Fugitive Prince Read online

  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 larg
e 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!”

  Exchange

  Winter Solstice 5649

  The explosive surge of spell-turned forces just used to restore Lysaer to Avenor subsided from the focus beneath Althain Tower. Where a prince’s mortal senses had lately discerned but rough stone and a mood of pervasive sorrow, for lingering minutes while the lane flux subsided, the guarding wards left laced through the rock stood roused in all of their splendor. A mind attuned to Paravian mysteries could discern their imprint. The fine energies twined into substance like hazed water, everlastingly falling: a lightning-laced lattice of pattern came sheathed in a beauty fit to draw spirit from flesh.

  While the fitted block walls of the citadel ceased their sympathetic vibration, the visiting adept of Ath’s Brotherhood paused just outside the door to the King’s Chamber. Her willowy build and white robes made her form appear cased in brightness against the grimed arch of the stair vault.

  Or perhaps the effect arose from the spirit aura thrown off by initiates of her discipline when they chose to walk in dim places. Few in Athera were empowered to keep pace with the mysteries of Ath’s Brotherhood.

  One such confronted her now, a Sorcerer who, over thousands of years, had been other things in his past.

  He leaned on the massive, iron-strapped door in what seemed a deranged fit of woolgathering. His features were glazed in the glow of the candles. Less susceptible than stone to the fluxes of grand conjury, wax-fed flame only danced to the drafts, as winter’s cold swirled and snatched at the shutters, and moaned through the chinks in old masonry.

  The adept surveyed Althain’s Warden with her tuned awareness. Her shapely hands stayed clasped beneath her embroidered cuffs; threadwork of gold and silver which at times glinted back something more than commonplace reflection. The heavier sconces, flaming in iron brackets on the landing, scrawled moving shadow across her Fellowship subject, masked in his disarming vagaries.

  Sethvir’s eyes alone showed a mind like surgical steel swathed in misleading burlap. Beneath the spiked tufts of white brows, his gaze remained bleak and trackless as ice on the northern flank of a snowdrift.

  The adept knew a sudden, deep stab of uneasiness, as if a wet leaf had brushed scraping tracks down her spine. “Never doubt,” she urged, her dusky chin lifted under the shelf of her hood. “Your Fellowship chose right and fitting action with regard to Lysaer s’Ilessid.”

  Sethvir’s seamed knuckles tightened on the doorframe. “Right or not, his expulsion was our forced duty.”

  Evasive words, to mask chains of happenstance that would come to shape Athera’s future. Ath’s adept matched his challenge, unwavering in her regard. Drafts stirred the clogged fleece of the Sorcerer’s beard and combed unseen over sinews and flesh he often forgot he possessed, so many years had his consciousness ridden the intricate tides of the earth link. Against flooding warmth and pale paneling, Althain’s Warden seemed an emaciated tree, braced and shaped by relentless storms.

  The adept laid slim, olive fingers on his sleeve. “Why are you troubled? Should we fear for one man’s fate, do you think? The judgment of the Paravians is sourced in Ath’s wisdom. They won’t err in behalf of your prince.”

  By their nature, indeed, they could not. Sethvir knew best of any. His sustained, rooted patience was the unflinching remorse of a conscience chained still through long years and hard-fought experience. Before such burdensome memories as his, no mere touch in kindness could comfort. Althain’s Warden therefore yielded nothing, his face clamped to folds like burled cypress.

  The adept firmed her grasp, insistent. “Lysaer shall receive his redemption from wrong.”

  “And is his choice wrong?” Sethvir asked. No kindness could spare him the lacerating vision imposed through the channels of the earth link. Stamped into his awareness, passed on through her contact, the adept shared the keening, hot surge of a crowd whipped on to devotion in the far-distant plaza at Avenor.

  “What’s left to weigh?” Unperturbed, she let Althain’s Warden share the upset Lysaer’s will had once imposed upon the sacred grove in her brotherhood’s hostel near Shaddorn. “This prince is both willful and flawed.”

  Outside, a blast of north wind hurled sand like gritted smoke against the tower. As if flesh were scoured by the sting of each grain, Sethvir shook his head. “Lysaer is terrified beyond life to abandon his care for the innocent.”

  “Never mind they need none of his help!” The adept spilled a silvery, sharp laugh. “Athera’s folk can find their salvation very well. They need no misfit savior playing on their fears to shore up a creed reft of spirit.
” Still probing, she gave Althain’s Warden her most bracing pity. “Stay your grief in this hour, you waste anguish on the wrong victim. While Ath’s order becomes maligned by false truth, and the masses are fired to worship your Prince of the Light, rather, Arithon s’Ffalenn becomes the spirit in mortal danger of corruption.”

  “Then you see very well.” Sethvir disengaged his arm. “You must know our Fellowship dreads that beyond anything.” For an instant, the wells of his eyes seemed rinsed blank, both shield and mirror against her prying concern. “You name just one ugly crux out of many. Each of my doubts is well-founded.” He covered her young, woman’s fingers with a palm that had worn bloodstains before those of ink, and too much of both for lasting quietude. The strength which led her to the head of the stair was anything but an old man’s.

  She protested his courtesy as unnecessary.

  “As you wish.” Sethvir let her go. While the tormented flames in the sconces rinsed his face, Ath’s adept read its mapwork of lines and snatched insight: Althain’s Warden regretted a hope kept too fiercely.

  Swift in riposte, his forthright, sad smile foiled her sympathy. “Your Brotherhood can never serve as priests.”

  The lady gave way, then, no longer able to match that wise gaze. Shaken, not cowed, she veiled her distress in the screening shadow of her hood. “For all good intent, if we tried, we would seed the very rift in Ath’s continuity that Lysaer s’Ilessid shall create through selfish error.”

  Brotherhood adepts could not intervene in affairs of kingdoms or men. Nor did their high initiates leave their hostels to teach or draw in new acolytes. They dared not set forth to preach, even against Lysaer’s threat of false faith, which could raise the sure power to scatter them. Theirs was not, and never could be, a guide to established religion. Seekers came to them to find inspiration; as they chose, they might stay and take the path to life’s deeper mystery.