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  Keeper of the Keys

  Janny Wurts is an illustrator and author of several successful fantasy, novels including the Cycle of Fire trilogy (Stormwarden, Keeper of the Keys and Shadowfane) and The Master of Whitestorm. She is also the author, with Raymond E. Feist, of the bestselling Empire series (Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire and Mistress of the Empire).

  JANNY WURTS

  Keeper of the Keys

  THE SECOND BOOK OF THE CYCLE OF FIRE

  HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy

  An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  This paperback edition 1993 3 5 7 8 6 4 2

  Previously published by Grafton 1990 Reprinted twice

  First published in Great Britain by Grafton Books 1989

  Copyright © Janny Wurts 1988

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  ISBN 0 586 20484 9

  Set in Meridien

  Printed in Great Britain by HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproducued, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Virginia Kidd

  admiration, respect, and warmest friendship

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to:

  My youngest sister, for proofing, and two extraordinary friends, an author from the West Coast and a sailor from the East, for support and suggestions respectively. Lastly, to the friend no longer living, who reviewed the preliminary draft.

  Prologue

  Chilly wind slapped the swells into whitecaps off the west shores of Elrinfaer, where, a lone fleck of colour under frowning cliffs, a fishing sloop spread tanbark sails beneath the leaden grey of the overcast. She was an aged craft, patched and stained with the wear of her labours, but now her nets hung slack. Her occupants, two brothers, leaned idle on the landward rail. Grizzled and grey and dour, they squinted shoreward at a dark bundle of cloth sprawled on the sand above the tide mark.

  The younger one spat into the sea. 'It's a boy, that. Flotsam don't wear boots, not that I ever saw.'

  'You say?' The sibling grunted in disgust. 'Only last week, you missed the buoy marking the headland. Near to run us aground for that, and now you claim you got eyesight!' Still, intrigued, he did not order the boat put about. 'If that draggle o' cloth is human, I'll give a week's coppers, and buy you a beer a night.'

  'Ye'll lose, then.' The younger brother laughed, and sprang to haul in the sheets. Dearly loving a wager, he braced himself against the shuddering heave of the boat as wind-tossed canvas thundered taut. 'If he's drowned, I get his rings.'

  The elder brother caught the worn tiller. 'We'll see.' And he turned the sloop, which reeked of cod, and sent her dashing in a heel for the beach head.

  Lashed ashore by a rampaging flood of surf, the craft's sturdy timbers grated and grounded against sand. The elder brother leaped the thwart, his calloused, twine-scarred hands braced to steady the prow. The younger brother vaulted after, and kicking sand from his wet boots, stumped up the beach to determine the winner of the bet.

  He bent over the dark lump by the tide line, sending gulls flapping seaward. Tentatively he touched, then drew back.

  Impatient, the brother by the boat bellowed after him. 'Well? Who's doing the buying this week?'

  The answer came back, subdued against the boom and echo of breakers under the cliffs. 'It is a boy.' The younger fisherman paused, and slowly stood straight on the shore. 'A sick one.'

  The elder brother cursed, the exhilaration of the wager abruptly gone sour. Now out of decency they must take on a passenger; sick, even dying, the wretch would need food and water, and the sloop's hold was not yet full enough to pay even the cost of reprovisioning. 'Better bring him in,' he shouted. 'And the beer copper goes for his bread.'

  The younger of the two fishermen shrugged philosophically, then lifted the limp body from the sand. His find proved to be slight, black-haired, and dressed in the remains of fine clothing. The eyes opened in delirium were blue, and the hands ravaged by what looked like burns.

  'He probably eats like a flea.' the younger brother muttered as he arrived, breathless, and deposited his burden in the sloop's bow. 'Weighs little enough.'

  But the elder brother remained unsympathetic. He jerked his head, anxious now to be away from shores that were deserted, ruins of the once fortunate kingdom of Elrinfaer.

  'And anyway, you have the sporting instincts of a grandmother,' groused the younger. He set his shoulder to the sloop and shoved her ungainly prow seaward. As she slipped, grating, into deeper waters, the boy in the bow groaned in the throes of fever.

  'Would you have left him, then?' accused the younger, bothered at last by his brother's silence. When he received no answer, he shrugged; the castaway wore court clothes, badly torn, but the dirt on the tunic was fresh. Perhaps he would have wealthy relatives who would reward his rescuers for his safe return.

  I

  Betrayal

  By evening, they gathered in the great hall on Cliffhaven, a rough-mannered crowd of sea captains, sailhands, and men at arms. All were exiles, lawfully condemned as thieves or murderers by the Free Isles' Alliance or the outlying kingdoms; except one, a slight, black-haired girl, almost lost in the brocade chair where she sat with her feet tucked up. Her arms were sunburned and briar-scratched, her nose peeling; but the robes she wore had the pearly sheen of a dreamweaver trained by the Vaere. For that reason, the bearded captain who wended through the press of beer-drinking companions approached with guarded respect.

  Jostled by celebrants, sailors with silver-hooped ear-lobes, and officers still wearing mail, he gained the relative peace of the corner. There the captain set his tankard aside. He had been assigned the task of ensuring the enchantress's comfort, and at present the girl wore a troubled frown. He had to yell over the noise; immediately he regretted that his shout sounded gruffer than he wished. 'Taen Dreamweaver?'

  At her name she looked around, pale eyes enormous under the shadow of her brows. Her age was eighteen, but seemed less. 'Jaric isn't here.'

  'No? Are you certain?' Surprised the boy should be gone, the captain stroked the knife at his belt out of habit. He echoed the girl's concern as he scanned the crowd in search of the sole surviving heir of the sorcerer Ivain Firelord.

  The victory celebration had been organized hard on the heels of war. The timbers of the main door still slanted, singed and blackened and half-torn from their hinges by a barrage of enemy sorcery. The crannies between revellers were stacked with broken furnishings, upholstery bristling with arrows. Men could not yet be spared from the labour of repairing defence works to clear the hall of wreckage, and the Kielmark, who ruled this den of renegades, was never a man to pause for niceties. Abetted by Taen Dreamweaver's talents, his garrison had just repulsed attack by an armada that included demons. By his orders, the survivors would have their chance to release their aftermath of tension, and to mourn the loss of dead comrades; but only tonight. Tomorrow captains, crews, and men at arms must be fit once more for duty.

  The atmosphere was predictably boisterous, with arguments and slangs and bouts of arm-wrestling compounding into a crescendo of noise. Meticulousl
y patient, the captain sorted through the motley press of renegades, all armed, some bandaged, and most laughing and expansive with drink. Yet from one end of the hall to the other, where the bodies of senseless sailors snored off their excesses in a heap, his efforts yielded no glimpse of the tousled blond head of Jaric.

  Nearby, someone banged the pommel of his knife on a tabletop, denouncing the careless pitch of a cluster of singers. The captain winced, unsure whether dreamweavers cared for obscenities. He glanced back to the girl and found her worried gaze still upon him. 'You searched?' he asked, referring to her Vaere-trained powers, which could trace the mind and memories of any man she chose with little more effort than thought.

  'No.' As if the question were painful to her, Taen knotted nervous fingers in her lap. 'I don't have to. Jaric has gone to the ice cliffs.'

  The captain sucked in his breath. 'Kielmark'll be stark tied. Better tell him now.' Purposefully he recovered his tankard, his intent to steer towards the end of the room where the revellers pressed thickest, and the great booming laughter of the Sovereign Lord of Cliffhaven wafted over the lesser din of the crowd.

  'Corley, no,' said Taen, unexpectedly calling the captain by name. But if her powers of cognition were uncanny, the hand she laid on his arm to restrain him was human, and sorrowfully thin. 'I'll find Jaric, trust me. Don't risk what we both know will happen if the Kielmark discovers him gone.'

  'Kordane's Fires!' swore the captain. But she spoke sense, this enchantress with the eyes of a child. The Lord of Cliffhaven maintained sovereignty over the criminals who served him through wily cunning and a distrust that brooked no exceptions. Though only a boy, as Firelord's heir Jaric aroused the Kielmark's suspicion in dangerous measure, for even the finest fleets and fortifications in Keithland were useless against the potential of a sorcerer's power. Corley looked at the Dreamweaver, assessing, and saw by the set of her jaw that she would stop him reporting if he insisted; Vaerish sorceries made her capable. Defeated, he tipped his head heavenward, his words almost too soft to be heard above the noise. 'Girl, on my life and manhood, I didn't hear you say that.'

  He glanced back to find the enchantress already going, her silver-grey robe an oddity amid leather leggings, studded baldrics, and the plainer linens of the sailhands. Corley watched, unsettled, as she crossed the crowded hall. The most hard-bitten fighters in Keithland parted readily to let her by, some drunk and argumentative, but all saluting her passage with a sincerity rarely seen on their scarred and sea-tanned faces. The Kielmark had made no secret of the facts: without the Dreamweaver's help, Cliffhaven would have fallen to King Kisburn's army, and his demons sworn as allies would have spared no lives in their quest for vengeance against humanity.

  Taen slipped between the bronzed bulk of a quartermaster and a sailor with missing teeth. Both raised their tankards in her honour, and as she vanished into the hallway, Corley silently longed to be elsewhere. The situation was a right mess; the Dreamweaver had defied her Vaerish masters to stay and defend Cliffhaven. No mortal understood the extent of her peril by doing so, but the Kielmark had sworn to remedy the lapse with all speed and set her on a southbound ship no later than dawn next day. Added to that, Jaric's hasty departure was the height of bad timing. Angry now that the boy could not at least have asked for escort, Corley's fist tightened upon his tankard. To leave the King of Pirates ignorant when two under his protection presently traipsed through the wilds of his domain in the dead of night bordered upon an act of insanity. Corley had served on Cliffhaven long enough to learn what his life was worth; he took a hefty swallow of beer, and decided precipitously not to honour the Dreamweaver's request.

  But even as he strode forward to inform his master of the girl's departure, her dream-touch cut his mind. 'Don't!'

  Corley froze between steps and cursed. She watched, then, with the unknowable talents of her kind; her sending carried awareness that she would stop him by force if she must. Having no wish to test himself against sorcery, the captain sat carefully in the brocade chair left empty by her departure. He laughed, very quietly and not without humour. Then, much against his careful nature, he lifted his tankard and quaffed the contents to the dregs. If the Dreamweaver chose to follow the son of Ivain Firelord to the ice cliffs that imprisoned the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer, at least one captain in Cliffhaven's great hall decided he wanted no part of the matter. With luck and a little time, he could arrange to be drunk to the edge of prostration when the Sovereign Lord of Cliffhaven discovered both enchantress and sorcerer's heir gone from his party without leave.

  * * *

  Outside, a damp salt wind scoured the bailey. Clouds hazed the moon's setting crescent, and gusts off the harbour blew sharp with the scent of impending rain. Taen paused in the archway, blinking while her eyes adjusted from the candle-brilliance of indoors to the dimmer flicker of torchlight. Canny enough to be silent, she stifled the flapping hem of her robe with her hands, and looked carefully for the sentry; revelry on Cliffhaven could never be expected to slacken the diligence of the Kielmark's patrols. Yet no man waited, spear in hand, to challenge the girl in the bailey. Empty cobbles shone wet in the dew, and the ring which normally tethered the saddled horse lay flat, a steely disc of reflection.

  At that, Taen caught her breath. She bent her Dreamweaver's awareness to the stables, and immediately encountered activity. Already guessing the reason, she narrowed focus, and found the sentry questioning the horse-boy. Between them they would not take long to sort out the fact that someone not under orders had removed the horse kept saddled and bridled in the bailey for the Kielmark's emergency use at any hour of the day or night.

  Jaric, thought Taen; she muttered an epithet learned from the fishwives of Imrill Kand that would have reddened even the sophisticated ears of Corley, then stepped swiftly out into the wind. She must hurry before the sentry carried word to the Kielmark. Pounding, breathless, through the passage to the horse yard, Taen engaged the talents only recently mastered under the Vaere. The minds she sought to influence were less informed, and therefore harder to convince than that of Captain Corley. The bailey sentry was an old hand, well familiar with the Kielmark's temper; and the horse-boy was native to Cliffhaven. All through childhood he had seen men hung out of hand for disobeying orders. Beside that sure punishment, to him a dreamweaver's sorcery seemed the lesser risk.

  Taen crossed abruptly from shadow into torchlight, making both sentry and horse-boy start. Neither truly saw her for what she was, a small, dishevelled girl with trouble marking frown lines on her face. Their eyes took in the silver grey of her robes, and stopped, wary.

  'Enchantress,' murmured the horse-boy. 'Kor's grace, don't bewitch us.'

  Taen paused, swallowed, and wondered if anyone would ever treat her normally again. 'Ivainson Jaric is the key to Keithland's survival.' She shifted her regard to the sentry, standing sweating in the light of the stable lanterns with his hands locked around his spear. 'The Kielmark and the Firelord's heir must not meet at this time. The boy is distressed, enough to make him careless. He would cross your master, and certainly get himself killed. But if you loan me a mount, I can stop that, and ensure you won't suffer any consequences.'

  Neither the sentry nor the horse-boy was moved by the promise. The Kielmark's discipline was legend on land and sea, and no man who gainsaid him survived. A tense moment passed, the gusty dark laced through with the distant beat of the sea. Taen gripped her whipping robes, and strove to maintain patience. She would not use compulsion on these two, not unless she was desperate. But when the sentry whirled with a look of stark fear and bolted, she was unequivocally cornered. Her powers answered, reliably, and blanketed the running man's awareness. Between one stride and the next, he pitched forward, to land in a sprawl across the midden.

  The horse-boy gasped.

  'He's unharmed!' Taen said, and though her skills were still raw and new, she managed to translate awareness of just how unharmed directly into the boy's shocked mind. 'Saddle me a mount,' she add
ed gently. 'And please do believe me when I tell you I can manage the Kielmark's rages.'

  The horse-boy regarded her sceptically, as if he noticed for the first time that she was not so very much older than he; yet her powers had deceived demons. With a shrug and a shake of his head he turned to do her bidding. Only his attitude of nonchalance was spoiled by the fact that his knees shook.

  Taen leaned back against the timbered half door of a stall. Relieved she had not needed to engage her dreamsense a third time, and taxed more than she cared to admit from swaying the sensibilities of Corley, she tried to stop worrying. Around her rose the black granite walls of the stoutest bulwarks in Keithland; surely for a short time more she would be safe. Tomorrow would see her on a ship bound for the Isle of the Vaere, only five days past the date imposed by the fey master who had trained her. Even if demons knew of her existence, they could hardly act so swiftly.

  In the dark at her back, a horse snorted. Taen started forward, and barely managed not to cry out as a warm muzzle bumped amiably against her arm. She backed away, just as the horse-boy reappeared with not one but two mounts on a leading rein. The smaller he handed wordlessly to Taen; the other rolled eyes showing nasty rings of white. War-trained, it sidled as the boy tugged its headstall and expertly directed it through the passage, to the tether ring in the bailey. Taen sensed his preoccupied thought. Granting an enchantress a mount was perhaps excusable, but if the Kielmark chanced to ask for the saddled horse and found no animal ready, his great sword would answer the offence before he spent breath with questions.

  Taen faced the blaze-faced mare she was to ride, and preoccupation with the horse-boy's problems faded before immediate troubles of her own. She was brought up among fisherfolk - the largest animals raised on her home isle were goats. Riding even the gentlest mounts invariably gave her the shakes.