Traitor’s Knot: Fourth Book of The Alliance of Light

Fionn Areth crumpled, glassy-eyed and raging, into the dark of unconsciousness.

Roused by the throb of the bruise on his head and the stinging slice on his forearm, Fionn Areth groaned, limp and queasy with vertigo. Spinning senses revealed a small, panelled chamber, lit by a clouded casement. The fusty air smelled of ink and hot wax, while an old man’s voice stitched through his fogged thoughts, gravid with accusation.

‘…same pair wrecked the Kittiwake’s tap-room before, in the company of a known smuggler.’

Someone unseen cleared his throat and replied in the sonorous drone of state language.

While the debate sawed onwards over Fionn Areth’s head, he absorbed the fact that he slumped face-down, cheek pressed to a battered table. Iron manacles circled his wrists, which were draped like dropped meat on his knees. Somewhere nearby, a quill-nib scraped.

He tried to sit up. The effort spiked fresh pain through his skull, jogging the memory of terror. Where else could he be but in a magistrate’s custody? His despair was confirmed by the crack of a gavel, then a man’s bitten phrase, that the miscreants’ infractions were anything but a moot point.

While Fionn Areth mustered the shaken breath to assert his abused state of innocence, Dakar’s unctuous speech intervened.

‘Captain Dhirken passed the Wheel years before you took office. Lord Magistrate, the past charge was not left outstanding. Yes, her crew wrecked the Kittiwake. But the damages were settled in full at the time, paid off by the singer responsible.’

Fionn Areth shut his eyes. This was Shipsport, not Jaelot. His panic still haunted with visceral force. The nightmare repeat of prisoner’s chains could not be happening again. Through rising nausea, he tried to protest. ‘But I wasn’t th—’

A kick rapped his ankle. He gasped and shoved straight, snatched the swimming impression of a vaulted ceiling above a railed dais. There, a number of corpulent, robed men sat arrayed in stern judgement against him.

‘Shut up, you fool!’ Dakar hissed in his ear. ‘Handle this wrong, and we’re dog-meat.’ To Shipsport’s gathered tribunal, he temporized, ‘This time, to our sorrow, we haven’t the coin to pay fines for disorderly conduct. We can’t make amends to the Kittiwake’s landlord, beyond our respectful apologies.’

‘Well, sorry’s no recompense!’ The stout table jounced as the tavern’s greybeard owner thumped an indignant fist. ‘I’ve suffered enough of your hot air already to bore me past Daelion’s Wheel! The last time, your friend played his lyranthe for hand-outs. He sang, forbye, like a silver-tongued lark! Caroled until every last mark cleaned his pockets, and bedamned to your pleas that you’re penniless.’ To the magistrate rapping his gavel, he railed, ‘My tap-room’s in shambles! My son broke his arm. I demand satisfaction. Grant the Kittiwake use of the bard’s talent for one month. The house takes his proceeds until the debt’s paid, with the extra for punitive damages.’

The town clerk waggled his pen in remonstrance. ‘The accused in the dock broke the peace, don’t forget! Shipsport’s coffers are due a steep fine for their act of civil disturbance. These charges must be met beforetime.’

While the magistrate stroked his suet chin, and the spring’s nesting wrens cheeped in the eaves outside, Fionn Areth stirred to a sour clank of chain. ‘But I don’t—’

Dakar jammed an elbow into his ribs, then spun lies with pressured invention. ‘The bard has a head cold. Can’t sing a note. Force him to try, his sick croaking is likely to rile your patrons past salvage. You said yourself, the Kittiwake’s crowd likes to toss inept singers through the window. That won’t meet your fees, and my friend lies at risk of suffering a crippling injury’

Truth and impasse; the magistrate smothered a yawn. The victimized landlord glowered, arms folded, while the clerk licked his thumb and flattened a clean sheet of parchment. ‘Hard labour, then? Incarceration? Public whipping? The brawling was started without provocation.’ He tapped the scroll bearing the transcribed statement. ‘Disrupting the peace calls for a harsh sentence.’

Shipsport’s magistrate laced his prim knuckles and delivered the final verdict. ‘The accused have no money. Therefore, the bard will perform until the debts to the town and the tavern are discharged.’ He silenced objection with the superior glare he reserved for the low-class condemned. ‘No reprieve!’

‘I won’t sing for any man!’ yelled Fionn Areth, a mistake: his broad grasslands vowels displayed no congestion. ‘Not for a penny, not for struck gold, and not ever for settling damages over a riot that I didn’t start!’

The Kittiwake’s landlord stared down his beak nose. ‘Upright men don’t keep the company of smugglers.’

Since such shiftless character was the s’Ffalenn bastard’s legacy, the slung mud was going to stick. By luck alone, none of Shipsport’s officials connected today’s face with the infamous Master of Shadow. Draw undue attention, and some sharp-eyed busybody might come forward to point out the oversight.

Fionn Areth slumped in the prisoner’s dock, cowed by his fear as the steps of due process saddled him with the arraignment.

Experience taught him the futility of argument. His just plea would only fall on deaf ears and earn him a savage beating.

‘You dare the impertinence of claiming to refuse?’ The magistrate flicked a glance toward his clerk, then granted the case his sharp quittance. ‘Call back the guards to remove the offenders. Lock them in the dungeon on bread crusts and water till the singer sees fit to change heart.’

The dungeon in Shipsport outmatched even Dakar’s revolting description. Flood-tide clogged the drains with green slime, coating the floor with decomposing shell-fish, strained through the wracked straw and stranded kelp. Fionn Areth gagged on the nauseous stench. Too miserable to curse the rough handling of the wardens who hauled him into confinement, he sagged as they bolted his manacles to a chain spiked in the sweating stonewall.

Head tipped forward, shoulders hunched to avoid the damp masonry chilling his back, the Araethurian squeezed his eyes shut. The pound of his pulse split his skull to white agony. To make matters worse, the Mad Prophet had burst into a fit of inebriated singing. The cell had an arched ceiling. Within closed confines, his racket raised echoes fit to drive the dead to screaming torment.

Oblivious, Dakar belted on through a ballad expounding the exploits of two whores, a blind cobbler, and a goat. Cuffs from the guards failed to silence his noise. Dakar grunted, undaunted, through his tone-deaf rendition of the repetitive chorus.

‘He’s sloshed to the gills on the Kittiwake’s rotgut,’ the long-faced turnkey observed. Anxious to leave, he jangled his keys. ‘If you bash him unconscious, he’ll just wake back up. I say, let him bide. Locked in without recourse, his wretched companion is going to be driven insane. He’ll either pay up the charged fine for relief, or he’ll kick the brute’s bollocks clear through his throat. If such doesn’t kill him, the mutton-head jape won’t be left in a fit state to breed.’

Dakar widened his brown eyes, unfazed. Limp as a roped walrus in the hands of the guards, he forced them to tow him up to the ring to fasten his prisoner’s shackles. As they wrestled the bolts, puffing vile curses, his chained posture proved no deterrent. Dakar followed the ballad with warbled, scurrilious doggerel extolling the virtues of gin.

‘That’s it!’ snapped the turnkey, ears plugged with his thumbs. ‘The tide floods apace. Tarry much longer, and we’ll have wet boots.’ He fidgeted until the last guardsman filed out, then clashed the grille shut on the miscreants. His malicious grin flashed by the glare of held torch-light as he secured the rusty lock. ‘Enjoy the Lord Magistrate’s sweet hospitality!’

The squelching tread of officialdom retreated, plunging the cell into darkness.

Fionn Areth stifled his impulse to shout. The icy air settled like a batt of inky wool once the upstairs portal banged closed. The reek of sea rot and urine overpowered, as the flow of fresh air was cut off.

A large insect scuttled over the Araethurian’s scraped wrist. His jerk of revulsion clanged the fixed chain, and his curse snatched the break between choruses. ‘May the furies of Sithaer’s eighth hell plague the day that your dam spread her knees and gave birth!’

Through the hitched pause to recover his breath, Dakar chuckled. ‘You might as well sing along with me, bumpkin. Stay cheerful, you won’t have to think overmuch, or listen to the skittering wild life.’

‘Damn you for a sot!’ Fionn Areth lashed back. ‘Without your loose habits, we wouldn’t be dangled like carrion, nose to nose with the starveling rats.’

‘Ho!’ Dakar whooped. ‘Starveling rats! That’s poetic’ Buoyed to euphoria by the Kittiwake’s ale, he nudged his companion’s ankle. ‘Know this one, do you?’ He plunged into another obscene recitation, at a pitch fit to mangle the ear-drums.

‘Shut up!’ Fionn Areth kicked back, cleanly missed, and clunked his head against the wall with a yelp of anguished frustration. ‘Just how are we to get out of this fix? They think I’m Athera’s Masterbard! In truth, I don’t sing any better than you. If you’re going to insist that we work off our fine that way, the Kittiwake’s roughnecks might as well batter us straight to perdition right now. Better I give my consent to such madness, before we pickle in this cesspit, drowning in rat crap and sea-water.’

‘Well, practise a bit first.’ Dakar hiccoughed in brosy hilarity. ‘Might as well test your talent before we’re marched out to get diced by a mob of drunken sailhands.’

‘You should care, numbed as a dolt on cheap beer,’ Fionn Areth cut back in ripe sarcasm.

‘Actually I’m not,’ Dakar confessed, his blurred whisper nearly lost in the darkness. ‘For the record, at least, I’m uselessly pissed until after the tide-water rises.’ Louder, he added, ‘Sing, damn your hide. Howl like a monkey, or warble in counterpoint. If you don’t, the pesky warden might decide to withhold our ration of bread crusts. The last thing we need is some ham-handed grunt trying to drag us back upstairs beforetime.’

‘What!’ Fionn Areth jerked his sore wrists in a bale-fire flash of amazement. ‘Refuse the chance to get out of this place? You’re off your head! Gone moonstruck, and truly’

‘Skin-tight on beer, but not crazy,’ Dakar insisted with owlish gravity. ‘I thought, since we’re here, you should savour the experience. The odd, swimming varmint who might perch on your head will be offered the gift of survival. Far more than a rat might see benefits.’

Past hope of holding a sane conversation, Fionn Areth lapsed into stiff silence. Besotted whimsy could not reverse the gravity of his current quandary. He felt no pity for the doomed rats, though the shut door blocked their way to the stairwell. Not as long as he languished in chains, bearing a criminal sorcerer’s features.

Dakar was no use. Unfazed by the threat, he filled his lungs and resumed bawling sing-song nonsense. The cold grew no less. The stink stayed oppressive. The herder from Araethura cursed the short length of the chain, which would not let him clasp his hands to his aching head. While he sat, chewing over his circling fears, the news from upcoast moved apace: word already spread, that the Master of Shadow had escaped from the Mayor of Jaelot’s close custody. The men-at-arms dispatched in his pursuit had been lured over the Skyshiel Ranges and into the wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens.

In darkness, the graphic accounts spurred fresh terror: of town-born blood spilled by savage design; eye-witness tales of shadows and haunts bringing death on the Baiyen causeway; of men lulled to sleep by the singing of stones and frozen to glass under moonlight. Everywhere, Arithon’s name inspired fear. If Dakar gave short shrift to the doctrine that claimed Rathain’s prince was a demon, today’s episode of manic debauchery destroyed the last foothold for trust.

Fionn Areth snarled a frustrated oath. Although Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had risked capture to spare him from the horror of Jaelot’s scaffold, the Mad Prophet’s assertion the deed sprang from sound character only made the surrounding facts seem the more ominous. Today’s truth spoke too loudly: when the passes reopened, no more wearied men straggled in upon starving, lamed horses.

The first hardy caravan to descend from Eastwall had described the emergency muster at Darkling. Bloodshed had dogged Arithon’s heels at each step. By command of Avenor’s high priesthood, Alliance troops had unfurled the sunwheel banner and marched upon Daon Ramon. They had not embarked on the campaign alone. At Narms, no less than Lysaer himself had gathered a veteran company. His cry to arms also raised the standing troops trained by his steward at Etarra. Both forces had converged on the snow-clad barrens, to wage the Light’s war against Shadow.

Until breaking ice reopened the northcoast, and the trade galleys hove in from the west, the eastshore towns held their uneasy breath, as yet unaware that a crushing defeat had shattered Lysaer’s combined host.

Licked by the trickle of rising water, young Fionn Areth had no choice but to hang his trapped fate on a prayer. ‘Merciful maker, let the ice hold the north passage closed for a while longer.’

A trained seer, Dakar knew the Spinner of Darkness had survived the Alliance assault. He would not divulge his liege’s location. That sore point piqued Fionn Areth’s suspicion and tightened his queasy stomach. No platitude eased him. Not since the hour the Mad Prophet broke his last scrying, stunned into unyielding silence. He refused to speak of Prince Arithon’s plight, even sunk in his cups at the Kittiwake. Desperately determined to carol himself hoarse, perhaps needing to smother the nag of his conscience, Dakar stayed deaf. He would not acknowledge the scope of his peril, allied to the Master of Shadow.

A goatherd who lacked arcane talent could do nothing but thrash out his worries alone.