Traitor's Knot (19 page)

Asandir smiled. The expression showed tender sweetness and sorrow, and quite transformed his gruff face. ‘Take the knife given you by the seeress and, at your earliest convenience, return it to its rightful owner.'

‘Who might that be?' Sulfin Evend asked, disbelieving. ‘Do I know him?'

‘Her?' The Sorcerer shook his head. ‘She is the elder of the Biedar, a desert tribe found in the Black Waste of Sanpashir.'

Autumn 5670

While falling leaves and frosts clothed the north in carnelian and gold, edged with diamond, amid the milder lands to the south, the day's early heat streamed through the high colonnades of the ancient hospice at Forthmark. The Koriani Seniors who attended their Prime Matriarch were obliged to wait in the glaring sun of the courtyard. Yet unlike her three sisters, Lirenda was powerless to shed her stifling formal mantle. While sweat trickled down her nape, and her layered skirts clung to her humid ankles, she could not unclasp even one tight button. Chin held high, she was powerless to protect her pampered complexion or raise her hand to relieve the prickle of heat rash inflicted by dampened wool.

No reprieve lay in sight. The courtyard's stonewalls, with their uncanny carvings, blocked the breeze from the snow-clad peaks. Shaded under the overhang, Selidie Prime sat enthroned in a high-backed chair. Her purple mantle draped in pristine folds, the hems stitched with sigils of copper. Beneath pinned gold hair, her aquamarine eyes offset a delicate, doll's face. Exquisite in beauty, her deformity jarred: bundled in linen, her maimed hands lay like clubs on a cushion placed in her lap.

Tragic center of the morning's activity, the most skilled of the hospice's healers bent over the Prime's ravaged limbs. They fussed and conferred, in no rush to finish the delicate task of removing their enspelled bandages.

While the ranked seniors waited, constrained to patience, Lirenda fumed in forced stillness.

A more terrible fate could not be conceived to crush pride and dismantle ambition. Fallen from power and privileged position, Lirenda suffered, consumed by trapped rage, her favoured title stripped from her. Through the
months since she fell under punitive sentence, she fed on her well of balked hate. Though she still owned the knowledge of an eighth-rank initiate, her punishment denied her autonomy. Snared by the sigil of obedience sealed through the matrix of the Great Waystone, Lirenda could not move or speak without a direct command. Kept like an item of valuable furniture, she existed now as a precision tool at the beck and call of the Matriarch.

Unlike the witless ones, stripped as blank husks, Lirenda suffered the corrosive torment of her unimpaired intelligence. Day to day, she endured, her most basic needs enslaved to one voice, that her flesh must obey without question.

She could not speak, though the pretence on-going before her scalded her very blood. She must watch each move as the sigils for reversal, destruction, and regeneration were dissolved, one by one in succession. The polished quartz stylus dipped, flashed, and cut, a moving light in the healer's deft hand. The meticulous work would be tiresome: each eddy of tied energy must be recaptured in crystal, then given release and dispersal. Close handling of such contrary forces required deep concentration. One slip, or one misplaced stroke might easily sever a finger. With unflagging courage, the hospice healer blotted her brow. A skilled assistant answered the Prime's breathless complaint, then offered a posset to numb her gnawing pain. Slowly, the fine gauze bandages were snipped, then unwound with tender care.

Lirenda chafed as the rest of the farce was played through. She seethed to witness each hopeful, faked phrase the Matriarch spoke to her underlings. For this warped creature who sat wearing the mantle of prime power well knew of the gaps that existed between the restorative spells and a resident spirit that did not match the auric matrix of her youthful body. Today's exhaustive effort must fail. The same as it had, week upon week, since the Matriarch's arrival four months ago.

Immersed in their dangerous, intensive labour, the best healers at the order's command still believed they might cure their Prime's ruined hands. Lirenda stayed powerless. She could not divulge the unsavoury secret: that Selidie was a being possessed by the unscrupulous shade of her predecessor. The irony scalded, that
Morriel
sat there, a smug, changeling crone, re-embodied as a slender sylph.

The last layers of the dressing were eased away to a cry of dismay from the healer. For of course, the contracted claw fingers remained frozen amid their scarred calyx of wrecked bone and tissue.

Selidie said no word to ease the distress. Forthmark's most skilled talent exclaimed with bent heads, then faced their defeat with hushed deference. The thin silk mitts were retrieved and slipped over the Matriarch's ghastly infirmity.

‘Next week,' the Prime ordered. ‘You shall try again.'

‘Your will, Matriarch.' The healer dared not argue a direct command, or protest today's thankless dismissal. Oath-bound to obedience, she wrapped her instruments, while her assistants swept up the cut shreds of bandage and
bundled them for disposal. The group curtseyed and filed out, leaving Prime Selidie enthroned in her chair.

Such towering confidence should have raised hackles, had any-one present possessed either authority or courage to try inquiry. Yet Prime rank of itself granted total immunity. The sole voice that might have denounced the vile crime had been crushed by that tyranny, then silenced. As Selidie surveyed the seniors awaiting her needs in the courtyard, Lirenda alone had the sense to be frightened, aware as she was of the ruthless mind behind that peremptory glance.

‘I want Fionn Areth,' the Prime opened at length. ‘He has been left at large for too long. I require him taken back in hand and placed under our order's protection.'

The peeress wearing the fourth band of red rank responded with veiled trepidation. ‘By your will, Matriarch, your command shall be served, though with all due respect, the boy is still kept under lock and key inside warded walls at Alestron. We lack the duke's confidence, and the merchants we hold under our sworn oath of debt have not succeeded in buying his ransom.'

‘This could change, shortly,' Selidie said, crisp. Where, as Morriel, she would have dispatched subordinates with an impersonal snap of her fingers, now, her change of persona compelled her to address them by name. ‘Marisette! Prepare an array for a grand scrying. Lirenda, take charge of my keys and fetch the Great Waystone from the compartment beneath my state chair.' On afterthought, she added, ‘You look hot. If you like, my page can take charge of your mantle as you let yourself out.'

Reduced to a miserable, subservient gratitude, Lirenda swept out on the errand. By the time she returned, shrouded jewel in hand, Forthmark's skilled seeress had completed her protective chalked circles. The quartz sphere for her scrying had been aligned to receive the Prime's influx of tuned spell-craft.

Lirenda placed her wrapped burden in the Matriarch's lap. Under orders, she had to kneel on the tile, then set up the shielded tripod with its forged ring of containment. Next, her fingers were needed to untie the jewel's silk wrappings. She unfolded the cloth, taking desperate care not to graze the perilous contents. The bared presence of the order's great amethyst puckered her skin with unpleasant chills. Worse torment still, she sustained the dazzling proximity of its powerful presence as she used shielded touch, and seated the sphere into its cradle.

Longing seared her to obsessive desire. To be this close to the penultimate might of the order outmatched every concept of cruelty. Lirenda steamed, become little more than the acting hands for a position that should by due right have been hers. A helpless slave, she stepped clear as ordered, while the onlooking seniors took position to one side, and the active seeress settled herself into trance. Then the usurping Prime leaned forward and rested her brow against the faceted jewel. The southern air chilled to ice as she woke the dire force of the Waystone's focus.

Lirenda sensed the harrowing flux of stirred energy as the great amethyst engaged. She shuddered to its contrary tides of charged malice as its matrix was tuned and locked into submission. Once the stone's wayward forces were bound, firmly under the Matriarch's command, Lirenda was asked to enact the sigils to connect the grand focus to a smaller quartz sphere, preset by the seeress for scrying. Harnessed as thoroughly as the massive amethyst, she must act in strict concert, her neat, puppet gestures entrained with the Matriarch's invocation.

When the poised sigils meshed, a thread of hot light burned through the stilled air, there and gone, as the paired crystals equalized their resonance.

‘Now,' said Prime Selidie.

The seeress invoked her high art, made the dedicate vessel to her Matriarch's will.

A saffron streak of sunshine speared through the quartz sphere. As the image resolved fully, the need to empower the Great Waystone became obvious: this scrying bridged an expanse of salt water, prying into the gloom of a ship's cabin lit by the checker-board glare from an open hatch grate. Further, the vessel carried a powerful protective talisman: the view came through scattered with flecks as the cipher warding the hull diffused the imperative of the Prime's sigils. The specialized training of Lirenda's lost rank let her interpret the signature of the lane tide and divine the ship's east-bound course, south-west of the Cascain Islands.

‘Merciful grace!' murmured Forthmark's titled peeress. ‘ I never knew such a potentized scrying could be done in an ocean setting!'

Selidie's secretive lips framed a smile. ‘The
Evenstar
has carried our tag for some time. We had a ship's chandler on our rolls. He discharged his due debt by embedding our wrought-copper sigil under her sheathing when she was careened.'

The elderly senior showed dismayed interest. ‘The merchant brig bearing an Innish registry that's been shipping relief to the west? Don't say her mission hides covert motives.'

‘Listen, you'll see,' Prime Selidie responded. ‘The ship's records might appear spotlessly clean. But her captain has been a loyal supporter of the Master of Shadow since childhood.' Under her direction, Lirenda fine-tuned the array of sigils. The increase in power, upstepped by the Waystone, pressed the air into palpable tension. The scene in the quartz sphere flickered to life and unveiled two figures engrossed in a scathing argument…

‘…won't put in at Innish, to try would be madness!' Feylind's long braid flicked like rope in the shadow, to the adamant toss of her head. ‘A ferreting customs keeper's forced inspection could land us in trouble over our heads!'

Her first mate's remonstrance bounced back, through the irritable clomp of his sea-boots. ‘Because of our passenger? Sithaer's deathless fires, Captain! The crew isn't partial. They'd see your live contraband thrown off for bait before they would sail to
Alestron without putting in for provisions. We'll be down to stale water and salt beef with maggots. Run out of spirits, besides, you'll see your best sailhands swim for Shaddorn's brothels the moment we wear ship to round Scimlade Tip!'

‘Oh, “Captain”, is it? Formal title, but no respect for my orders?' Feylind chose a word she had learned in the stews rousting laggards. ‘The bullheaded crew on this hulk is well paid. They'll use their brains, not their bollocks!'

‘You say?' Before she launched into the rest of her tirade, the mate grinned, caught her close, and pinned her mouth under his challenging lips.

Wrung breathless, half-laughing, Feylind wrenched free. ‘That ploy isn't going to soften me, this time.' She pushed him off, only to find her body assaulted more thoroughly. The hand wound in her shirt front jerked her to a stop. Two buttons tore loose. She was bare underneath. ‘Alestron,' she gasped, as her mate cupped her breast. He kissed her again, and through the busy interval, expertly began to unbreech her.

‘What about your twin?' Neat, sun-browned, and sculpted with muscle, her longtime lover tasted her ear, then her throat. ‘Fiark will gut you if you break a schedule that's been kept as dependable as the turn of the tides.'

‘Fiark can howl himself inside out—'

Smothered again, Feylind pounded the mate's back as he lifted her onto the berth.

‘Stop biting,' he grumbled into her neck. ‘This tub stops at Innish, as scheduled. The runaway woman can be dressed up in slops. Hands chapped like that, and scrubbing a deck, she wouldn't be given a second glance.' A pause, a heave, and a burst of soft laughter. ‘Feylind, you wild cat, why not just give in and enjoy this!'

Her reply emerged muffled from behind his broad chest. ‘Randy stud horse! Why don't you give up? I won't forget how we dumped standing orders to transfer a specific party of hot fugitives onto the Khetienn, off shore.'

That persistent subject engendered a sharp pause. The mate rolled onto his back, Feylind caught against him, her slender waist fanned by the crimped gold of her braid, which, rifled of its tie, came undone. ‘Dharkaron's Spear and Black Horses, woman! Will you never let loose? Fiark will have dispatched a fishing lugger long since to sail that bunch out to rendezvous.'

Feylind slugged the blanket beside the mate's ear. Her man never flinched, only shifted his shoulders and kneaded languorous fingers into her nape.

‘He didn't,' Feylind retorted, though with less heat. ‘Dakar hates fishing boats, and the rescue in Jaelot was a Koriani game-piece. Did you know that the witches spell-crafted a grass-lands goatherd for bait? He's said to look like Arithon's double. Dakar's too wily to play loose with that quarry. I'll lay you six coin weight, gold, to a toss in the sheets, that the spellbinder will have stayed stranded in port before entrusting his charge to a bought captain and a strange vessel.'

‘Here's my toss in the sheets, and without your pestering contest,' the mate murmured, complacent. His grin flashed in the gloom, then vanished again, to nibble another sweet patch of flesh.

Feylind gasped and recoiled, just once. Then she flushed and subsided against him. ‘I'll show you exactly what you can toss…