The Ships of Merior

‘So, how much did they learn?’ Sethvir asked on a grainy note of laughter.

The request engaged a shadowy blur that defined itself into the corpulent image of the bodiless being he addressed. Robed in scholar’s grey belted at the waist with a doubled band of leather that buckled suspiciously like a harness girth, Luhaine stalked soundlessly forward. Frowning over full cheeks and a wheat-shock bristle of whiskers, he stabbed a stumpy finger in accusation. ‘Considering Dakar’s ploys in Jaelot? By rights his plague of fiends should have drawn Koriani interest like flies to dead meat to peddle talismans against that iyat bane. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate the enchantresses let that slip past.’

Sethvir raised bushy eyebrows.

The spirit who glided over the moist carpet seldom cursed, but his agitation showed signs of turning stormy. His rejoinder was not delivered in words, but in a cobbled scrap of memory hurled like a slap at his colleague.

For a second, Sethvir shared the tight and detailed vision of a wasted crone in violet veils bent over an ebon table. Around her like flesh-eating vultures in hoods the silky sheen of black grapes, a circle of women followed her interest as she said, ‘Ah, but his endowments are to be envied.’

The subject under discussion was a shimmering web of light captured by determined scrying: the life-print of Arithon s’Ffalenn as unveiled the past night over Meth Isle’s focus. As avidly as spiders might suck the juices from a trapped insect, the enchantresses analysed his attributes. They dissected the spiralled framework of his power, both latent and schooled: of a mage’s chained discipline and a shadow master’s wild talent linked through the blaze of a visionary mind. The cherished potential of his musician’s talents were picked out in all their ethereal shadings, a silver-lace braid wound through a will stamped in flesh like bright wire. Here, the beacon symmetry of s’Ahelas farvision tangled razor-point edges with the nettle and gossamer tendrils of undying s’Ffalenn compassion. There, the enchantresses read the sorrow and despair in the moment of Deshthiere’s conquest: Arithon’s self-awareness like the fixed sting of thorns, that hope and effort could buy him no better than failure.

Sethvir shrugged the burdensome image away with long-suffering patience. ‘The Koriani Prime and her First Senior learned nearly as much from a spying foray six years ago. Although Arithon’s personal Name pattern is now shared in common with the Prime Circle, Morriel is little more enlightened.’

Luhaine sniffed, his bodiless bulk passing without mishap between a side table stacked with gutted tea canisters and a clothes tree festooned with worn bridles. ‘Well, she certainly didn’t know that Arithon and Lysaer had drunk from the Five Centuries Fountain.’

Sethvir stilled. His eyes turned a dreamy, vacuous blue as he engaged direct power to sample the consternation bought on the heels of that revelation. When he found the Prime Circle scurrying in agitation like an ant hill pounded by a hailstorm, he chuckled outright. ‘The news should keep them busy for a little. Why trouble? The only ramification I can see beyond hysterics, is one especially deserving young initiate will gain a course of training she would otherwise be forbidden to merit.’

Luhaine’s lugubrious mood failed to brighten.

The Warden of Althain sighed. As if conceding some unseen point, he sat upon a cot he never slept in, folded veined hands on his knees, and absorbed himself in muttering a cantrip that would banish the damp from his rug. When the binding was complete and the musty smell dispersed along with the dregs of the water, he fidgeted gently and peered at the vortex that comprised his discorporate guest. ‘Luhaine?’

The portly apparition spun about in a noiseless whirl of grey. ‘You can’t say I haven’t witnessed more than my share of the Koriathain’s grand councils. They’ve fixed on the ironies of Arithon’s nature and see nothing beyond surface paradox. That, they’ve concluded, creates an explosive potential for instability. Once their Senior Circle divines the Shadow Master’s chosen course and location, they’re not going to allow him free will. He’s the last of his line, and Morriel’s ancient with spite. You know they’re very likely to launch on a quest to see him dead.’

Sethvir seemed to hold to concentration with an effort. ‘They don’t know Arithon’s mage powers were left impaired since the battle at Strakewood. Given that aura to study in depth, do you think they’re going to plunge in and meddle without caution? We’re speaking of Torbrand’s descendant, after all. By Ath, at that, they’d be entitled to suffer due consequences!’

But the immediacy of the Shadow Master’s peril could not be so lightly dismissed.

‘I don’t care how nasty a temper Rathain’s prince has inherited. If he gets himself compromised by enchantresses and we make an open move to intervene, we’re going to gain a whole world of trouble.’ Luhaine’s image bulked ominously dark against the lit square of the casement. ‘Tell me now,’ he insisted in point blank demand much against his stolid nature. ‘How much time have we bought before the Koriathain try again? They’re bound to bring still more power to bear and we can’t use the same ploy twice. How long before they have their way and unriddle Arithon’s disguise?’

The outlook isn’t good,’ Sethvir allowed in vague discomfort. As Luhaine’s black eyes glared through him, he relented in a gritty snap of grief. ‘At my outside guess, three months.’

‘Midsummer solstice,’ Luhaine murmured. ‘Daelion show us all mercy, we don’t even know if Kharadmon will survive, much less return before then.’

Crisis could fall well before the Fellowship was prepared to match their powers against the Mistwraith’s bane-spell. This time, when no answer was forthcoming, Luhaine lacked the will to badger Sethvir from his silence.

Disruption

The sparrows who scrapped over the breadcrusts on the windowsill stopped pecking after crumbs and flurried away on startled wings.

Their shadows flitted across the work table, cluttered with its melee of opened herb jars, powdered roots, and tied bundles of dried flowers that burdened the air with thick scents. Determined to ignore whatever spurred their panicked flight, Elaira, initiate Koriani enchantress, continued to brew the poultice paste she hoped might treat the lame shepherd; one whose leg had mended awry from a fall through a rockslide, and whom the hospice healers had tried to turn off because his need was not urgent. Though his fused joints made him limp, he could walk enough to manage, if never to scale steep slopes of Vastmark shale to drive his flocks to summer pasture.

No stranger to poverty, Elaira often shouldered illogical causes. Confirmed as a misfit, she was left by her peers to pursue her studies in a niche between the stills and the herb stores. There, in solitary, contented untidiness, she fed songbirds on crusts that were not mouldy, and concocted obscure remedies as she pleased. A loosened coil of auburn hair licked a cheek streaked yellow with powdered groundsel. Steadily swearing in gutter dialect, pale eyes level in concentration, Elaira strove to balance the conjury laid like ghostly embroidery across the heated air above her crucible.

The delicate forces flickered and twined, scorched thin at the edges as crux points strained to spin awry. To reshape a mangled bone and contracted knots of scar tissue took more than astringents configured with seals of forced growth. Renewal of any deformity required a death-spell tempered with runes of rebirth, contrary and difficult fluxes for the most gifted healer to balance; an energy binding Elaira knew better than to try while her mind was tormented to distraction.

She bit her lip, pressed by a reasonless urge to throw a glass flask just for the need to hear it shatter. The alternative was to break inside; to turn to face whoever had raised her door latch and scattered the timid songbirds. Elaira shut her lips in fierce denial, while the filigreed energies she had wrought through the course of an unspeakable morning collapsed in tangles and bled away.

She could bury herself in the pages of musty herbals and brew tisanes until she rotted away into dotage without lifting a jot of her misery. Her arcane sensitivity to water made the sea tides ring in her blood. Awareness of the spring equinox was ingrained in her being, alongside the scrying twenty-one enchantresses had undertaken on last night’s lane surge, to hunt down and locate one man.

Merciful Ath, Elaira begged silently, let the Koriani Senior Council not have found Arithon s’Ffalenn.

Her plea with fate went unanswered.

‘The Prime Enchantress requests your immediate presence,’ the intruder in the doorway announced in a clear-edged child’s treble.

No such summons would come to her if Arithon’s position was not compromised. Elaira moved, stood, acknowledged the blond pageboy who looked young for his eight years in the order’s quilted violet livery. ‘Lead me to the matriarch.’ Through a miracle, her voice came out steady.

Since the ill-starred battle at Strakewood, she had endured the years as best she could, hedged and dogged by the surety that Arithon’s anonymity could not last; not when the Koriani council had named his wild talents a latent threat to society and her knowledge was their bridge to understand him.

Elaira stepped into the corridor on the heels of the page, vexed with her superiors enough to pity his adult composure. On impulse, she said, ‘Let’s take the short cut through the service vaults.’

‘You want to?’ The child grinned around missing front teeth, then raced ahead and nipped through a dingy, arched postern.

The ancient hospice abandoned to Koriani use by the initiates of Ath’s brotherhood was an ungainly, rambling edifice, drilled like a battered honeycomb into the limestone scarps south of Forthmark. Its crumbling warren of storerooms harboured perpetual, clammy humidity, fed by damp, porous rock that seeped from the flow of underground hot springs. The spacious outer chambers used to house the sick were less oppressive, spared by the beat of clean sunlight through south-facing casements. There the pervasive must of mildew was scoured off by boy wards wielding buckets and holystones to earn their keep.

Elaira’s mood better suited the cavernous back staircases and circuitous, low-ceilinged tunnels that twined through rootcellars and storage cells. Cobwebs streamed in the draughts, glistening like shot silk in the glow of widely spaced torches. The air reeked of tallow smoke and corroded metal, and the walls wore patinas of old soot.

Elaira hurried. Her step made no noise, despite hardsoled boots and a stone floor that threw back sharp echoes. Orphan of a street whore, raised from infancy by beggars until an unlucky brush with the law had bound her into Koriani fosterage, she kept the sly habits of her childhood. Yet no matter how unobtrusively she passed, the silver-blond fairness and amethyst silk tunic of Morriel’s personal pageboy drew notice from every peer and scullion dispatched on errands to the cellars.

Ones who did not merit summons before their Prime, and who were the happier for it.

Elaira shrugged off the speculative whispers that hissed in the wake of her steps. Already marked apart for a worldly entanglement she was helpless to alter or break, she took perverse pleasure in watching the Prime’s pageboy spoil his formal grooming. Past the steam-choked laundry, where red-cheeked junior novices gossiped across their washtubs, through a chattering procession of boy wards who hauled in wood for the kitchen, Elaira’s cavorting escort was remarked. Aware to a fine point of the Prime Circle’s use for her flaws, she dared to ignore the huffy senior taking inventory, who brandished her tally slates and scolded.

In breathless vindication, Elaira grabbed the child’s hand and tugged him to refuge in a pantry. A hidden door at the back opened through the annex by the wine stores, to the boy’s smothered gasp of delight.

‘Didn’t know about this byway, did you?’ Elaira grinned, scraped cobwebs from her hair, and cupped the crystal that hung from the chain at her neck. ‘You’ll like it. The floorboards are infested with cockroaches.’ As the power she focused brightened through her hands, she said, ‘Go on. Catch a few if you want. Just don’t let me find you tweaking off any legs or wings. You can horrify your dorm mistress all you like. But if the insects take any harm from your pranks, I’ll blister your tail with a spell.’

The page stifled a whoop and fell to, dirtying the knees of his hose as he scavenged beneath an old grape press. Elaira watched his deviltry in sad silence. The male children selected as Morriel’s pages led proscribed lives, chosen tools of Koriani higher purpose. But unlike her, whose vows constrained for life service, the boys regained freedom at puberty.

She helpfully offered her handkerchief to net and secure the live contraband, then doused her spell and hustled up the timber stair with its rickety rope and tackle, originally strung to lower filled vats, before Koriani tenure had uprooted the vineyards to grow herbs.

Elaira opened the stairwell portal. Someone had smeared lard on the hinges, probably a scullion sneaking off for assignation with a milkmaid. The enchantress shut her eyes, swept by unbidden association: of long, musician’s fingers flicking dry stems of hay from her hair. Whether the tenderness in that memory had arisen from instinctive s’Ffalenn compassion, or some deeper need that touched the heart, she might never determine. Her order’s inflexible codes of conduct disbarred her from amorous pursuits. Elaira shook off forbidden thoughts, while the page reassumed his lapsed duty. He preceded her down the corridor to the columned atrium Ath’s initiates had originally used for their devotions.

Before the casements had been paned with stout glass, the chamber had been a terrace garden open to the sweep of mountain breezes. Marble toned like fine, blue-veined flesh had lain under snow through winter’s freezes. In the hot, amber days of Shandian summer, flowering vines had laddered the pillars, shedding sweet fragrance and petals. Now, the cracked stone planters were planked over as tables, or else spell-sealed as vault space to preserve rare scrolls on arcane practice. The fountains and pools were all mortared in, their scars masked under purple carpets sewn in silver with Koriani seals of ward and guard.

Older sigils carved in the walls and the roof groins channelled more potent powers still: a captured resonance of earth song, or the clear, high vibrations spiralled in sympathy with the constellations along the ecliptic. Except for a poignancy instilled by time and death that marked its brotherhood creators as mortal, the currents ran similar to the ghostly, faded harmonies left imprinted upon the land by the mysteries of the vanished Paravians.

But no past solace imparted by Ath’s initiates could bring comfort to the future. Elaira pressed leadenly forward, into sunlight and space.

Unchanged by the grand turn of centuries, a ceremonial fire burned in the squat bronze brazier set. in the chamber’s centre. Nested in the cushioned chair behind, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani order awaited audience. She was old, emaciated as a dry stick. The scrappily withered features above her winged collar seemed fused with the porcelain bone beneath. Morriel wore her cloudy hair netted in diamond pins. The lavender and purple mantle of high office enveloped her torso like a calyx, and fine knuckles reduced like storm-stripped twigs rested loose in her lap.

‘I heard you clearly,’ she was saying, her voice the reedy scrape of dead leaves against granite. ‘Your point does not signify in this case.’

The tall, graceful Senior she addressed raised her chin. Eyes of tigerish, tawny brown flashed under the silver-wired band of a high initiate’s cowl. ‘The girl is weak and unsuited. Dare we entrust such responsibility to a vessel twice proven to be flawed?’

Morriel Prime gave a breathy scrape of laughter. ‘Are you befitted to judge?’ She folded clawed hands, then restlessly laid them separate since neither position eased their pain. ‘Take heed and look inward, First Senior. Your view could well be as muddled. For a fact, your speech is unwarrantedly careless.’

Quick instinct made Elaira break habit and allow her next footfall to grate.