The Ships of Merior (60 page)

Horror still revisited through his recollection of the trials, the miasma of late-burning oil lamps intermingled with the sweaty fear of the accused. Then the weeping agony of the families through the purges, as every man, woman and child suspected of sorcerous activity, or in sheltering the queen in her escape, was sent to the executioner’s block for justice. The poisoned, vicious anger of his royal father still cut, at his request to ask his mother’s family for the training to develop his born talents to full advantage.

Whatever cloaking spells and trickery Queen Talera had used to shame her lawful marriage and beget her bastard, her cuckolded husband never shed his passionate distrust of magecraft. Her legitimate firstborn had grown to manhood without so much as a herb witch to tell him whether he had inherited any further arcane potential from the distaff side of his bloodline.

Whereas Arithon had been raised by the high mage himself. His powers had been moulded by the arduous discipline demanded by a master’s training

Lysaer jabbed the butt of his spear into the loam of the deerpath. The breeze had died. Sun cloaked his shoulders in unpleasant heat as his track meandered through the bottomlands, crossed like sable braid with the trickles of spring-fed freshets. His uneasy mind spared no thought for the splash of startled frogs and the whirred wings of marsh wrens and blackbirds. Distaste for his charge warred with childhood jealousy, never quite silenced by the principles expounded by his father.

The words still haunted, burred with the memory of the wax-scented gloom of the privy chamber as the royal spate of rage finally cooled.
‘My son, ideals and strengths and the foundation of sound rule are never so simply reconciled. A king who values his subjects will treat with them as a fellow man. Power to upset natural order goes ill with royal office, that by nature must wield influence over lives. The concepts of justice and fairness are not born through greater strength. They spring instead from sympathy with the lowliest weakness.’
The King of Amroth had looked upon his heir, the seams of a life-time’s bitter decisions softened to entreaty on his face.
‘The judgements you make for the crown when you inherit will be hard enough on the heart. You will need a mind undivided between the laws that must govern humanity and the uncanny secrets of the mysteries.’

Experience lent vicious validation to such counsel.

Queen Talera had been moved to desert her family for something more than spiteful vengeance. She had gone, she insisted, to right a balance, then been lonely enough to bury the grief of her sacrifice in the comfort of illicit love.

Briefly beguiled into friendship with her bastard, Lysaer had seen the insidious way fine knowledge of
power could corrupt mercy. The secret fear rode his heart: how the means to sway fate might corrode a man’s spirit to forget his humanity and embrace an abstruse creed without pity. Wider knowledge could blind the eye to suffering; or why else should Athera’s greatest arcane order give even indirect sanction to a prince who had turned the shining wisdom of his upbringing toward acts of unconscionable slaughter?

Shadows had been used to entrap an army; magecraft itself, to bind and kill.

And yet the Fellowship sorcerers who held the sure resource to forbid such offences stood back and did nothing at all.

Lysaer refused to resent the sorry fact that he stood alone in his resolve. He would act and risk perilous consequences to find whether the Koriathain were willing to lend their arts to help him track down a felon.

The enchantress’s cottage lay deep in the glens. Upon Lysaer’s arrival, late day spun cobwebbed shadows across vibrant green moss and tender grasses. Shoots of sprouting herbs and the whiskered leaves of coltsfoot grew in hoed rows by the snaggled sprawl of a withy fence. The dilapidated dwelling beyond sagged in the roof beams like a toadstool leaning to rot. But the shutters were whitewashed and the stone step swept clean of debris. Footsore, thirsty, his heartbeat rushed by apprehension, Lysaer strode up to knock.

The panel swung open to his touch. From a gloom flecked by the unsteady eye of one candle, a cracked porcelain voice bade him enter.

The boar-spear was too unwieldy to carry indoors. Lysaer rested its shaft against the outside lintel. The hasty breath he snatched to brace his nerve was ingrained with must, tallow grease and unwashed fleeces, and a fierce tang of aromatic herbs. Beneath lurked a taint of less pleasant things: of stale ash and husked insects trapped in cobwebs; of rust and dried
blood and grated rootstock. A tingle kissed his nape as he stepped in to a shrill squeak of floorboards.

Something moved beyond the light like the smooth slide of bone against cloth. ‘You do not come to hunt beasts, son of s’Ahelas.’

Startled to be named for his mother’s kin, Lysaer sidestepped in failed effort to escape the glare of the candle. Stopped by the touch of something iron against his knee, he sensed the bundles of dried herbs in the rafters, and wool hooks draped with pallid skeins of yarn. ‘I came to seek counsel.’

The tart voice snapped in correction. ‘You came to ask to know the refuge of your half-brother, Arithon, your purpose to arrange for his death.’ In flame-rimmed outline, a withered hand lifted. An unseen treadle creaked, and the starred spokes of a spinning-wheel squeaked to life in a sudden whir of air.

Rinsed in trickled sweat, Lysaer made out the crone’s form. She sat, swathed in dull cloth, hair like spun glass and spider’s thread an uncombed blur in the darkness. Hooded eyes fixed him, sunken pits in a skull. The cleft lips looked as if they were stitched the way paupers dressed corpses out for burial.

Lysaer raised his courage to open a distasteful negotiation. ‘Do the Koriathain condone the wanton use of arcane power? Walls and buildings in Jaelot were unlaced, stone from stone, and none who suffered saw justice.’

The spinning wheel settled into rhythm. ‘You speak of an event on a coastline far beyond the chartered boundaries of Tysan.’ A sibilance of cloth, a scratch of dry fleeces and yarn turned off the spindle, teased between waxy, crabbed fingers.

‘Rathain’s own prince was the instigator.’ Calm under questioning, Lysaer said, ‘Do the powers of Athera permit such a prince to despoil the same cities bound under his sovereign protection?’

The crone’s chin lifted. Tor this you set yourself to pluck a man’s life from the hands of Daelion Fate-master?’

Bored through by a gaze like struck flint, measured in every detail, even down to the trembling gold highlight on his hair, Lysaer forced a bold step. ‘I would defend the weak and the innocent against any man whose misuse of grand conjury caused them harm.’

The whickered turn of the wheel held steady. Pin-wheel shadows flared over a plank table, a leather chest, and a hamper of laced withies in one corner. ‘If I grant you the scrying you desire, you will use it to violate the peace. Our Koriani creed cannot sanction bloody war.’

Lysaer advanced to preserve the initiative. ‘I haven’t come empty-handed.’

‘A bribe? That’s impertinence, to presume earthly wealth could sway any sister of my order.’ The crone heaved up a coarse scratch of laughter. ‘Prince, you waste time. Take up your spear and go hunt the boar. He would show you more sport for less danger.’

Hands clasped before him in cool censure, Lysaer said, ‘I give the beggars in my court a better hearing.’

A creased palm slapped the whirling wheel to a stop. ‘Would a beggar offer bloodprice to take his half-brother’s life?’

‘Would you let a point of kinship overset a whole kingdom’s right to justice?’ Across darkness, through eddyless air clogged with the rancid reek of tallow, Lysaer felt the probe of the enchantress’s regard like subliminal pressure against his bones. Iron to his core, ruled every breath by royal dignity, he quelled the swift prick of affront, that this enchantress should dare to question his morals, or doubt his fitness to act on behalf of a jeopardized society. ‘In allowance for mercy, I would say instead that I petition for help to mete out a swift act of cautery. Who else is qualified to outmatch this evil? Or should civilization be abandoned to suffer, and a
people see ruin for a sentimental principle, hinged on an accident of birth? Do we shelter one life, regardless of ancestry, then sanction the act of mass murder? Answer me fairly: can the breach between townsman and clan-born ever hope to be healed for as long as Rathain’s prince remains alive?’

The treadle squeaked again and revived the lagged spin of the wheel. ‘You imply the Koriani Senior Circle is remiss? For Arithon s’Ffalenn, Morriel Prime has already made disposition.’ A tuft of wool flitted free of the crone’s grasp and drifted like an errant spirit across the candle’s thin halo. ‘You mistake us. We are not as the Fellowship, to turn blind eyes to events. I can lend your endeavour this much, Prince of Tysan: you shall suffer no interference. Should you find your quarry and run him to ground, force of arms shall be left to prevail.’

‘You would dismiss me unheard?’ Lysaer cried.

An invisible movement jerked the tint on a draught, and a snake hiss whisper lashed the gloom. ‘How dare you!’

But the implied admission stood:
that the Koriani Prime already knew the Shadow Master’s whereabouts.

Lysaer outfaced the crone’s ire. ‘Before the Mistwraith invaded Athera, your order did not trifle with nursing the sick. They peddled no petty charms for iyat bane and let herb witches attend birthings and sick livestock. Koriani magecraft at one time was said to cure mortal wounds. Initiate sisters weren’t culled from your orphanages, but sent to your hospices by parents, lest their talents languish without teaching. What of your hopes to restore such lost influence? Is your sisterhood content to remain overshadowed by events? As a prince pledged to mend this land’s rifts and sad hatreds, I would suggest your Prime’s goal and mine at heart aren’t so terribly different.’

The crone’s gaze devoured him now, sharply enough to raise a flush. Hazed by his own rapid heartbeat, Lysaer
finished on a drawn note of acid. ‘I beg to suggest this exchange is no tawdry bargain, but a just restoration of a moral balance. I once visited Althain Tower. Sethvir’s storerooms hold treasures that perhaps should be brought into daylight.’

‘You meddle beyond your depth, Prince!’ But the enchantress faltered in her spinning. The wheel lost impetus. Slackened a bare instant from firm tension, the yarn snapped into spring-loops and tangles, unnoticed as her eyes pinned his face.

Riled by the disparate sense of being memorized for future study, Lysaer lifted his spread palm and raised the bright current of his gift.

Light bloomed from his fingertips. The sediment of gloom flowed away as though strained from murky water to unveil the cramped room in its poverty: the threadbare coverlet on the trucklebed, moth-nipped and fringed with ravelled seams; furnishings worn to a patina of hard use; and walls swagged in warped shelves, crammed with a herbalist’s collection of flasks and packets of root stocks.

The enchantress proved an angular woman with sunken cheeks and puffed hands. Her shapeless brown twill hung speckled with wax and napped to frayed seams at the cuffs. Brown walnut eyes might have been warm, were they not touched to an impervious glitter that stabbed even the dead air for its secrets.

‘Speak your bribe then, Prince.’ Her face a leather mask, she added, ‘If you seek to gain, you must abide by my judgement. Your case will be weighed on grounds of moral merit, but beware. You trespass in affairs beyond your depth.’

Lysaer drew breath and found himself trembling after all. Necessity impelled him to commit himself. ‘I have seen in the store vaults at Althain a weighty sphere of cut amethyst. Traithe named that jewel the Waystone of the Koriathain.’

The crone gave a clipped cry. A candle-caught sparkle of tears rinsed her cheeks, quarried in seams and tired hollows. ‘We never knew,’ she said in a shattered whisper.

Misplaced since the time of the uprising, the Great Waystone held capacity to channel the trained awareness of one hundred and eighty enchantresses. The crystal had stood as the keystone of Koriani power. Since its disappearance, the sisterhood had been as a body blinded, reduced to crippling weakness.

If means could be found to restore its possession into the hands of the Prime, the order could rebuild its lost influence. The Koriathain might regain their former strength to steer events in mercy and compassion; to alleviate those trends of daily suffering the Fellowship in its arrogance deemed unworthy of attention. Through the Great Waystone, the medicinal virtues of herbals could be raised beyond individual treatment, plagues could be averted, the course of storms bent aside; earthquake and wildfire forced quiescent. Once more the order could act to spare the world from its imprint of senseless, natural disasters.

The crone sat bemused, her hands draped loose amid the carded wool in her lap. ‘Ath bless your vision, Prince of Tysan.’ Flushed to deep gratitude, she attended the matter of his asking price. ‘Approach and stare into the candle flame. My art shall grant the augury you ask of us.’

Lysaer dispelled the blaze of his gift. While the shadows rushed back and veiled her in obscurity, he crossed the worn, creaking boards. The isolate flame glowed through his hair, the tips of each strand fired bright as spun wire. He aligned his sight as the crone had directed, and inhaled the fragrance of lavender and pennyroyal and mint, and the fox-musk scent of whatever had been used to cut the oil from raw fleeces.

The crone neither spoke nor moved. Her lashes stayed
parted as her eyes glazed blindly into trance. The knuckles in her lap twitched once and stilled, chapped to cracks like the glaze on cheap crockery.

Tense, lightly sweating, Lysaer waited empty-handed for the magic to touch him. Seconds passed. The candle’s fire bent and wavered and thrashed up its rippled, thready fumes. His eyes burned with the strain of fixed focus. The transition that plunged into prescient dream fell seamless and silent, outside his five senses to fathom.

One moment he stood in the enchantress’s cramped cottage. The next breath he was nowhere at all, a disembodied presence shot through a swoop of uneasy distress. Then his awareness contracted into a sharp, focused vision that encompassed a vista far distant …