Obligation
The visitor who reined up at Althain Tower was a lonely speck upon the windswept downs of Atainia. Morning by then was almost spent, lidded under a raced scud of storm-cloud. His horse blew steam in the frigid air as the rider dismounted, stripped both saddle and bridle, then hobbled the gelding to graze. Head bared to the tumbling gusts, he removed a locked iron box from his bedroll, and confronted his grim destination.
Few men, standing under the spire’s bleak shadow, would not tremble and wish themselves elsewhere.
Sulfin Evend proved no exception. Although the sky fore-promised a drenching downpour, he would gladly have turned his back. His binding pledge to the blind seeress in Erdane now seemed an errant act of insanity, no reason not to turn tail and run south, fast and far from this desolate wilderness.
Fear rooted his feet. Lysaer’s endangerment posed too dire a threat to abandon the purpose that brought him. Sulfin Evend gazed upwards, chilled bone deep. High overhead, the leaden gleam of the roof-slates loomed through the masking mist. A raven’s croak floated downward. Wind snaked through the tasselled grass, snarling over the lichened summits of the Bittern wastes to the north.
‘Avenger’s black pox on the doings of mages!’ the townsman snapped, and pressed forward. His reluctant step crunched on the diamond frost that still clung to the flanks of the hollow.
Sulfin Evend’s distrust of the Sorcerers was direct; all his prior experience, confrontational. Having once been ensnared by Asandir’s spell-craft and forced to watch his company of lancers die while entrapped in a grimward, he still suffered the harrowing nightmares. The Fellowship would scarcely welcome the man sworn to rank as the Alliance Lord Commander.
Arrived on the cracked slate at the entry, Sulfin Evend found the outer grille raised. The ancient, strapped portal was also unbarred, its array of geared chains and counterweights a stitched glint of steel under an inside flicker of torch-light. Nobody waited beside the spoked windlass. Past the oppressive gloom of the sallyport, the far gate had been wedged back, as well. No Sorcerer lurked there: only the wind fluted dissonant notes through the black gaps of the murder holes.
Sulfin Evend faltered and stopped. If wards had been set, he sensed no prickle of gooseflesh. Althain Tower stood open before him. The invitation lent no reassurance. He edged forward. One step, two; he paused again. Every nerve strained, he breathed the scents of dank stone and oil, the aromatic resin of pine smoke underlaid by the taint of burnished chain. He assayed a third step.
Nothing happened.
A gust flapped his cloak, making him start, and setting the torch-flame winnowing. The fourth step would see him under the gate arch, no wise move. A man raised to recognize the rudiments of spell-craft should be loath to cross over any sorcerer’s threshold.
‘You have two choices,’ a voice pronounced at his back.
Sulfin Evend whirled, hackled. A tall, straight figure cloaked in indigo wool blocked the pathway behind him.
‘Go back, and leave all your questions unanswered. Or step forward and accept our hospitality’ Silver hair tumbled free as Asandir pushed back his hood. ‘I will not presume to advise you, either way, since you have already tested the nature of the peril you carry’
Sulfin Evend wrestled his outright fear. ‘You!’ he gasped, strangled. ‘Why not take me captive, as you did the last time?’
Asandir raised eyebrows like bristled, black iron. His tarnish grey eyes never flickered. Silent, he waited for his town visitor to make up his uneasy mind.
Retreat would require a step toward the Sorcerer, a sly fact Asandir used to his unsavoury advantage. Sweating with terror, Sulfin Evend forced speech. ‘After my abduction in Korias, no word you might say could establish your good intentions.’
‘Even the truth?’ Asandir tucked his fingers under his sleeves, a pretence: the morning’s damp cold should scarcely pose one of his kind the least moment of inconvenience. The voice, crisp and light, was impervious steel. ‘False son of s’Gannley, no prayer to the Light spared your life that day on the Korias Flats. Your deliverance from that grimward was done by my hand, despite what you chose to believe for the sake of convenience.’
‘Liar!’ Hanshire arrogance instinctively bridled. ‘I am no son at all, to s’Gannley’
Asandir’s amusement was wild as wind. ‘Are you not? As you stand there, all pride and quick temper, you are breathing proof of your matriarch’s ancestry. Go or stay by your merits. I shall not intervene. After all, your promise was not made to me, and Lysaer s’Ilessid rescinded our Fellowship’s protection when he cast off the terms of the compact.’
Shocked to hear that fact reconfirmed, and with incontrovertible finality, Sulfin Evend mustered the rags of his courage. ‘You’ll swear to my safety?’
‘Swear by what?’ Clipped to impatience, the Sorcerer said, ‘You are the spear-head for the Alliance’s war host! Do you presume to think we might have common ground?’ For an instant, perhaps, his cragged features seemed touched to an elusive sorrow. ‘Did you know you were never at risk from our Fellowship? My promise is only a word, by your lights. Even still, Sulfin Evend, you have it.’
A keen strategist, the commander wrestled the ironic challenge: a retreat at this pass would reject the Sorcerer’s spoken integrity; and also repudiate the blood pledge he had made at Erdane to Enithen Tuer.
‘Men die for promises,’ Sulfin Evend allowed. ‘What is a life in the hands of your Fellowship?’
‘More than words.’ Asandir tipped his head toward the entry, his chisel-cut face bemused enough to seem friendly. ‘Inside, if you dare, you’ll find out.’
Sulfin Evend braced his rattled nerves, faced about, and crossed over the tower’s threshold. The Sorcerer followed, his close presence mild and his footstep light as a ghost’s.
If the Hanshire-born visitor regretted his choice, no chance remained to turn back. Asandir laid brisk hands to the windlass and secured the outer defences.
As the thick doors boomed closed, drear daylight replaced by the fluttering torch, the Sorcerer’s frame was thrown into relief. Sulfin Evend observed, too wary to be undone by disarming impressions: how the capable hands that cranked the oiled chains were raw with recent burn scars. If the Sorcerer’s face appeared gaunt, or the spare frame beneath masking wool seemed hard-used, even haggard, his vast power remained unimpaired. The warding he raised to secure bars and locks drove his guest to a shudder of gooseflesh. Sulfin Evend had watched spell-craft being invoked all his life, by Koriathain who resided at Hanshire. The only working he had seen to rival Asandir’s seamless touch had been an awareness half-sensed: an impression left as a whisper in stone, laced through the stairway fashioned by Davien the Betrayer at the entrance to Kewar Tunnel.
Asandir locked the drum of the windlass and straightened. ‘The defences kept here are an obligation made to Athera’s Paravians.’
Startled to find his unspoken thought answered, Sulfin Evend said bald-faced, ‘You can’t still believe the old races exist.’
This time, as the Sorcerer retrieved the torch, his fleeting grief could not be mistaken. ‘They exist.’ He moved toward the last set of fortified doors, passed through, and attended their fastening. ‘If the Paravians had died, our years of trial would
