Fugitive Prince Read online

  That piquant anomaly would keep for later study. Morriel cataloged the nagging incongruity, then moved on, brisk, to the task of granting her First Senior a taste of prime powers expanded through the Great Waystone. She spun the jewel’s focus, sent a new probe unreeling over the far lands to the north, where the ice-sheathed crags of Tornir Peaks tore through the spine of the cape, and seas ripped to white spume off the Gulf of Stormwell.

  Lirenda shared the majestic swoop as the Prime’s channeled powers changed purpose. Delight stunned her. She reveled in a sensation like flight; knew the thrill of rushed passage, as if spirit could soar over jagged summits where no road ran, and Northerly’s trappers never ventured. The foothills were cloaked in a straight shag of fir. There, wolf packs hunted by the new silver moon, the fanned effervescence of hunger and slaughter trailing like smoke in their wake. The Waystone’s precise focus could pick out the frost-point embroidery of the Fellowship wards which bounded the Sorcerer’s Preserve. Through the lens of Morriel’s vision, the knitted intricacy of their conjury looked like crocheted water, random patterns twined into an accord beyond grasp of matter and logic. The Sorcerers’ works were like no other conjuries, their core of fey mystery fraught with perils and gloved in an unearthly beauty.

  Lest those secretive riddles beckon the mind into circling madness, Lirenda marveled instead at the creatures the wards kept imprisoned. Here flew the last deadly packs of winged predators brought to breathing life by the dreams of the bygone dragons. Most murderous of the surviving drake spawn, black Khadrim clustered on ledges of volcanic rock. They warbled unending songs of bloodlust. More of them crouched, armored tails curled over their needle-sharp talons. Warmed by the mud pots, they dreamed, ever restless, drinking in memories of the whistling dissonance as high-altitude air thrummed over thundering, taut wing leather. Here and there, a long, narrow head arched up and breathed flame. Others joined in, until the stony, raked scarps became necklaced with brands like a festival.

  Northward, Morriel bent the axis of the Waystone, over peaks mailed in ice, or snagged in batts of drifting cloud. Here, on the rim walls which bounded the Gulf of Stormwell, lay the mountains’ living heart, no longer cold, but aflame and bleeding the earth’s molten mineral through shattered seams and caldera. The peaks at the North Cape were unstable, a brutalized vista of riven rock. Here, earth and elements raged in endless war. Volcanoes like angry, fuming behemoths hurled hot rock and cinders. Magma spewed scarlet lacework into the boil of gray breakers, ever ripping their voracious, tide-driven channels between the shores of the Trow Islands.

  “There,” Morriel said, her voice the thin tone of dropped porcelain.

  Lirenda sensed the small peak singled out, its flanks carved lambent by lava flows.

  “We shall cap that vent in the earth’s crust.” Morriel spoke without arrogance, without even the prideful overtone a child might show a trapped butterfly.

  She brought the focus stone’s power to bear, a wheeling spin like forced vertigo. Then, in bursting white lines, she framed the grand seals into sigils. Overwhelmed by their magnificence, Lirenda could not discern whether the Prime traced the figures over the amethyst’s surface, or whether she called tiem up, blazing, from the granite discipline of her mind. Some she ecognized, for mastery of rock; dominance of earth; the interlaced patterns for repression and joining and guard. Others seemed disquietingly changed, indecipherable despite a haunting familiarity. The train of the construct shaped an unquiet strangeness that razed her to upsetting chills. Her rational thoughts were flicked on wild tangents to recoil into confusion.

  The spell towered, bloomed, achieved finished perfection. Then, like the flight of an arrow from bowstring, the sharp, singing hum of release.

  Perception overturned, kicked through an explosive cascade of change. Lirenda screamed with the upset as something spun wrong, and cognizance unraveled with the unbound, wild fury of a thunderclap. All order dissolved, then mastery and rule, leaving dark like the aftermath of carnage. Next, the slipped threads of power hurled into backlash. Chaos clapped down. For one yawning instant, natural law wrenched off course. Every sane tie to reason unhinged, as if torn from the span of creation.

  The impact slammed through the mind, then froze there in stopped reverberation. Lawless disorder coiled into itself like craze marks pressed through crushed crystal.

  Then the moment cracked free and passed. The earth turned serene. Summer stars burned untouched. Lirenda recovered herself, gasping and dazed, on the tower felted in the mild air of a bay shore night in Thirdmark. Etched in the eye of her mind, she still saw the volcanic basin at Northerly, and the fuming, scarlet lava jetting uncapped through the darkness.

  Next she became aware of Morriel’s speech, pronouncing maledictions in a quavering, vitriolic whisper.

  “Matriarch, are you hurt?” she asked, stressed and shaken, in need of reassurance for herself.

  She held on through a racked draw of breath, while the Prime expressed rage in a rising, thin shriek. “Damn them all to the dimmest pit of Sithaer! Fellowship meddlers! Curse their hands and their eyes and the tongues in their mouths. Let them suffer for this! May they die, every one, unmanned and weeping, helpless and unloved and alone!”

  Lirenda cowered at the tirade, afraid to move or speak, as the Matriarch spun, her features seamed bone in the starlight. “What’s happened? Ath forbid I should have lived to see the day! The Fellowship held our Waystone in custody for five centuries, and oh, we were fools to have believed they never tampered.”

  “But Sethvir promised me our Waystone was untouched!” Lirenda cried. The order’s own tests had assured the Warden’s statement was no falsehood.

  “Ah, untouched indeed.” Morriel’s malice changed to bitter admiration. “Sethvir did not lie. He did not disturb our stone. Clever fiend that he is, he never had to. He simply imprinted the Waystone’s signature into every cranny of the world through the earth link he gained from the Paravians. And damn his wretched cleverness, he laid no ward on Arithon, nor broke any thread of moral principle. The same trick just upset my scrying.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lirenda said.

  “You should, given more time and experience.” Morriel qualified in that etched, acid tone she used to restore equilibrium. “The key lies in the foundations of Fellowship philosophy, First Senior. The Sorcerers’ mastery keeps Paravian precepts. The Seven are bound, and must live by the Law of the Major Balance, itself a stricture of permissions. They believe earth and air, in fact, all solid matter, to be spun from animate spirit. Nothing they do, in craft or in deed, can proceed without an exchange of consent. So they have trammeled us. Our Waystone’s signature pattern has been given to all that has form in this world; and by Sethvir’s knotted conjury, all physical matter in existence has been empowered to refuse its channeled force of intervention.”

  Before Lirenda’s outrage, Morriel ran on, her rancor fired now by the ancient sting of balked rivalry. “Oh, we’re not helpless. Our order can still tune a circle of seniors into focused unity through the stone. We can still curb disease, and even, turn armies. But only to bend influence upon conscious, living beings, and these have wills of their own. Over the earth, against even the lowliest storm, our Waystone has been robbed of power.”

  The wide-ranging impact undermined at a stroke the triumph of the Waystone’s recovery. For the order’s major spell crystals were themselves irreplaceable. Brought in when the Koriathain first settled Athera, the stones’ offworld origins set them outside the scope of the Paravian-wrought earth link. Only those select conjuries channeled through their matrices could escape Sethvir’s observation.

  Now, the Waystone’s Named signature had been disseminated abroad by the Sorcerer. The unique, patterned aura of its influence lay hampered in ties of recognition. Its forces had been disempowered through rejection by all things over which the Fellowship’s compact held sway.

  Lirenda regarded her Prime Matriarch, shadowed under her hood of pale sil
k like a hunting spider noosed in spun gossamer. “What will you do?”

  “Whatever I must.” Morriel stroked skeletal fingers over the polished, sullen facets of the Waystone. “The Fellowship of Seven have no given right to curtail our Koriani powers. I will go myself and present my demand at Althain Tower. The Sorcerers will heed, or be sorry. I will gain back our autonomy.”

  Three Seasons

  Summer-Winter 5648

  In late summer, amid the long train of scholars who bring musty ship’s rutters, and the flocked parchments of archived maps, and even, from Erdane, new proof that the Isles of Min Pierens exist in the margin of a faded merchant’s lading list, a brawny craftsman bows before Lysaer s’Ilessid, and says in his broad southcoast accent, “Your Grace, I’m named Cattrick, and I’ve come to apply for the master’s position in your new shipyard at Riverton…”

  At twilight on the autumn equinox, while the day fades to night and two seasons shift balance on the fulcrum of change, three Fellowship Sorcerers at Althain Tower seal the next layer in the construct which has commanded their unsparing efforts for a year; and clean power spears out in a ruled, white line to pierce the very nadir of the heavens…

  On the wide moors of Araethura, while winter’s diamond dusting of frosts silver the stems of sere grasses, the child, Fionn Areth, survives his first year, while his mother weeps for the auguries yet to entangle his future, and his father stands taciturn and silent…

  III. Sentence

  Winter 5648-5649

  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 th
e 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.”