Fugitive Prince (19 page)

Winter gloaming cloaked the sedges, and the raked, brown stalks of dry weed heads flattened to the gusts that sheared off the Bittern Desert. At the edge of the dunelands, under sky like translucent enamel, Althain Tower reared up in blunt contour, spidery runners of ivy and splotched lichens clotted to its southern side. Morriel Prime worked age-stiffened joints through the snipped-off fingers of her gloves. Swathed under layers of thick, hooded cloaks, she drew a deep breath of the knifing, cold air, and quashed back a riptide of old rage.

Koriani feud with the Fellowship of Seven had lasted since Third Age Year One.

Behind her, fidgety amid the slurry of mud and rimed ruts which seized the stone flags by the gate arch, her young deaf-mute servant stared with his mouth slacked open. No other but Iyan attended her. Too much power and too many secrets lay housed at Althain Tower. Mortals who asked a Sorcerer’s hospitality were wont to reemerge changed, since the impacting force of a Fellowship presence was too heady to encounter without sparking an altered perception. No enchantress dared count herself exempt. Despite the strict code of the initiate’s oath, Elaira’s faulted faith in the Koriani Order had stemmed from just one illicit talk with Asandir.

Morriel sized up the massive grilled portal, impenetrable before her high arts. That irritation galled her with surprising ferocity. Learned as she was, disciplined in the mysteries and dedicated as fine
steel in her convictions, even still, the spelled wards on the gates lay outside her means to command. Seals conformed in dire forces unsettled her attuned senses. The ache of them raised bone-stripping twinges from the longevity bindings laid in live currents through her flesh.

In the moan of winter winds, under a zenith deepened to fathomless cobalt, the thorny coil of past event transferred its harsh sting to the present.

Morriel cupped the wrapped Waystone against her breast, the grip of her left hand white knuckled to secure her cloak against the gusts. Althain’s defenses had endured for unnatural centuries, the length of an age before a destitute humanity had embarked on its flight to seek refuge. While spacefaring civilization had torn itself apart in a dog pack scrap over the bones of its fallen greatness, the Fellowship of Seven had maintained an isolate residence on Athera.

Whoever they had been, whatever their unrevealed origin, they chose this place for their work. During the Second Age, they had turned the bloody tides in the Paravian conflict against the ravening packs of drake spawn. Rescued from near extinction, the old races had survived to see peace on their overlooked and uncharted little world.

No such enclave of wise powers had intervened to champion mankind’s beleaguered decline.

Amid the suffering and the atrocities of humanity’s Armageddon, the Koriani Order had been founded to resist the collapse of higher culture. Their purpose had been to perpetuate mercy, while other specious, greedy factions waged war, and burned a priceless heritage to ashes.

What fragmented knowledge remained to be salvaged hung on the brink of being lost beyond all recovery. Morriel confronted the fast sanctuary at Althain, her mood like fired obsidian. Too many of her predecessors had begged these same Sorcerers for help. Each matriarch had been unconditionally refused. Now, when her own term of office neared its end, the current Prime shouldered the more demeaning errand of petitioning for power that was hers.

The necessity ignited a rage of bitter vintage. She alone guarded access to the imprinted memories of every Prime Matriarch to live before her. To Morriel, sole protector of mankind’s banished history, the green earth here was no refuge, but a prison kept warded by tyranny.

At the dawn of the Third Age, when the refugee survivors arrived to beg asylum, the Fellowship of Seven claimed no pretense. They
were sworn to guard the land by Paravian law. If mankind would settle, the culture that shaped them must be set aside to keep accord with indigenous tradition. Such were the terms drawn into the compact, for which the Fellowship Sorcerers stood surety.

The Koriani, with their mission of merciful protection, were lent no voice in that council. Tolerance might argue that today’s Prime Enchantress should rise above the outworn grievance of the past. Yet the burden bequeathed by her office was too heavy. Time left her weary of the proscribed knowledge she sheltered, records that might only be passed on to the precarious charge of a successor.

Althain Tower’s stark dignity only mocked her in that bone-hurting, chill winter twilight, monument that it was against all that time or attrition might erase.

Morriel trembled as the old flare of rage stirred her blood. Truth fed her temper. Behind this locked portal lay power enough to grow past this world’s horizon, to restore at one stroke all the shining civilization her predecessors had labored to save; and lost. The accumulated wisdom of those centuries was dispersed, or else confined beyond recovery by the bucolic bounds of a compact sworn by seven Sorcerers in behalf of three vanished races.

The moment was past, to mourn, or waver, or regret. Morriel came to do battle on Fellowship ground, armed with naught else but her righteous indignation and the exhausted rags of her faith.

The clank of a windlass heralded the moment her arrival drew notice. Counterweighted chain reverberated inside the sealed archway as the innermost defenses were winched open. Then firm footfalls echoed through the vaults of the sally port, and the heavy, barred gate cracked open. Asandir’s craggy profile jutted through the gap, behind the lowered grate of the portcullis.

“Sethvir bids you welcome to Althain Tower,” he called, then challenged in chisel-cut bluntness, “He invites you for tea and specific conversation concerning an arrow let fly three years past by Duke Bransian s’Brydion in Vastmark.”

Morriel released a laugh of bloodletting satisfaction, waved Iyan forward, and rasped her reply. “You may tell Sethvir, I accept.”

The unveiled presence of the Great Waystone flicked violet lights across the litter of empty plates and the glass sides of the jam crock not yet tidied from the table. The lone member of the Prime’s entourage felt comfortably at home. Iyan perched in the window seat with his knees drawn up, contentedly licking traces of elderberry off of the stamped tin spoon. The more elegant butter knife, cleaned the
same way, remained in the possessive grasp of the other ham fist hooked to his cross-gartered shin.

Sethvir approved the deaf-mute’s simplistic pleasures, his smile all childish innocence. The bearded, sprite’s features veiled in the steam which wafted off a fresh tea mug held no guile. As a host he had been faultlessly attentive, and yet, the sparkle to his eyes warned of wayward refusal to address the major talisman Morriel had presented before him.

To her stripped ultimatum to reverse his act of mischief and erase its Named imprint from the earth’s eidetic awareness, he sighed with reproachful complaisancy. “Done is finished. Who could live up to the conceit you believe I possess?” His irreverent manner expanded to gleeful chagrin. “You embarked on a journey of four hundred leagues
in belief I could sway the will of a planet?
My dear, I am flattered, as well as sorry for the discomfort and inconvenience brought on by your expectations. But no living power in Athera could move the earth to do as you ask.”

Morriel hissed in a sharp breath. “You’re lying.” Nestled in shawls, ensconced in a padded chair like an egg in a silk-lined cup, she shared her glare equally between Althain’s Warden and Asandir, who leaned against the doorpost, his bench lately banished to the larder to make room for visitor seating. The afterglow behind the paned arrow slit had fled. Plate rims poised above the pooled shadows cast by a tallow dip spiked on an iron pricket.

Unsinged by the Prime’s focused ire, blissfully intent on sloshing the dollop of cinnamon butter just added to flavor his tea, Sethvir shrugged. “What you think doesn’t matter. Your crystal has been recognized, and earth will abide by its own nature.”

He might have said more, but Luhaine snatched the opening to expound. “Stone and soil, you must know, are susceptible to energy. Like the mind of a mimic, they will copy and retain the patterns of induced vibrations. No made spell under sky could remand that given property.” Warmed now to his subject, the invisible spirit ran over the Prime’s reedy protest. “And anyway, the conundrum’s not linked to a balanced equation. To invoke the attempt to dominate a planet would create an unsolvable backlash. Where could the discharge from such a raised force become grounded? Earth itself would reject the called power to bind it into subservience! Even if this were a mutable truth, how could its awareness of your great crystal’s resonance be masked? The memory of land is scribed in the language of epochs. It endures across cataclysm. Ath Creator did not gift its being with forgetfulness.”

“Then give me a spell of illusion for blinding concealment,” Morriel demanded.

Sethvir looked up from his mug, his eyebrows tipped in patent injury. “Just because you accuse me of deceit doesn’t mean I’ll change my character to become so.” He glanced across at Iyan, who held the spoon in locked jaws, as if he sensed the tensioned undercurrents to words deaf ears could not hear.

Althain’s Warden set down his tea. He turned his back, gave the mute servant’s arm a kindly pat, then vacated his chair to share the cushion in the window seat.

Balked by his move from polite negotiation, Morriel shifted target and accosted Asandir. “Indeed, the hour has come to discuss that arrow once loosed in Vastmark.”

Ghost quiet on his feet, the Sorcerer who arranged the Fellowship’s field work moved his tall frame and claimed Sethvir’s empty chair. He slid the filled tea mug aside and laced his fingers over crossed forearms. “You provoked an attempt to assassinate Arithon s’Ffalenn by fanning Duke Bransian’s urge for blood feud.” His riposte matched hers like testing, cold steel. “No light matter.”

“For that you hobbled the powers of our Great Waystone, admit it,” Morriel accused. Eyes like jet bead bored into the Sorcerer’s of impenetrable, mirror-glass gray. “You protect Rathain’s prince, peril that he is. A mage-trained master fallen under curse of violence will incite more deaths than that one, on Duke Bransian’s arrow. I’ll say what I think. Your Fellowship has never regarded the people on this world as more than expendable ciphers.”

“We’ll set aside the question of whether you’re qualified to make any judgment on that.” Asandir gave no sign he was perturbed. “The issues are separate, in fact.”

“I see.” Morriel raked up a disdainful cough. “The nature of an inanimate earth and its resistance to change weighs more than our Waystone’s potential to spare cities with children and families from the misfortunes of storm or disaster?” She stabbed a stiff finger from beneath her layered fortress of blankets. “Condemn yourself, Sorcerer, by those answers already given.”

The tallow dip flared, streamed by an affronted swirl of draft. But whichever discorporate Sorcerer roused up for rebuttal bowed before Asandir’s prior claim to defense. “Lady Morriel, where are your grounds for dispute? Athera’s land and natural resource were never placed at humanity’s disposal.”

“Which point is moot, since your precious Paravians have left their ancestral ground.” Morriel jabbed home her point. “Will you
endorse bloodshed just to hold your lofty place as guardians of their abandoned heritage? While you mourn for vanished unicorns, our cities slide further into violence. Your Teir’s’Ffalenn is too perilous a presence to leave at large in the world. I see you’re not blind to the flaws in his nature. If your Fellowship won’t act to curb his lethal cleverness, our order must. Lysaer’s rule offers selfless governance, a fair concern for the needs of society. The obsessions the Mistwraith has driven him to embrace will fade without fuel if Arithon is removed as his target. I find no justification whatsoever for restraint. How should any one life be worth the thirty thousand left dead at Vastmark?”

“Because we are not speaking for one individual, but of the survival of all life on Athera,” Kharadmon snapped with blistering irony.

“That is the root of our quandary,” Asandir admitted.

The clipped note to his speech arrested Morriel’s tirade. She narrowed seamed eyes and read closer, disturbed by the precedence that Luhaine permitted his rival’s remark to stand unchallenged. Through the coarse, ruddy flare of the tallow dip, past the vicious play of static thrown off by the unshielded Waystone, she at last interpreted Asandir’s stark patience for the stillness of a desperate uncertainty.

“What have you done?”
she whispered point-blank. Then in knifing accusation, “How is our world set at risk?”

“The peril is not new, but an ongoing extension of the trouble begun when man first created the aberrated mists of Desh-thiere.” Asandir sat forward. “If I may?” He caught up the Waystone in long fingers, impervious, as though it possessed no more hazardous an aura than a chunk of unwarded glass.

The Prime Enchantress bridled. Convinced he had the effrontery to mock her by degrading her grand focus as a scrying stone, she gathered herself to revile him. Yet he did nothing but pass the jewel back across the table.

“Your jewel sets off a disturbing dissonance,” he temporized as he ceded its cold weight into her protective grasp. “Better we ease the distraction before the next subject is explored.”

Morriel Prime tugged a silk shawl from her knees and veiled the sullen glimmer of the Waystone. She felt disgruntled, manipulated, and pricked by the awareness that Asandir’s gently innocuous request urged dismissal of her complaint. She would not be side-tracked from her mission. Nor would she be lulled by the informal nature of Sethvir’s bachelor hospitality. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. Placed firmly on guard, she must anticipate their ploys, even as they offered diversions that led off on tangents.

“Are the wards on Rockfell Pit gone unstable?” She settled the Waystone in the hollow of her lap and waited in rankling patience.

“Those defenses are secure,” Kharadmon assured from his overhead vantage above the door arch. “But Desh-thiere was divided upon its entry to Athera. The greater concentration of its fog was turned away, as we have unsettling proof. The uncontained portion cut off on the gate world of Marak is anything but a dead entity.”