Master of Whitestorm (31 page)

The sequence of memories seemed unending and every one of them lacerated.

A duke defied for the sake of an infant in peril;
another, a tavern girl with large hands he had left, because she had tempted him with sweet innocence and a trust that made him sick with the resurgence of fear.
Terror founded the worst of his faults, made him flee to fight wereleopards. Because death by fey killers alone in the dark was easier,
easier,
than loving a girl without any wall to defend her.

There were no safe havens, no crannies of conscience that did not sting. Carralin died in his bed, in his absence, her hopes ripped out with her throat. Korendir had survived the brother’s vengeance in the caves of Ellgol, because in pitting his sword against wereleopards, he did not have to think; each cat slain meant one more frightened girl might be spared.

Ithariel sampled the bitterness, the futile grief, and every step made in purest terror. She shared Korendir’s split knuckles as he dressed gray granite into blocks for the bastions at Whitestorm. She lived his dreams, and could not endure them. Left no awareness beyond an agonized instinct to flee, she doubled back to seek harbor in the eddyless oblivion of the womb.

There, tucked like a frightened rabbit in the heart of a half-formed fetus, she remembered her one true name. Control returned to her scourged and battered spirit. Her magic was blunted with weariness, and drained spells clung like cobwebs over her innermind. Yet before she engaged the sequence that would key her back to consciousness, her detached enchantress’s intuition uncovered a thing unknown to the man himself.

She saw a forgotten place from his infancy, bleak with smoke and battle and the shadowed, hideous shapes of creatures never born upon Aerith. There a man in bleeding armor handed an infant wrapped in blankets to a servant poised by a postern.

“Take him, and swear to me,
swear!
Never tell anyone who his parents are. If you do, that knowledge will bring his death.”

The servant reached out, weeping as though his heart would break. And as the father handed over the bundle that wrapped his son, his face showed briefly by lantern light. Gray eyes, he had, and russet hair; Ithariel saw the device on his surcoat, and recognized at once who he was.

Then the man stepped back into darkness. “Go,” he said gruffly to the servant. “Keep faith, and may the blessing of my gratitude reward you for as long as our lives may last.”

XVII

MAJAXIN’S REVENGE

ITHARIEL FOUGHT
through exhaustion and found the spark of conscious will needed to disperse her misfired spell. She opened her eyes to the chamber she had always known as home, but which would never again seem the same.

Her eyes streamed tears. The pins had somehow slipped from her hair, and the russet length of her braid unwound itself over her back. She had sought the key to a man’s will, and instead, become heir to suffering which shattered peace. Comfort did not exist to ease the scars of such experience; the memory could only be abided.

She wondered whether she would scream, as Korendir continually feared he might, when the nightmares broke her dreams as she slept.

Her shoulders shook with emotions she could not escape. Never until now had she guessed how perfectly suited this adventurer was for the task she had chosen him to undertake. The irony cut that she might have spared herself pain and asked openly, and won his willing assistance. Now simplicity became complicated by the haunted turn of mind that made him stubborn; also, though he could not know, by the stolen secret of his paternity.

Ithariel of the White Circle wept, having tasted his measure of despair.

That moment, she noticed the hands that steadied her; their warmth cradled her back and one pearl-draped, silk-clad shoulder. At some point, the black sword had gone; he had set it aside to rise and stand by her. She looked up into eyes that mirrored all the horrors of hell, and in them found a compassion that against all credibility still endured.

The shock of discovery undid her; in all the Kingdoms of Aerith, he alone could count her sorrows, both those newly inherited, and ones of her past she had summoned him in hope to absolve. Ithariel bent her head and collapsed, tear-blind against the hollow of his throat. “Cruel man, what have you done?”

His arms moved, folded her into an embrace that promised the patience of ages. “Compounded an error of judgment, it would seem.” He worked a twist from her braid and smoothed down the loosened ends. “I intended no worse than to keep your spells from my mind.”

Not to have forced her to share every waking horror he had meticulously kept hidden from every man, Ithariel knew too well. She had seen behind his reserve; his present calm was possible only because he had nothing in him left to hide. She had sounded his depths and partaken of the sick fear that drove him repeatedly into risk. Limp against him, her cheek pressed to scars left by swordcuts and slave whips, she listened to the beat of his heart. Korendir’s hands on her back were steadier by far than his nerves.

For all that, he was first to ask his will of her. “Ithariel, return me to the duke.”

His resumption of a principle that could only end by killing him bespoke something deeper than obstinacy. Disrupted from pursuit of understanding by a surprising sting of resentment, Ithariel pulled back from his touch. “Did you think I called you without purpose?”

He sat back on his heels, hands draped lightly over his thighs. The motive behind his insistence by now lay hidden as he said, “Whatever it is, I must refuse.”

Ithariel rose. Hair fell dark as poured wine over her collarbones as she stepped on light feet to the candlestand. There, with her hands braced on cold iron and the eyes he could not see closed to dam a desperate flood of tears, she spoke. “Would you go without hearing my terms?” And she named them, though to do so was cruelest betrayal.

“Korendir of Whitestorm, undertake a single task for me, and I will grant the capstone of tallix crystal you desire to complete your stronghold. The ward imprinted within shall hold your granite firm through battle, quake, flood, and fire, even should the sea rise up, or the sun change course from west to east. That is the prize for my contract. Will you accept?”

Ithariel sensed movement, but dared not look around. His boots clicked deliberately on stone floor, one step, two; then she heard nothing at all. She need not see his face to know the intense, ungovernable longing her offer had loosed in his heart. The capstone he had dreamed of could only be obtained through an appeal to the White Circle; a boon for which no coin might bargain. Now the vision he had labored, killed, and nearly lost his mind to achieve was being offered in reward for a single service.

The silence stretched on. The musty wool smell of tapestries hung on the eddyless air. “What do you ask of me?” Korendir’s voice sounded lifeless, resigned to inevitable surrender.

Ithariel tightened her grip until wrought-iron ridged her palms and every knuckle went white. She took a breath. Candleflame shimmered in reflection over the pearls at her neck as she said, “Destroy Tir Amindel and the ward crystal you desire is yours.”

Without warning his hard fingers caught her. He broke her hold and spun her around in a whirl of fallen hair. She glimpsed ice in his eyes before her last loop of braid slipped free and veiled her vision. But his rage remained evident in his speech, threatening as steel across whetstone.

“Am I a child, to be coaxed with a promise of bright stones? Destroy Tir Amindel! Gut the fairest work of architecture in all of Aerith in trade for the immortality of my miserable refuge? Lady, I have a price, but none great enough to buy that feat. Return me to the duke. Better I die for his wretched pride than perpetuate the brutality that burned Shan Rannok.”

Ithariel did not answer; could not, for the measure of his sacrifice ceded to her the most deeply dishonorable choice.

The man she had outraged could not know this. He shook her, not gently, and her hair flung back to reveal tears that had nothing to do with the pain in him. She understood, to a fine point, precisely what she had asked; she also had her reason. “Who was the builder of Tir Amindel?” she demanded with sudden sharpness.

Taken aback, Korendir regarded her. “The sorcerer, Majaxin, if the King of Faen Hallir’s archives say truly.” His hands bit a shade less harshly into her flesh. “But the transgressions of major enchanters are not the concerns of a man. Let the White Circle attend to their own.”

The rage in him remained; his eyes stayed guarded and his mouth turned down like a cleft chiseled into rock. He would see his dream die before he changed his mind, Ithariel understood. She had no avenue left except to appeal to his integrity, and that was going to cost.

“White Circle enchanters are the only powers on Aerith who are incapable,” she said on a note of regret. She moved against the pressure of his hold and this time he let her go. “Have you ever heard of the Six Great Banes?”

Korendir backed off. He set his shoulders against the wall in a gap between paired tapestries. On his left, an armored knight addressed a lady veiled in sorrow; to his right, a hunter pursued a wounded stag. If he played the part of the deer, Ithariel reflected, the images were apt; his nature was his weakness. At some point, he had recovered the black sword. It rested in the sheath at his hip, and his hand traced the grip as if each passing minute abraded his nerves, but he was listening. “You’d better explain.”

The fate of the moment was upon her; too late the enchantress wished she could back away. “What I’m about to relate is unknown beyond the White Circle.”

Ithariel paced to the opposite side of the chamber, opened a drape, and stared beyond at the night sky and stars. Her voice resumed, deadened by the hangings. “You’re a well-read man, but the Banes of the mages are not written out in any archive. They are spoken by rote only, and they name the perils that enchanters cannot encounter without ruin. Three reside within Aerith, and three within the otherworld of Alhaerie.”

Here another adventurer might have questioned, or raised protest that a thing accursed to wizards might offer greater risk for a man of mortal birthright. Korendir spoke only to offer insight of his own. “The Mathcek Demons must be one such peril.”

Jolted by his chance irony, Ithariel nodded. “Since the fall of Morien at Alathyr, yes. He was a fully invested Archmaster, but his powers availed nothing. His Council Major perished with him. The second Bane is Querstaboli, the water elemental which lairs in the isles off Emarrcek. The last, to our sorrow, is Tir Amindel.”

No move and no sound came from Korendir.

His silence lent her courage.

Fixed in her purpose as the stars beyond the casement, Ithariel told of Majaxin, whose obsession for beautiful things had led him to infamy and exile. Most powerful of wizards, his last vengeance against the White Circle which disowned him was the abduction of the Archmaster’s daughter, then sixteen, and her father’s dearest pride. Majaxin had imprisoned her in a cave on the edge of Sithmark, and ward over her was the greatest tallix crystal ever mined.

Here Ithariel caught an edge of the curtain and worried it between her hands. “Eriel bore Majaxin a son and a daughter. She died two years later from sorrow and abuse, and though her fate was kept secret for close to a decade, the White Circle enchanters heard. They moved against her murderer. Majaxin was betrayed into capture by the designs of his own son.” Velvet crushed and smoothed and crushed again between the enchantress’s fingers. “Although the boy’s actions were just, he was never so brave. He took his own life in remorse. Majaxin stood trial, and was fairly sentenced to death.”

Ithariel released the crumpled curtain, aware that if she continued her voice would break. As she strove to restore her composure, the set of her back must have alerted Korendir. She did not hear his approach, but started slightly as warm hands closed over her shoulders.

Gently he turned her around. He saw the tears that ran down perfect cheekbones, to splash and scatter droplets through her pearls. He spoke no word, but cradled her head against his chest until she steadied enough to continue.

Ithariel told of the code of redemption, which lawfully allowed the condemned a final act of good will to temper his history of crime. Majaxin built Tir Amindel. The city was offered as a home for all he had wronged, but in the inspired genius of its beauty, he wove a bleak geas of bane. Any White Circle enchanter to enter there became trapped, never to leave, never to die.

Cold in the circle of Korendir’s embrace, Ithariel ended her tale. “A crystal laid in the cellars of the ducal palace compels their lives to felicity. You have walked the streets of Tir Amindel. You’ll recall a people without grief, or anger, or peace. Laughter and smiles were the only expressions you observed, though tragedy or offense might ache the heart. You must also have guessed the worst, that although the original inhabitants live on to a weariness of days, their offspring do not. They bear and die as mortals do, but deprived of natural emotions.”

Ithariel straightened in Korendir’s arms. Her face had lost its control. “Majaxin was my father,” she said, knowing understanding would tear through the mercenary like a knife.

The enchantress slipped clear of his hands. He allowed her, attuned to her need for private grief; what he had no means to guess was the disastrous potential for risk that she invoked by involving him.

Yet without his singular talents, hope died. No other in Aerith could aid her. Ithariel raised her head, stared at stars, and stated her final plea. “If the tallix crystal is shattered, the city will fall. Even now, the duchess and her husband laugh hysterically over the corpse of a little boy. They suffer most cruelly without tears. Tir Amindel is the last and greatest of my father’s sins. I beg you to bring it down, to break Majaxin’s banespell and set the inhabitants free.”

* * *

Sunlight shone kindly over the city of Tir Amindel; it glanced in starred rays off crystal-tipped spires, and burnished stone bastions against a backdrop of glowering cloud. Korendir of Whitestorm adjusted with a sailor’s ease to the heave of the ferry that battled the chop on Kelharrou Lake. A windblown figure in black, he studied the city skyline. Where another man might be reluctant to believe that hostility could motivate such artistry, the mercenary chose without regret. Tir Amindel would fall, swiftly and cleanly as a blossom razed by the scythe.

Ithariel had warned that the tallix which guarded the city’s geas might unleash perils upon any who interfered with it; beyond that she could not qualify. All Korendir possessed against the sorceries of Majaxin was a sliver of spell-crystal imbued with every protection in Ithariel’s power; the jewel hung from his neck on a length of braided chain. Against the wrath of the duke, she left him the mail from Emarrcek, and the stallion that had matched a wereleopard’s speed. The bright surcoat Korendir had refused, out of preference for his threadbare black.

Clouds veiled the sun and smothered the rainbow refractions atop Tir Amindel’s bright towers. Gusts from the east blew heavy with rain, and whitecaps smacked the ferry at the waterline, threading fingers of foam across her decks.

“Mean looking squall,” observed a gaudily dressed merchant who parked his bulk against the rail. Mistaking the mercenary for a courier, he added, “If you’re looking to keep dry in comfort, there’s a tavern on the harness maker’s street that serves a decent stew.”