Fugitive Prince (60 page)

I
nside the shimmering, mercurial barrier which bounded the Paravian grimward, the natural progression of time dissolved. As spellbinder, Dakar noticed the alarming development when his subliminal connection to sun, moon, and stars became cut off like snipped thread. Footsore, exhausted, and snappish from hunger, he shut his eyes and milked his recalcitrant memory. He retained a shamefully sparse store of facts for his years spent in Asandir’s tutelage. What fragments he gleaned could be counted on three fingers, jumbled as trivia between detailed reminiscence of his past trysts and wistful hours spent wenching.

By contrast, each one of his two-silver harlots stood out with a jewel’s exotic clarity. The quirk moved him to teeth-grinding worry, that the fragment of lore that might key their survival would stay obscured by the decadent pursuits of his past.

“Well how was a drunk to know what his life might come to depend on?” Dakar snapped to Felirin’s sensible inquiry.

Distempered and soaked in cowardly sweat, the Mad Prophet drummed his heels against his horse and drove its balky steps through the ward’s shifting bands of coiled energy. The bard and the Shadow Master rode behind him like shadows, the former reduced to a petrified silence, and the latter, too undone to care where his mare’s herd instincts might lead him.

The Mad Prophet wished in jangled irritation that Arithon’s wits were not scattered. This once, the other man’s unmerciful perception would have posed an indisputable advantage. For his own part, the spellbinder found such exactitude wearing. Escape into thoughts of a lush woman’s favors seemed resounding good sense beside the outright insanity of braving the perils now at hand.

Dakar yanked a wrinkle from the knee of his trousers before he chafed a new saddle sore. He needed no scholar’s insight; nothing about a Paravian grimward would seem canny to human awareness. The location of all seventeen known phenomena might be charted at Althain Tower, but whole years at a stretch, a man might pass those marked sites and encounter no trace of their presence. Through his five centuries as a Fellowship apprentice, Dakar could not remember one time when the Sorcerers did not attend to the grimwards alone.

The protections which turned the inadvertent traveler from a disastrous step through their boundaries were laid down with ruthless potency. When the seals required adjustment or rebalancing, the task was always shouldered by Asandir or Sethvir. Their discorporate colleagues Kharadmon and Luhaine might sometimes assist from the sidelines by misdirecting strayed game or even the occasional two-legged trespasser, but Dakar retained the distinct impression that such places held consummate danger for any spirit left unshielded by mortal flesh.

At any cost, a man must not come to die here. Not unless he wished to be struck from the Fatemaster’s Wheel for all time. Of all the trials suffered in Prince Arithon’s service, this one trod the surest course to folly.

Dakar tugged a snarl of hair from his mouth, his rude stock of oaths an inadequate quaver as three muzzled mounts bore his small party of fugitives irrevocably into the unknown.

Ten paces ahead, his unsettled senses ripped back into clarity. As if an eyeblink had remade the landscape, the vista ahead showed seared trees and sterile dust, charged in a flat tang of ozone. Currents of wild energy flicked over riled nerves. The Mad Prophet found his teeth set on edge, and his vitals clawed with unease. The interlaced spells which defended this border threw off a debilitating resonance. Leaves shriveled as they unfolded from the bud, and trees became stunted, shedding skeletons. The blight on the land fed Dakar’s disquiet; he knew of the Fellowship’s aversion to cause harm to anything growing.

Yet in this place, that dearly held tenet had been broken with stark and appalling violence. As if this circle of spelled seals confined
something unworldly that would not respond to the kindlier magics wrought out of natural forces.

The air wore the musk of seared earth and dry rot. What sky glimmered through the clawed fists of bare branches loured under blank haze, unblessed by the face of sun or moon.

Dakar attributed the eerie, flat murk to the proximity field of the wardspells. He glanced behind. Felirin found courage in lilting gentle nonsense to his horse. Arithon had shaken out of his stupor enough to gaze about. His features might seem as blank as chipped chalk. Yet the man who held his intimate trust could unmask that expression and discern the agonized frustration of a master driven sight-blind to mage talent.

“Keep close,” Dakar warned. Exhausted as he was, and unfit to ride point, the others were plainly in worse state. Felirin’s wrapped hands fretted and fumbled to maintain a grip on his reins. If hazard threatened, Arithon could scarcely stay erect in his saddle. Which perhaps was as well; Dakar had a nasty stab of intuition that the black sword, Alithiel, should not be drawn in this place.

Its uncanny, bright power framed too stark a contrast to the shadowy forces he sensed, laced into queer, subliminal eddies by the blameless stir of their passage.

That disturbed awareness was torn short as his mount balked with a jarring snort. Dakar curbed its rank fear. He peered ahead, wary, then gasped in outright awe.

The sere ground gave way to an expanse of polished granite. Ancient, quarried stone was veined in tangled strata of obsidian and milk quartz, and incised with grand arcs and figures scribed across with Paravian runes of glowing silver.

“You’re wise to be jumpy,” Dakar cajoled his timid gelding. “But I’m the best chance you have to stay breathing. Throw me off, you’ll end up as fly meat.”

He dug in his heels, to no avail, until Felirin’s more willing gray thought to pass him. The bay’s competitive nature reasserted with a bounding start forward. Dakar swore and snatched mane as his horse clattered onto the massive, smoothed block, the mare at its heels, her breath sucked in fast, nervous snorts. The unease of the animals was justified. The array underfoot was centaur work, each dressed stone fitted seamlessly into the next with matchless and uncanny precision. The charged coils of power in the joined ciphers made living skin burn and tingle in waves, and threatened a ranging headache.

Dakar could take no measure of their strength. The magic knit here reached beyond mortal senses, mighty as time, as stately as the steadfast
turn of the earth, and wrought on a scale to strike terror through his armor of knowledge. Through a shrill, singing dizziness, the spellbinder counted the eight seals for banishment. His horse skittered over the directional, six-sided figures for safeguard, matched to the cardinal points, and vectored above and below. These stood laced through by ward after ward of containment. He identified
an’alt,
the configured symbol for infinity, stamped over and over in ribboned light. Other runes he did not recognize at all, but the force in them struck like blades of ice through the thick leather boots in his stirrups.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the rune for safe-crossing aligned with so many ciphers to annul power,” observed Arithon, ridden up on his sweat-draggled mare.

Dakar swiveled in surprise. “You can read these?”

“Only some of them. My grandfather’s library at Rauven was limited. ” Arithon frowned through a fallen thatch of hair, more than weariness making him haunted. “The resonant harmonics I can hear through my bard’s gift are dissonances, all. Not what I’d call reassuring.”

Then, with no warning, the paved expanse ended. The horses crabstepped off a razed edge in the stone and into a rustling growth of forest.
One heartbeat before, no trees had been anywhere in evidence.
To the rear, the rune ring had vanished away into shadowed, random avenues of oaks. The spellbinder took that for an ominous sign. The guarding sigils at the portal had sealed the way closed behind them. No return course was possible by the path they had entered. If another safe exit to known territory existed, they must endure whatever perils lay ahead and unriddle the grimward’s dire mysteries.

“Ath, where is this place?” Felirin gasped. “No timber of this size grows on the Korias Flats.”

“Well we aren’t there anymore,” Dakar ripped back, testy as he bludgeoned his upended senses to gain the full use of his mage-sight.

Yet a discipline which should have responded like reflex escaped his effort entirely. Trained access seemed blocked. He could trace out none of the underlying patterns to this forest’s vibrant energies. The too-sharp barrage of his unrefined vision rattled him down to the pit of his vitals. Sight framed an impossible discrepancy. The foliage of these giants grew out of phase with the season, cinnabar and gilt with the fireburst palette of autumn. The maples, the beeches, and the crowned, ancient oaks soared aloft in vaulting splendor.

No such stand of primal forest should exist inside the fifty leagues separating the grimward’s location from the old tracts the clans held in Caithwood.

Dakar withstood his craven impulse to rein in by tugging his beard with brisk worry. “We’ll need to make time. There’s no guarantee we’re not still being pursued, if those guardsmen were fools enough to follow us.”

But the terrain itself thwarted haste. No paths cut these wilds. While the party of riders ducked vines and low branches, their mounts picked their way in uneven steps over ground laced with roots like snagged rope, and through hollows where stones were deceptively quilted in moss deep and lush as a king’s robe. Felirin marveled in monologue under his breath, as though he sought to commit such strangeness to verse. Arithon curled on his mare’s crest, fists crushed to his forehead in pent-back, dazed misery, leaving Dakar to tax his bewildered wits and effectively function as guide.

He soon discovered the impossibility of keeping straight bearings through a grimward. The place was possessed by bewitching strangeness. A man might choose an opening between two pillared oaks, only to find his steps redirected him ten paces further to the left, and on through a different byway altogether. What passed for sunlight shone a pale, lambent gold, with ruled shafts slanting through glades of stippled shade. Maintaining a constant sense of direction should have posed his trail-wise party no difficulty, except the unnerving tricks of the landscape mazed and bemused the awareness.

While Dakar puzzled to unravel the anomaly, Felirin broke off his ongoing composition. “Whatever sort of magery’s afflicted our senses, we seem to be traveling in a circle.”

“Spiral,” Arithon corrected, half-muffled through folded fingers. His speech seemed almost drunkenly slurred, the inflection lapsed back to the antique dialect of the splinter world of his birth. “Don’t you hear? A harmonic resonance patterns this existence that guides the placement of each footstep.”

“What?” Dakar swiveled to stare, startled enough to ignore the branch which slapped his exposed side. The surprise seemed unfair, that Arithon had observed more than anyone else while apparently lapsed into a stupor. A tug on the rein stopped his gelding, while the Shadow Master’s mount followed suit by dumb instinct.

Felirin halted his gray, his plain, honest face charged to wonderment. “Masterbard,” he murmured, “in truth, Halliron’s teaching unveiled your true destiny. My life has been spent in devotion to music, and yet, my ear can’t detect this nuance you speak of.”

Sunk as the Shadow Master was in discomfort, his precise sense of
language never left him. Caught back in reflective speculation by one word, Dakar twisted aside to pursue inquiry. “Existence?”

Like a child in creased clothes jogged out of a dream, Arithon straightened. He blinked unfocused green eyes. His hands ran hot sweat where he changed grip to the saddle out of shameless need to stay upright. “Don’t say you hadn’t noticed the landscape is unstable. ”

“Damn you!” Dakar resisted a hysterical laugh. Through the trees to the right, he had just glimpsed a broad, grassy plain. Beyond lay a skyline edged in mountains whose shattered white peaks belonged to no range in Athera. “Why not use your boot and kick me awake? I’d be eternally grateful.”

But this time, the victim was too spent to counter that lame attack of sarcasm. His painstaking effort to order plain thought became a trial to witness. Felirin politely averted his gaze, while Arithon sought to translate impressions with comprehensible clarity. “I might add that the earth where your horse treads is anything but solid ground.”

“Well, try the next riddle with an answer at the end.” The Mad Prophet looped his reins in the crook of one elbow and massaged his pounding temples. His balked effort to plumb the phenomena by mage-sight had left him high strung and dizzy. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear my talent’s gone blind and dead as your own.”

An hour spent immersed in furious thought had left the spellbinder no whit the wiser. Here, the sparkling energy ties which laced the very substance of creation did not follow any pattern laid down by natural forces. The aberration chewed him hollow with dread, that the trees, the moss, the very sun on lit leaves remained dense and elusive to mage-sense. Petrified to plumb the extent of his helplessness, Dakar shrugged. “If I could accept the impossible, I’d say nothing in this place has an aura.”

Eyes shut, Arithon snapped off a nod. “You’re surprised? This reality isn’t alive by any founding law of Ath’s creation.”

Dakar bridled to hear his foreboding confirmed. “However can you know?”

Too stressed for impatience, Arithon said, “I still have my bard’s ear. The vibration of this existence is not myriad, but seems to be loomed from one thread.” He labored to qualify. “The song of its being does not change register, not for a tree, or a rock, or an insect. Since the shadows as well won’t answer my gift, I have to presume they’re illusions. The logical end point is scarcely reassuring. We must be traversing a path through a dream.”

A chill splashed over Dakar’s moist skin. “Save us all, don’t say that. If that’s true, somewhere there must be a great drake, still alive and sleeping.”

But Arithon had retreated back into dazed silence. The bay mare bore his suffering weight, hunched and half-senseless in the saddle, leaving Dakar floundering and alone with his terror.