Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ gasped the enchantress. Spurned by the rough shove that displaced her, she dropped civilized discourse for spellcraft.

      For one breath-stopped instant the air seemed to burn. The Hatchet blinked, staggered backwards. By the time vision cleared and his balance recovered, the pavilion lay empty. No sign remained of the nosy enchantress beyond the latched box left behind on the trestle.

      The uncanny artifact was far too dangerous to leave at large in the war camp.

      The Hatchet spat a ferocious oath. Forced to secure the damnable construct under lock and key, he pursued his disrupted course of inspection in a viciously poisoned mood. Throughout, the anxiety haunted: had his late campaign in Havish been sabotaged, with a victory snatched from his grasp? Who knew what twisted wickedness motivated the Koriathain.

      To be wrangled again by their wiles mocked his competence. Worse, fumed The Hatchet, the bedevilling shrew played on his fierce desire to see Lysaer s’Ilessid deposed after the shame of defeat. Hooked bait on that weakness galled his thorny temper.

      “Damn your meddling Prime, I will seize my reckoning,” he snarled, then shouted outside and summoned his equerry at a frazzled sprint.

      Repercussions touched off by the upset in Dyshent flared more than The Hatchet’s distemper. Across the continent, surrounded by packing crates as the Senior Circle of the Koriathain uprooted itself from their entrenched lair at Whitehold, the Matriarch vented annoyance. “The cagey snake has rejected my overture!”

      “Your morning’s work was scarcely in vain,” soothed the attendant, hovering Senior. The spelled crossbolt had stayed in The Hatchet’s possession, a temptation planted in fertile ground. “The game is young. The Light’s prickly commander will surely succumb, if only to upstage the avatar.”

      But Selidie’s displeasure rejected optimism. “The overblown martinet lacks respect for our order.” How dared he threaten a reigning Prime with his pipsqueak talk of retribution! She needed the man to react on his merits, not haltered in spells as a puppet.

      Her bit players must all be engaged by free will. Anything less circumvented her cause to wrest the sisterhood clear of the Fellowship’s compact. But the very tools to pressure the Sorcerers carried a double-edged price: where The Hatchet’s directive to eradicate clanblood weakened the historic guardianship of the free wilds, such butchery also reduced the available pool of heritable talent. Fewer gifted candidates would survive to be inducted and replenish the order’s strength. Koriathain wrestled other perverse inconveniences: Selidie dared not risk a passage by galley to leash the Light’s mongrel commander herself. The might just restored by recovery of the Great Waystone made the amethyst too precious to hazard at sea.

      Her choice to relocate to Daon Ramon imposed an inconvenient journey by land. Hence this invasion of boxes, up-ending her household just as fractious events approached a critical crux.

      Lysaer’s double-blind play was exposed: The Hatchet’s over-zealous detail would shortly board a galley held under storm anchorage. When the challenge at the sterncastle door went unanswered, the lock would be smashed by war-bond authority.

      Selidie knew, seated amid the echoing chaos of her windowed gallery at Whitehold: the frantic search would find an empty cabin. The Light’s delinquent avatar and his personal servant were not aboard.

      On the sore subject of Lord Lysaer’s activity, her own stellar resource fell short. Repeated auguries by Koriani talent sank into murk.

      Selidie chewed over her thwarted frustration, irritated by back-ground chatter, and the scrape of filled trunks dragged aside for the porters. Since the scryers tagged the Mad Prophet’s presence well to her west, today’s obfuscation most likely involved a Fellowship Sorcerer’s mark.

      Asandir’s ward of guard upon Daliana might be clouding Prime Selidie’s reach. The pesky chit had vanished after her collusion with the Mad Prophet had engineered Lysaer’s abduction from the carnage at Lithmarin. Separated from the spellbinder’s protection in Scarpdale, the inconvenient young woman had never resurfaced, even under an exhaustive search backed by the order’s Great Waystone. Therefore, another bold finger had meddled. Only one other power in reach owned the main strength and audacity.

      Selidie called her attendant Seniors to active duty despite the convulsive disarray. “I require an immediate circle of twelve, a cleared room, and the chest that contains the Great Waystone for the purpose of engaging Davien.”

      The announcement reeled the room to shocked silence. None dared flout the Prime, no matter the peril inherent in crossing the Fellowship Sorcerers; and of the Seven, the Betrayer was unspeakably dangerous. The most experienced Seniors recalled: last time their Matriarch had wielded the might of the Waystone against him, the affray had seared her to a stub-fingered cripple.

      On the moment the Prime Matriarch firmed her resolve, the renegade Fellowship Sorcerer in question stood on a rock slope in the Mathorns, red-and-white hair like a stallion’s mane tumbled over his taut shoulders. Above, like a massive stilled pendulum, a boulder half the size of a house creaked in a sling, cranked vertical by a match-stick brace of fir logs. The stone overweighted its groaning support, suspension maintained by permission and sorcery mighty enough to unravel the mountain beneath.

      Being Davien, no such carelessness happened, though from an earth-linked vantage at Althain Tower, Sethvir winced for the timing as Kharadmon swooped in, bristling to level the ancient score of his grievances.

      Arctic draught at the nape his first warning, Davien flexed his interlaced fingers in an artistic stretch. “What, no flowering nightshade? No hellebore? Not even the toxic flamboyance of the tiger-lily? Provocative orange would suit us both, if you still style yourself in that obnoxious green cloak.”

      Clad himself in autumnal russet and brown, the coarse outdoor wool paired with calfskin boots and cordovan leathers, Davien perched on the pile of casks and provender, stored under tarps in the open. The refuge at Kewar engineered for a shade now required renovation to suit his incarnate release from the dragon’s service. The old entry, drilled out, underwent the critical step of receiving a guardian cap-stone: finicky spells and physical effort interlaced in fraught measure with fatal danger.

      Insolent necessity, Davien snatched the interruption to eat. His usual satirical mockery absent, he peeled the wax from a cheese, cracked a loaf of dark bread, and with a thoughtful expression, dug in.

      Kharadmon commanded the wind for his voice. The question became, not how many, but which mothballed fight he picked first.

      While the shade coalesced for the opening salvo, Davien raised an eyebrow and busily chewed as the tirade unleashed. “Not mentioning your colossal mistakes that saddled us with the rebellion, or the brutal inventiveness that destroyed King Kamridian, sunk in your criminal culpability, what excuse grants you the license to fling Asandir’s gift of survival into our teeth? Also Luhaine’s sacrifice in your behalf! How deadly the irony, that his butchered flesh once paid for your mess at Telmandir, only to lend you the undeserved grace to salvage your reincarnation.”

      The Betrayer said nothing. He did not belabour the pertinent truth: that Kharadmon’s culpable action had upset Asandir’s intervention, which would have disarmed Shehane Althain’s sprung defences on the historical hour that he became fatally savaged.

      Yet Davien’s weighted silence failed to stem his discorporate colleague’s furious accusations.

      “By your passionate claim, our use of clan blood-lines to treat with the Paravians created the schism between town-born and talent. Who’s СКАЧАТЬ