The Ships of Merior

While the wains were pulled up for unloading, he stole a moment while the watch was diverted, and behind the move of blowing on chapped hands, cast a sharp eye across the waves. His month in the dungeon had left him more time than he liked for uninterrupted concentration; his eyesight was clear as a sailor’s.

A gruff voice shouted behind him, ‘You!’ A pikestaff hit Dakar across the shoulders. ‘Back to work! And hurry on about it.’

The Mad Prophet stumbled forward, caught short of a trip as he ploughed shoulder down into the stone block in process of being jockeyed from the wagon bed onto log rollers for transport. Men swayed. The wagon creaked. The dressed mass of granite shifted, grating, then spun off-balance and dived. Those poles not instantly milled to slivers lumbered out of alignment, while men jumped clear and swore, the slowest ones nursing whacked shins.

‘It’s the fat idiot, again!’ screeched the pikeman appointed to attend the wain’s unloading.

Wide-eyed in affront, Dakar regarded flat folds where once he had sported a paunch. ‘Fat?’

A mailed fist fetched him a ringing thump on the jaw. ‘No talk. Just work. Or ye’ll see yourself pressed to parchment under yon mother of a rock.’

Dakar staggered on rubbery knees and fell spectacularly flat on his fundament. Prods from the pike failed to raise him.

‘Fiends plague us!’ The watch captain arrived, the higher-pitched clink of his accoutrements clear over the deeper tones of shackle chains. ‘Drag the lout into the spray! Cold water should rouse him soon enough.’

Two convicts were waved over to manhandle Dakar clear of the work crew. He lay sprawled at the edge of the sea wall, a crumpled heap in stained rags, bruised and apparently dazed; except that his face stayed raptly turned toward the surf that pounded below. At length, he stirred, not due to the needling spray that sheeted over him, but because he finally sighted the sign he sought amid the moiling whitecaps.

There were fiends in truth, out amid the breakers, riding the incoming tide to replenish themselves. Energy sprites native to Athera that drew fuel from the tumble of the waters, invisible to the eye except as crests that rose and broke, then subsided, unnaturally splashless, into the current of the bay. What the Paravian tongue named iyats, or tricksters, for their tireless penchant to make mischief.

Dakar’s lip curled in an evil smile through split and bleeding contusions. He moaned for effect, rolled over and propped himself on his forearms. Then, eyes clenched shut in a feigned fit of queasiness, he mustered his skills as a spellbinder and inwardly massed a tight, spinning core of focused energy. Sloppily, as a novice might, he let the force bleed into his aura. The miscast conjury was imperceptible, even harmless, little worse than the flash of static discharge that might jump and ground to metal in a dry freeze. But as Dakar well knew from experience, the slightest mismanagement of mage-force was irresistible fare to the appetite of an unsated fiend.

Often enough in the past he had suffered, when negligent handling of his lessons had attracted the sprites to plague him. As much as Asandir tried to castigate him, Dakar’s ways stayed incorrigible. Ever and always he remained an insatiable magnet for fiends.

He felt a shiver thrill the air as they sensed his beckoning presence. The splashless fall of the wavecrests unravelled, spouting into joyous, wild spray as the creatures arrowed from their sport and fastened upon his signature of strayed power. Never before had he revelled in the itches and small tingles that played over his skin as they spun, drinking the energy-spill off his aura. Where one came, more followed. Iyats liked travelling in packs. Prickled and lightly burned through the tuned perception of his mage-sense, Dakar judged to the second when the fiends blithely gathered to feed from his handout became charged and engorged beyond their simple needs. He groaned and groped and stood upright with just enough show to draw the eye of the watching overseer.

For once in league with shouted oaths and harsh orders, the Mad Prophet let the guardsmen prod him. Chivvied, cursed, and shoved on by impatient pike butts, he let himself be hazed into the thick of the work crew, no longer unloading carts, but labouring and groaning to lever the heavy blocks into place on the broken sea wall. The smells of salt-damp wool and sweat combined with the squeak of ropes through blocks and tackle; the grind of stone over stone. Pressed amid the heat of straining bodies, made to shoulder his share of the weight, Dakar licked crusted blood from his teeth and cut off his trickle of leaked energy.

The invisible fiends knit about him in spirals of distorted breezes. They buffeted and pinched and tweaked at his hair in signal fits of irritation. When he refused to give in and fuel their wants further, they lent themselves in their madcap way to tease, to frustrate, to annoy, that they might sip what stray spurts of emotion they could wring from whatever victims were available.

In an eyeblink, the work on the jetty erupted into chaos.

Stone chips and rocks sprang up and whirled airborne, clanging off the helms of the officers and unmercifully pelting the conscripts. Bruised and screaming in wild surprise, men heaved off the encumbrance of their loads. The massive dressed blocks misaligned and jarred awry, then dropped with a thud to quake the sea wall. Granite rasped against granite, grinding off falls of small pebbles that ripped aloft to sting flesh. Men coughed out curses and spat grit while the older blocks already mauled by storms and ice loosened, cracked, and gave way, to fall with thunderous, geysering spray into white petticoats of surf.

A waterspout kicked up where no breath of wind was in evidence. It shrieked and snarled and snaked itself a passage like a whip through mild air. The lead ox teams scrabbled back, whuffing. Pounds of solid muscle strained against the constraints of leather and shafts, while the stout cart behind struck a wall of rock and compressed. The wagon bed groaned and burst in a wreckage of timber. The next dray in line jounced and jammed two wheels in cracked paving, its hubs wrenched off to a squeal of sheared linchpins.

Yards away, three stolid drovers appeared to entangle themselves in their ox goads and fall flat.

‘Ath spare us!’ yelled the captain in charge. He ducked too late to miss the sliced foam off a wave top that poured itself down his back. Red-faced, dripping, ready to murder for sheer fury, he hopped from one leg to the other. ‘We’re caught in a damned plague of fiends!’ The pikestaff in his hands came alive with the urge to bang down and hammer at his insteps.

Bleeding now from a dozen minor gashes, men at arms threw aside polearms to slap at the hail of small pebbles. While the oxen bucketed against their yokes, and bedevilled carters strove to quiet them, iyats possessed the very reins in their hands and exuberantly undid the buckles. The dropped leather twined snake-fashion and laced around ankles and fetlocks. While the animals bawled and the convicts thrashed in their shackles, the beleaguered guardsmen unsheathed their daggers. They bent to hack themselves free, then stamped and slapped at cut bits of leather that groped up their calves like maggots.

‘Men, get the prisoners to form ranks!’ shouted the harried captain.

While his troop pushed, punched, staggered, and shoved the distraught work team into ragged columns, a sizeable stretch of the sea wall began in bounding starts to unravel. Rocks flew and cracked, whistling the air like slingshot.

‘Back!’ screamed the officer of the watch. ‘Inside the gatehouse! The talismans there will fend off the fiends.’

Braced on planted feet just shy of the crumbling jetty, the Mad Prophet laughed through his reddish frizzle of beard. If the little tin fetishes that dangled from the gatehouse had once held power to ward, time and attrition had drained the spells. The residue that lingered might deflect one fiend; never a full pack bent on a spree of wild mischief. Against common belief, the jangle and chime raised by wind-tossed strips of tin caused no warding vibrations. Their sound was good for nothing but warning and the iyats would pass them unscathed. Dakar knew from bleak experience: having tasted the heady discharge of spell-force on his person, the sprites were apt to dog his tracks for days.

As unrepentant instigator, he set his jaw against the throttling tug of his prison smock, that a smaller iyat seemed bent on unravelling into a garrotte. He marched in his shackles through splintered carts and the steaming heaps of dung littered by the terrified ox teams, and felt inordinately cheerful. Singing bawdy ditties in confinement was vastly preferable to hard labour that might see a man’s bones ground for fish food; worth even the torment of a plague-storm of fiends to regain a safe state of idleness.

Four days later, engrossed in a target shoot against Jaelot’s second captain of archers, the Masterbard’s apprentice Medlir poised at the butts in the practice yard to tally the score of his arrows.

An off-duty guardsman hailed him from the gate across the field. ‘Hey, minstrel! Did you hear? That fat man your master must play to redeem was let off his term of forced labour!’

Wrapped in a faded dun cloak, lashed about the ankles by the wind-crumpled stands of spring grass that had finally pushed through the mud, Medlir flicked back his hood. Eyes as changeably flecked as the lichen tinged wall behind his shoulder widened under up-turned brows. ‘You speak of Dakar? What’s to hear?’

His shooting companions clustered around, sand pig-gins empty, their shafts still jammed in straw targets. The silver they stood to lose if the count was completed left them amiably open to diversion.

Now able to laugh at the afternoon’s pestering annoyance, the guard just off watch in the dungeons strode over, his conical helm tucked beneath his arm. ‘Fool bailiff had to release him. No choice. Besides being crazy, the fat man’s a breathing, walking lure for stray fiends. Brings them on like a lodestone draws iron, and not a blighted talisman in the city seems to hold power for protection.’ Arrived at the butts, and soldier enough to count and weigh odds at a glance, he slapped Medlir on the shoulder. ‘You’re winning? With that? Against longbows?’

‘I was.’ The minstrel gave a crooked smile. Long, supple fingers unstrung the horn recurve, then surrendered the weapon to a page boy for return to common stores in the armoury. ‘You didn’t tell Dakar the name of the inn where we’re quartering?’

The guardsman’s brisk humour turned wicked. ‘The city dungeon won’t keep him. Who’s left? I hope you’ve got patience for waking up with your bootlaces snarled into knots.’

‘Well, I don’t.’ Energetically merry, Medlir laughed.

He kept to himself the piquant truth that a masterbard’s art included chords arranged in particular harmonic resonance to repel fiends. Halliron had forbidden his apprentice to perform any music in public; for himself, the old man avowed to make no appearance until the moment he was compelled by the terms of the judiciary’s bargain. If Jaelot was pestilent with iyats due to Dakar’s incarceration, the Masterbard and his singer in training would retreat to their attic and share rich appreciation of the havoc.

Spirit Tracks

Touched across distance by a prompt from the Warden in Althain Tower, a raven flaps and rouses a Fellowship mage, who ignores the stiffness of old wounds to arise, don his threadbare black cloak, and journey eastward across Radmoore Downs toward the spell-guarded stronghold on the edge of the dread mires of Mirthlvain …

In western lands, the same call is heard and declined by another spirit mage who stands watch over an enclave of enchantresses; in particular one initiate with dark auburn hair and a guarded heart, entrapped in the web of greater intrigue that surrounds the Master of Shadow …

Far removed from Athera’s spinning orb and the sphere of Sethvir’s provenance, the discorporate awareness of a sorcerer departs from a world bound in ice and shackled under brooding bands of fog; and as his conscious presence arrows on through the emptiness that freezes the space between stars, he fears the next place he seeks to unlock the Mistwraith’s secrets may prove as lifelessly desolate as the last …

IV. CONVOCATION (#ucdb488e2-83e0-5c76-b362-5a84ff52736b)

Some days after the clanborn courier had taken leave of his tower eyrie, Sethvir, Warden of Althain laid out a fresh square of parchment. With one elbow braced against a tome on celestial mechanics whose listed orbs and planetary bodies lay nowhere near his present world of inhabitancy, he pondered; his hands out of fussy habit trimmed pen nibs the way a duellist might whet fine steel. Then, his left hand curled around a tea mug, the sorcerer penned out the message Tysan’s lady steward had asked him to send on to Arithon s’Ffalenn. Moved by purposeful afterthought, he added an inventory that filled twelve close-spaced pages. The items he catalogued had been on Maenalle’s mind, too lengthy for a courier to memorize. Willing servant to her intent, Sethvir let the breeze dry the ink. Then he rummaged through a cupboard, salvaged a battered seal from a tin full of oddments, and secured the document under the device of the ancient princes of Camris, from whom the lady traced descent.

The waning night beyond the casements was the eve of the vernal equinox, by custom a time for the Fellowship sorcerers to gather in convocation.

Althain’s Warden tucked the finished letter into a satchel already packed for the occasion and descended to his equally cluttered living quarters. There he replaced his threadbare robe with another only slightly less ink-stained. Outside, the sky lightened to dusky pearl. Bright-eyed despite not having slept for several days, Sethvir continued down the stairwell.

No cressets brightened the black iron wall sconces. The commemorative statues of Paravians housed on Althain’s ground floor wore a gloom only fitfully broken as the gleam that leaked through the arrowloops jinked across gold braid and trappings.

Sethvir required no torch to see his way past the ranks of marble unicorns; the homed majesty of centaurs that loomed above his head; the waist-high maple pedestals that elevated the diminutive bronzes of Sun Children. If concern for the future burdened his thoughts, here, the past weighed unquiet as well. Through mage-sense, Sethvir felt the vibrational echoes left by the steps of former visitors. In winnowed air currents like moving chiaroscuro, he could trace the tides of old magics, ones wrought by Paravians in subliminal harmonics; and others more recent, of Fellowship craft, that feathered the skin like a tonic. Surrounding all, enduring as bedrock, lurked the guardspells that sealed Althain Tower from the world and its troubles outside.

The sorcerer bypassed the gold-chased panels, built to mask the massive, geared chains and windlass that worked the tower’s grand portal. His satchel slung like a knapsack, he knelt by an inset trapdoor and paused, apparently overcome by reverie; in fact, his mind sharpened in search and coursed outward, beyond Athera’s cloud layer and into deep vacuum through which the stars drifted like lamps.

But the far distant spirit of the colleague who journeyed to study the Mistwraith’s origin returned no response; nor had for an uneasy score of months.

With Lysaer extending his influence into Tysan, the peace could scarcely last. Time to reclaim the cursed princes from the Mistwraith’s geas was growing sorrowfully short.

Raked by a shiver, Sethvir aroused, recalled to those troubles close at hand. A ring-pull lifted to his touch; defence wards dissolved and the heavy stone rose to a stir of moving counterweights. The chamber’s miasma of aged cedar and wool gave way to the draught that welled up, spiked like a storm-breeze with ozone. A stair shaft cut downward into cold dark, limned like dust on ebony by the silver-blue glimmer of the power focus set into the dungeon below.

Sethvir secured the trapdoor behind him and descended. Daybreak was nigh, its song plain to read in the soft, bursting static of the earth lane’s magnetic signature. Althain’s Warden stepped off the landing. He crossed a concave depression paved with lightless black onyx, then the focus itself, of concentric circles over-scribed in Paravian runes, mapped out in pearlescent phosphor. Tingled by the unshielded play of elemental forces, he positioned himself at the pattern’s centre. His feet rested on the apex of a looping star interlace that met in a nexus of five lines.