The Ships of Merior (29 page)

The sorcerer cradled the bard’s temple in one steady hand. ‘For the deep happiness you have lent the Prince of Rathain, and for your years of unstinting service, our Fellowship would grant you sky and earth.’

The touch warmed like gentle fire through an aching pressure of cold mist. Halliron let the air spin out of his throat. His eye drifted closed. Asleep or unconscious, he never felt the scalding lattice of mage-force that Asandir raised to ward the wagon that cradled him.

When the sorcerer finished, nothing inside could be seen through the unshielded glare of raw spells.

Beyond the low stair, two laggard servants departed in haste through a side door; Asandir stifled a grin for the geas Luhaine had chosen, which harried them to leave in a pressing false need that their bladders required relief.

Then his levity faded. There’s a problem I’ve had to leave unfinished.’ Aware of Luhaine’s attention like a quill prick against exposed skin, Asandir qualified. The Duke of Alestron and his brothers were absent when I visited to see if they meddled in forbidden armament. I agree with Sethvir: their evasion hides purpose. Would you mind looking in on them?’

Then, too pressed to wait while Luhaine assembled his usual lugubrious reply, Asandir stepped to the pony’s bridle and guided its skittery, nervous progress down tiled risers left scoured and trenched with cold scorch-marks. Behind him, the iron-rimmed cartwheels banged and slammed, and chipped parallel grooves of fresh
cracks. The vehicle jounced onto level floor and scrunched across fragmented flooring.

Luhaine admonished on a surly nip of frost, ‘No doubt you want the wardings checked on Desh-thiere’s prison at Rockfell Peak beforehand?’

‘Well sunrise won’t wait,’ Asandir threw back, insouciant.

Overhead, muted light slit the high, lancet windows miraculously still paned in filmed glass. Asandir reached the ash-blackened edge that traced the near rim of the power focus. He stroked the pony’s nose, murmured into its ear, then straightened. He spoke his next incantation in Paravian, each lilted cadence and musical vowel cut and measured to stamp the air into arcane seals like edged foil.

Power answered.

Too mighty a flux for concealment, the force rocked a tremor through the building. Now each consonant snapped out and hammered into echoes that sifted falls of plaster from the ceiling groins. Ozone tanged the hazed spill of dust. Then stillness locked down, fixed as light trapped in glass, and the pattern underfoot flared alive.

A silver-blue shimmer raced through the old runes. The cart rolled over their heatless light, and the pony loosed a gusty, frightened snort. Its hooves jinked and rattled over glassy chips of tile as it sidled, uneasy in the traces.

Asandir soothed a hand over sweating buckskin hide, his touch now all he could spare to calm the pony’s frayed nerves. For need, he attuned his awareness through his boot soles to gauge the flow of forces in the focus. The static of the lane-pulse jagged in white bursts, sparked by the advent of sunrise. Careful to sound its resonance lest the pattern’s function had been impaired or corrupted by time, the sorcerer quickened step. He crossed the two inner circles, then positioned the cart
on the interstice at the centre where the axis of all lines converged.

Brightening glare lined his chin with hard light as he braced in preparation. ‘Luhaine.’

On that spoken signal, he ceded the powers he had awakened to the control of his discorporate colleague. All ties to sensation left him. The sole thread that grounded his consciousness to flesh became his gentling hand on the pony. The nexus of his will bent into a craft honed through thousands of years of experience. Nothing else mattered. Nerve and bone would unravel before he lost hold on his wards to shield Halliron from the wrenching flux of spell-transfer.

Daybreak charged the lane.

Power whined and crested. The pattern flared, then shattered past visible light into a pealing vibration. Luhaine’s deft mastery trapped the enabled current, then directed an unruly dance of forces to turn, mesh, and ignite wild power into an orchestrated explosion.

A crack ripped the unshielded air. Winds blasted. The torn seams of tapestries whipped to frayed threads, and every glass flask and window-pane left whole in the mayor’s palace burst to sugared powder and blew outward. For an awful, time-rending instant the confines of the feast hall lay scoured in primal glare.

Then normality reasserted. Eddies of mauled air spun and died. Tile fragments raked into crannies, then skittered and clunked back to rest. The spellcraft raised through the focus pattern pulsed and dimmed, and slowly died. The sorcerer, the cart and its occupant were gone, delivered to a ruins in Sanpashir’s desert. The place they had occupied in Jaelot held only a smoking curl of dust and a pile of steaming manure.

For that; for the crazed marks of wheels and the crescent-shaped dents that the pony’s shod hoofs had gouged in the marble stairway, a second sorcerer whose spirit was discorporate had no polite means to fix. Luhaine
departed, a drifting wisp of cold, as drudges, servants and blue-blooded residents gave way to hysterical screaming.

A blind fool could guess that Halliron’s apprentice sorcerer had revisited, to terrorize the city with more spells.

In due course, dishevelled officials raised in haste from their beds converged to assess the fresh damage. They called guardsmen to set chains on the perpetrators; except there were none to be found.

The Mayor of Jaelot’s smashed feast hall lay uncannily empty. The roster was changed, the day’s patrols recalled from the gatehouse, while his lordship fumed and paced. The lyranthe-playing sorcerer his judiciary wanted burned had escaped through thin air, beyond all reach of due process.

Dakar awakened late to the cinders of a burned-out fire. Halliron, the sorcerer, and the pony cart bearing them had departed before first light, with a note left behind in explanation. The black stud remained, pawing restlessly by the tree that tethered its headstall. Grumpy and sore from scanty sleep, Dakar stumbled out of his blankets to root for a snack amid the cache of supplies.

Nearby, damp-haired from a wash at the stream, Arithon crouched over the sorcerer’s saddle packs, immersed in thoughtful study as he fingered a heavy gold coin. Clearly recovered from the past night’s distress, he looked up at Dakar’s blundering. His expression seemed as affable as the manner he had affected in disguise as a masterbard’s apprentice.

Curdled to distrust, Dakar stared until he tracked the elusive discrepancy: a striking, indefinable tension infused the Shadow Master’s presence. Stripped of the shadows he had used to veil his features, his poise reminded of a wildcat set to stalk.

‘This coin is riddled with spell-wards,’ he opened, his flexible voice inquiring. ‘I hear them. But without more
experience, I couldn’t unravel the purpose behind their harmonics.’

Dakar squatted, rifled the nearest canvas bundle and fished out a wrapped loaf of bread. Guardedly wary, he settled on his hams and broke the crust. ‘If Asandir left that to pay the black’s stabling, it’s rotten with mage-craft, sure enough.’ Through a bulging mouthful, he qualified. ‘You’ll see that bit of gold get passed from hand to hand, from ostler to horse trader, and the stud, whether sold or rented to post riders, will find his way back to his master. He’ll be where Asandir next has need of him, glossy and fit, and have not a whip mark on him.’

Arithon’s interest turned rueful. ‘My worry was wasted, I see.’

The sailing instruments; Dakar kicked himself for lapsed wits. With Arithon bound seaward, a horse would be useless as tits on a fish. Disgusted to find the bread as unpalatably stale as the ship’s biscuit he heartily detested, the Mad Prophet stamped off to the stream to wash down the crumbs and relieve himself.

Arithon used the interval to pack the small camp and scatter the dead embers of the fire. When Dakar puffed back uphill, he was waiting, the black stallion’s bridle reins looped through one hand. Spattered green-gold in new sunlight, his black hair thrown back from angled cheekbones, the prince who was Master of Shadow appeared absorbed by the trill of the woodlarks that flitted through the boughs overhead; except the eyes he turned upon Dakar stayed emerald-hard and measuring as a trap cocked and baited to draw blood.

The Mad Prophet stopped. Determined to stay nonchalant, he hitched chubby fingers in his belt. ‘You plan to ride.’

‘To Ship’s Port, I think.’ The invitation casual, Arithon added, ‘We’ll take turns in the saddle, if you wish.’

The rage rose thick and hot, until Dakar felt he might strangle. ‘Do as you please. I’m not going.’

‘I’d thought not.’ Arithon slipped a thong at the saddlebow; a canvas packet slithered loose. He flicked a neat wrist and tossed it.

Slammed in the chest by the bundle, Dakar staggered backward, gasping into the smoke-tainted cloth reflexively clutched in his arms.

That’s your share of our stores.’ Over his shoulder as he vaulted astride the tall stallion, Arithon finished, ‘Don’t waste the coin on cheap doxies.’

‘Bastard! You planned that I wouldn’t be coming.’ The last imprecation flurried the woodlarks away on scared wings. ‘You insufferable son of a bitch!’

‘Yes, to the first, who denies it?’ Touched to a wicked edge of laughter, the Shadow Master raised his eyebrows. ‘But the last? Dakar! How unfortunate for Lysaer.’ The black stud snorted and shouldered ahead at the brush of his rider’s heels. ‘We did after all share a mother.’

Jostled aside, then dealt a buffeting sting by the whisk of the black’s departing tail, Dakar kicked a log and howled insults until his ears rang. The fit gained him no satisfaction.

Sometimes fate seemed to dog him like the fury of an unpaid whore. Never mind the small blessing that the rain had dried up; from the moment the Mad Prophet set off hiking, the day grew perversely less pleasant.

South of Jaelot, the coast road jagged inland, to the east hemmed by rock-slashed ravines capped in fir, ruched and ruffled like a widow’s collar around the stripped peaks of the Skyshiels. To the west, in summers when storms stayed mild, rolling meadowland quilted the hills in a sun drenched patchwork of hayfields. Between pocketed hollows where the farmers’ crofts clustered, blooming larkspur twined sprays of indigo amid daisies, and yarrow splashed in drifts like white foam. Under wide, cloudless sky; across broad, wind-combed acres, any spirit escaped from an onerous duty might revel in new-found freedom.

Yet Dakar took no joy from leagues of magnificent scenery. By noon, his eyes itched and his nose ran; country air had never agreed with him. Each step he took reminded him how much he detested travel on foot.

The nap he snatched to refresh himself became spoiled by the diabolical placement of an ants’ nest. Scratching and twitching and shaking out his clothing, he sought second refuge by a streamlet. There he fell asleep in comfort, only to discover as twilight came on that foraging muskrats had ripped open his pack and devoured every crumb of his food.

Too lazy to regret the ward-spells he might have set to protect himself, Dakar flagged a ride with a merchant’s drover bearing candles and beeswax. Since the heat of full day would damage the wares, the wagon travelled to market by night. The Mad Prophet tucked into a niche behind the buckboard, contentedly primed to share gossip.

At midnight, beaten down by judicious wheedling, the drover shared his meal of barley bread and ham. Dakar cheerfully stuffed his belly, only to waken shortly afterward, doubled over and moaning with cramps.

The meat had likely been spoiled. Far too crafty to voice such suspicion, the Mad Prophet rocked and clutched his belly. ‘That stream water must have been tainted.’

The drover met the excuse with the same sappy nonsense he used to soothe his draught mules. Self-absorbed in a misery that spiked like white fire through his groin, Dakar missed the moment when his benefactor’s sympathy changed to shouted imprecations.

His next clear sensation was the dry jab of weed stalks prickling into his cheek. A pungency of road dust and pepper grass made him sneeze, a detail which forced recognition: the uncharitable drover had pitched him out on the verge. Dakar sweated through the bothered conclusion. He might languish of bellyache until crows
came to peck out his eyes; not precisely the plan he had intended to escape his obligation to Asandir.

Too wrung by discomfort to care, the Mad Prophet closed his eyes. Small use to dwell on dying when he could dream more pleasantly of hot, lusty tavern girls and foaming tankards of ale.

He got instead a disruptive intervention by brisk hands that first rolled him over, then latched his armpits in a grip like torture and peeled him up from the ground. Sunlight hit his face and his eyes like a slap, while the world upended and spun.

After disjointed thoughts, he unriddled the indignity that he dangled face down over somebody’s saddlebow. The shoulder of the horse that bore him was sweat sheened and black; the girth unfocused inches from his nose had been stitched with sigil patterns to discourage wear.

After centuries of being collected comatose from binges, Dakar knew precisely where he was. He groaned at the gouge of the pommel in his gut until unconsciousness mercifully reclaimed him.

The most vile hangover he had ever suffered hounded him back to awareness. He sensed darkness and a fire. A demon rode his skull, one that wore spurs a half an inch long and delightedly stabbed heels through his eye sockets. Clear-minded enough to bemoan the unfairness, since no drop of spirits had passed his gullet, he clamped sweaty hands to his temples. ‘Gaaah,’ he grated through parched tissues. ‘I feel all ground into ruts by the wheels of Dharkaron’s filthy Chariot. Where in Sithaer am I?’

A rapid-fire shower of lyranthe notes drilled like bodkins through his ears.

‘It appears we came to share the saddle after all,’ observed Arithon from some unseen place beyond the embers. ‘Since you asked, you are currently sprawled on dry oak leaves, halfway down the road to Tharidor.’

The Mad Prophet ripped out a scatological epithet, then winced at the sting of his own vehemence.