Traitor's Knot Part 33

The obsequious tailor never returned. Worse, their piles of shed clothing had been removed by the overly efficient housemaid. Plaintive shouts towards the kitchen failed to roust any servants to remedy their foolish predicament.

Incandescent, the head priest became first to crack. 'How can the laziest servant we have be sleeping, amid all this noise?'

For in fact, the street beyond the dagged curtains suddenly seemed to be packed full of hooting revelers. The commotion masked worse: in brazen fact, the waylaid house-staff had been tied up and gagged by a foray launched through the garden.

Cautious of his pins, a pudding-faced acolyte waddled onto the balcony. There, yanked up short and yowling with fury, he backpedalled, tripped, and sat on his unfinished hem-line. Torqued around to nurse his stabbed a.r.s.e, he yelped again as he skewered his armpit.

Through the subsequent stream of unlovely language, his fellows deduced that the lower-town wh.o.r.es had broken the record for outrage. The head priest ventured a tender descent from his perch. Trailing pale silk and a scatter of pins, he reached the cas.e.m.e.nt and parted the curtains. The view dropped his jaw. Dancing on rouged feet, a parade of belled harlots regaled him with blown kisses and smiles. Covering each splendid, seductress's curves was a sunwheel robe, its emblem jiggling against unbound b.r.e.a.s.t.s, while the trade-quarter shopkeepers, reeling drunk, clapped and shouted to cheer on their antics.

One of the prost.i.tutes screamed in delight. 'Dharkaron bear witness, you fat, pious saint!' Bosom out-thrust, her attire skirled above lissome thighs, she ran on, 'Here's Ath's perfect justice! We're twins!'

The priest flushed puce and roared, indignation drowned under the roisterers' shrieks of hilarity.

There followed an infamous chase through the streets, in which eight naked priests in flapping silk held by pins bolted outside to fetch the town-guard. Armed men were conscripted in the cause of the Light, then dispatched to wrestle the belled tarts of Innish to recover their desecrated sunwheel finery.

The ladies wore nothing but paint underneath. Amid the rough play and licentious jokes, all of Innish dropped prostrate with laughter.

From the safe seclusion of Fiark's locked warehouse, Kyrialt heard the wild tale of the fisticuffs to stand off the embarra.s.sed town-guard when the perfidious tailor came to report. Since the clansman ached too fiercely to roll on the floor, he buried his chuckles against his wife's neck until he was gasping and paralysed.

This was the southcoast, where scandalous gossip was awarded the status of legend. Years might pa.s.s before any priest in white robes would escape being the b.u.t.t of snide comments. The water-front tarts would wage their mean feud. For the suppression of trained herbalists, they would seize the incentive to re-enact the obscene celebration at each anniversary.

Early Summer 5671 Links Arrived with all speed at the hidden encampment tucked in the Thaldein Peaks, and scarcely able to pause to acknowledge a home-coming deferred for sixteen years, Ianfar s'Gannley relates the urgent word sent by a Fellowship Sorcerer: 'Forge an iron blade for a ritual death. A sunwheel priest rides the trade-road from Erdane who's become the slaved sh.e.l.l for a necromancer . . .'

Late night, at Avenor, a breathless courier disembarks from an inbound ship and demands an immediate audience with the Blessed Prince; the sealed casket he bears holds the packet of dispatches rushed at speed from the far east, to be opened in private by no less than the hand of the avatar himself . . .

Awake in his chair under soft summer moonlight, Sethvir of Althain senses a wrongness with the pulse of the stone near Etarra, and again tastes the tang of an innocent's let blood; as a shudder of horror disturbs his gaunt frame, the adept by his side overhears his grim plea, 'Let Asandir achieve his swift return from resetting the grimward at Scarpdale . . .'

Summer 5671 XI. Confrontations Under the sheer blue sky of summer, the noon sunlight beat down, burnishing the raw gold of Lysaer s'Ilessid's blond hair. The black rag he wore tied over his eyes wicked up a darkening ring of perspiration.

'You look hot,' Sulfin Evend observed, prepared to stand down and unstring the long-bow gripped in his hand.

For answer, the Blessed Prince snapped his fingers in peremptory command to fire off another arrow.

No straw target had been set up on the greensward that sweltered beneath the gauze film of the midday haze. The shots dispatched throughout the morning had been random, each shaft launched to a different point of the compa.s.s. They hissed in flat arcs, or sailed into slow volleys, all directions including straight up.

'You've only missed eight out of ninescore and six,' the Lord Commander pointed out with dry irony.

Lysaer's head turned. The bright hair that wrung longing sighs from the maidens lay wilted against the drenched blindfold. 'That's eight times dead by some wretched clan marksman, should I show myself in the free wilds.'

Sulfin Evend dutifully hefted the bow. He yanked a fresh arrow out of the sand bucket and set the fletched nock to the string. 'You might not be tired; but the sweat and the blisters aren't serving a thing but your angry, perfectionist pride.'

The sealed dispatches just arrived from the east an on-going bone of contention between them, he drew and released. The shaft leaped out, its whining flight intercepted by a needle-thin flare of sent light. The wood lit incandescent and burned, trailing an acrid taint of scorched feathers on the sluggish stir of the sea-breeze.

Today's show of inexhaustible accuracy gave Avenor's ranking war officer little cause for celebration. Not while his piercing inquiries kept on being deflected with oiled consistency. Years of experience in s'Ilessid service left Sulfin Evend ice-cold: he well knew when that charmed pattern of reticence brewed up the most wrenching campaign surprises.

Balked on one front, he turned his a.s.sault against the more volatile impa.s.se. 'If you won't restore trust with the Fellowship Sorcerers, or try other means to engage the latent talent pa.s.sed down through your mother's lineage, trust me. The safest course would be to return to Hanshire and drive through a brutal bargain with the Koriathain.'

'Filthy tactics!' Lysaer s'Ilessid declared. 'You won't cozen me to soften my stance. The ladies can brood on their sour disappointment. I will not let them barter my sworn men for studs or play with lives as political bargaining chips.'

His stilled pause served back as an ominous warning, Avenor's Lord Commander at Arms had made no move to string the next arrow.

Beneath the soaked rag, Lysaer's abrupt smile held a poignancy to seize mature heart-strings. He forewent his ill humour, aware that beguiling charisma could not soften resolve: the past months had proven he could not bend the will of his adamant, right-hand retainer.

Day upon day, they clashed verbal horns. The need to confront the incur-sive corruption that endangered the Light's governorship of Etarra also blazed into fierce disagreement between them. More than once, they had bruised themselves sparring when the sore issue edged onto the practise floor.

Now Lysaer unburdened, his honesty scathing. 'I already gave you my word not to rush. We've agreed that Avenor's security must come first. I can't leave Tysan's capital exposed as it was, or have the trade-road through Westwood left at sufferance of errant Khadrim.'

'The last escaped predator has been recontained!' Unwilling to play coy with the least taint of falsehood, Sulfin Evend jettisoned tact. 'That was Fellowship business, and better left to their knowledgeable hands and experience. If I can entrust them with my uncle's life, why can't you leave matters that are outside of your depth in the provenance of the Sorcerers?'

'Because I fear,' Lysaer stated, reasonable. 'The citizens of Etarra are my given charge. They cannot be abandoned to contend with the horrors that just cost you the lives of three officers. Nor will I knowingly cling to my safety. Not while a body of Sorcerers whose affairs are all suspect leave the common populace to live in ignorance. These people are wide-open to harrowing risk!'

Sulfin Evend bit back his urge to retread the same, tired arguments: that luck and surprise timing could not hope to prevail against a second incursion. Not with the cult's secretive masters forewarned and still smarting from the resounding defeat given to the late cabal installed at Avenor. Etarra had no ancient Paravian circle to focus the force of the lane flux, a fact that eliminated the powerful backing once granted at need by Sethvir. Worn from the heat, chafed snappish with worry, Sulfin Evend left the next arrow untouched. Instead, his gaze measured the latest disturbance to impinge on the site of the tourney-field.

A contingent of indignant figures marched across the hacked turf, resplendent with the flash of fine jewels and burdened down in state finery.

'Well, you can't deal with this matter blindfold,' he said, caught aback by startled amus.e.m.e.nt.

For the dignitaries had abandoned their haughty decorum. Undaunted by the fly-blown manure heaped by the cavalry's picket lines, they hiked up their ribbon-trimmed robes and pressed on like a covey of disgruntled quail. To judge by their militant strut and stiff chins, and the flush on their scowling faces, their pointed reception was going to make a close afternoon all the hotter.

'Could I guess?' Lysaer mused. 'The seneschal's persnickety secretary has been overset by the justiciar's packet from Shand?' The firm line of his mouth also twitched with curbed laughter. 'Bring the man on. Then just watch me.'

Prodded by impulse and evil delight, Sulfin Evend notched a fresh shaft to his string. He pulled to full draw, then released.

The arrow arched out. An etched sliver under the broiling sun, the deadly missile whined upwards. Slowed as the shaft reached the peak of its arc, the shot lost its impetus over the hats of the contingent of approaching council-men. Sulfin Evend saw movement as one of them pointed. Several heads swivelled. Another peered skyward, eyes shaded by visored fingers.

The fl.u.s.tered officials were all male, in douce accord with the bias of town law, and the rigid practice of westlands propriety. No voice in Tysan would raise questions of gender. Yet Sulfin Evend was privy to Lysaer's private nightmares. He knew of the damage incurred by betrayal: a mother, a beloved wife, and now, Ellaine had abandoned this s'Ilessid prince. Since each one had crossed without shame to an enemy, Lysaer's distrust of women would not suffer the opening to tear at the deep-buried scars of such wounds.

Above the greensward, the trembling arrow tipped, then spun point down and rushed earthward.

'Should I presume you are also displeased?' Lysaer remarked with stripped humour. Awake to the prank just barely in time, he launched the razor-thin flash of his gift into the arrow's sped course. The shaft torched. Its residue puffed a roil of black smoke over the poleaxed council-men.

Hazed to a sharp halt, Avenor's crown governance collectively bristled. Then, their state velvets snagging up dust, the shark pack regrouped, determined to vent scalded nerves on the grace of the divine presence.

The beak-faced trade minister shoved in first. 'This storm of dissent that's inflamed the far south shows no sign of abating! There have been debauched acts -'

The surge of declaiming interruptions lost wind to the rotund minister of the treasury. Annoyed by the ruin of his best calf-skin shoes, he elbowed in front, moist chins quivering. 'My scribes are accounting our losses twice weekly. We've had recruiters' tents shredded by riots, stolen wine and mislaid stores, never mentioning the tally of damaged -'

'The missing white silk for the new priest initiates!' a red-faced crown acolyte burst in, at once shouted down by his beak-faced superior, 'Oh, that's scarcely the worst! Today we've had word that the gilded fittings for the new temple at Ishlir have gone missing. Every one of our inventoried wagons arrived filled by crates crammed with rocks! The stone for the marble facing's been lost under still more nefarious circ.u.mstances -'

'It sank, actually,' the palace accountant upbraided in stuffy correction. 'A bridge collapsed on the trade-road. Four drays tumbled into the river. The carters were forced to go swimming to rescue their floundering oxen.' He sniffed, then concluded, 'Barbarian work, surely. Their pillaging raids have increased.'

Sulfin Evend stayed poised behind Lysaer's shoulder, primed for the moment his blindfold liege would be hounded from regal complacency.

Lysaer snapped imperious fingers, instead. 'Next arrow,' he commanded.

Straight-faced, Sulfin Evend bent his yew-bow, while the yammering council-men stumbled awkwardly backwards, still ticking off points on their fingers. 'Four strayed shipments of gold, the tribute chests lifted from a company of guards, not to mention the pestilent scourge of indecent ballads and satire - why have we no edicts to curtail the bards? Their lying tongues are a galling obstruction!'

The bow cracked in release. Its launched shot sheared upwards into the blue, where a snapped burst of brilliance destroyed it.

Coughing out the taint of singed fletching, Avenor's justiciar clung yet to the rags of diplomacy. 'We have thefts going unpunished, and desertions applauded by riff-raff.'

Here, the gifted clairvoyant who trained for the high priesthood thrust forward to cite the fresh case. 'Last fortnight, a temple's newly blessed floor was defiled by a crofter's escaped herd of swine! The doors were barred shut. No muddy pigs could have entered unless a malingerer herded them in.'

The justiciar restrained the fuming priest by the shoulder, and strove to restore court decorum. 'Our efforts to bring justice to bear on that incident turned your most competent officers into a laughingstock. Serious inquiries could not be held while jeering hecklers turned every magistrates' hearing into an act of low comedy! The dock-side at Shaddorn foments open insurgency. An outbreak of mud-slinging begun by the wh.o.r.es was abetted when waterfront craftsmen opened their shops and let the guilty escape the town watch.'

Beneath the gleaming, fair hair and rag blindfold, Lysaer's mouth showed no change of expression. 'Arrow,' he stated in peremptory calm. Sulfin Evend well knew when to follow an order. He nocked, drew, and released on demand, then observed to see how s'Ilessid ingenuity would field the mounting unpleasantness. There would be a design: Avenor's self-styled prince always played his tensioned lines with tenaciously brilliant resolve.

The next shaft whined aloft.

'How do you suggest the Light should respond?' Lysaer flicked his wrist. The seemingly casual gesture released a burst of ball lightning. The explosive energy consumed its frail mark, wisping another pall of spent carbon.

Avenor's shrewdest trade minister cleared his wattled throat. 'Lord Exalted, your losses are happening. The longer we deliberate, the more chance we'll be faced with enforcing a drastic solution.'

'Your Divine Grace.' Avenor's crown steward ventured his case, his prudish, tucked hands ill at ease with the new-found mantle of his authority. 'Since the spring, the holy treasury has been robbed of twenty-eight thousand gold royals. Thrice that in hard silver coin weight. That's not accounting for vandalized property or the fines that are, daily, being waived by south sh.o.r.e officials whose moral fibre has been swayed by malicious sabotage. We are losing hard-won support by the hour, and to what? Indecorous behaviour, malign gossip, and life-sworn men-at-arms shamed into defection. I suggest that money and resource don't vanish by accident. Rumours on this scale do not sprout unsown. We know the bards who are singing the satires don't answer to the same description, however, the Spinner of Darkness has a most subtle hand. Surely this must be his work?'

'Arrow,' said Lysaer. 'A high, ranging arc, aimed for drift and wind, due south-west.'

A cold-blooded order, most softly spoken: yet the crack of its emphasis cried challenge. Sulfin Evend stilled his p.r.i.c.ked conscience, bent his powerful bow, and sighted the shot's angle above the flagged towers of the palace.

When he loosed, the shaft arced upwards without interruption. It slowed, losing impetus at the height of its arc. A needle of sunlight glanced off varnished wood. Then the point turned, and gravity took charge. The missile plunged, aligned towards the heart of Avenor's inhabited court plaza.

As though no hapless bystander risked being skewered, Lysaer turned his masked face towards the cl.u.s.ter of dismayed council-men. 'You think I should act?'

The arrow whined earthward, its lethal broadhead a distant twinkle of steel nicked through the blanketing haze.

One fretful council-man moistened parched lips. 'Your Blessed Grace, for the Light's justice, you must.'

No one moved. The shaft's flight sped unchecked, raising stifled gasps from the onlookers.

'Must?' stated Lysaer s'Ilessid, and this time, his held fury lashed his governors a cringing step backwards. 'Innocents are suffering!' The acolyte priest sank to his knees, broken to desperate pleading. 'Intercede. I beg you, my lord. For wanton cruelty, would you chance an innocent's death as the price of our forward presumption?'

'You would not forget at the cost of a burial.' Lysaer's forefinger flicked. Light erupted. The explosive blast slammed the dead air like a thunder-clap. The descending arrow was annihilated, and more: the guildhall roof peak showed a smoking scar where melted lead had scoured through to expose the underlying support beams.

As dreadfully edged, the Divine Prince's restated question: 'How do you suggest that the Light should respond?'

The acolyte swallowed. The trade ministers hedged. Hatted heads dipped, and pinned feathers nodded, while the egg-bald town-gatekeeper peered at his toes as though his best shoes might sprout answers.

Sulfin Evend a.s.sessed the collective distress, silenced to burning contempt as no man of courage came forward.

Their blindfold avatar stood his unabashed ground. The soaked rag and the heat should have spoiled his grandeur: no sovereign majesty should rise above the wilted gra.s.s of a tourney-field. Yet Lysaer's innate presence engaged his shocked dignitaries as though he sat enthroned, while the tension built higher, stretched to the bleak pitch of a storm front. When at last Lysaer chose to speak, his response only shocked for its mildness. 'Ill-gotten, worse spent. The Master of Shadow shall receive the sour fruit of such petty conniving.'

The gruff seneschal tripped over himself to chime in. 'We have matched the creature's slinking ways often enough. All that is good, he will seek to desecrate. His works cloud the truth, defame and tear down.'

Lysaer showed the untoward outburst his tolerance, then resumed with astringent dignity, 'I have heard each insult, each injury, each death. I have not responded in anger. Never presume this has not been a choice! My restraint is not to be mistaken as fact, that I am resigned or complacent.'

'Then guide us,' entreated the harried Lord Treasurer. 'How do you propose to redress rifled coffers? We require some tangible means to offset the depletions of theft and these constant, draining expenditures!'

Lysaer's imperious gesture enjoined his Lord Commander to unstring the long-bow. Then he hooked off the blindfold, unveiling eyes turned steel-hard by the pain of experience. 'The Spinner of Darkness has done naught but feint. He taunts. He withdraws. He wears at our flanks, not with lethal threat, but with laughter. What does he wish to provoke, but a cheap and undisciplined clamour for vengeance?'

The clipped pause was not gentle as Lysaer tossed his rag with the last, forlorn arrow in the sand bucket. 'On your feet!' he cracked to his kneeling acolyte. 'This cause we are bound to serve with our lives is not petty. It is not about anger, or antics, or a little rage, done to put down mean acts and desecrations. We are allied to serve the needs of a people and defend their born right to freedom. In our hands, the design must be shaped to liberate this world from the threat of tyrannical sorcery. You insist I should act.'

Lysaer's drilling stare raked each face, as if searching for something found wanting. 'Then where do I start? By hanging a false tailor? By arresting the dock-side bawds of Innish for the crime of a naked priest's blushing embarra.s.sment? Do I disrobe the trade council of Southshire because they succ.u.mbed to a fraud arranged by a covert conspiracy?'

'You risk an impotent image if you do nothing,' the candidate for the high priesthood pointed out, while the treasurer's clutched list of deficits crackled between his nervous hands. 'Injustice demands rest.i.tution.'

Lysaer sighed, above rancour. 'Would any such act reduce the threat imposed by the Master of Shadow? Would his actual strength be diminished? The degree to which we embroil ourselves will only debase our long-term credibility. Lose impetus to revenge, and we just defer the hour of lasting triumph. I will not rise! Nor will the Light stoop to the gutter over a skirmish of slanging and insults!'

'That's all very well.' Shamed, but not cowed, the Minister of the Treasury drew breath to broach the issue of critical short-falls.

The Blessed Prince cut him off. 'This is my word, and your given will, as you cherish your grace under heaven. Gird yourselves for war. The conflict you desire is imminent. Forge weapons and raise arms in the name of Light. Recruit every able young man. Do your work well, without pause for effrontery. Never bow to outrage or embarra.s.sment! For tomorrow, I shall sail east by fast ship and lay the groundwork for a true reckoning.'

Lysaer unveiled his purpose, a flung stone amid the tense quiet. 'I go to pursue two counts of rank treachery. Proof has reached my hand. My princess is at Spire in the hands of Ath's adepts, and Duke Bransian s'Brydion of Alestron has engaged in a treasonous collaboration with no less than the Master of Shadow.'

'The fell demon's escaped Kewar!' someone gasped, shocked.

'For some months,' Lysaer s'Ilessid avowed. 'I had cautioned you all this would happen.'

Amid reeling upset as Avenor's high councilors fought back the wind to regroup, the Blessed Prince closed with crisp force. 'Let us see if the south can sustain its insurgency with my hand on the reins of Shand's politics.'

Enraged to have been played in the dark alongside Avenor's fresh council-men, Sulfin Evend did not scramble in stunned step to accommodate Lysaer's brazen announcement. Instead, he strode off the tourney-field, placed the whirlwind muster of escort and honour guard in the hands of a competent officer, and returned to the royal suite. There, he ordered his crack team of sentries to retire into the ante-room. Still armed, and grimed with dusty sweat from his extended hours of archery, he bowled through the frantic servants who lugged trunks and scurried to pack the state wardrobe. Undaunted by protests, he shouldered past more attendants with towels and barged into the regent's bath chamber.

The Blessed Prince relaxed in the huge marble tub, sunk hip deep in the gla.s.s-tiled floor. His soaked head reclined on a sandbag of linen, while a manservant sponged lather over a torso sculpted with fit layers of muscle.

'Out!' snapped Sulfin Evend.

The man-servant bristled, prepared to retort.

Yet Lysaer's genteel word affirmed the dismissal. The attendant waded out of the tub, his poisonous glare raking the vulgar intruder as he stalked through the doorway.

Undaunted, Sulfin Evend overshadowed the replete form of his liege. 'You're not wearing your knife,' he accused, while the steam whorled up in ghostly eddies between them.

Lysaer at last deigned to open his eyes. Surrounded by pristine white tile and set against bloodless, fair skin, the gaze burned with lapis intensity. Unspeaking, he raised a hand from the suds. The flint blade was clenched in his fist.

Which curt response did not disarm Sulfin Evend's combative mood. 'You toy with good men,' he attacked. 'That disrespect shows a lack of trust that deeply shames and demeans them.'

The Blessed Prince maintained his hard stare. 'You're here to take issue? Then level the field. Strip off your armour and join me.'

'I'm not here to play games!' Sulfin Evend cracked back.