his tactical survey encompassed the loom of stuffed furnishings and the gleaming, shut doors of the armoires. The room’s gilt appointments lay wrapped in gloom, the resplendent state finery worn for the feast long since folded away in the clothes-chests. By custom, one candle burned on the night-stand: the Prince of the Light did not sleep in the presence of shadow or darkness. Amid that setting of diligent neatness, the lit figure sprawled upon crumpled sheets stood out like a shout of disharmony.
Every nerve hackled, the Lord Commander advanced. The frightened page who minded the flame abandoned his stool and jumped clear. No stammered excuse could dismiss the harsh truth: Lysaer’s condition had passed beyond indisposed. Nor had drink rendered him prostrate. Lifelessly white as a stranded fish, a torso once muscled to glorify marble lay reduced to skeletal emaciation.
Horrified, Sulfin Evend exclaimed, ‘How long has your master been padding his clothes?’
‘My lord,’ the boy stammered. ‘His Divine Grace swore us to silence.’
‘Blazing Sithaer, I don’t care what you were told!’ Sulfin Evend strode forward. He tugged off his gauntlets, snatched up the pricket, then bent to assess the shocking extent of Lysaer’s condition. The porcelain-fair profile on the pillow never stirred at his touch. The icy, damp flesh was not fevered. Alarmed, the Alliance commander raked back the disordered gold hair. No reflex responded as he pried back the flaccid, left eyelid. The unshielded flame lit a glassine, comatose stare, and a pupil wide black with dilation.
‘Answer me now! How long has his Divine Grace languished like this?’
The equerry quailed before that steel tone. ‘My lord, we don’t know when this wasting began. Grief would blunt the appetite, one might suppose, so soon after the loss of a son.’
That honest uncertainty seemed reasonable, since the train of personal attendants initially brought from Avenor had all died in the course of Daon Ramon’s campaign. Sulfin Evend shoved back the rucked coverlet and continued his anxious survey. The prior disaster did not bear thought, against this one, sprawled senseless before him.
‘Do you actually fear someone poisoned him?’ the equerry ventured from the side-lines.
Sulfin Evend said nothing—just thrust the candle back toward the page. ‘Hold this.’ While the whipped flame cast grotesque shadows about him, he grasped Lysaer’s arm. Unnerved by the grave chill to the limp wrist, the Alliance commander held out in grim patience while the light steadied, and unveiled the dread cause of the malady.
Up and down milk pale skin, in recent, scabbed cuts and old scars, Lysaer wore the tell-tale marks of a man being leached by the dire magics of a blood ritual. Sulfin Evend leashed his stark fear. The nightmarish course of this sapping addiction scarcely could have occurred under Lysaer’s informed self-command.
Nor would such a complex and dangerous binding be invoked by rote or the lore of a fumbling novice.
‘Those scabs aren’t infected,’ a new voice declaimed. The prince’s long-faced valet had emerged from the closet where he kept his pallet. Barefoot, still plucking his livery to rights, he padded up to the bed.
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
