Traitor's Knot (36 page)

Winter 5671

S
ulfin Evend had never been dazzled, first hand, by Avenor's former princess from Etarra. Her fabled beauty and her fiery wit were volatile subjects, wisely avoided in his liege's presence. Since her death had occurred before his appointment to rank, the repercussive response caught him off guard when the dispatch set under King Eldir's seal reached the hand of the Blessed Prince. The packet exposed an intractable truth, backed up by names and hard proof. Talith's murder, concealed by a conspiracy as suicide, sparked off an explosion that smashed the restraint of eight months of sensible planning.

Every painstaking, laid strategy became swept aside.

The insane speed at which Lysaer put his galley to sea and on scorching course for Avenor pitched his Lord Commander at Arms to a state of stripped nerves without precedent.

‘You are taking an unmentionable risk, and for what? A woman whose demise happened years ago! Another month, and you'll have our new recruits behind you. Go forward with less than five companies at your back, and you won't have enough strength to cordon your gates. Who knows what evil might slip through the breach? This rush to move now is stark madness!'

Lysaer s'Ilessid chose not to reply. His stance on the deck was as steel, utterly set against reason.

Sulfin Evend had known he might face his own death; peril in war was his venue. Yet at the end of the galley's drenching run north, tied up at the dock at Avenor, the dread that reamed chipped ice through his veins outstripped
every concept of fear. He had argued himself raw, held his ground like scraped flint, that Fellowship counsel gave short shrift to the folly of standing untrained against necromancy.

No adamant word changed the outcome. The party of picked officers gathered on deck, resplendent in parade arms, and glittering braid, and immaculate sunwheel surcoats. Sulfin Evend shut his eyes against the stabbing glare, while the clammy sweat trickled under his mail coat and gambeson.

‘You are the right hand of justice,' addressed a taut voice at his side. ‘More than Tysan's people rely on the justice we march to enact here, today'

‘I would be elsewhere,' Sulfin Evend replied. A kind hand clasped his shoulder, provoking recoil. He opened his eyes before thought.

The vision that met him was substance: Lysaer s'Ilessid regarded him, clad in white silk clasped with abalone shell buttons, and without other jewel or ornament. The only gold accent was his bright hair, feathered in the light riffle of sea-breeze; the only intense colour, his glacial blue eyes, which matched worry with magisterial candour. ‘If I had any-one else, on my word, your desire would be made true. Is this so very bad for you?'

No reply served. Sulfin Evend did not wish to speak of the spirits, swirling like silver and gossamer foil on the surrounding air. His recent, night ride through the free wilds to reach Hanshire had shown him enough of such things to unsettle his peace for a lifetime.

‘The seers of s'Gannley do not view the course of the future,'
Asandir had explained on the hour Sulfin Evend had honoured his full commitment to Enithen Tuer.
‘Their gifted talent encompasses truth and reopens the gateway to what has passed. If you take oath for the land under Fellowship auspices, I must warn: the ritual will awaken that latent cognition. I cannot make the process selective or reseal your eyes should you live to regret. Nor would I, if the choice left the option. Every resource you have will be needful.'

Too late now, to revoke the binding done in the King's Chamber at Althain Tower. Too late as well, to curb Lysaer's impatience. Outside, the deafening noise at the water-front revealed a populace gathered to witness their idol's return. That such an effusive celebration should turn out to greet an unscheduled arrival boded no earthly good.

Sulfin Evend regarded the white-clad figure before him, solid and warm; too hurtfully vibrant against the wisped ghosts of the sorrows left imprinted upon the site of Tysan's crown capital. Grey-eyed and mortal, he granted his liege his scorchingly brutal response. ‘Sight or not, I am no trained talent. Being able to see beyond time is not the same thing as a guarantee of protection.'

Lysaer lashed him back with incensed conviction:
‘I will not suffer the murder of innocents!'

‘You feel that your victimized subjects are due your sovereign protection,' Sulfin Evend restated. ‘Then for their safety alone, I should force you to run!' Against jingling noise as the armed escort prepared to form ranks, he added,
‘Since you can't embrace reason, you won't leave this ship, that I do not stand at your shoulder. You're wearing a mail shirt and the Biedar knife?'

‘Here.' The Divine Prince tapped the breast of his doublet, a quilted garment of satin-stitched silk that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. ‘I'm determined, not foolish.'

A rumble signalled the gangway, run down, then the milling tramp as the men-at-arms debarked to assemble on the cleared dock. The standard-bearers fell in at the fore. White-and-gilt icons, they unfurled the state banners to stream in the wind: the Alliance sunwheel, opposed by the crown-and-star blazon of Tysan agleam on its field of deep blue. Arrayed five abreast in two parallel squares, fifty of the elite royal guard stood for their field captain's inspection. Their spired helms gleamed, and their war-sharpened weaponry hung parade-ground precise. Today, with no spare attention for oversight, Sulfin Evend was compelled to turn out his most reliable veterans. After Daon Ramon, the necessity galled him: against irrational odds, he knew that he risked the most steadfast core of his troop.

‘I will not cower,' Lysaer insisted, stonewalled by his Lord Commander's resistant silence.

No option remained, except to bear up and issue the order to march.

‘Positions!'

The troop captain took his place at the avatar's back, along with the muscled bursar and two petty officers. Whichever men carried the forged silver shackles, the fine cuffs and thin chains were well muffled and hidden. The Divine Prince's party assumed their place with the escort, whose smart columns wheeled and faced straight ahead. Sulfin Evend covered his liege's left flank. His finest point-men strode at right and left, bearing the fringed royal banners. The finials on the standards had forge-sharpened points. Steel chimed to each step: the advance herald's tabard concealed enough weaponry to stand down an assault at close quarters.

Against arrows, or cross-bows, Lysaer wore only mail, and the birth-born power of elemental light. ‘This is as it must be.' His quick glance showed confidence to scald the raced heart. ‘I am in the best hands. Carry forward.'

‘On my mark!' shouted the troop captain.

The baton fell, and the ranked squares marched shoreward, with the world's divine saviour a white diamond clenched in their armoured midst.

A wall of sound met them. Although the s'Ilessid regent had not entered Avenor for over a year, his magnanimous presence had made itself felt on the heels of defeat in Daon Ramon. Through summer's famine, his tireless work on the coast had seen laden galleys and supplies routed north. His draft teams had braved the clogged roads, and his war host had stooped to guard caravans. Beset by the torrential lash of the rains, their trained strength had battled the flood, slogging the relief carts through cresting rivers and sucking mud that wore the hearts out of men and horseflesh. No village had starved. Packed
against the breakwater and along the warehouse sheds at the harbour front, Avenor's populace shook earth and sky with their cheering.

Sulfin Evend moved into that welter of noise, nerves keyed to unbearable tension. Lysaer's step beside him stayed measured. The caparisoned horse sent from the palace to bear him was refused with lordly disdain. Whether that shocking departure from form had been done for courage, or arrogance, or spurious whim, the act already lay beyond salvage. The avatar's will was no man's to question.

Past the rebuffed consternation of the grooms, and the prance of retreating horseflesh, Sulfin Evend pressed the company ahead through the clouding swirl of the spirit imprints. Unseen by his men, they hovered and danced, ethereal as dusted silver wherever the land held a confluence of lane force. Avenor had once been a Second Age stronghold built by Paravian founders, each of its laid stones aligned into harmony with the tidal flow of the mysteries. The earliest structure had not been ornate. A narrow, walled keep had once crowned the rise, overlooking a coast-line left wild.

Lysaer's restored rule had dismantled that ruin in defiance of ancient history. Now, square brick towers supplanted the tumbled remnants of the foundations. Warehouses and wharves jumbled over a shore-line opened to bustle and commerce. The slab that remained of the Paravian landing had been smashed, its mossy, whorled carvings and rusted spikes for ring moorings reduced to sunk rubble in the green surge of the tide. Yet if the granite that had received the law-bound step of past high kings lay fallen, the magics instilled by the centaur guardians were not wont to yield their reach lightly. Power yet flickered like undying light, spun off as the lane flux caressed the crushed shards that retained a tenaciously living awareness. Where currents snagged through those caught bits of held memory, sorrow still spoke with a subtle dissonance. The burning flow of subliminal forces, snapped and snarled off course, refired the forgotten past. Sunchildren sang, their heads crowned with garlands, while wraith-frail boats carved into bird forms and fish crowded to launch for the seasonal water festival. Echoes once sounded by crystalline flutes plucked the heart-strings and closed the throat.

Overwhelmed from the moment he stepped on dry land, Sulfin Evend lost his footing and stumbled.

An anchoring clasp closed over his wrist. ‘You look like a man on a march to the scaffold. Is this regret?'

The Alliance commander turned his spinning head and regarded the grave countenance of the man he had sworn an irrevocable oath to defend. ‘At Hanshire, my life was never my own. This at least is a path I have chosen.'

Lysaer's answering smile both dazzled and blinded. ‘You have not let me down even once under fire.'

The flame of s'Ilessid regard stole the breath, raised a swell of fresh pride to lull caution and flatten resistance. One might live for such favour. One
might die to answer the unearthly craving instilled by this prince's affections.

Before the wreck of the campaign in Daon Ramon, Sulfin Evend would have gone forward to bask in that addictive radiance. Afterward, he had braved Althain Tower to prevent the same brilliance from falling enslaved. A knife's edge had severed that piece of himself, which could have gone forward, self-blinded. His pledge to a Sorcerer had, now and forever, torn off the glittering veil.

Today, he held firm to keep such rampant charisma from carving the less-ordered world into chaos. Seen beside the exalted, clean grace of the spirit forms, or the spun dream of a sunchild's flute, Lysaer's grace was exposed as gilt over clay: all promise, without truth as substance.

‘My trust is unshaken,' Avenor's regent insisted. ‘Who else but you could walk steadfast beside me?'

‘Better me than another,' Sulfin Evend replied, surprised to be galled by that irony.

Lysaer's friendly touch fell away, scalding far less than the afflicting, sorrowful silence left by the Paravian ghosts. Sulfin Evend pressed on, rocked to reeling grief. Over the site of the Second Age wall, the unquiet onslaught intensified. Awake at the threshold that opened the gateway to perceive Athera's live mystery, he walked the duality behind Asandir's warning fully and finally at first hand.

Attack, if it came, would not find him prepared. The fell workings of necromancy unravelled the shining law that had once given these spirit forms breathing substance. The core harmony sustained by Athera herself shrank before the wounding blight of cult practice, that ensnared the living, then parasitically fed on trapped agony to crystallize flesh into an unnatural state of longevity.

Against dire threat, Sulfin Evend walked naked. Steel could not defeat a warped creature whose ways had defied the Wheel's crossing. Muscle and brute force held no power to vanquish the forces that moved past the veil: only conscious awareness, raised beyond the bounds of the physical senses and trained by the ways known to mages.

Creeping doubt seeded dread. Sulfin Evend battled the ebb of his courage, all too keenly aware the commitment he shouldered would not forgive ignorant failure. While the silenced light of reanimate grace seized his raked heartstrings and twisted, the roaring voice of surrounding humanity hammered into the morning air. The rising ground from the harbour led his company into the shade of the sand-brick towers of the inner citadel. Changed Sight showed no glory of human architecture flying the realm's snapping standards, but a planted impediment that shaved the dance of the mysteries into shuddering disharmony. If clanbred barbarians discerned with such eyes, small wonder they hated the towns! Sulfin Evend reined in the strayed bent of his thought. His duty demanded strict vigilance.

‘You must safeguard against the ritual knife-blade, and other things far more
difficult,'
Asandir had forewarned.
‘Where the rites of necromancy might be at play, a small wound can pose lethal danger. A pin in the hand of a suborned servant, or a sharp edge on a ring might break the skin during casual contact. Because Lysaer has succumbed to a binding before, he will be doubly vulnerable. If a man set under the sway of cult influence sheds the least drop of his blood, you don't have the skilled grounding to offer a remedy.'

Battered numb by the deafening adulation, with his vision awash in the glittering static of flux, Sulfin Evend could scarcely walk upright, far less absorb threatening details. Whether or not he harboured regrets, Lysaer was not going to turn back.