TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior Read online

  The power streamed on its course like flung phosphor. Its passage hazed torches and lamps, and roused families in alarm from their beds. Women wept, and infants laughed outright. Men rushed in their night robes to grab weapons. Festival fires flared up in conflagration, scattering circles of dancers; while everywhere along the old energy paths, the roof-trees of shops and houses groaned and flexed and erupted into growing twigs and buds. Pulverized slates and chimney bricks kicked aloft in whining fragments. Every tower and wall and stone building built counter to natural alignments rang out in bell tones, then caved into collapse as the resurgence of a ritual denied for six centuries reclaimed its interrupted conduit.

  Ruinous though the backlash became to human property, life and limb caught haplessly in its path took small harm beyond bruises and abrasions. A few who were elderly or worn with mortal sickness died with smiles on their lips; and miracles happened along the flux lines. A blind little girl was restored back to sight. Two cripples tried their legs and walked. A demented woman wept for sanity restored, while an accountant fell into wailing madness as he obdurately tried to reason through events outside the pale of mortal logic. Swept into the majesty of the solstice surge, no spirit in Jaelot passed untouched.

  While walls and breakwaters and cottars' sheds tumbled to dust and smashed fragments, people gave way to joy and panic, and every shade of passion in between. The reawakened chord of mystery fanned outward, to blaze in renewal across the continent. In the damaged palace, amid the wreckage of the feast hall, the musician at last stilled his strings. He sat, slumped and drained, his forehead pillowed on the warm wood of a masterbard's instrument and his slack fingers dangling as the forge-fire heat of inspiration dwindled to thunderous silence.

  The only individual still present to observe was the prophet chained fast on the scaffold. The wood that fastened his fetters rustled half-reborn into greenery, or else whittled wholesale into slivers. Dakar wrestled in a racked breath and said through his chattering teeth, 'Daelion Fatemaster witness! This city will burn you for a sorcerer. That's if Koriani witches don't descend on you first and rip your flesh like bloodsucking harpies.'

  Limp at the feet of his accuser, the Crown Prince of Rathain stirred; straightened. He turned the dry fabric of his sleeve cuff to wipe the sheen of oil from his lyranthe strings. Very slowly he stood up. The inimical eyes at his back could have speared holes in his dampened shirt as, in an edged and dangerous weariness, he said, 'Then it would be best, don't you think, if we left?'

  For answer, Dakar slammed down his wrists to a murderous clang of solid chain.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn cringed from the sound. 'Please don't,' the whisper a plea, or a threat; given the nature of his bloodline, telling which could be hazardously troublesome. Black hair fronded across his collar, he tipped his head and whistled a sharp, fluting note charged still with the arts of a masterbard.

  A resonance coursed through gleaming metal, and the locks that fastened the cuffs to Dakar's limbs snicked in sharp succession and snapped open. 'You might have done that earlier, damn you.'

  'I couldn't,' Arithon said faintly through the rasping dissonance of fallen steel. 'The power was beyond me until a moment ago.'

  Dakar stopped in the act of rubbing chafed wrists, shot out a rough hand, and spun the smaller man to face him. The prince swayed, loose-limbed and graceless as a scarecrow. Amid the severe planes of s'Ffalenn features, deep-set eyes caught the light in flat reflection, unfocused as tinted green glass.

  The Mad Prophet saw, and swore mightily. 'Dharkaron's black Chariot and Spear! A lifetime spent magewise, and look at you! Wrecked to your boot soles, and played clean out of talent like a fish. You're going to be sick from this later.' He gestured at the scorched pattern that demarked the unmasked lane focus. 'You raised the old mysteries on spiteful purpose, didn't you?'

  Arithon's brows twitched into a difficult frown. 'Halliron's eulogy was my idea. The rest was intuition. I'm certainly not about to be sorry.' Self-effacing in his disregard, that a lesser man might have been destroyed by the powers he had thoughtlessly channelled, he cradled his borrowed lyranthe against his shoulder while the sweat sprang at his temples and trickled in drops down his jaw. 'And I can't be sick. Not until we've pulled Halliron out of here. Since you're sober enough to try scrying, can you stay your grudges long enough to find him?'

  'Not if I have to carry you,' Dakar replied in bitten fury. Afraid less for his own skin than for the sure retribution he would earn from his master should Arithon come to any harm, he smacked his thighs with his fists. 'Fiends eat my liver! How Asandir must be laughing!' Then, as Arithon shuddered, he was forced to grab him wrist and shoulder in a support he found abhorrent. 'Come on. The servants took the Masterbard to a servant's pallet near the pantry. If we're lucky, they'll have run off and left him.'

  Unmasking

  By the pull of the sea tides in her blood, Elaira knew before she opened her eyes that moonless, indigo night still deepened the arched casements of the Koriani hospice. This was not one of the bad times, waking up. The smells of herbal soap and the familiar astringency of a cailcallow tisane gently told her she lay in the wards with the sick. Three months past, she had busied herself brewing such potions. Now, in unpleasant irony, she was the invalid being dosed; crystal-resonance realignment for longevity was no course for the faint-hearted.

  Elaira gingerly shifted position. The sheets clung sweat-damp to flesh that weighed like an unfamiliar burden. Her head ached, and her veins felt as if their delicate insides had been systematically reamed and scalded.

  Morriel Prime might forewarn of the pain, but no one had mentioned the secondary effect of the dreams.

  A breeze wafted in, perfumed by frangipani and the fruity bouquet of flowering vines that laced the old hospice's south fagade. Goat-bells tinkled somewhere outside; fainter and farther off trailed the notes of a flute played by the flock's child herder.

  Elaira clung to basic awareness, of smells and sounds, and the fierce, blazing tapestry of midsummer constellations.

  On nights such as this, she even dwelled on raw pain to maintain her grip upon wakefulness. Any means at hand to serve as anchor against the ripping shoals of nightmare that stole upon her unawares; dreams which sucked her down into suffocating honor, then left her, shaking and sobbing and bereft of any memory to name what fear had overwhelmed her. At other times she relived the sordid terrors of her girlhood, driven to heartpounding flight from the constable's watch through the dingy brick alleys of Morvain. The beggars and thieves who had befriended or betrayed her loomed more real than the immediate present.

  Afterwards she aroused to find herself a stranger locked in a grown woman's body, dissociated from identity, cast adrift from mind and self by the alignment effects of her spell-crystal. When such transition caught her alone, for sweating, tortured minutes, she might gasp in confusion, desperate to recapture the scattered threads of an unstrung self-awareness.

  If the process failed to kill her, the longevity attunement undertaken at the Prime's command would be complete in another three months. Elaira vowed then to rediscover how to laugh; she would live on to a despicable old age and hound First Senior Lirenda to twitching fits of irritation.

  Such fancy tugged forth a battered half-smile, quickly stifled since even that slight movement raised a tingle like a stabbing of small needles down her nerves. The urge to shut her eyes against discomfort overpowered her, and her mind spiralled downward into sleep.

  A vivid dream arose to claim her, unlike any other known before ...

  * * *

  She walked on a spit of silvered sands. Spent waves lapped foam like wet lace around her ankles and stars wheeled in their summer courses above her wind-tossed hair. The polestar rode at a higher angle, and the pull of flood tide bespoke a northern latitude in the hour approaching midnight. Through the grit of each separate sand grain, in the tang of salt-braced air, Elaira felt, like an oncoming storm, the advent of midsummer solstice.

&nbs
p; Tugged by an augury of danger; stalked by some unseen threat, she faced inland.

  Nothing sinister seemed to be in evidence.

  Above the curved sills of the dunes, an ancient ruin fronted the surf, half-razed towers and storm beaten bulwarks thrust like crumbled sculpture against sky. A lingering, haunted harmony of line identified the site as Paravian. By the forces that arrowed through the soil, Elaira sensed a power focus there: stone eons old, laid down in patterns; mantled now in clumps of black moss and pried at by invading sedges. The resonance bespoke the seventh lane's vibration, but an intrusive; dissonant irregularity purled through its magnetic play of static.

  There; the nagging, creeping uneasiness intensified to a shiver. Elaira cupped her temples to tighten her concentration and trace the uneasy sense of wrongness.

  This power was neither dead nor forgotten, but the glittering, interlocked links of fresh conjury raised by twenty-four enchantresses sealed in a spell-circle at Athir.

  A distant voice shimmered through her dream. 'You must be aware, an outside spirit has tracked us.'

  Elaira had no chance to be afraid. The sands on which she walked overturned and dissolved, while her isolate awareness reeled through a well of hazeless dark. Power snatched down like the nip of steel pincers, then clamped, and closed and held her pinned. When light came again, she beheld an upward view through the blue-tinged facets of a prism. A ring of female faces veiled in gauze regarded her downward in retum.

  'It's the initiate Elaira,' someone identified in frosty, disdainful consonants.

  No sleep-induced dream brought her here, but the perilous vision of clairvoyance. A jolt of pure terror sheared her viscera as she overheard Morriel's reply to the dismayed senior who had spoken; whose safe-wards her disjointed consciousness had all too unwittingly blundered through.

  'The intrusion is scarcely a surprise. The Skyron jewel was used to align Elaira's crystal for longevity. Since the stones are still paired in resonance, and our solstice scrying is tuned for the Master of the Shadow, her infatuation would naturally draw her into sympathy.'

  Another voice ventured in brassy disapproval, 'A ward must be set to block her, then.'

  'Let her bide,' Morriel contradicted. 'I rather think her presence may help turn the search in our favour.' Shackled like waking nightmare by her tie to the master crystal, Elaira raged that her empathy for Arithon s'Ffalenn should be forced into usage to break his guarded privacy. She could do nothing but endure in despair as the quartz stone that altered the live tissues of her body blended with the pulse of the greater jewel held in resonance above the seventh lane focus, a thousand leagues north and west.

  Power licked through joint consciousness, as twenty-four Koriani Seniors shaped their geas of compulsive summoning. Methodically dispassionate, they first recreated the personal pattern that mapped the character of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  To this, they keyed layers interlocked like ring-ripples, spell overlaid upon seal in sticky webs of attraction: entrapments as natural as the drawing force between iron and magnet; the pull between sun, moon and tide, or the honey that beckoned live bees to a flower. The

  Prime laced darker themes in counterpoint, as relentless as insane obsession, or the mindless craving of drug addiction, that could marry flesh with substance in drawn-out physical torment.

  Heart-tied in compassion for Arithon, Elaira could feel the weaving's cruel pull. On her cot in the hospice at Forthmark, her body thrashed and whimpered, as the Koriani Circle hooked out from Athir and plucked up the core of her deepest shame. Their callous theft left her violated, soiled, as they drew from a love unasked and unwanted, and intermeshed its innocent essence to enhance their poisoned noose.

  Clear as a chimed note, the moment of solstice midnight swept the lane to the east.

  The power focus at Athir flared like a crucible with the vibrancy of captured earth power. More than waves and old stone drank its current. Even across vast distance, Elaira could not escape the awful moment when the Koriani scrying meshed into the lane's swelling surge. The freed construct coursed outward, pitched to seek union with its counterpart in blind and pitiless potency.

  Hide, Elaira begged the memory of a black-haired prince whose spirit had banefully marked her. Stay still; make no move to draw notice.

  Better, surely, had she died before her fateful past encounter with the Master of Shadow. Whatever haven Arithon had found to evade the draw of Desh-thiere's curse, with his personal signature from the Fellowship linked in tandem with forced power, no shelter under earth or sky could withstand the probe of this summoning.

  Tears of misery and betrayal welled up, to spill down Elaira's temples. Grief consumed her, and futile anger, while under layers of rucked bandaging, the sliver of crystal conjoined to her being rang in helpless concert with the geas channelled outward to seek Arithon. The scrying's unconscionable demand blazed through her, remorseless in its passage as a sunbeam shot to focus by a lens.

  Even her pain lent no respite. Fuelled by the sweep of earth's solstice, fanned down the conduit of the seventh lane, the geas pattern combed and sieved through farmsteads and cities and village settlements. Elaira shivered in revulsion as a thousand hapless lives were encountered and winnowed aside like the toss of so much dry chaff. The scrying allowed no quarter. Broadcast outward as a mindless set of urges, raised like a damned thing to measure its need against all life in its path, it keened in insatiable demand of its match.

  In a second compressed to the detail of hours, the summoning embraced the wind-raked scarps at Northstor, then cascaded through the chain of port cities set along the crescent coastline that edged the Cildein Ocean.

  Elaira lay limp with exhaustion before the tingling rush of solstice midnight passed, and the lane surge sank and subsided. The Koriani summoning slackened with the ebb, until, in the sleepy fishers' shacks of Merior, it eddied back on itself in a snarl of unrequited symmetry.

  Its siren call to the Master of Shadow remained miraculously unanswered.

  Amid the dank and shadowed mazes of Athir's ruined walls, the Koriani Circle broke off, confounded. One by one, the order's most accomplished enchantresses stirred from the throes of deep trance. They pushed back gauze veils, bewildered, stunned; while the energies of their failed scrying frayed around them like so many wisps of torn floss.

  Elaira could have laughed at the thwarted defeat on their faces. Her intuition had played them false. Ceded a victory that pierced for its sweetness, she revelled in giddy relief. Wherever the wily s'Ffalenn prince was sequestered, he was no place along the seventh lane.

  The enchantresses regrouped in disgruntled frustration. Governed by discipline, they engaged rituals to disperse their bands of power; but seared through their silence while the spell seals were isolated and banished through strictly set counterwards, the unspoken fact remained: Arithon s'Ffalenn had slipped through their net once again.

  Only one rebellious spirit was lapped in the sphere of the Skyron crystal's influence: Elaira alone favoured the cause of their quarry. She was left defencelessly exposed as the vindictive suspicion of several Seniors burgeoned into open accusation.

  'Desist!' cried the Prime in flat rebuke. 'No charge can be called against Elaira. No mere initiate could have sheltered Rathain's prince from the draw of a grand scrying.'

  'What sorry pass have we come to?' seconded another caustic peer. 'Had we not misplaced the Great Waystone, we could have had Rathain's prince crawling belly-down to find us!'

  'Silence!' Morriel cracked back. 'Our efforts are wasted in groundless blame or misplayed regrets for what's lost. Either the Fellowship itself maligns our work, or the Teir's'Ffalenn turns his guile in a direction we never thought to search. Whichever reason has balked us, no more can be accomplished tonight.'

  Crumpled in abject weariness, Elaira overheard the order for the Skyron crystal to be locked away in its coffer. But even as the appointed Senior moved to gather up the great focus stone, the inexorable turn of time carried t
he progression of solstice midnight westward. As the moment crossed the sixth lane, the massive aquamarine revitalized in a sudden, unbidden burst of power. Elaira shared the shock of recoil.

  Then all thoughts, all fears, were cancelled by a rolling charge of harmony that surged through the jewel's unshielded lattice. At one with Morriel's circle of Seniors, she reeled, blind and dazed, as the sensitized planes of the aquamarine erupted and blazed, incandescent in song-struck vibration. In Athir, the power focus under its tangled wrack of weeds also magnified that resonance. Its coils blazed to sudden life in a captured peal of joy so pure it kissed earth like the union of desire and perfect fulfilment.

  Swept up through the link to her spell crystal, Elaira endured, along with twenty-three senior initiates slammed to witless exultation, as the life-force of forgotten Paravian mystery tolled its wakened chord across the continent.

  Morriel alone retained her sense of self-command. 'Ath's grace, where is this coming from? We dare not languish in blank ignorance.'

  The Skyron aquamarine was not as the Great Waystone, vanished in the chaos of the rebellion; its lesser capacity could not channel several tasks without one purpose bleeding into another. And so as cold power was retuned into alignment, Elaira shared the vision that emerged, as the flow of the night's uncanny vortex was traced down to its source. Along with Morriel's seniors, she tracked walls and stonework torn apart and scattered like straw chaff; chimney bricks rammed askew from rafters, and roof-beams clothed green in budded leaves. She heard the wails of Jaelot's terrified populace, that had seen half their town come unhinged. There at the core of destruction, exposed amid smoking mosaic and the overset tables of a feast hall, the hands that had unleashed the wild mystery: the mortal singer who had keyed the release of an earth force held mute through five centuries.