Fugitive Prince (75 page)

The land had not changed. Clear sun shone down, untrammeled by strange mists. Shocked speechless and scarcely able to stand upright, Lysaer s’Ilessid saw that his company of guards had been thrown to a man from their feet.

For a disjointed moment, they remained in stunned fear, flinching and paralyzed from reaction. Then a breeze stroked the weed tassels. A wren sang. The day resurged in all its diverse normality, while shocked men rubbed flash-blinded eyes. They groped after dropped weapons. A stupefied handful of seconds crept by before any of them noticed the miracle.

A dust-coated, haunted captain at arms was sprawled weeping at Lysaer’s feet.

The prince blinked. He could not place the man’s wiry, dark hair, nor the bloody gash raked down his forearm. The filthy, torn blazon on his surcoat was no sunwheel, but a sable stag on a scarlet shield.

His own captain was first to exclaim from the sidelines. “Hanshire? Sulfin Evend?” The name raised a babble of incredulous shouting.

“Look! Ath, it’s him!”

“One of those who was taken by dark sorcery!”

“Behold! Did you see?
My Lord Prince of the Light has recovered the lost company’s commander from the well of oblivion!”

Lysaer took firm grip on his rattled nerves. Plunged into shocked chill, still half-unmoored and consumed by his struggle to dismiss the chord of grand mystery which had touched him, he fell back on reflexive inspiration. He caught the prostrate man’s pitifully thin shoulder and raised him in a brother’s embrace.

Then he studied the face, a square-jawed stranger’s.

His racing heart rejected the implication, though to his bones,
he knew.
The powers which had redeemed the lost captain were none of his own. His memory of their uncanny strangeness pried at logic, undid belief, to the massive upset of clear principle.

Denial remained. If sorcery
was
wrought from the heart of life’s source, if music and grand harmony and clean balance framed its powers, then Lysaer rocked on the edge of the abyss. All that he strove to accomplish in the world became unveiled as a misguided illusion.

“No.” Lysaer shut his eyes, his two hands locked and shaking. Conflicted by self-honesty and devastated pride, he ached through a moment of absolute crisis, before he recalled his own truth:
the adepts of Ath’s brotherhood once sought to sway him the same way.
They had used such diabolically crafted illusion to distort his perception, and blind honor, and convince him that Arithon s’Ffalenn was born innocent.

Indeed, what better way to seduce a mortal will from right action than to cloak perfect evil in a seamless, evocative beauty?

Around him, his dedicated company were clamoring for attention. He heard words, felt the heat of their worshipful astonishment. Sulfin Evend was speaking of his sojourn through terror, of seeing his small troop of men torn and savaged by monsters drawn from the First Age. He described landscapes cloaked in ice which had changed into mountains, or chasms of boiling rock between one man’s step and the next. “Of all who followed in pursuit of the Shadow Master, I was the last left alive.”

“Fellow, you’re bleeding,” the royal captain interjected. “Let’s see that arm.” At his reprimand, the equerry was sent to fetch bandages from a saddlebag.

“There was a Sorcerer,” Sulfin Evend gasped, while a man knelt and cut away the clotted shreds of his sleeve to bare his untended wound. “He wore dark robes. While the rocks of Sithaer itself boiled and burned and ran molten about me, he came and forced me to walk down the throat of a dragon’s skull. I fought him. He told me to cease struggling, that resistance was wasted. Then he flung me into the dark.”

“Ugly, but just scrapes,” the royal captain informed, his examination complete. “You’re lucky the mess hasn’t festered.” He accepted the dollop of poultice paste the remiss equerry had mixed from stored remedies and a waterskin.

While his gashes were dressed, the victim insistently pursued his story, trembling from shock and amazement at his deliverance. “I knew I would be imprisoned in that place for all time. In my hour of despair I called on the Name of the Prince of the Light, and was heard!” He turned shining, worshipful eyes upon the blond-haired scion of s’Ilessid who stood a half step removed from his honor guard. “Praise your Grace! The blessed powers of Light have triumphed over darkness, and I stand before you alive.”

The instant the bandage was secure on his arm, he pushed through the men and knelt once again at the feet of Lysaer s’Ilessid. “I have seen the truth. You are sent by divine mission to deliver us from darkness.”

Surrounded by the worshipful circle of his men, the prince understood he must keep the pretense of manhood and react. If not, he risked being forced to explain how narrowly he had escaped an insidious and subtle attack of enemy subterfuge.

He laid his crossed hands upon Sulfin Evend’s bent head. Unable to imagine how a man could stay sane through a harrowing ordeal wrought of sorcery, he chose utmost tact and said gently, “You need not still serve.”

The Hanshire captain’s fervent response became the balm which cemented cracked faith, and distanced the grief of Talith’s passing.

“My lord prince, I would walk through Sithaer yet again to join in your battle against darkness!” Sulfin Evend tipped up his transformed, avid face. “Your Grace of the Light, let me ride at the fore-front of your troops, that the spirit you have saved from the pit of evil should inspire others to stand strong.”

Touched to relief, that a man of such fiber wished to carry his sunwheel banner against the legions of Shadow before him, Lysaer s’Ilessid raised the wiry Hanshire captain to stand erect at his side.

“You shall command the host of my field army.” His royal admiration was no less than sincere as his choice squared battered shoulders under the singed tatters of his Hanshire surcoat. “The cause of humanity stands strengthened this day by the priceless gift of your courage. Your mettle is proven, Sulfin Evend. Your name shall resound unforgotten throughout history. No braver heart in all of Athera could spearhead the honor of the Light!”

Weeks after Lysaer’s new Commander of Armies received his investiture at Avenor, the focus circle beneath Althain Tower captured light and then blazed into an actinic coruscation of raised power as a spelled tracer crossed the veil. A template of slipped time interlocked and aligned. Hurled through that storm’s eye by the much delayed impetus of his homecoming, Asandir set foot on firm stone and staggered.

The Warden stood waiting by the center of the pattern; Sethvir caught his colleague’s weak-kneed, failing weight before he measured his length.

“Blessed Ath,” Asandir whispered. “I’d hoped you might meet me.”

Around him, the restive flare of raised lane force sparkled and churned like a river flood sucked into whirlpool. Its brilliant intensity all at once shattered thought. His eyes would not focus. The laced mesh his own powers had called into being hazed into a blur, and his knees buckled under him after all. Despite the help of the Warden’s
staunch shoulder, Asandir understood in dismay he was not going to stave off collapse.

The dwindled reserves he tapped for clear speech became unimaginably precious. “The Major Balance is served.” He paused to control a spasming shudder. “The Hanshire captain has been sent through alive.”

“I know. He crossed back six weeks ago.” Matter-of-fact before the shocking, hot touch of Asandir’s clothing, Sethvir shifted his grip. “Don’t speak.” He clapped out a spark of conflagration with his palm, felt the stout weave of cloth and worn leather tatter away into ash. “I’m here. You don’t have to fight to stay standing anymore.”

With utmost gentle care, he eased his colleague’s rangy frame onto the cool, grounding stone of the floor. One quelling word scribed a rune on the air. In response, the excited flare of stressed power dispersed. The focus patterns dimmed and subsided back into their dancing blue glimmer of quiescence.

“The second lane’s left in chaos,” Asandir murmured, eyes squeezed tight shut. The coiled tension in his body did not let go, as if his contact with dense matter, or even the currentless mild air caused him a sourceless pain. “The upset will have to be remedied quickly.”

Between the spin of his unruly senses, he could not ignore the snagging ache of vibration thrown into disharmony. The unbalanced backlash shocked through the earth’s lanes like a damping spill of poison. The black stone which channeled that energy beneath Althain belled in shared dissonance as the wayward, reverse polarity of the grimward strained distortions through the weakened geometry of the wardspells demarking its boundary in Korias. The world’s natural weather would suffer in resonance if the magnetic turbulence was not curbed and sealed separate.

“Never mind.” Sethvir’s murmured assurance pattered echoes off the veined agate floor and glanced in multiplied whispers from the ceiling vaults. “Other hands will correct the imbalance this time. You’re in no shape to do so yourself.”

Asandir felt his senses slip, unraveling on a hurtling plunge toward chaos. He smelled metal and rust. Still dazed by deliverance from the reek of dead bone and charred rock, the dusky fragrance of sagebrush and meadow grass which clung to Sethvir’s robes half unmoored him. The grateful, euphoric dizziness of knowing he was safe threatened his balance worst of all.

“I’m unfit to stand up,” he allowed at last. His words fell away into distance like shot arrows. “You know the problem can’t wait.”

He forced his eyes open. Around him, the tower’s white-marble walls fractured into light. His awareness remained vised in an uncontrolled flood of mage-sight, until thought and vision lost their form like run wax. The enveloping, lapping tingle of lane force strayed from the earth’s tuned chord of identity and degenerated into spats of insensate static. “A magnetic disturbance on that scale is almost certain to—”

“You cannot concern yourself,” Sethvir interrupted. “Not now.”

“I must. Who else can you send?” Unable to separate which suffering was his, and which the ripped pulse of the world’s discord, Asandir belabored the frayed rags of discipline to recoup a sure hold on his faculties.

“Be still!” The Warden’s remonstrance clove his will like jarred iron. “Let me.”

Through the jangled membrane of his skin, Asandir felt Sethvir’s sensitive fingers. Touch came and went with the lightness of moth wings, testing, then mapping the vortices of fusion where his biological body engaged with the more subtle frequencies of spirit. His colleague’s ministrations shored up flagging stamina, soothing with sympathetic infusions of fine energy; even so, Asandir felt the reverberation of each release drill through the marrow of his bones.

“Don’t call Kharadmon.” His strained eyes stayed open. The shocked, widened pupils were rimmed at the edge, the ephemeral, veiled silver of thin ice paned over turbulent water. “Especially now. The star ward must never be left unguarded for an instant.”

“No,” Sethvir agreed. He spun a thought like loomed silk. A circle of mystic seals gleamed above his cupped palms. He blew them to a cloud of indigo and silver, then let their essence purl like poured water over Asandir’s crown, where they sank into the weave of his tangled, dusty hair. “Luhaine will come.”

In a parallel response to that promised reassurance, Asandir sensed a needle of thought align with the pattern underneath him. Traced by that delicate key of vibration, the focus blazed active. Like the dislodged grain of sand which presaged a rockslide, lane forces resounded on Sethvir’s command and sent forth his summons for assistance.

“Fires and light!” Asandir winced. “The Prime Matriarch herself must sit up and take notice of that.”

Sethvir’s concern cracked into a puckish glimmer of devilment. “She’s meant to.” He spread ink-stained hands and quelled his colleague’s move to arise with a shockingly small stir of effort. “Luhaine’s been riding herd on Morriel’s councils since her plot to
snatch Arithon came to light. A call sent through earth will bridge her wards fastest. Let go. Rest now. I daresay the world will continue to turn without your hand on its axis.”

Asandir groaned through a dull burn of agony. He never intended to give way. But the coiling smokes of oblivion he grappled stole through his weakened defenses. Darkness slipped in on ghost feet and trampled the glimmering last spark of his protest.

The Warden of Althain rocked back on his heels. Lapped in the warm summer fragrance of herbs, and maroon robes like old, fusty parchment, he drew a long, calming breath. The patience he borrowed from stone itself could no longer stem his sharpened state of anxiety.

“For mercy and the world, we cannot keep on like this.” Eyes shut through the moment he required to steady himself, he thanked every power in creation for Arithon s’Ffalenn’s resolve to renew his offshore search for the Paravians. Each hour that the Shadow Master spent provisioning his brigantine at Innish seeded the potential for another disaster. The Mistwraith’s curse had embedded too deeply since the great war in Vastmark. Lysaer’s grand cause now commanded too widespread an influence, and simple evasions would no longer serve. This time no less than a Fellowship Sorcerer had nearly been lost in the breach.

Again, Sethvir ran distressed fingertips over his colleague’s limp flesh.

Cinder burns had branded livid trails of blisters across Asandir’s craggy features. Couched in cavernous bone, the pinched, closed eyes seemed to battle the drawn veil of sleep.

“You pushed your limit far too dangerously close,” Sethvir admonished the Sorcerer who lay slack at his knees. Shaken by pity, he cupped his hands over cheekbone and jaw. His feather touch traced the lean, corded neck, then trailed over a chest that wore too little flesh over its vaulting of ribs. He paused, repeated his survey, then frowned and moved on, over the abdomen, and down the full length of long legs.

Then he arose and set to work.

Asandir never moved. The chamber beneath Althain seemed a capsule of stillness as Sethvir removed his soft shoes. Through the expedient decision to rechannel lane force as a restorative, the afflicted Sorcerer scarcely seemed to keep breathing.