a life initiate of Ath’s Brotherhood. He sucked a grim breath. His prior suspicion stood confirmed: the adepts were in sympathy with Arithon s’Ffalenn, and this delegate’s presence, an unpleasant, sure proof that their kind had joined ranks with the Fellowship against him.

As dark followed day, a fifth Sorcerer limped after, his caped cloak, short tunic, and leggings woven of somber black wool. A raven rode his shoulder, wings spread over a steel gray thatch of hair. The bird surveyed the prince and the assemblage of Sorcerers, but its mind and its thoughts were not avian. All of its master’s shrewd intelligence lay reflected in eyes the hue of ripe chestnuts.

“Traithe,” Asandir greeted. A swordsman’s swift step carried him from the mantel to draw out a chair. His care for his colleague’s infirmity held deferent respect for good reason. Traithe of the Fellowship had been crippled since the terrible day he had raised the wild forces to seal the passage at South Gate against the Mistwraith’s incursion. His sacrifice then had cut off the invasion. Though fogbound, the world had survived. If his quizzical smile and listening ear had once eased Lysaer to amity, today, all the laugh lines were stilled. Traithe’s visage looked tired, his mouth a taut fold, grim with years and old pain.

Sethvir chose the seat beneath the banner of Tysan, flanked right and left by the mismatched shades of Kharadmon and Luhaine. Between the one, rapacious as a gambler in a card parlor, and the other, staid and somber as a judge, Althain’s Warden might seem like a maundering old man, prone to openmouthed dozing. Except the eyes he raised to the prince were no dreamer’s, but a surgeon’s kept steel, to flay skin from bone on a glance.

Lysaer resisted the coward’s urge to plead. Fellowship Sorcerers were not subject to persuasion. Unlike his packs of recalcitrant mayors, they could not be swayed by sincerity. Trappings of ornament or clothing would not impress them. At will, they could strip him down to his naked spirit. To face down all five without trembling in dread required an act of main strength. Lit by the merciless flood of the candles, Lysaer felt sealed outside of time. The tower’s very presence distilled his perception into shapes too precise for forgetfulness. Grand causes and ideals were excised and diminished. The strivings of honor and the layered masks of selfhood became turned about, reduced to flat copies in reflection, a purposeless circling like movements of fish behind glass.

Lysaer clasped his hands, steeped to acid resolve. He was the hawk in the falconer’s net, and the Fellowship, deadly and powerful conspirators acting in concert with a criminal. The right was not theirs to decry his moral destiny, or to accost him with binding judgment. They could hurl their dire threats, and he could refuse. He had no stake to bargain beyond dignity and life; his sole weapon became his own staunch fiber of principle. Let the Sorcerers break him with brute force and conjury if they could. For the sake of all threatened and innocent people, he would do no less than extend his best effort to stand strong.

Traithe opened in shaded, soft sorrow. “You are aware, our Fellowship acts in accord with the Law of the Major Balance. We bring harm to none, nor does our practice force any man against his given will. The talk in the cities of coercive spells and rituals raised out of bloodshed is no more and no less than the ignorant bluster of fear.”

“If choice is still mine, then send me back, now.” Lysaer inclined his head, every inch the magnanimous prince. “Or prove yourselves hypocrites, since the conjury which plucked me up out of Tysan was an act done without my consent.”

“You will listen.” Asandir sat forward, his eyes the washed, pale opal of the tiercel’s, and his expression forbidding as granite. “Games of rhetoric will not serve, nor will we bandy obstructive, petty argument. Do you realize, in truth, the place mankind holds in the order of this world? Or do you even care, in your self-righteous cry of public sacrifice?”

Kharadmon flicked one finger. Like the barbed parody of a stage magician’s trick, a shadow-bane flashed and arced airborne. Asandir fielded the spinning coin in one fearfully capable hand. At first touch, as if the gold scalded, his mouth flinched into a line.

“Abomination,” murmured the adept of Ath’s Brotherhood. The soft, fluting voice was female, and young, and the shadowy hood turned a fraction. Unseen eyes bored into the prince and measured his regal stillness. “Ah, no,” she said. “A mere hedge witch’s sigil to ward against darkness could not turn the might of the Fellowship. But stronger powers lie dormant behind symbols. Beliefs cling to metals. For those reasons, the cumulative resonance of your gold rings unclean.”

Asandir held the coin cupped between his palms. Through a span of stilled silence, its cast glow of reflection seemed to light his seamed face from within. He spoke a liquid, clear word. The language he chose was the ancient Paravian, and the inflection shaped sound like struck crystal. Time stopped, suspended. The mystery in that moment held the potential to snap thought, or the latent might to rend mountains. But Asandir’s summoning framed only kindness. Lysaer knew an instant of scouring, sore grief, that he was but fashioned of mortal clay. He felt as a child shut in the cold dark, and the wrench all but felled him, that the Name gently spoken was not his.

The shadow-bane melted to that power of compassion. Both sigil and sunwheel flowed molten and smoothed. Asandir was not burned. The disk he laid down and slid back across the table was transformed to a pristine blank. The Sorcerer spread his hands flat and looked up while the prince was still nakedly shaken.

“Tricks and spells,” Lysaer gasped. “Would any man argue? At your bidding a stone might be made to wail and weep.”

“Even so, the stone weeps for choice, by our code.” Asandir’s speech stayed dispassionate, uncolored by the fabric of sheer caring he had just summoned to redeem the shadow-bane. “What code shapes your life? The deceptive diffraction of Ath’s order you encourage shall afflict miseries to span generations. You style us criminals who break lives and spill blood. Do you not do the same for a feud?”

Lysaer snatched at argument to collect himself. “Why not tell me? Did Arithon s’Ffalenn weigh the full measure of consequence when he tore buildings in Jaelot stone from stone, or placed arms in the hands of Vastmark shepherds?” Flagged confidence returned, became ringing conviction. “What of the five hundred he murdered at the Havens? Or the mountains torn down upon Dier Kenton Vale to crush tens of thousands more beneath the Wheel?”

“Those spirits lived and died in free choice within Ath Creator’s ordained order,” the adept said in metallic soft sorrow. “Their beliefs and expectations held no more than error. They fought for lies, but not faith. The course you now tread would deny the prime source from whence springs all joy and all life.”

Lysaer fielded that sentiment with contempt. “Are they any less dead for their choice or their truth? Arithon, also, can beguile to turn innocents. If I don’t oppose him, who will?”

“Beware, false prince,” Sethvir interjected, neither wistful nor diffused, but earnest in a concern that terrified for its mildness. “The fears you smooth over in the trappings of moral platitudes will counterbalance nothing. Neither can they build. You will find the just fervor you raise can save no one. In the end, your own followers will dictate your actions. Their will shall rule yours with a needy finality that you will be powerless to gainsay. We can offer no help for you then.”

“I was beyond help the moment I fell under Desh-thiere’s curse,” said Lysaer, succinct. His diamond studs flashed like ripped bits of light as he snatched his small opening for riposte. “That was supposed to be your problem. By what right do you criticize my methods before you have broached your own failure?”

A pause seized the chamber. Sethvir and Asandir stayed wrapped in glass silence; the spirits of Kharadmon and Luhaine looked pressed into the air like stamped felt. The adept made a sound, in sorrow or dismay, and clasped bronzed hands to her lips, while the candles burned on in smokeless, unreal indifference.

A baleful, black cutout given life in a scene without motion, the raven splayed its left wing feathers. Its head swiveled sidewards. One bead eye stayed fixed, a spark of buffed bronze, as it balanced to its master’s shift forward.

“There is no pretense here, Lysaer.” Traithe’s rebuke was rust swathed in velvet. “Desh-thiere’s ill works pose the true danger, a peril shared by us all. Subject to a curse to kill Arithon you may be, but that does not rule out choice and action. Mind and will can be yours to command outside of your half brother’s presence. Blind hatred can be fought.” The raven preened on his shoulder, undisturbed, as he entreated, “You are gifted to seek justice. Don’t make that a weapon for righteousness. The misery you seed in your quest to kill Arithon might live on long past your death. Claim your cause as divine, and you found a tradition that will not be lightly shaken.”

“You are swift to condemn my role as deceit.” Lysaer’s fine hair shone a pale, fallow gold beneath the flood of the sconces. When he raised his proud head, all the strain showed, his beautiful face stiff in his forced effort not to weep. “As one human ruler, I may be in error. But in all fair conscience, can I stand aside and let Arithon of Rathain turn his sorceries on an unsuspecting society? What binds him to constraint? You who claim wisdom know better than any. A mortal who commands unchecked power becomes ripe for corruption. Jaelot and Alestron have already suffered. Why beg for a large-scale disaster?”

The prince turned his head. Despite a transparent desire for privacy, he pursued his point, dogged, to its finish. “If I sacrifice one value for another, if I choose to create a balance of power, who are you to cry me down? The debt incurred becomes my personal score on the slate of Daelion Fatemaster. I am the Shadow Master’s opposite. My place is to check him. Ath have mercy on us both, for the fate brought upon us by the bride-gift of a sorcerer whose ancestor was trained by your Fellowship!”

Lysaer faced forward in blazing, brash courage and hurled his own charge in defense. “If your hand is revealed at the root of our conflict, tell me why have you not acted?”

Asandir arose, dark brows drawn down over eyes turned a forbidding, storm gray. “How dare you mistake us for the street beggars of Avenor, to try and wring sympathy by crying lame causes, then playing the puppet martyred for the grand destiny.” He leaned on the table, the veins on his hands like vines gnarled into aged oak. “Or do you hope you might finally convince yourself?” His glare flickered over the prince like crossed lightning. “We have not acted because Desh-thiere’s curse is inseparably tangled with your life aura. As Traithe said, our Fellowship does not kill.”

“You claim you would let two lives tear civilized society asunder?” Lysaer laughed, his widened eyes locked on the Sorcerers. “Then indeed, I have no hope.” Honest rage tore through his gritty resentment, for a second upsetting the ironclad duty dunned into him with royal birthright. “Ath, did you think I desired my exile to this world? Or that I asked to become your sacrificial weapon against the Mistwraith?”

“The Fellowship has never been a force in Athera to take guiding charge of human destiny!” A creature of movement and action, Asandir thrust up from the table. He stalked to the fire, braced an arm on the mantel, while the flames at his feet snapped and flickered. Their light played a moving mapwork of lines over his hard, shuttered features.

Luhaine retrieved the lapsed dialogue. “Our purpose is rather to stand guard for the land, and to this end, you’re being asked some harsh questions. Face yourself!” The entreaty was raised, a knife blade that offered no quarter. “You embark on a dangerous precedent, even beg the ruin of your race! How dare you mask over the miracle that is the prime source! For arrogance, you put yourself on that pedestal in attempt to whitewash a curse-bound directive to end your half brother’s life. True justice plays no part. You veil truth for vendetta, for vengeance and base envy, because Arithon will not be seduced by the evil you seek to attach to his name.”

Lysaer swayed. His glittering shoulders wavered, almost bent.

The adept swept to her feet, relentless. “Unstop your ears and listen, scion of s’Ilessid. Persist on your present path, and you shall gain your desires.” As Lysaer’s blue eyes widened, she pressed him, “Oh yes. Your half brother shall walk in the shadow you create. But not before you stand blackened enough to raise despair of a force sufficient to break him. Every mortal enclave on this continent shall fall as victim to your cause. Your memory shall be sealed in the archives by violence, for nothing in creation can stand or flourish in the absence of love. Let us see, in the hour that Arithon’s blood stains your hands, whether conviction for your fellowman or overweening pride is your master.”

That bleak forecast raised consternation among the Sorcerers. Unmindful of their stir, Lysaer sank to his knees. Tears wet his cheeks. The light snagged and shivered in his diamond studs as he bent his bright head in defeat. “Have mercy,” he pleaded. “I admit to my wrong. Lend me your guidance to heal.”

Asandir returned to the table and sat, his harsh gaze fixed on his hands. Silence fell, filled by :he tormented sobs of the prince, who perhaps had been brought to realize the enormity of his acts. No Sorcerer leaped to mete out the last test of surety.

Kharadmon shouldered that burden at the end, his razored, brief style expressing the inflexible Law and just consequence of the Major Balance. “Abjure your call to arms. Publicly renounce your false tie to divine calling. Then you shall have at your side all the help our Fellowship can command.”

Lysaer pressed his forehead against the patterned carpet. Hair like combed sunlight fronded the hands he held clenched at his crown. He would not look up. Shamed to abasement, he asked of the Sorcerers, “What do I say to ease the grief of the widows and the mothers whose loved ones were slaughtered in Vastmark?”

“Tell them the truth,” Sethvir answered, implacable. “Your mistake should not be permitted to compound, nor be passed to their sons, to die for wrong cause and false sacrifice.”

At that, Lysaer regained the will to stand straight. Through shock-darkened eyes, he perused the stilled faces of five Sorcerers, then the shadowy countenance masked by the hood of Ath’s adept. In tear-stained magnificence, he looked like one of Ath’s avatars, fallen, a sword forged in blood to stand firm against wrongful action. “Ath preserve, you ask me to break my personal, given trust. As I am cursed, so too is my half brother. I can’t leave my people defenseless before him. Bind Arithon first. Then take my capitulation on any terms that you ask.”

“Ath show you mercy,” Sethvir replied. “I am sorry. We now must do more than warn.”

A thin, feral smile seized Lysaer’s lips. “I thought so!” He loosed a jarring peal of laughter. “Here is the truth. Power begets force, did I not say so? What will you do now, if not call me down by straight violence?”

“You mistake us,” snapped Traithe, no longer the listening confidant, but grim as the raven just flown from a field of raw carnage. “Your life in our hands is sacrosanct, and your will, no one’s other than your own. But mankind’s place in Athera has never been a born right.” This was straight fact. The ancestor of every human alive had first come as a refugee begging for sanctuary. “Settlement here was permitted under strict terms by the compact sworn between our Fellowship and the Paravians.”

“Did you think kingdom law was written at our whim?” Kharadmon sat forward, his trickster’s flamboyance razed away. “The original charters were drawn by our hand, but to the old races’ auspices. Their strictures are not mere rules to be overturned for some upstart mayor’s convenience.”

Not to be outdone, Luhaine plunged on to lecture, “For the acts you have initiated, for setting your seal to chained slavery, and for seeking to supplant Ath’s order and the Law of the Major Balance, you have defied the tenets mankind was charged never to violate.”

“Now you know.” Sethvir tucked folded hands beneath the spilled fleece of his beard. Diminished by sorrow, he appeared to read his next lines from the whorled grain of waxed maple. “Our Fellowship keeps a trust with the Paravians. Each human child birthed here lives and dies on the sufferance of our intercession. We stand surety for mankind, all their works, all their laws. Yes, even for their greed and their strivings that could mar every facet of this world. Understand this. We guard and nurture as we can, but our service is not to our race.”

Althain’s Warden paused. As if the air to drive spoken words bound him mute, he looked aside, the set to his shoulders gone bird-boned and frail. He seemed an old man without mystery, outworn by relentless attention to detail and a shackling burden of care. “There exists no compromise, no quarter. Any man to defy the compact, who breaks the first order set down by the Paravians, must be cast outside our protection. You will leave Althain Tower. None here would misuse grand conjury to upset the fate you pursue. Nor shall we mourn, or answer your cries when the justice of the old races falls upon you and the followers you seduce into blindness.”

“You will not break me by intimidation,” Lysaer said. “I stand as the shield for my people.”

Sethvir bowed his head.

No second chance followed, no gap for reprieve. The image forms of Kharadmon and Luhaine whisked out like gale-blown candles.

Lysaer felt their presence encircle his form in cold air, while the adept slipped her hood and bared features of frost-brittle clarity. “The ways of the Paravians are not those of men. They are not born of earth, but sprung from the prime source itself.” Her upraised finger accused him. “Woe to you, prince. The wrath of Athera’s true guardians is no light fate to invoke.”

An actinic burst sheared the chamber as a rune seal flamed above Lysaer’s head. The cipher blazed yellow-white, then faded to violet. Sensation followed, a sourceless wind of fine energies that hazed through all the five senses. Lysaer experienced no physical discomfort. But the vibration rocked on through his mind. Something inside of him howled wild protest for the irrevocable step being taken. His awareness became pierced by untenable loss. No grief ever savaged the heart to such depths, as if for an instant he had gazed upon paradise, then plunged for all time into darkness. He wept. Ugly, racking sobs closed his throat as something unnamed and brilliant slipped away and consigned him to friendless desolation.

The hurt sieved and tore him, needles through silk, until he felt nothing but numbness.

Then Asandir was beside him. Firm hands took his arm, drew his faltering step away from the King’s Chamber and into the black chill of the stairwell. Lysaer reeled as though drunk. Plain air turned his head. The stairs felt absurdly hard beneath his feet, and the shadows pooled under the sconces held menace like teeth, lurking unseen to gnaw flesh.

Lysaer called on his gift to blast out the darkness, but no spark answered. His limbs seemed battened in felt. Again he stumbled. A Sorcerer steadied him. The touch was raw power and limitless strength clothed over in gentleness that plunged a dull ache to the bone.

“You are deceivers,” the prince insisted. “Betrayers of your own principle to shield Arithon.” His voice seemed a stranger’s, and his commitment to honor no more than the soulless whine of spent wind.

Asandir pressed ahead, bundling his charge between the stilled ranks of statuary. Their mystery had gone strangely dull; now, the centaurs, unicorns, and sunchildren seemed nothing more than exquisitely beautiful carvings. Lysaer felt remorse, and then wondered in leveled, pure logic why he should pause for regret. The tricks of the Fellowship were evasively subtle. The guiding hand on his flesh was creased by the bridle rein, ordinary, no more than a common old man’s. Still the contact was comfort and animal warmth; then even that simple solace was gone as Asandir released him by the trapdoor to the vault.

“Go down.” Winter drafts bit deep where the Sorcerer pointed.

Lysaer locked his jaw, sliced again by a glass-edged sorrow. He spoke fast and bitter to fill the void. “The mayors who fear you, did your Fellowship disown them the same way?” Steadier now, he seized the giddy nerve to laugh. “I’ve read the musty old records of the uprising kept at Erdane. They speak of retribution and vengeance to be claimed for the blood of the murdered high kings. Yet five hundred years have passed. Nothing happened.” The freezing, dry air braced him back to banked rage.

“The Paravians are gone,” Lysaer insisted. “They might never return. Yet you still threaten and raise dread in their name. I say humanity deserves better than empty rules and the coercive threat of your sorceries. I shall spread truth, that your compact has no foothold in present-day governance.”

Asandir still said nothing. At the base of the stairwell he stopped, unnervingly inscrutable. His hands hung still at his sides, empty and large knuckled as a quarryman’s. Lysaer looked away, unbeguiled by that traitorous semblance of humanity. Before him spread the concave Paravian focus, its patterns strung across in mazed chains of ciphers, white quartz embedded in onyx. Then, touched to life by some spark of bound magecraft, the demon sconces blazed into flame. The Sorcerer’s taut face became etched in copper; then that warmth erased to unyielding, struck iron as captured lane force flared the pattern lines active.

“Step forward,” said Asandir. “Your people are waiting at Avenor.”

Lysaer turned his back. He walked in unvanquished pride to the center point of the focus. “I will see mankind released from your tyranny. Justice will follow war. The land will be given a peace free of shadows, with no help from absent Paravians.”

No word came back. Only Asandir’s signal to Kharadmon and Luhaine, who poised, unseen, to engage gathered power for the transfer. Then chaos clapped down, and time came unhinged. All links to the senses dissolved through a fireburst of light. Spinning vertigo remained, slashed once by the twined cipher of a sorcerer’s mark that spanned the whole axis of creation. Through the deluge of static and the keening explosion of channeled energy, Lysaer came aware of a far-off sibilance of speech…

“…say something fast to avert panic,” his captain at arms called out in shrill urgency. “Just name the event as a portent of Ath’s favor, and hurry. If the mob’s left to think our prince was abducted by sorcery, we’re going to see mayhem and riot.”

No brave line of pikemen could stand their ground if the dais became stormed by panic. Since the play of uncanny, shimmering light seemed the least of two evils, the chancellor had no choice but step into the breech. His orator’s shout rose above the crowd’s stunned astonishment.

“There will be alms!” Forced to a desperate semblance of calm, he improvised, “As you see, the Prince of the Light obeys higher forces! He goes where he’s needed upon instant notice. Are we children to pine for his continuous presence? The shadow-banes are blessed. Let them be disbursed by our own public servants, and leave his Grace free to shoulder the burden of our defense!”

Just as the mob subsided from its milling roar, the light of Lysaer’s gift shimmered clean once again. Restored, riled and whole, to his ceremonial dais at Avenor, he was fully exposed to the public eye and the stupefied shock of his officers. The moment was his to recoup what advantage he could.

“I’ve come back with proof!” he announced, his snap of resolve reborn from quenched terror. “Since Merior, I’ve known the adepts of Ath’s Brotherhood were in league with Master of Shadow. Now they and the Fellowship Sorcerers have joined in conspiracy against me.”

Before the stark awe of his ranking retainers, he whirled face about. The crowd in the plaza redoubled their chanting. Cheers pealed and woke to a howl of animal noise. “Prince of the Light! Prince of the Light!”

Lysaer drank in the adulation. Spurred to fierce exultation, countersurge for a hatred he had long since ceased to resist, he bared his teeth in a laugh. White clad, gold haired, fired by his gift, he raised his fists in defiance of the Sorcerers who had dared to intimidate and censure him.

“Behold!” he addressed the masses in a ringing, exuberant shout. “You and your children shall be saved from shadow! I am called to serve Athera and oppose the Spinner of Darkness! No cause and no power will stop my pursuit until he lies dead, and the allies to his evil works are thwarted!”