Traitor's Knot Read online

  The adept touched his sleeve in tacit apology. ‘In fact, I could not without causing more harm.’ The Alliance doctrine already held that Ath’s Brotherhood practised fell craft, hand in glove, with ‘Shadows’ and Fellowship tyranny. Her presence at Althain would appear to confirm that wrongful and dangerous impression.

  ‘I respect your concern,’ Asandir all but snapped. ‘But that man downstairs has too sharp an intelligence for me to waste a moment with less than the truth. Dead set as he is to pick quarrels with necromancers, he’ll have to learn fast that you, and I—and Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn—are anything but his enemies.’

  Up the rough granite stair, past the fifth level’s locked double doors, Asandir’s deer-hide boots made no sound. His purposeful focus through the ascent stirred the adept to alarm. She said, ‘Sethvir expected you would kindle the third lane beacon.’

  The Sorcerer maintained his cracking fast pace, with speech crisp as glass tapped by iron echoing in the chill darkness. ‘If I light the beacon in summons, Luhaine would be pulled out of Teal’s Gap before he could finish the bindings to curb the Khadrim.’ A corporate Sorcerer required five weeks to reknit the wardings that held the Sorcerer’s Preserve. As a shade, Luhaine had to invoke tedious steps to safeguard his unshielded presence. The labour he shouldered would take that much longer and expose him to far greater danger.

  Asandir rushed the next flight, still expounding. ‘Traithe’s raven would sense the lane’s summons, as well. Should I let him worry? He’s too far away to respond. If Davien changed heart and decided to help, surely before now he’d have troubled himself to lift some of the strain off Sethvir!’

  Gold ciphers flashed; the adept turned her hooded head, startled. ‘You can’t mean to respond to this crisis alone!’

  Asandir passed the eighth landing, still climbing, and breathless enough to sound irritable. ‘Call Luhaine to go? I can’t sanction the choice. Not with Lysaer in jeopardy. We cannot afford to strap another sorcerer’s resources off-world indefinitely’

  Stopped, appalled, the adept stared as they reached the ninth-floor threshold, and Asandir checked his stride to fling open the door. Beyond, the eyrie chamber that held Sethvir’s library lay silted in gloom under starlight. ‘You realize I can’t intervene in support of your reckless choice!’

  ‘As you wish, naturally’ The Sorcerer’s shadowy form swept ahead. His haste raised eddies of book-scented air, and flicked dust from the sheaves of the quill-pens stuffed in their crocks atop the carved ambry. The ebon table was already bare, cleared of its cached stacks of books since the onset of Sethvir’s prostration. ‘Go or stay,’ said Asandir, unequivocal. ‘I will enact what is necessary’

  The adept clasped tight hands, her censure kept silent: the Sorcerer’s intent to slip free of his body, then fare into the void without posting safe oversight was no less than a lethal risk. Kharadmon had been sheared, live spirit from flesh, caught short in the same adverse circumstance.

  Too rushed for precautions, Asandir tossed back a pressed explanation as he rifled a cupboard and withdrew a brazier of black iron. ‘The trace imprint of the spell that attracted these wraiths was a working of mine, made in partnership with Sethvir. I share the permissions that frame it.’ Still talking, he assembled the antique tripod at the center of the stone table. ‘Where Luhaine and Kharadmon could only react in defence, I can enact a direct intervention based on the right of my authorship.’

  The adept did not leave.

  Sethvir’s herb stores yielded a braid of dried sweet-grass to ignite the brazier. Asandir filled the pan, then looked up, his glance hidden steel under the shrouding of darkness. ‘Marak’s wraiths are voracious. They consume by possession. With Athera imperilled by three deranged grimwards, our Fellowship cannot possibly field an assault. If we tried, we would certainly open the chance of provoking a large-scale invasion.’

  Outlined by the pricked glimmer of stars shining beyond the latched casement, Asandir scrounged for a sliver of chalk amid the odd caches of snail-shells and the pebbles with mica that Althain’s Warden had collected to amuse visiting crows. Then he swiped the layered dust from the table-top and ticked off the cardinal points to frame a passive circle of warding. His hand did not shake. The straight line of his brows, the taut cleft of his mouth were the mask of a man who seemed heartless.

  The adept, who read auras, saw the unshielded spirit. Asandir’s inner nature held caring so fierce, the deep flame of it seared without surcease. She crossed over the threshold. The subtle, stirred light that moved with her presence brushed the Sorcerer’s peripheral awareness. He checked, raised his head. The focused restraint behind his mild glance could have melted fixed stone with compassion.

  ‘I might be bound by the will of the dragons,’ Asandir said. ‘This does not make me a puppet. Your grace is the exalted gift of Ath’s peace, and not suited for sordid conflict. Leave here. Do as your given nature requires, and stay on your path with my blessing.’

  She smiled. ‘I would sing in sorrow for the greed of your wraiths, but not share in your action to bind them.’

  Her dusky complexion lost in the gloom, she presumed, and clasped the Sorcerer’s wrist. He was as lean as the wind itself, all strong bone and wire-strung tension. ‘Have you done more than eat, since your working to stabilize Radmoore’s grimward?’ she chided. ‘No sleep, not so much as a cat-nap? Then I will stay, and keep watch for your health.’

  Asandir touched her knuckles to his forehead in salute. ‘Brave one,’ he murmured. ‘The trial of these times is a burden on us all. I’m heartened to have you beside me.’ Eased free, he bound his closed circles with runes to rein the beacon into containment. Then he asked due permission, invoked the four elements, and tuned his established rapport to channel the lane flux through the brazier.

  The herbs flashed alight, releasing a plume of sweet smoke. Their kindled spark blazed on without fuel, a searing point of indigo blue that notched the Sorcerer’s cragged features with creases. Asandir hooked a chair and sat down.

  Against the looming back-drop of book-shelves, the sliced gleam of gilded Paravian lettering demarked his gaunt silhouette. He laced his competent, large-knuckled hands. Eyes closed, without ceremony, he bent his silver head and settled into deep trance.

  Ath’s adept took position beside him, quiet hands laid on his shoulders. Their broad strength was as bed-rock. Asandir’s auric field wrapped her, dense as the fires of a star. The intimacy of close contact laid bare the painfully volatile paradox: the breathing vessel that housed his vast presence was most fragile, a living tissue of flesh and bone no less than mortally vulnerable.

  The adept resisted the cry of her fear. Poised at the crux, she saw far too clearly as Asandir stepped into the breach. For Athera herself had been left wounded by the wanton acts of the dragons. Ath’s gift of love, sent in redress, had been the Paravian races; and the Fellowship, who stood as the drakes’ chosen champions, were appointed to protect the resonance and safeguard the heart of the mysteries that sustained them.

  A mis-step tonight might tear the fabric of a world, unspinning its expansive existence. If Asandir failed, the penultimate truth in Athera’s weave might be dimmed, lost to the pain of entropic separation, destruction, and sinking darkness. If the mysteries withered, the conclave of Ath’s Brotherhood could not hold open the gateways or maintain the exalted discipline of their mastery.

  Peacefully as sunlight cast through a pool, the adept sent her calm reassurance. ‘Keep your strength. Hold the line.’

  She experienced the moment, as the Sorcerer balanced himself into a state of stringent harmony. Mind and will, emotion and thought were centered into alignment. Embodied consciousness became condensed to a pin-point that hung the poised axis of power: Asandir bridged the liminal threshold between the strictures of order and chaos.

  The deft instant passed. The adept sensed his auric field lighten, then spin away, while the etheric awareness mooring his spirit unreeled like dropped thread behin
d him. Then the lane beacon blazed into adamant brilliance. Now immersed in its current, the Sorcerer inducted the raw charge he needed to fuel his journey.

  Amid her listening calm, the adept sensed the caught echo of Asandir’s experience. Merged into the singing magnetics, his being became at one with the flow that guided the migrating birds, then the convection of winds raising the static charge for a storm front. He absorbed the cold hands of the desperate poor, gleaning the overlooked grain from the fields, then the silenced pounce of an owl, and the squeal of the mouse in its talons. He knew the pinched hunger of families in Dyshent, and the misery of clansmen serving in chains on the galleys snugged under a town breakwater. He was a caravan camped by a road, while oxen grazed under starlight; then the dissonance of crystallized water, warped out of true by the discharge from Scarpdale’s torn grimward. The current there bespoke Sethvir’s bright pain, holding the desolate span of what fast was becoming a rampaging breach: Asandir endured the horrific ache and passed on by, as he must. Farther south, the ancient circle at Telmandir brought him the laughter of King Eldir’s sons. Clan lodge-fires burning in Elkforest braided into the silent bleeding of trees cut down for charcoal at Deal. The Sorcerer felt the delvings of miners who broke rock for tin beneath Lithmere, and rolled as the surf, slamming the shingle at Earle; he was icy water, and the schooling of fish, then misted cloud, billowing under the new-risen moon.

  Althain’s lane beacon intensified as the Sorcerer drank in its cascading stream of wild energies. The change struck too fast: one instant the adept felt Asandir’s essence, nestled into Athera’s magnetics. Then the brazier flickered, divided, as the Sorcerer launched in departure. Cold blue as a star, the spark resteadied and blazed, a detached beacon behind him.

  Asandir travelled the icy void without anchor. Into unshielded territory, endangered by questing wraiths, he dared not carry his rapport with the lane’s flux. He fared outwards adrift, dropping all but the ephemeral memory of the clay shell left at Althain Tower.

  The adept steadied her breathing and curbed her raced heart-beat. Apprehension would serve no purposeful good. For where the observer constrained to five senses might dimly sense hostile cold, and the emptiness of deep vacuum, the stream of the Sorcerer’s unleashed presence would discern vistas beyond. Asandir would re-encounter himself, mirrored in the upper registers. Shifted into vibration and light, his trued self would be redefined: in music beyond hearing and colour beyond sight, he would rejoin the grand spectrum that sourced Ath’s creation.

  That siren call could unstring the mind. Even the self-aware spirit might run mad with desire to embrace the sweet ease of surrender. Against the thundering chord that was life, unveiled as exalted glory, Asandir had no more than spare will, and the hard-set choice of endurance. The dragons had bound him. The warp thread of his life had been precisely matched to the weft thread spun by their dreaming. Summoned with such clarity, his nature must answer. Irrevocably, fate had wedded his destiny to the cloth of Athera’s existence. If he lost his grip, or let go of himself, there would be no route back, except through tormented insanity.

  Braced for the course of a steadfast vigil, the adept tracked the tuned pulse of the Sorcerer’s life chord and committed herself to patience…

  An adamant presence hurled outwards across the vaulting dark of the deep, Asandir touched against the protective matrix laid down by his discorporate colleagues. The construct gave him the reference point to leap over the distance at speed. Spelled wardings rang like a cascade of tapped chimes as he answered the challenge and passed, clean as a needle through silk.

  Onwards, he pressed. The crystalline voices of stars braided song all about him. Ahead, if he reached, he could sense Kharadmon, weaving a convolute string of evasions. The inventive working strung a web of entanglements to delay the first influx of marauding free wraiths.

  Asandir allowed that contest wide berth. Even the most shielded contact with his colleague invited the chance of disaster: if such an encounter drew glancing notice, conflict would be joined. The pack that nipped at Kharadmon’s heels would turn, with the tenantless husk of the body at Althain posing an irresistible gambit. The tenuous tie between spirit and flesh would lead back to Athera and provide the ripe opening for hostile possession.

  The field Sorcerer had no choice but to pass Kharadmon by and hold to his unswerving purpose. With the planet behind no more than an azure chip inset against velvet darkness, his reference became the whisper-thin trace of the trees, a remnant left by the defunct spell once created to call his colleague home from an ill-fated survey of Marak. That cold, icy world had succumbed and died, overrun by the wraith-riddled fogs that had also sourced the Mistwraith’s destructive invasion. To the famished horde, cut off at South Gate, the rich life on Athera remained as a prize to be ravaged by relentless conquest.

  Asandir made his way without disturbing the imprinted energies the old spell had scribed through the ethers. If he ranged too near, the wraiths already in progress and tracking might sense him. More than agile opponents, they could slip between time. To evade their keen senses, the Sorcerer upstepped the frequency of his being until he rode the carrier wave of harmonics, octaves above solid matter. Awareness without form, he sailed the vast deeps, whirled in the black flame of the untamed glory that existed before ordered creation.

  Here lay his danger: streamed through the very essence of joy, cradled by power to absolve every grievance, Asandir knew a pure exaltation that acknowledged no pain and no boundaries. Marak’s wraiths, Athera—the binding charge of the dragons—seemed dwindled to insignificance.

  The ties that sustained vital flesh became both prison and leash, an encumbrance the self-aware spirit might snap as identity thinned and faded.

  For that thread to endure, the Sorcerer must renew his attention from moment to moment. The very act denounced his full Name. Each reaffirmation cut like a betrayal as, steadfast, he refuted the core of all knowing that cherished his greater existence. Asandir suffered a hunger of spirit that transcended all cares of the flesh. Beguiled, then claimed by the might of Ath’s mysteries, he drifted, while a whisper arose to sustain him.

  Far behind, so very far, the Sorcerer still sensed the echo of peace set forth by Ath’s adept. A spirit entrained by free will and high mastery, she expressed the grand dance while still holding to human form. Her stance extended him gentle reminder: of the body and the frame of intent left behind at Althain Tower. The drakes’ legacy caged him in danger and hardship; separation and pain, that knotted his heart to the fate of a world, sliced sharp and deep as old agony.

  Asandir chose.

  The residual spell cast its faint, shining line across the black well of the deep. From his point of raised vantage, through force of bared will, he could trace the course of its reduced vibration. He sensed the wraiths also, knew them by the flat tang of their avarice and their driven, voracious hunger. He hurled his awareness farther out into the dark, searched until he encountered a space where the spell’s inactive path was untrammelled. There, he wrenched the frame of his consciousness back into dimensional space. He arrived, tightly shielded. Since a whisper of presence would draw the free wraiths who currently quested in crossing, his deterrent must be worked in stealth, and at speed.

  No use, simply to annul his permissions, or use a forthright rune of banishment. The original conjury was impressed in the memory of Athera’s live trees. To impose straight will on their dreaming consciousness, or to refigure the remnant as anything else but a tie of regenerative expression would be an invasive violation. The staid grace of a forest did not comprehend choice. Its tidal cycle of being did not recognize destructive intervention. A tree did not act; it simply was, a reflection of placid tranquillity.

  The Major Balance demanded exacting integrity. What could not be ended must be reworked within the strict frame of harmonic alignment.

  Asandir engaged help from a distant, hot star, one that possessed no fair, spinning worlds to entice the ravenous wrai
ths. Its gifted fire fashioned half of his remedial warding: a loop of geometry, hard-edged and impenetrable knit into a circle expressed in both darkness and light. From the gap of the void and the stuff of shaped energy, he welded opposition into pure balance: birth and death annealed in the cyclical spiral understood by the language of trees. In consummate mastery, the Sorcerer bound the opposing forces through the torus of time, without end and without a beginning.

  The effort taxed him. Unlike his colleagues who existed as shades, the concentration required to engage his craft must be enacted in dual awareness. Asandir dared not waver, or slacken his grasp on the contrary forces he handled. One strayed thought, for a fractional second, would dissipate the energy field that sustained his untenanted body.

  If he mis-stepped, so far out in the void, Ath’s adept could not extend her power to save him.

  Asandir sealed the primary layer of his conjury, aware the foundation he created was vulnerable. Should any Fellowship colleague or adept with initiate knowledge succumb to a free wraith’s possession, all that he fashioned could fall to misuse and violation.

  The Law of the Major Balance was a stricture graced on permission, not a limitation based upon force. Its restraint was enacted by choice of free will, without imposing fixed bonds or control. Its wisdom sprang out of living awareness, not a rote rule, or formulation. True order was not subject to knowledge, but arose from the deepened awareness that sprang from coexistence in unified consciousness. Used without due care for consent, the rarefied power the Sorcerer wove could be turned to harmful intent. A pattern of creation in symmetrical balance must also encompass the means to warp, and imprison, and destroy.

  Whole power entrained the hoop of all being and did not deny the constrictive face of its nature.

  Asandir wrought knowing he could not enact the least set of punitive protections. Not without sullying the dire symmetry of existence and admitting the stasis that seeded all entropy.