over sheer cliffs to find cover. While scouts poured like rats from the ridge top and divested him of jewels and purse, he hurled back insults in sweating, savage bursts. They ripped off his cloak and took the beautiful, chased belt knife bought to match his confiscated sword. Down-trail, the venomous oaths of the mercenaries marked the loss of weapons well proven in battle. The more seasoned officers curbed combative tempers before excuse could be found for barbarian arrows to make bloody end to dissent.
Maenalle’s scouts were thorough, immune as wild goats to steep rocks and bad footing. At masterful speed, Lysaer’s disabled caravan and fighting company found itself weaponless and wagonless, then abandoned afoot in the rim walled gorges that led through the ford of the river Valendale. Bitterness replaced their purloined baggage. Although no man suffered harm, and Maenalle’s matchless discipline had prevented anything worse than wisecracks and whistles to befall Lady Talith, no one inclined toward forgiveness.
The wainloads of goods that had been cursed every league across Atainia now became cause for mortal affront.
Pacing at Lord Diegan’s side, his affianced lady astride the one mount that guest oath had held sacrosanct, Lysaer stayed withdrawn. In boots not fashioned for hiking, he blistered his feet with the rest on the wretched, frost-cracked stone. That he carried the only sword among two hundred seasoned fighting men seemed not to concern him unduly. While the shadows swallowed the cliff walls and the day eased to cobalt twilight, Diegan chafed at the silence. His worried glance at his prince was met and matched by a sidelong flicker of mirth.
In no mood for jokes, he spun with such force that a fir branch switched him in the cheek. ‘Fiends and Sithaer’s fury, your Grace, whatever are you thinking?’
‘You’ve got evergreen needles in your velvets,’ Lysaer observed. He broke into a shocking, sunny smile. ‘Do you miss your horse all that much?’
Avenor’s weaponless commander at arms stared, stupefied. His spurs jangled as he kicked at a moss-coated rock, then recouped sufficient dignity to glare at the prince to whom Etarra’s lord mayor had so high-handedly awarded his service. When Lysaer absorbed his pique in brazen merriment, he frowned. ‘Ath! I’ve seen you blast trees to charcoal at the merest flick of a thought.’
Lysaer said nothing.
Jabbed to suspicion, Diegan added, ‘You pulled your strike against those archers on the slope! You planned this whole thing, didn’t you?’
A dying thread of sunlight bloodied sparkles in gold hair as Lysaer gave back the barest shrug. ‘Not precisely.’ His levity vanished and his eyes went suddenly hooded. ‘You might say I expected things might happen as they have. If I tried for a happier outcome, the end result isn’t setback. No one can say, now, that Tysan’s clans weren’t fairly offered their chance to lay due claim to s’Ilessid loyalty.’
But the issue went deeper than that, Lord Diegan saw in awed respect. As the impoverished victim of a clan raid, Lysaer s’Ilessid had bought footing for condolence. Bound on to Erdane as a charity case, not even the city’s irascible mayor might question his need to raise troops. Far from feeling threatened by the muster, his guilds would be moved to endorse it: the prince’s cause would win aid out of congenial commiseration and sympathy. Etarran enough to appreciate a master turn of statecraft, Lord Diegan laughed in the teeth of the wind.
‘By Ath,’ he said in exultant admiration. ‘You’ll have your kingship of this realm, then your army to harry out the Shadow Master. After the scale of today’s losses, the guilds and the town councils will fall over themselves to lend you their funds to raise a garrison.’
Messenger
Four days after the raid that beggared Prince Lysaer in the Pass of Orlan, a messenger was dispatched at speed from the clansmen’s mountain outpost. No matter that the hooves of his horse were dampened by late-season snow; the muffled vibration of his passage was heard and tracked by a mind a hundred leagues distant.
Through the five centuries since the Paravian races had vanished from the continent, wardenship of the tower built to guard their artefacts and culture had fallen to a Fellowship sorcerer. Most days he could be found in a black-beamed chamber that creaked in the unquiet winds, elbows braced on a library table heaped as a gull’s nest with parchments and opened books. Scrolls stuffed the niches in between, trailing moth-eaten ties, or else weighted flat at the corners by oddments of tea-stained crockery and tinted glass inkwells missing corks. Ensconced amid his clutter like a packrat, Sethvir sat with his ankles hooked on a stool. While his hair grew in untidy tufts, and his maroon robe gathered dust and loose threads, he kept and catalogued records, and tracked world events as they happened.
As long as Athera had lain fogbound, he had followed the phases of the moon through the pull of the tides. He felt the daily tramp of Etarra’s drilling armies shake the earth alongside prints in dry dust traced by fieldmice. A missive scribed in blood that had passed through flame, then rinsed off in brine from the face of a thrown bit of slate, touched him in fourfold vibration; amid the voices of a billion dropped stones, that one he noted and marked apart. He sensed the grand music of the planet’s twelve power lanes, and the warp through weft lacework of energies still channelled over land and air by the residual dance of Paravian mystery.
So long had Sethvir’s mage-sense been twined with the thunderous chord of world life-force, that his thoughts took on the patterned aspects of stone, with but tenuous hold on the present.
When at length the clang of a sword hilt against the portcullis nine storeys down echoed through the bowels of his sanctuary, Sethvir already knew the name and the errand of the courier; had been aware of both since the moment Tysan’s lady steward had dispatched her rider to his tower.
Limned in the gloom of failing day, the Warden of Althain finished a line of spidery handwriting. He leaned sidewards, rinsed his quill in the tepid dregs of a teacup, then raised eyes of pale turquoise that looked vacuous as sky; but in fact, held a relentless train of review as the interstices of this moment’s event unreeled to bear on the future.
Below him, marring the crystalline cry of first starlight, the swordsman continued to hammer. To Sethvir’s ear, the metallic din bespoke forge-fire, and hill steel, and centuries of unrequited bloodshed. I’m coming,’ he grumbled in a tone as tart as an old hinge. He stood up. Dust and bits of scribbled paper settled on a floor already littered with outworn quill pens and the dropped caps of inkwells. The sorcerer sneezed, peered down as if touched to unwitting delight by the faded weave of the carpet, then stumped in his over-sized fur buskins to the casement, which had been unlatched for days, banging and creaking in the gritty north gusts off the desert.
The bulwarks of Althain Tower were fashioned of granite, stark and grey, the rough-chiselled grooves of a desperate need softened under green seals of lichen. Sethvir crossed his arms on the sill, took absent notice of a hole chewed by moths in his sleeve, then leaned through the casement and peered down.
‘I’m not at all deaf,’ he chided gently.
Below him, lent an ant’s perspective, a shaggy bush pony stood with its hip cocked, its reins looped through the elbow of a man in the undyed leathers of a clansman. The shoulders energetically working flinched and stopped. The visitor glanced up, sheepish, from the tower’s locked entry and hurriedly sheathed his sword. While the reverberations from his pounding subsided to a rumble, then a whisper, he called, ‘I beg your pardon. Sethvir of Althain?’
Outlined against dusk by a halo of blowing white hair, the sorcerer grinned like a pixie. ‘Your lady wishes me to bear a message to Arithon, Prince of Rathain. No, don’t speak. I know the
