Traitor's Knot Part 24

The stone's power doused. Just shy of disaster, its aligned focus slammed shut. The invasive fiend stayed locked inside, trapped as a fly caught in amber.

'd.a.m.n the man, d.a.m.n him!' Prime Selidie gasped. Shaking, drained white, she dropped in a limp huddle onto her chair. Her shocked eyes regarded the gossamer smoke that dispersed off the stress-heated crystal. 'Cursed seed of wild talent, what have you done?'

For the ma.s.sive amethyst had been pressured too far. Not only flawed, not only polluted by an embedded fiend, its clear purple heart was streaked through: intense heat had feathered a raw streak of citrine across the jewel's dark center. The irrevocable change would alter the quartz matrix and shift the sphere's frequency and alignment.

Struck dumb by the penalty of her morning's work, unable to measure the damage done to the order's most irreplaceable resource, Prime Selidie pounded the scarred stubs of her hands in wordless, ferocious frustration. While her spoiled slippers and soaked hems chilled her feet, her tears fore-promised a vengeance beyond words upon Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn.

Late Winter 5671 Interludes By the lamp-lit glow of Evenstar's chart desk, Arithon prepares a packet of dispatches for Feylind to sail on to Southshire; and to her sharp protest, he answers, unswerved, 'Your delay will be pa.s.sed off as damages caused by a natural storm. I shall be gone, with the four in my party well away aboard Khetienn. A snared fiend can be dispatched to summon her north and arrange for an off-sh.o.r.e rendezvous . . .'

With Lysaer s'Ilessid bound upcoast by galley, along with his remnant war host, High Priest Cerebeld meets with Avenor's high council, elated by news just arrived from Raiett Raven's suborned spy ring: 'A colossal mistake has just turned in our favour! Once the Divine Prince receives King Eldir's sealed dispatch, the hard proof that set his princess to flight will lay the ground for our opening to break him . . .'

Immersed in the earth link, the Warden of Althain dreams a thread of interlinked possibilities: of an enchantress at Ath's hostel, now fated to shoulder a perilous journey; of a flawed amethyst and a Prime Matriarch hobbled; an eagle whose mettlesome impulse has seeded a whirlwind whose harvest will reap bitter fruit, followed hard by the telling, first link that forges the chain into ill-starred event: a vivacious, laughing carrot-haired bride is promised a bolt of scarlet silk for her wedding . . .

Winter 5671 VIII. Avenor Sulfin 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 sh.e.l.l b.u.t.tons, 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 encompa.s.ses truth and reopens the gateway to what has pa.s.sed. 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 reseat 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-st.i.tched 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 a.s.semble 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 m.u.f.fled and hidden. The Divine Prince's party a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sault 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 sh.o.r.eward, 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 sh.o.r.e-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, retired 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 para-sitically 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 succ.u.mbed 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.

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 a.s.sault, 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 d.a.m.ned 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 sc.u.m 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 he 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 gla.s.s. Where the cupola loomed, packed to crowding with state figures clothed in gaudy panoply, Sulfin Evend saw outside the shocked sh.e.l.l 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.

Then he delivered the list of the conspirators to Lysaer s'Ilessid, beside him. 'High Priest Cerebeld, and his four senior acolytes. Lord Chancellor Quinold, Lord Secretary of the Treasury Eilish, Gace Steward, the Lord Keeper of the Gates, Erdane's Guild Amba.s.sador Koshlin, the Lord High Justiciar Varrun, Avenor's Guild Ministers Odrey and Tellesec. My prince, no heroics! For self-preservation, you will stand out of reach as you denounce each offender for treason.'