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  ‘I don’t see how our lines cross,’ Prince Arithon restated, the edge to his tone all but warning.

  ‘Torbrand’s get! Truly.’ Black eyes glinted. The elder settled back on her heels. Ever restless, the breeze whirled stray sand on the blanket through the moment she peered at him, slantwise. ‘You wish to leave, naked?’

  Outplayed, not yet irritated, Arithon sighed. ‘Fire Hands was remiss not to leave me a cloak.’

  ‘He knew you that well,’ the old woman agreed. Her dry grasp shifted, cupped over the frown that troubled his brow. Since he was tired, he chose to allow her: the touch brought him sleep that carried him, dreamless, into the gold of new morning.

  Since the desert tribes travelled by night in deep summer, he was not aware of the strong, younger hands that tucked him in a litter and bore him into a cairn of stacked rocks. He slept the day through. When sundown came, the aged crone rubbed his wrists and his feet with sweet oil, and set a fresh warding to ensure that he did not awaken. Her nod roused the camp. The young men who stood guard shouldered the litter again, then resumed their careful trek eastward under the slender sickle of the waxing moon.

  Arithon rested. The trackless, black wastes erased the night’s journey from memory, while the wheeling stars passed overhead without record. The soft lilt of voices, and the bright ching! of the goat-bells glanced off his unhearing ears.

  No nightmare struck until the dark just past midnight, when the spirit tide ebbed, and frayed boundaries were most wont to weaken. The horror that stalked was not real, not present; but the dream-state both altered and rippled the veil, blurring the line between time’s world of substance, and the vistas beyond, that lapped at the unfettered mind.

  Hammer to anvil, the emotional impact shuddered through breathing flesh. Arithon thrashed. The insufferable feeling lived with him, still: a remembered horror that had occurred, as his being was drawn by arcane constraint, then forced into shackling bondage. The experience of being disbarred from death shocked a howl that began in his viscera and opened his throat in raw agony.

  A callused palm muffled his outcry. Other hands, agile and youthfully strong, caught his battering wrists and his ankles. While spoken words that meant nothing tried and failed to bring surcease to his torment, he struck out with deranged ferocity.

  ‘Nay so!’ rapped a voice of incisive command. The restraint – not bloodied rope ties, or wax seals – fell away.

  Abruptly freed, Arithon curled on his side. A knot laced into himself, trapped in misery, he trembled, until a tentative, kindly touch laid a strung lyranthe against his clenched fingers.

  His shuddering breath took in the familiar: a fragrance of citrus-waxed wood and old varnish. The clean scent of the resin used to stiffen the instrument’s tuning pegs raised the forgotten echo of joy. Closed fists unbent. Tortured, Arithon reached out and stroked the cool, silken finish of shell inlay and gemstones. These had voice in the darkness. A beauty that whispered through mage-sense, imprinted by generations of masterbards, each devoted, unswerving, to harmony. Most recent of these, Halliron sen Alduin, still seemed to be chiding him with the wise vehemence given to elderly men before dying: ‘If a masterbard’s music can one day spare your life, or that of your loyal defenders, you will use it …’

  Successor now bearing his mentor’s title, Arithon fought the surge of his nightmares to listen. His outer ear heard the brushed voice of the wind, drawn across ten courses of silver-wound wire, with the bass drone strings, thrumming beneath. No matter how emotionally raw, his sensitized talent could not refuse their sweet resonance.

  Arithon gasped a ripped word of gratitude. Reunited with the heirloom lyranthe last played at Sanpashir to raise the lane flux in transfer two years ago, he shoved erect and acknowledged the desert tribes’ generous stewardship. Then he gathered the instrument into his arms. His trembling clasp traced over the fretboard. Desperation guided his tuning. When the first chord rang out in corrected pitch, he immersed his torn faculties into the weaving of music.

  His measures plunged into the well of blind fear. Sliding falls carried him deeper. He wrought his brutal despair into melody, carving out the courage and calm to plumb the most ravaging depths. In harmony, he sought to shatter the terror and break the cycle of endless reliving.

  He would heal by such art, though recovery took days. The Biedar crone allowed him that space. Her dartmen pitched camp and kept watch at her bidding, until the afflicted had played his horrific dreams to a state of prostrate exhaustion.

  Then their journey resumed, with Arithon litter-borne. Once they reached the haven of Sanpashir’s deep caverns, they slipped into the womb of the earth. In the split cavern they called by the Name of the air, they granted their guest a tight, warded circle of privacy.

  There, his days passed in silence. By night, his cascading spill of struck notes drilled through rock and wind and raised tears in the far-sighted eyes of their gifted.

  That incongruous, sheet-silver curtain of sound was the first thing to greet the outland intruder brought in tribal custody from the sea-side. Herded in before dawn a moon’s quarter hence, this one the Biedar still held under blindfold. Town-born, he had come uninvited, bearing forged arms to the headland. Because his outspoken protests were ignorant, his escort maintained their precautions. Besides the rag, this trespasser’s wrists were lashed behind his stiff back.

  Since sunrise eased the dread pull of rank dreams, the new arrival need not bear the heart’s cry of the other guest’s lyranthe for long.

  While the final, struck notes spun dying echoes through the maze of Sanpashir’s caverns, Sulfin Evend was pressed, stumbling, down a steep incline of stone. The deft hands of four dartmen guided him through the narrows that guarded a cul-de-sac. There, the tied cloth was pulled from his eyes. A silent young woman swathed in veils cut the rope from his wrists. She replaced the rough bonds with soft rag, more graciously knotted in front of his waist. A damp cloth was offered to cleanse his dust-caked face. Then dried meat, sour cheese, and an unleavened biscuit were set into his anxious grasp. For the first time since setting foot on the shore-line, Sulfin Evend was permitted to eat and drink on his own.

  His escort of silent, robed dartmen remained. They tracked his least move with inimical, dark eyes and answered none of his questions.

  Then, as now, they refused to soften despite his peaceful entreaty. An impatient man, Sulfin Evend leashed rage. He had little choice. A dead seeress’s loan of their elder’s flint knife had been the sole grace that once defended his sworn liege’s life. Since the talisman had delivered the spirit, intact, from the hideous rites of Grey Kralovir’s necromancers, the Lord Commander of the Alliance’s war host stifled his rampant frustration. He was not such a fool, to transgress arcane bargains. Neither could he evade the harsh charge of his oath to a Fellowship Sorcerer.

  His overtaxed nerves would have to be nursed, one hard-set breath at a time. Sulfin Evend ate the simple fare without savour. Wary of the poison that tipped desert darts, he would endure till these uncivilized people chose to grant his appeal.

  The haunting strain of the lyranthe remained silenced when at length his warders allowed him to sleep. Yet somehow the searing measures lived on, unleashing a torrent of unquiet dreams. Sulfin Evend catnapped upon the damp stone, while the taciturn dartmen kept watch from the dark, their vigilance stubborn as bed-rock.

  Later, an older man came with a torch. Words were exchanged in thick dialect. Then the elder departed. The robed dartmen allowed Sulfin Evend a brief walk outside to stretch his legs and relieve himself. Under daylight, he snatched the opening to ask once again if he might be given a fair hearing. As usual, no one deigned to reply. The desert-folk hustled him out of the glaring white sun. Dazzled and stumbling, he was prodded back into the gloom of the rock cave. While he was still blinking and cursing stubbed toes, they rebound his wrists with their twisted rag ropes. Then he was ushered back underground, but not to the same cave of imprisonment.

  This pass,
he was led through a narrower cleft, worn smooth by the footsteps of centuries. The close wall on both sides had been carved. Sulfin Evend need not be a scholar to recognize the interlaced coils of Mother Dark’s mystic serpents. Heart pounding, unprepared, he realized his hour for audience had arrived. The reddish gleam of a lit cavern loomed at the far end of the corridor.

  ‘There, you will go,’ the lead dartman instructed, and although no other order was given, the escort of warriors melted behind. The outland stranger was left the choice to proceed of his own free will.

  Sulfin Evend steadied his harrowed nerves. Past turning back, he advanced to confront a power of mystery that had stood in the breach to curb an entrenched binding of necromancy. Such strength, perhaps, fit to rival the arcane reach of a Fellowship Sorcerer, whom none but a fool approached lightly.

  Across that carved threshold, rinsed in carnelian glare, a crone sat beyond the embers of a neat fire. She was shrouded. Black silk veils melted at one with the shadow thrown off by the coals. Her motionless presence might have been overlooked had the intricate whorls of embroidery that patterned her hems not chiselled her form in the darkness. The rock floor underneath her tucked knees had been channelled with similar patterns. Their looping spirals confounded the eye, while the gravid air wove an uncanny dance with a fragrant blanket of herb smoke.

  Afraid for no reason, Sulfin Evend stopped cold. Instinct insisted that he should take flight without any care for the consequence. Before he risked death as a dartman’s pinned target, his trailing escort grabbed hold. They shoved his reluctant, awkward step forward, then pressed him face-down on the earth.

  ‘She is eldest!’ snapped one in the stilted accent imposed by his wilderness dialect. ‘Here, she rules. All others brought inside of our circle must show their seemly respect.’

  The townsman submitted until they let him up, though the sensitivity brought by his errant clan lineage prickled his nape with unpleasant warning. An odd charge of awareness seemed to attend the ancient woman’s rapt stillness. Almost, the cave’s stone seemed to whisper and speak, while the flickering fire hissed in the cold air like the breath of a thousand vipers.

  Sulfin Evend crouched on his heels. A brave man in battle, he could not stop shivering. The crone never moved. She looked unassuming in her rags and raw silk. Yet her wisdom spoke volumes through silence. Worse than Enithen Tuer’s, her eerie knowing unsettled his calm as she uncovered her wizened face. No matter how seasoned, the grown man wrestled dread, while her black, shining eyes stared him through.

  The well-rehearsed greeting Sulfin Evend intended stuck on his paralyzed tongue.

  The crone motioned him closer.

  The skilled dartmen behind disallowed his insane urge to try protest. Sulfin Evend edged towards the fire and sat. Hands tied, he could not refuse the goat-horn flask the barbaric matriarch uncorked and pressed to his lips. He managed the trial, though the swallow he took seized his breath like a fist in the guts. The bitter taste of strange herbs made his eyes water, while the bite of alcohol kindled a bonfire inside, wringing his body to sweat and rushed pulse.

  The old one nodded, apparently appeased by his effort to honour her customs. She opened without need to ask for his name, or inquire what purpose had brought him. ‘Your kinsman who lay under threat of the shadow that consumes the spirit is dead.’

  ‘Raiett?’ gasped Sulfin Evend. ‘Lysaer’s appointed Lord Governor of Etarra? He can’t be!’ The shock left him stunned, that the crone’s uncanny faculties might read even the branching ties of his blood-line. ‘I wished to petition your people for knowledge! Beg a stay of protection, that my uncle might be permitted the chance of salvation.’

  ‘Done!’ said the old woman. ‘The cult you knew as Grey Kralovir has been sundered. Already, the one you name Raven has passed from this world, cut free from the ties of black craft-marks. Your need was released on the hour his remains were consumed, cleansed of all taint by white mage-fire.’

  She moved. Paper dry as the scald of sun on baked rock, her crabbed finger tapped his moist forehead. ‘You need not plead for our help, town-born man! Nor do you owe any debt to Biedar. Not for your kinsman, departed.’

  Rattled by the uncivilized drink, or perhaps by the jab of her censure, Sulfin Evend wrestled the scatter of his wheeling, irrational thoughts. For in fact, the dire peril to his uncle had been the lesser of two threats that brought him. ‘I bore a flint knife, made by your ancestry, that your warriors reclaimed at the time I made landfall.’

  Unblinking, the crone nodded. ‘The knife you brought back here has always carried but one written Name on its destiny.’

  Sulfin Evend gathered his courage. ‘Then I ask leave to plead for your favour.’

  The old woman strummed a hand through her necklet of bone, jangling its strings of carved fetishes. If not encouragement, the gesture suggested he had her due leave to explain himself.

  ‘I once gave my word to a Fellowship Sorcerer to return the knife’s legacy to your keeping. This, I have done. The boon I would ask of your grace is to loan me the talisman for additional protection. I make the appeal on behalf of my liege. Lysaer s’Ilessid lies entrapped under a vile curse by the Mistwraith. Could you grant a stay to defend him when the madness saps his right mind? As the prince’s sworn man, pledged to safeguard his virtue, I speak the truth. The Alliance behind him is built on false cause. I petition your people for assistance. Don’t leave me stripped of all recourse as my liege loses ground to the blood-lust imposed by Desh-thiere.’

  The crone laced her seamed fingers. ‘Your obligation not being ours, you shall meet the one whose true gift has arranged for your uncle’s deliverance.’

  Sulfin Evend bristled. ‘Did you hear nothing? Lysaer’s misguided policy seeks to cleanse every trace of initiate knowledge from the five kingdoms. Backed by the fanatical, armed might of the towns, this self-righteous crusade may yet come to threaten the ancient roots of your heritage.’

  ‘Refuse?’ snapped the crone, not one whit inclined to reverse her lofty dismissal. ‘A fool’s errand, truly! Do you realize whose Name you spurn to know? His hand is the same, that will wield our ancestor’s knife! Through him, the Kralovir’s vile works have just been undone for all time. Ahead, if his strength stays the course of his fate, he bears the very flame of your hope.’

  Frowning, his throat left seared raw from her wretched decoction, Sulfin Evend forced the stark inquiry. ‘You claim that this man has brought Lysaer’s salvation?’

  ‘Past, and perhaps for the future.’ The crone bent her head, deferent. ‘Alone on Athera, he is the key to secure your liege’s deliverance from jeopardy!’

  Sulfin Evend lost his breath. Rocked dizzy, he ventured, ‘Whose Name, then, Lady?’ Sweating beneath her discerning, hard stare, he barely sustained without cringing. ‘Do you speak of a Fellowship Sorcerer?’ No other power abroad, that he knew, could have routed the works of the Kralovir.

  The crone hissed in the negative. ‘Mother Dark’s chosen is not of the Starborn.’ Both wrists chinked with bracelets, twisted of blown glass and copper, as she spread her red-dyed palms in a gesture that acknowledged the forces that lived and moved through the world, unseen. ‘Know him, and the boon that you ask of Biedar is well answered. For there will come the dark hour. His life thread crosses the palm of your hand. The choice is yours, seithur, whether or not to stay blinded.’

  Head spinning from the heat of the fire and the searing influence of the strange herbs, Sulfin Evend grappled to make sense of the crone’s oblique phrases. She insisted the threat at Etarra was cleared. If so, the dread taint of necromancy had been expunged from the core of Lysaer’s Alliance already. Sulfin Evend cradled his head in roped hands. Prompted by gratitude, he yielded to the tribal elder’s request to confront her prodigal champion.

  What would her folk show him, after all, but another primitive shaman, steeped within the queer, uncouth mystery of her nomadic tradition?

  Blindfolded once again by the dartmen,
Sulfin Evend found himself ushered away from the crone’s revered presence. His steps were not steady. Either the pungent drink or the smoke from the coals had befuddled his natural senses. Drawing deep gulps of clean air in the passage, he let his escort draw him farther into the caves that riddled the deeps of Sanpashir. They guided him downwards. The way turned in switchbacks upon a steep slope, sometimes carved with the semblance of steps. Generations of inhabitance had smoothed the limestone into worn hollows. The dank tang of mineral mingled with smells of rancid fat and cold soot. Sulfin Evend was held back while someone lit a torch. Footfalls echoed around him as he was prodded leftwards, into a passage. The air changed, the last of the desert’s dry heat smothered out by the bone chill of underground bed-rock and damp. He heard the trickle of fresh water, and waded through cold, shallow pools. The cavern whispered with the splashed plink of springs, no help to salvage his bearings.

  The dark and the blindfold unstrung his mazed faculties. Now, each stumbling step and the close taint of smoke wrung him to visceral nausea. He lost count of the turnings and thresholds he crossed before the path wended upwards. He panted, distressed, though the sharp ascent seemed not to trouble the desertmen. He tasted the scorched flint of dry, outdoor air. The grave chill of the deeps gave way to close warmth, threaded through by the fragrance of embers reduced from a birch fire.

  There, Sulfin Evend was steered to a halt.

  The warrior beside him gave warning. ‘Take care, town-born man. Do not stray too near. The one you approach is a sensitive, and for this, we ask your respect. A warding circle laid down by our elders keeps guard for his fragile peace.’

  The blind was removed. Though no one came forward to untie his wrists, the armed escort stepped back and stood down. Their cloaked forms melted into the shadow behind, leaving Sulfin Evend alone to regain his strayed bearings.

  He stood at the verge of a narrow rock-chamber. A raw crack in the ceiling let in the fresh air. The errant, hot breeze from outside winnowed smoke from a clay pot packed with coals, several yards from his planted feet. That carmine glow, and the pallid scatter of ambient light glanced lines of reflection off a lyranthe’s silver-wound strings.