Already, the sterling strengths of true character staged the potential for a tragic relapse.
‘We face a bad call regardless,’ Sethvir admitted in gloomy assessment.
If, against weighted odds, the s’Ilessid sustained his avowed course and renounced his former posture of divine importance, he would leave the religion’s false doctrine intact, ripe for other arcane exploitation. Lysaer’s absence ceded the Prime a wide-open field to keep steering the True Sect’s high priesthood.
Which naked threat made Asandir bristle. ‘No chance the Matriarch won’t pounce on the choice to leverage the Light’s canon as her ready weapon against us.’
‘The Paravians’ return could shatter that web,’ Sethvir murmured, deceptively wistful. But the diamond gleam behind his veiled lashes bespoke tears before dreamer’s bemusement.
‘Check, then, if not mate,’ Asandir finished, tart for the venomous irony. For of course, with the old races lost to the world, the chore of house-cleaning such meddlesome spiders fell under the Fellowship’s purview.
The Koriani Prime would launch her ambitious assault, with the impasse bought by Arithon’s term of captivity broken at last. Marak’s invasive wraths might be banished, but the Fellowship’s hands remained overburdened. The discorporate Sorcerers Kharadmon and Luhaine yet laboured to dismantle the mighty wardspells, once fashioned to separate the rogue horde into single entities whence a masterbard’s song could transmute them. A grand construct potent enough to dim the world’s sun must be unravelled, each coil of energy harmlessly dispersed before the onset of explosive attrition. More, the life-web of two other afflicted worlds required to be mended and rebalanced.
Asandir’s practicality never minced words. ‘Either the Koriathain turn the might of the masses to shatter the compact, or we rend our own solemn oath by desperate means to prevent them.’
Sethvir picked a napped thread off his cuff. ‘We’re all too conveniently hobbled.’ Cheerless, he placed the repaired vessel in a niche where sunlight would fire the vibrant enamels. If the gesture brightened the cloud settled over the library, no rainbow might ease the gloomy predicament that Lysaer s’Ilessid had been formally outcast from the protective grant made by the Fellowship for mankind’s lawful settlement. An unmalleable point the Prime Matriarch planned to mine for her ruthless advantage. With Arithon’s survival also bound under Asandir’s pledge of noninterference, both of the princes stood at the cross-roads of deadly risk.
‘Davien,’ said Sethvir, ‘would be having a field day if he were at liberty to offer comment.’ Not least, for the back-handed reverse, that the traits instilled into Athera’s crown blood-lines had bred so perniciously true. But, of course, no one dwelled upon Davien’s hung fate, wedded to the perilous whim of a dragon.
The bleak pause after that might have gathered the dust displaced out of Sethvir’s cupboard, but for the shuffled step on the outside stair, and the cursory bang at the library door that forewarned of another arrival.
‘My unfinished business come flocking to roost,’ the field Sorcerer observed, beyond tried, as the latch tripped.
A plump, brosy man with a salt-and-ginger beard shoved over the threshold with a laden tray. He wore a sober brown tunic, neat as a clerk’s but for the haphazard knots that snarled his laces. The inquisitive dart of cinnamon eyes picked up Asandir’s presence and narrowed.
‘I wasn’t told you returned!’ the fellow accused, while several fortnights’ freight of injured offence precipitated a minor disaster. Something crunched under his left-footed tread. Then he tripped on Sethvir’s chunks of river stone and escaped falling flat by a hairbreadth.
‘Hello, Dakar,’ greeted Asandir. ‘The bluebirds will lay a fresh clutch by next spring, and your stubbed toe will recover. Before you waste further breath in complaint, we could use a tranced prophecy telling us where the Prime Matriarch plans to wreak her next round of havoc.’
Once, the rebuke would have flustered Dakar scarlet. But tempered living and wisdom, painfully gained, at long last had established decorum. The tea-tray came to rest on the table without the crash of unbridled pique.
‘Could I offer an augury without knowing the facts?’ The spellbinder also known as the Mad Prophet snatched up a cloth napkin, bent his stout frame, and scooped up the pulverized egg-shells. He slid the offended rocks to one side with a genuine word of apology, then accosted the sore point headlong. ‘You didn’t invite me to the Koriani summons at Whitehold! Neither would Sethvir share what occurred or tell me the terms you relinquished to win the Prime Matriarch’s appeasement.’
Asandir extended lean legs and answered the gripes in strict order. ‘I didn’t. He won’t.’ Reclined with his capable fingers locked behind his tipped head, the field Sorcerer trampled the incensed retort. ‘You stayed here because, on formal terms at the time, you were no longer subject to my apprenticeship.’
Dakar shut his gaped jaw like a fish revolted by a distasteful morsel. Appalled, then suspicious, he shot a glance sidewards.
Sethvir answered, his air of innocuous innocence absorbed as he poked through his displaced belongings. ‘You were signed off and sealed as your own master before Asandir ever left to square the debt held against the Crown of Rathain.’ The crock with the spider was removed from harm’s way. Benignly agreeable, the Warden added, ‘Enjoy the autonomy. Pursue your own fate. All your Fellowship ties have been sundered. The parchment was formally entered in record, which means by my count, you’ve been free-loading here for two months and a day.’
A mild turquoise eye peered askance as though startled to catch Dakar dumbfounded. ‘Do you wish,’ Sethvir mused, ‘to question the surety of the star-stamp I placed on the document?’
The high flush of fury drained fast as the impact struck home: Dakar faced his discharge from an eight-hundred-and-fifty-year term of formal apprenticeship. More, the severance came vouchsafed under Sethvir’s titled standing as Warden of Althain.
Dumped unceremoniously on his arse, the Mad Prophet leaped to pick a fight with his erstwhile master.
‘No one informed me!’ he fumed to Asandir. ‘Why the blatant surprise? Is this some new test? Or, dare I suggest, a secretive manipulation?’ Stung beyond sense, Dakar renewed his festering grievance. ‘Since I stood for the oath you just brought to closure, in fairness, I should have witnessed the finish.’
‘Oh, you started the dismal affray, beyond question!’ Steel eyes half-lidded, Asandir let his former protégé squirm. ‘If you thought I’d be lenient, Sethvir doesn’t forget.’
Denial was futile. Dakar’s maladroit usage of Fellowship auspices indeed had saddled Rathain’s crown with the ruinous obligation to the Order of the Koriathain in the first place.
Asandir was not finished, though the accusation lay over two hundred years in the past, and nary a word since had broached the disgrace, or faulted the spellbinder for prior misconduct. ‘The discharge of your jumped-up initiative at Athir has set Athera’s future on tenterhooks and cost a gifted woman her life through an ugly act of self-sacrifice. Don’t trouble to add the misery that a sanctioned s’Ffalenn prince has endured, caged in conditions of inhumane horror throughout centuries of captivity!’
‘He’s survived to win free,’ Dakar argued, jaw set. ‘You assured me that Arithon’s mind was not broken.’
Sethvir’s retort produced three succinct images derived from the earth-sense bestowed by the Paravians.
