Traitor's Knot (37 page)

The thoroughfare narrowed past the customs office. Forced into close quarters, his armed columns re-formed and dressed ranks. Pressed on both sides by cheering fanatics and hailed from the dormers above, the Blessed Prince and his retinue crept towards the main gate. Amid the smart polish of his men-at-arms, Lysaer wore no gleam of metal. Stark as a snowdrift, his form drew the eye, an exposure no less than frightening: from overhead, and in frontal assault, he was guardless and desperately vulnerable.

Sulfin Evend choked down his driven need to signal an instant retreat. A dried posy shied down. Torn leaves and trailing ribbons brushed across Lysaer's shoulder. He never flinched. His gracious nod acknowledged the young woman, whose wedding circlet dropped at his feet. Patchouli and rose, lavender and citrus, the scents swirled on the breeze as more favours rained down, blithe as a blizzard upon him.

‘You would have more security,' Lysaer observed, not oblivious. ‘We haven't much farther. The archway's just ahead.'

‘One crossbolt would kill you,' Sulfin Evend said, curt. Eyes fixed forward, he
stared through
the gossamer form of a high king clad in unadorned deer-hide. That royal, also, had walked without arms. In an antique serenity lost with the rebellion, the pellucid imprint of a young woman awaited that forgotten, past home-coming. The young king enfolded her in his embrace. Her loose hair streamed over his shapely, taut hands; words or laughter, their reunion stayed silent.

At next step, their twined forms flickered, then vanished. The trammelled air cleared. Dropped out of tranced vision, hit by deafening noise, Sulfin Evend swore and recovered himself. His foot columns now crossed over the old city gate, where Avenor's past keep underlay the new paving. The cavernous new portal of brick just ahead obscured his critical view of the square, foreclosing his chance for advance preparation. Since an ambush might easily lurk behind the effusive welcome, Lysaer s'Ilessid saw reason enough to awaken the light of his gift. Illumination bloomed overhead as the column marched into the passage spanning the four outer keeps.

Despite flooding brilliance, Sulfin Evend felt cold as his tight-knit company tramped under the embrasured defences. The mounted, caparisoned ranks of
Avenor's royal guard met them on the far side. The moment stung, for the fact there was no princess waiting, and no red-haired crown heir standing tall to greet his father's return.

Like a blow, one recalled that Kevor s'Ilessid had been killed by Khadrim fire on a past winter foray through Westwood.

How Lysaer s'Ilessid managed his grief, no man knew. His beautiful features were forge-hammered iron as the spires of the state palace fell behind, then the pennoned cornices of Avenor's guild-houses and garrison armoury. Beyond the inner gate and the citadel bastion, the roadway disgorged into the open plaza, its paved sunwheel a dazzling glory of gold-and-white brick, and its central, railed dais with its gilded cupola, shimmering under full sun.

No more spirit forms lurked. Instead, the cold air abraded the skin with something more than winter's ice clarity. Here, where a Second Age focus circle underlay the Alliance renovation, the converging flux of the first lane's current scoured off the wisped cry of past history. On the hour Asandir had arranged the arcane transfer from Althain Tower to this place, Sulfin Evend had encountered no Sighted visions. Only the surging pulse of Athera flowed here, an ephemeral sense of the magnetic forces that shimmered past range of perception.

By night, stars had burned with unnatural brilliance. Under daylight, without any Fellowship escort, the plaza heaved with movement and noise. A packed mass of pink faces and wealth, Avenor's court displayed its full plumage to greet the return of the Blessed Prince. The celebration seemed a sure sign that the high council had touted the stalemate at Kewar as a victory for the Light. Effusive citizens stamped and teemed, bearing lit candles or flourishing streamers. At the first dazzling glimpse of the avatar, the barrage of raw sound became shattering.

Aware, through the tumult, of Sulfin Evend's locked frown, Lysaer said, ‘What did you expect? No matter how sudden my home-coming, the masses thrive upon spectacle and formal ceremony'

‘I don't have to like it,' Sulfin Evend snapped back.

Hand closed on the cross-wrapped grip of his sword, he glanced forward to measure the welcome turned out on the central dais. And there, underneath the domed roof and draped banners, the uncanny danger he feared lurked in state finery to meet them.

Shade itself seemed to darken in that one place. Unlike the Sighted shimmer of spirit forms, this horrific, smoky roil of trapped shades seemed the dance of the damned out of Sithaer. Their shrouding presence spindled the air like black snags of raw silk, naked forms wound and pulled to distortion. The horror he viewed was no trivial handful of violations enacted on innocent victims. In cold fact, the aberrant corruption of the realm's ranking peers was entrenched, the work of a cult fed to saturation by long-standing practice of vice. The glittering party arrayed on the dais wore its unseen miasma, thick as the clogged scum on a pond.

‘Mercy on us, they're riddled!' Sulfin Evend gasped, appalled. ‘Strike them from a distance, I can't promise they'll drop.'

‘Then we shall close in and trust to surprise,' Lysaer answered. ‘I refuse to retreat. The fifty we have must rise to the challenge. You hand-picked each one for his courage.'

Yet a fearless advance could not abrogate danger. ‘You face power enough to make dead flesh walk!'

The nightmarish warning posed no deterrent. Lysaer held to his steady advance, where even a madman should falter.

Sulfin Evend swore desperately under his breath. Cult minions relished murder as a hunting sport. They would have their eye fixed on one standing target, where, from a distance, his men-at-arms had no means to differentiate the blameless bystanders from the afflicted.

His sharp guard of veterans would be utterly hobbled. Puppet shells ruled by necromancy wore their haze of infection beyond range of unSighted vision. No abnormal behaviour marked them apart. They awaited Lysaer's approach in cold ambush,
knowing
he had slipped through their cult's fingers at Erdane, and now lurking shoulder to shoulder with innocents, secure in their mantles of high office.

Sulfin Evend battled an uprush of nausea. To a seer whose gifted talent was truth, the dais ahead was murky and
crawling:
a rippling, tormented fabric of shades whose slavery transcended mortality. Smeared faces reflected their ghastly torment, gibbering in silenced agony. Elongated hands snatched and plucked and implored, each pitiful gesture a mute cry for mercy. Women, children, babes, and old men, the necromancers' captive prey drifted as smoke suspended in swirling oil.

And through them, a thousand dire sources of threat: the jewelled pins, the ceremonial knives, the gentlemen's spiked canes, and parade arms—
any one of which might be turned to draw Lysaer's blood.
Sulfin Evend wondered in harrowed distress if his sole option would be to throw himself bodily in front of his heedless prince.

Worse, the palace guard stood at the fore. Well trained, fully armed, their front ranks were equipped with cross-bows. Sulfin Evend saw, horrified, that he could not be sure the elite captain appointed to their command was untouched by the deadly taint.

‘Lysaer, your light!' he exhorted. ‘You have to dazzle them,
now!'

‘…
seems excessive to stage an intense display,' Lysaer s'Ilessid demurred through the welter of noise.

‘Do it, no argument!' The Lord Commander's shout was imperative. ‘Fires of Sithaer, this is a staged trap! Your regency ministers are not just suborned, but
replaced
by cultists who practise enslavement. Fail me once, and you won't leave this plaza unscathed, nor will one man among the picked company I've brought to stand at your back.'

‘My high council's turned?
All of them?'
Lysaer's shock was shrill. Targeted by worse than invasive conspiracy, he did what was asked: augmented the halo cast by his gift. The blast cracked the surrounding air to white fire and unleashed a harsh back-lash of heat. ‘Names,' he insisted, his face a stamped mask. ‘Give me names! I'll serve every one who's transgressed by black arts under the arm of crown justice!'

The roar of the awe-struck crowd redoubled and slammed like a living wave through the square. Sulfin Evend walked battered and blinded. ‘I would give you corpses, run through with cold steel,' he snarled, though grisly truth made that promise a mockery. Brute force could not grant his liege a defence, or win his best company their deliverance. Not against a worked evil that fouled the natural turn of Fate's Wheel.

Fear numbed the mind, that the horror ahead outstripped every mortal protection. Sulfin Evend was seized by the anguished
need
for a greater wisdom to stand alongside him. His scalding appeal expected no answer. Yet he walked inside a Paravian focus ring, bound by a
caithdein's
blood pledge. An arcane confluence of energy aligned. His acute, inner cry burned into the flux as it peaked towards crest at high noon.

Forces inherent in the land itself captured that crystalline thought, and one man's piercing desire for balance engaged the heartcore of the mysteries.

Sulfin Evend felt a fist of pure energy punch through the wall of his chest. His breached heart opened up. Ripped through by a thundering wind from the void, he reeled, all but unmoored. The bone-rattling din of the mob fell away. Firm boundaries dissolved into distance. Between one step and the next, he was
here
and
also
there, hurled back to the moment at Althain Tower
as he spoke a vow to serve Tysan, and a knife in the hand of a Fellowship Sorcerer touched his wrist and cracked open the vault of his inner awareness.

Then and now
, Sulfin Evend's perception arced upwards. A force outside comprehension embraced him: fluid as light, gentle as breeze, and as joyously silent as dew on a leaf under starlight. The moment here,
now
, and there,
then
, became as unknowably vast as eternity: but the Sorcerer who cradled his being was not any longer Asandir.

Instead, Sulfin Evend
knew
the Warden of Althain. Sethvir appeared first in his robes of maroon velvet; then as a presence half-seen, bundled into an astonishing weave of soft light; then as a withered old man, pillowed unconscious in the flood of a candle-flame…

‘I don't understand,' Sulfin Evend gasped, startled. His words echoed. Their form was both spoken and not:
he existed in twofold awareness.
Both in
and not in
the King's Chamber at Althain Tower; and also, amid the winter chill plaza in Tysan's capital of Avenor.

Sethvir's response reflected grave calm. ‘Don't try. Stop thinking. Just listen. Accept the gift of my experience.'

Sulfin Evend still heard the din of the throng, registered the passing impression
that Lysaer s'Ilessid was speaking. Yet the core of his mind that existed at Althain enfolded him in pristine silence. All else lost meaning.
Here
, the cold air glued his skin into space. From
there
, his earth-bound form sheared to gauze, while his unfettered mind spiralled free.

As well, the dazzle of Lysaer's gift seemed reduced to translucent glass. Where the cupola loomed, packed to crowding with state figures clothed in gaudy panoply, Sulfin Evend saw outside the shocked shell of his intellect. His greater Sight unveiled
all of the names.
The creatures entrapped by the cult's twisted influence stood exposed, their corrosive threat vivid as blight.

‘How can I contain this?'
Sulfin Evend quailed, winnowed helpless before the depth of a horror that held force and darkness to swallow the spark of his fragile mortality.
‘Such knowledge lies past me.'

‘Knowledge is of the moment'
, Sethvir stated in gentle correction.
‘
Caithdein
, Sulfin Evend, your claim to serve balance has been witnessed and heard. Your oath as permission: my wisdom is freed to stand upon yours. Go forward, self-determined, and place trust in that truth. Let my actions speak through you. Or fail. You act on your merits, both ways.'

Sulfin Evend knew terror. The withering sense of his personal inadequacy crushed him down. Against cringing retreat, he held one silken thread: a touch sustained in ephemeral connection through the heart of Athera's grand mystery. Faced by the unknown
on both fronts
, he chose.

He answered the force that addressed him with tenderness and supported his short-falls with caring.

Sulfin Evend advanced, still subsumed by the paradox. The slip-stream of time flowed around him
and through
the pin-point moment that sealed his blood oath.
Caithdein
, he had been forged by a Fellowship ritual that made him as vessel and conduit. Amid his drilled column of steadfast, armed men, he heard himself call for a cordon. ‘You'll surround the state figures installed on the dais!' His following instructions were fast and explicit: the deployment must happen without fuss or fanfare, an apparent precaution to curb the flash-point excitement showed by the crowd.

As his armed column closed in on the cupola, Sulfin Evend capped his hurried instructions with specifics for his bursar and both petty officers. ‘By the laws of crown justice, we have thirteen conspirators to arrest before the hour of noon. They will be charged here. You will not touch their flesh! Leave me to set them in shackles. If they resist, or try to flee, by my orders the men will drop them point-blank, using the iron-tipped crossbolts.'

Netted in Lysaer's light, enveloped amid the transcendent shimmer of lane flux, Sulfin Evend charged his acting captain to make ready with the silver manacles.