Traitor's Knot (35 page)

A command sigil blazed red as a sign-post. Aimed arrow of purpose, the bound spirit dropped through the gateway framed at its heart. Now tempered as a tool, her consciousness broke through and emerged into the scald of bright sunshine, and ocean-fresh air, spiked with the pitch tang of oakum…

‘…how aware are they?' Dakar the Mad Prophet was saying. Seated cross-legged on the warmed planks of a ship's deck, he resembled a dollop of suet rolled up in a knot of old rags.

‘I don't actually know,' mused the Prince of Rathain, poised intent by the pin-rail above him.

Something banged in the hollow space belowdecks.

Arithon paused. Equally rumpled in torn breeches and soiled shirt, he raised dark eyebrows at the shouts that erupted from the depths of the
Evenstar's
hold. To judge by the cursing, her sailhands encountered some fouling nuisance involving pinched fingers and ballast rocks. Though the brig where he lounged was left becalmed in the aftermath of a seasonal storm, the cant of the timbers beneath his braced feet bore a distinct list to starboard.

Planking shuddered to another booming report of a large stone being shifted to port.

Dakar winced with his eyes shut. ‘If the crew keeps on fumbling boulders like that, we'll spring all the dastardly seams in this tub long before the keel's sitting level.'

Arithon grinned. ‘You happen to be sitting on Cattrick's best work. If he ever hears of your slanging remark, you'll become dropped meat underneath his bludgeoning fist.'

‘We have to reach shore, first.' Dakar's jaundiced attention shifted and measured the vital figure above him. ‘Who needs Cattrick's rough temper?
That
look on
your
face spells trouble, right here.'

Impervious to rancour, Arithon pursued the lapsed thread of his earlier reasoning. ‘Fiends don't appear to originate thought.'

Dakar's horrified flinch also failed to swerve him off topic.

‘…or emotion. At least, when I ply them with musical tones, they don't respond, except by reflection. They experience by imprint, without innovation.
Complex patterns will draw them with insatiable greed. That's probably why they fixate upon our intense feelings and delight in our rage and frustration. The innate creativity of conscious awareness lies outside their range of experience.'

‘They are drake spawn.' Dakar's emphatic shrug dismissed a conundrum far better dropped
now
, without further tinkering speculation.

‘Fragments of awareness,' Arithon ploughed on. His gaze surveyed the sail crew at work on the mast-head, then the drifting, puffed clouds overhead; ignored outright, the Mad Prophet's furious, mouthed cue to
be still at once
and stop speaking.

Dakar signalled again, his chopped gesture ignored: as ever, such galling perversity seemed ingrained in the fabric of Arithon's character.

‘…beings conceived from an experimental idea that was never balanced into completion.' Through yet another shuddering crash, and Feylind's yell of admonishment, the Master of Shadow reconsidered the shapeless sack by his feet. His mood of suspect mildness remained throughout his bout of oblivious monologue. ‘Davien's notes were explicit. He explained
iyats
as raw energy granted the willful drive to exist. They sustain as parasites, feeding off borrowed charge, but lacking the self-aware memory of an entity able to grow and evolve. That explains how a sigil was fashioned to hold them. And yet, I imagine coercion through force may have been a bullying waste.'

Dakar stared, aghast. ‘No,' he blurted. ‘You couldn't. Dharkaron's Spear drop you for taking mad risks,
you can't try such a damnfool ploy, now!'

‘Iyats
crave complex patterns,' Arithon repeated. Eyes level, hard as the glint off chipped emerald, he finished his razor-edged point. ‘They might, therefore, respond, led on out of straight fascination.'

‘Arithon! Be quiet!' Harried past subtlety, Dakar ripped at his beard. ‘The Koriathain are onto your game-board, again. Their forsaken sigil's turned active.'

‘Some minutes ago, yes. The dissonance stings. But I have no intent, now or at any time, to grant their meddling wiles even one step off my chosen course.' The Master of Shadow turned his head aft. ‘Feylind! The men aloft, have they restrung the topsail halyard?'

‘Almost,' the captain's reply floated forward. ‘The cracked sheave's repaired. The boy's catching his breath before shinnying back up to the mast-head.'

Arithon's manic interest flashed into a grin. ‘Let's whip up a little experiment, shall we? Could Teive perhaps pass me a suitable line? Then call the hands down from the crow's nest.'

Dakar loosed a martyred breath through his teeth, then clambered aside to make way for the crewmen descending the ratlines. ‘Are you dead certain you ought to try this?'

Arithon laughed. ‘Sure as the scryer's eye tracking my back!'

He received the coiled line, then bent and untied the knotted strings securing the sack. A lightning-fast reach, and his fingers emerged, grasping a glint of rarefied light. Two days of experimentation had let him define the precise
frequency required to shadow a fiend. Tuned in to the range of their volatile energies, the sliver of effort required to stay them had been reduced to an artful subtlety.

Trapped
iyat
in hand, Arithon engaged mastery and tightened his intent into crystalline focus. His etched purpose defined the sequence required to raise and rethread the lift for the topsail halyard. Then, ordered thought framed as template, he let the
iyat
soak up the imprint.

‘Stand clear,' he cautioned. He placed the flaked rope, then loosed the charged fiend from his grasp.

The
iyat
dispersed to a wisped shred of light and faded from view altogether. A drawn second passed. The sailhands watched, riveted. Another moment, while the grousing quips from the hold rang on the windless air. Then the rope twitched. Snake-like, its hemp coils stirred in possession. Sprung out of its coil, it unreeled in a vertical rush, aimed for the topmast crow's nest. The end threaded through the appropriate block, swooped back down, then veered awry in a gleeful dive toward the wallowing swell of the Cildein.

Arithon, laughing, snapped off a fresh shadow. His timely move stripped the fiend from the rope, while Teive's thrifty reflex captured the flailing end before valued cordage lost itself overboard.

‘Feckless creature,' chided Arithon, thoughtful. Mage-sight let him track the creased bolt of distortion left by the fiend's streaking departure. ‘We'll just have to try the manoeuvre again.'

‘You shouldn't,' Dakar grumbled. ‘You're likely to find the rope turned as a whip, if not hanging you up by the throat.'

‘Free will, my Prophet, in law and with strictures.' The Master of Shadow delved back into his warded sack with enthusiastic delight. ‘No starved creature bites the hand bearing gifts. I only have to toy with the mix. You don't think my demand can be tailored to taste? Shall we find out which frequency dazzles a fiend and which drives it to intoxication?'

The on-going trial required three attempts. The deck-hands observed with opened mouths, then played the stakes, taking bets. They slapped their knees and yelled ribald encouragement, while the fiends that had ripped them to shambles and shreds were cajoled into rerigging the topmast tackle. Arithon plied his mastery and refined his touch. His subsequent pranks grew flamboyant. When he set an even dozen to stitching a rent sail, Feylind whooped and cried tears, doubled over in gales of mirth. If a needle was lost, and three fiends defected, the nine that stayed on did a passable job.

None complained of the uneven stitching.

Which dalliance did nothing for Dakar's nipped frown. ‘We still have a scryer riding that sigil,' he reminded with acid remonstrance.

‘Trust me, I know.' Arithon caught his breath. A snared fiend in hand, he nodded in deference toward Teive. ‘We're fit to bear sail?'

‘Oh, aye,' the mate said, easy candour restored. ‘The boys just sent word.
Our ballast's restacked. Give us a fresh breeze, we've just got to bend on the canvas.'

In fact, the brig's keel rode trim again. Her hull settled tight in the water as ever, except for a stripped patch of sheathing.

‘Welcome back, ladies,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn. He glanced briefly downward, as though something pained him: and the eye of the scryer, far distant in Forthmark, spied the green edge of metal, pinned underneath his placed foot.

All the while, the active sigil of tracking had been removed from its original fastening.
Under the opportune gift of a calm, shifting the brig's ballast had raised the watermark high enough to let a swimmer down on a rope. Short work, from there, to spring the fastening nails and pry off the thin sheet of copper. The inscription had not been disrupted, or destroyed. Pressed flat to the decking, unremarked until now, the aggressive sigil now covered a second inert inscription fashioned from charcoal.

Bound into live scrying, the Koriani observer had barely that moment to ponder the cipher's significance. The mark bore no trace of resonant power. Masked out of view, obscured by the Prime's sigil, its form became vexingly hard to discern. Since the figure was copied, it
might
be recognized as Selidie's own construct, lately used to incite a rank plague of fiends. The slight caveat distinguished:
that this configuration had been reversed, line for line executed in mirror image.

Arithon, meanwhile, had not paused to laugh. He now sang a lyrical phrase in Paravian. Two days in recovery, his clear tones struck the air and revived the remembrance of flame: and a coal, once reduced from a living tree's heart-wood, refired to the call of the element. The charcoal mark quickened. Held in passive contact, pressed overtop, the copper-scribed sigil captured the pattern in resonant sympathy.

The Master of Shadow seized the moment and flipped the bright fleck in his hand. ‘Well, ladies, you've had more than plenty of warning to let go and back off your damned spying!'

He flattened his palm. This time without pause to temper his thought, he tore off his stayspell of shadow. The
iyat
he held unfurled and reclaimed its lost freedom. Gifted the limitless bait of live charge, it darted
straight down
, drawn first by the brightened promise of fire, then hooked by the vortex of the active sigil, still linked through the Waystone's roused focus…

Lirenda possessed no resource to break off the scrying's engaged connection. Denied personal autonomy, she could not frame a banishment or disengage the great amethyst. No critical step in evasion was possible without orders, made on the Prime Matriarch's initiative.

Then the moment flashed past. The
iyat
crashed in like a vengeful, shot arrow, consuming the energies of every last stay laid down for guarding protection.
Unable to warn, Lirenda suffered the burn of wild forces as the fiend snagged the raised field of the Waystone. Chaos erupted. Sucked down, whirled under, then punched blind and witless, Lirenda lacked voice for her agony. She could not breathe, could not think, could not feel her own heart-beat. A whisker from death, she raged, helpless.

Then the Prime's shriek of fury shattered the dark.
‘Alt!'

Lirenda snapped free. Dropped limp on the carpet, wrenched dizzy and heaving, she regained a grip on her up-ended senses. Prime Selidie stood above her, wrestling to quell the raging might of the Waystone. Her mastery was contested with virulent force. The loose fiend inside had no mind to relinquish a feast of near-limitless power.

Its fight was not scatheless. As energetic contention flared and whirled through the jewel and torqued the spin of its axis, a sawed note of vibration ripped through structured quartz, chopped short by a spang like snapped wire. A crack sheared one side of the great jewel's matrix, spreading a crackle of craze marks that threatened to shatter the sphere.

‘Alt
, damn you,
Alt!'
the Matriarch howled, desperate. Splashed by filth as Lirenda spewed on the floor, she rammed through the last sequence of ciphers.

The stone's power doused. Just shy of disaster, its aligned focus slammed shut. The invasive fiend stayed locked inside, trapped as a fly caught in amber.

‘Damn the man,
damn him!'
Prime Selidie gasped. Shaking, drained white, she dropped in a limp huddle onto her chair. Her shocked eyes regarded the gossamer smoke that dispersed off the stress-heated crystal. ‘Cursed seed of wild talent, what
have
you done?'

For the massive amethyst had been pressured too far. Not only flawed, not only polluted by an embedded fiend, its clear purple heart was streaked through: intense heat had feathered a raw streak of citrine across the jewel's dark center. The irrevocable change would alter the quartz matrix and shift the sphere's frequency and alignment.

Struck dumb by the penalty of her morning's work, unable to measure the damage done to the order's most irreplaceable resource, Prime Selidie pounded the scarred stubs of her hands in wordless, ferocious frustration. While her spoiled slippers and soaked hems chilled her feet, her tears fore-promised a vengeance beyond words upon Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn.

Late Winter 5671

By the lamp-lit glow of
Evenstar's
chart desk, Arithon prepares a packet of dispatches for Feylind to sail on to Southshire; and to her sharp protest, he answers, unswerved, ‘Your delay will be passed off as damages caused by a natural storm. I shall be gone, with the four in my party well away aboard
Khetienn.
A snared fiend can be dispatched to summon her north and arrange for an off-shore rendezvous…'

With Lysaer s'Ilessid bound upcoast by galley, along with his remnant war host, High Priest Cerebeld meets with Avenor's high council, elated by news just arrived from Raiett Raven's suborned spy ring: ‘
A colossal mistake has just turned in our favour!
Once the Divine Prince receives King Eldir's sealed dispatch, the hard proof that set his princess to flight will lay the ground for our opening to break him…'

Immersed in the earth link, the Warden of Althain dreams a thread of interlinked possibilities: of an enchantress at Ath's hostel, now fated to shoulder a perilous journey; of a flawed amethyst and a Prime Matriarch hobbled; an eagle whose mettlesome impulse has seeded a whirlwind whose harvest will reap bitter fruit, followed hard by the telling, first link that forges the chain into ill-starred event: a vivacious, laughing carrot-haired bride is promised a bolt of scarlet silk for her wedding…