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

The Lord Commander waved him back, wordless. Peril stalked here for the unwary. Bearing a taint of clanblood in his ancestry, he owned a birth-born talent, if an untrained one. Though that unsavoury history was nothing he wished to make public, he had little choice. Erdane’s mayors had burned the mage-gifted for centuries. Since that policy was also held in force by the Alliance of Light, and the sealed mandate of Tysan’s regency, no initiate healer could be summoned here without causing political havoc.

Exposed to risk, uneasily aware that his lack of knowledge laid him open to an untold threat, Sulfin Evend ran a tacit, spread palm above Lysaer’s livid wounds. Eyes closed, he sounded the range of awareness outside his immediate senses. The horrid grue all but crawled up his wrist, as his seeking hand ruffled across what felt like a chill flow of wind, ripped with tingles.

Beyond question, an arcane influence was draining the Blessed Prince of his vitality. Worse, the debilitating tie was entrenched to the point where a recovery might lie beyond reach.

Sulfin Evend addressed the hovering staff, dangerously level and low. ‘First, how often does his Divine Grace undertake the foul ritual, and next, where are the knife and the bowl?’

Blank stares from the servants; Sulfin Evend met their stone-walled quiet with fury. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I speak of! Your master has cast his life into jeopardy, and I won’t stand down until you give me a straight answer.’

‘But my lord,’ protested the equerry. ‘His Blessed Grace said not to’—which words clashed with the valet’s shrill dismay—‘but my lord, he can’t die! As the avatar sent here to put down the Dark, how dare you imply he is mortal!’

‘Avatar or not, he can still cross Fate’s Wheel!’ Sulfin Evend smoothed the slack hand on the sheets. Distaste turned his lips as he lifted the other, which still wore streaked stains of dried blood. ‘Here! See the proof? Our liege may be blessed with unnatural longevity, but he can’t sustain if he’s been enslaved by dark practice. Or are you sheep, too awed to see that he’s skin and bones? Before your eyes, he’s bled himself white! For all we know, the vile rite has been feeding some sorcerous cabal that’s hell-bent to destroy him!’

Consternation wrung gasps from the pair of servants, while the page-boy looked sick unto fainting.

‘Oh, yes! Believe it,’ Sulfin Evend cracked to their stupefied faces. ‘Did you think Avenor’s high-handed Crown Examiner could sweep the length and breadth of the realm executing born talent and not draw a wolf pack of powerful enemies?’

‘Merciful Light!’ cried the valet, aggrieved. ‘His Exalted Self claimed he was scrying in search of the Master of Shadow to secure our defence against Darkness.’

‘That’s doubtless the lure that first saw him entrapped.’ Raw with disgust, and taking due care not to sully his hands, the Lord Commander resettled the bloodied limb on the mattress.

Lysaer’s unresponsive, comatose state whipped him to freezing despair. Had the High Priest’s acolyte, Jeriayish, not died on campaign, the Alliance Commander would have flayed the skulking creature skin from bone, here and now: for hindsight suggested that the priest’s rites of augury had opened the access to engage this fell binding. Whether through slipshod practice, or by darker design, the dire plot would not originate there. Someone insinuated into Avenor’s inner council wished Athera’s Divine Prince reduced to a puppet-string power.

The equerry was speaking. Sulfin Evend refocused his wits and insisted, ‘Excuses don’t matter. Stop dragging your feet! I can do nothing at all if you can’t fetch the bowl and the knife that Lysaer used for the ritual. No! Don’t touch them!’ He barely quelled his imperative shout, as the page-boy scrambled to fling up the lid of one of his master’s clothes-chests. ‘Such objects are unclean and unspeakably dangerous. Lend me a silk shirt to wrap them.’

A fraught interval later, the Alliance Lord Commander braved the night in a borrowed servant’s cloak, an anonymous shadow bound for the unsavoury district flanking Erdane’s west postern. Crystalline frost crunched beneath his boots. Under the gleam of spring’s constellations, the unseasonable chill cut his exposed skin like a scourge. Sulfin Evend slipped past the grey-on-black timbers of the shuttered shop-fronts and crafthalls. At each skulking step, his left instructions chased through his circling thoughts.

‘Guard him! With your lives, do you hear? I’ll send up my captain to stand at his door, and this time, no one comes in!’

No words could settle his harrowing dread. The alley he sought would be hidden from sight, guarded by ward since Avenor’s harsh interdict, which outlawed the practice of talent. As ranking commander of the Alliance war host, Sulfin Evend knew he risked his life simply by showing his face here.

He pressed onwards, regardless. The artefacts he held bundled inside one of Lysaer’s silk dress-shirts left him no rational alternative. His rapacious profile masked under his hood, Sulfin Evend closed his eyes and edged forward. One blind step, two; his third footfall raised a crawling chill. The eerie sensation surged through his boot-sole, chased up his spine, and prickled his nape into gooseflesh.

Sulfin Evend kept his face averted and cautiously unsealed his sight.

The town-gate loomed ahead, alight in the glow of the watch lamps. To his right, a narrow, nondescript archway opened into rank darkness. Sulfin Evend resisted the urge to use more than peripheral vision. If he tried, the uncanny portal would vanish, not to reappear without use of initiate knowledge. He sucked a deep breath. Braced by a courage as dauntless as any demanded of him on a battle-field, he turned away from the main thoroughfare and plunged through the queer, lightless entry.

Darkness and cold ran through him like water, then as suddenly fell away. He found himself in a squalid back alley, little more than an uneven footpath overhung by ramshackle eaves and sagged stairways. The prankish gusts jangled the tin talismans of iyat banes, a dissonance that seemed to frame uncanny speech as he picked his uncertain way forward. The ground-level tenements were shuttered, but not locked. Here, the prospective thief was a fool, who ventured without invitation. Sulfin Evend picked his way forward, the chink of fallen slates underfoot driving vermin into the crannies. The stairway he sought had carved gryphon posts, a detail he was forced to determine by touch, since no lamps burned in this quarter. No wine-shop opened its door to the night, and no lit window offered him guidance.

By starlight, Sulfin Evend mounted the stair. The creaking, slat risers bore his weight sullenly, no doubt inlaid with spells to warn away the unwary. Against quailing nerves, he reached the top landing, just as the door swung open to meet him.

‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said a paper-dry voice. Backlit by a glimmer of candle-flame, a wizened old woman in rags beckoned her visitor inward.

Heart pounding, skin turned clammy, Sulfin Evend understood there would be a price. Nonetheless, he crossed over her threshold.

‘You’ve been expected,’ the crone stated as she fastened the latches behind him.

Sulfin Evend believed his surprise was contained, until her crowed laughter said otherwise. Hunchbacked and ancient, she spun to confront him. Eyes blinded with cataracts picked at his thoughts as thoroughly as any dissection. No coward, he resisted his urge to step back as her seeress’s talent unmasked him.

‘What did you expect?’ she admonished, not smiling. ‘You come to consult, have you not? Would you rather have met with a charlatan?’

He bowed to her, managed not to sound shaken as he named her with careful respect. ‘Enithen Tuer. Rightly or not, I have come to the only place where I might seek help within Erdane.’

‘I know why you’ve come,’ said the crone, fingers tucked in her mismatched layers of fringed shawls. ‘Years, I have known. So many long years, that I am left weary with waiting.’

Her clipped gesture offered a rough, wooden chair.

Released all at once from her piercing regard, Sulfin Evend sat down as she bade him. Her attic was tiny, shelves and table-tops jammed with balled twine and strange leather sacks, filmed with the dust of years. Wrapped in the fragrance of drying herbals, smoke, and stale grease, the Alliance man-at-arms huddled under his cloak, afraid to disturb the unnerving items clutched in his awkward grasp. ‘What do you require to lend me your services?’

‘No coin.’ Enithen Tuer shuffled to the hob. Her stumpy feet were bound in frayed flannel, and her fingers, chapped rough as a ragman’s. She snapped a flint striker to give him more light. ‘There is peril in this. Are you prepared? Can’t be turning back once you’ve chosen.’ Eerie, milk eyes surveyed him, unblinking, while the tallow-dips hissed on the mantel. ‘Be aware, warrior. The cost will test and try you. If you are weak, you’ll be broken.’

‘What cost, old woman?’ Struck cold, Sulfin Evend suppressed his impatience. ‘I don’t care for riddles or the drama of veiled threats. A man that I speak for lies dying.’

But Enithen Tuer would not be rushed. Her uncanny awareness seemed to press like a blade against the raced pulse at his neck. ‘Beware who should carry your heart’s pledge, brave man. The wise would walk softly, and rightly so. Lysaer s’Ilessid has been declared outcast from the terms of the Fellowship’s compact.’ The crone sensed his start; nodded. ‘Ah, truly, then you do understand what that sentence means.’

‘Explain anyway’ Unnerved by the pitfalls that might arise from the folly of a presumption, Sulfin Evend dropped pride. ‘My sources at Hanshire might not have been accurate.’

Enithen Tuer decided to humour him. ‘For breaking the sureties sworn by the Sorcerers, your prince’s licence to inhabit this world is revoked. His fate will be ruled by Paravian law. All the worse, for the trouble you carry tonight. As a man disbarred, Lysaer can’t ask for the grace of a Fellowship intercession.’

‘But the Paravians are vanished!’ Sulfin Evend shoved back his hood, ruffled as a jessed hawk. ‘Should I fear the old races’ absent reprisal? There are other powers abroad on Athera. Perhaps I should present my liege’s appeal to the Order of the Koriathain.’

The seer raised frosty eyebrows. ‘Would you indeed?’

Sulfin Evend steadied his rankled poise, aware all at once he was bargaining. ‘Their oath of debt might give me the more lenient terms.’ The sisterhood had chafed for thousands of years under the yoke of the Sorcerers’ compact. Surely, in the breach of Paravian presence, they would extend arcane help if he asked them.

Enithen Tuer gave that prospect short shrift. ‘Koriathain will not treat with the powers that currently shadow your prince. Why else, worthy man, did you come here? After the scandal that destroyed your grand-uncle, surely you recognized Lysaer’s malaise as a blood-bound tie of compulsion?’

Sulfin Evend could not mask the straight fear that shot through him. ‘How I’d hoped not. You’re certain?’

The crone tucked bowed shoulders. ‘Sure enough.’ She seemed suddenly tired as her gesture encompassed the objects swathed under his cloak. ‘The items you carry will show us which faction.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, arresting his move to unveil the unpleasant contents. ‘Not so fast! Never, without wards of protection where such a cult has engaged active workings!’ Porcelain eyes glinted, nailing him down with the force of their occult regard. ‘I, too, must demand my due reckoning for this service. Will you bear the cost and the consequence?’

Her swift, stabbing finger forestalled his response. ‘I will help. But know this, young man. You bring me my death. The moment I opened my door to admit you, that forecast outcome was set. I have waited to go, for years longed for the day I would greet the turn of Fate’s Wheel. What are you willing to pay in exchange? Would you give your heart, if I ask, or the last breath in your lungs? Will you stand firm, and risk all you hold dear to salvage the life of your master?’

The Alliance Lord Commander said, threadbare, ‘Anything. I must. The s’Ilessid prince carries my life debt.’

‘Then shoulder your fate.’ The crone bent to one side, and snatched up the blackened spike of the fire iron. ‘You are a loyal man, Sulfin Evend. There lies your strength and your downfall.’

‘Enough caterwauling emotion, old dame.’ Eyes like chipped slate matched that ancient, blind stare. ‘How do you want your pledge satisfied?’

‘Set down your burden,’ the seeress replied. ‘Then, if I can, I will ease your straits, but after you’ve sworn a caithdein’s oath to the kingdom.’

‘Here? In Erdane?’ Prepared to unfasten the knots on the bundle, Sulfin Evend shoved upright, his brows arched with fierce incredulity. ‘That’s a perilous folly, since the Fellowship Sorcerers have already appointed the post to a reiving forest barbarian!’ This was insane precedent, set alongside the fact that the Lord Mayor would subject any man who dared to revive the old forms of crown charter law to a branding, followed up with a public gelding.

‘Folly, is it?’ The ancient wheezed through a breathless laugh as she heaved herself to her feet. Fire-iron in hand, she stumped over the carpet and fetched a slender birch-rod from a hook. ‘How little you know of your blood-line, young man.’

Sulfin Evend clenched his jaw, head turned as the crone touched the wood stave to the floor-boards. She began scribing a series of interlocked circles, her swaying steps moving widdershins.