Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ as Prince of the West. That was before he forwent Tysan’s colors for a mantle of white fox and diamonds.’

      ‘Oh, he’s aged,’ the wife argued, her sharp humor fled as she stepped to assist with her husband’s disgruntled robing. ‘Just look at his eyes. Hard as faceted sapphire, and too driven for pity.’ A break, as she perked up his wilted lace collar, then, ‘You want the gold chain and ruby pendant?’ Without pause for his nod, she settled the massive links over his dove gray silk. ‘Whatever the Exalted Prince asks you to give, don’t commit the new recruits.’

      ‘What?’ The mayor peered at his wife. ‘There hasn’t been heavy fighting since the Caithwood campaign failed to clear Taerlin’s forests of clansmen.’

      ‘I know.’ His wife spun away in a rustle of layered muslin. ‘But things change. Whatever ill wind has blown in with that galley, no man of twenty should be sent out to die before the grass greens in the spring.’

      The mayor took pause, the squared links of his state jewelry dipped blood in the fluttering candlelight. ‘You think the Master of Shadow’s come back?’

      His wife plucked up her hand mirror. One glance, and her puffy eyes half filled with tears. She slapped the silvered face down in rare and explosive anger. ‘Whyever else should we be dragged out of bed before dawn?’ Discomposed by the thought of exalted state company, she rebounded to blistering irritation. ‘If Avenor brings word of the Spinner of Darkness, the ill news of his reiving is just going to wait until my maid makes me presentable.’

      Chilled in stockinged feet, unsure how to manage the imminent concept of shadows and minions of evil, the mayor bent and rummaged through the bottom of the armoire. He fetched out the fanciest boots he could find, ones with velvet-lined cuffs and stitched patterns of seed pearls. ‘I’ll delay the proceedings by serving mulled wine.’ He jammed a foppish black hat with peacock plumes over his short-cropped head, then sailed through the doorway, girded to balk s’Ilessid divinity and appease his wife’s queer foreboding.

      The hall and the stairwell were darkened by night, the pine-knot brand in the lower vestibule burned down to a flickering cinder. The light would be refreshed at the dawn change of watch, as yet several hours away.

      Such lack of diligent guard was routine. Narms was no bastion of armed prowess, to draw the Divine Prince in a crisis. Its city maintained one dilapidated keep, without earthworks. Built over and around the site of an ancient Paravian sea landing, her wealth was guild owned, and invested into skilled labor. Through the centuries since the uprising, the crumbled brick quay overlooking the bay head acquired a sprawl of shanties and warehouses. Sailhands’ dives lined the waterfront by the fishmongers’. The recessed cove of the harbor sheltered the industry of dyers and craftsmen, whose lifeblood was tied to town trade. Raw materials and goods came and left from the moss-crusted jetties built through the years after Rathain’s last high king was slaughtered. The current garrison quartered only mounted men-at-arms, split into small companies to guard caravans. For the clan raids that plagued the land route to Morvain, Narms’s south district offered a comfortable nest for fortune-seeking headhunters, who scoured Halwythwood for scalps that paid bounty.

      By tradition, Alliance interests made landfall at Narms, then passed briskly through to hold loftier counsel at Etarra.

      The mayor approached the entry to his great hall and discovered the royal delegation from the harbor already installed ahead of him. One leaf of the heavy double panel lay ajar. A spill of escaped light sliced the dimmed anteroom, strung through by the echoes of rapid-paced talk. The oddity shook him, that he felt estranged while underneath his own roof.

      Anxiety bit deeper as he reached the threshold, his shortstrided footsteps unnaturally loud as he entered the cavernous chamber. The hearthfire newly lit by his guard captain did nothing to lift the dank chill. Stone walls had been stripped of the star and moon tapestries unfurled each year for the solstice festivities. On a floor scrubbed bare of its formal wax polish, the replacement hangings of hunting scenes lay still rolled, not yet looped on the polished brass rods. The board trestles had been stacked by the wall during cleaning, except for the one set erect for the use of the surprise delegation from Tysan.

      That rectangle stood like a snag in the candlelight, bare of linen cloth, and surrounded by men whose steel-clad intensity raised a wall of unease at ten yards. Among six, on their feet, the seated man towered, his self-contained presence a mantle of majesty that seemed bred in the flesh and the bone of him. As always, Lysaer s’Ilessid held the eye like a compass drawn by a magnet.

      Golden-haired, cloaked in white, the s’Ilessid prince shone brilliant as diamond and pearl couched against the unadorned setting. The chair he occupied might have been a throne, not the tawdry furnishing the deerhounds had chewed to tattered hanks of burst horsehair. His innate nobility overshadowed his retinue, whose sunwheel tabards of gold and watered silk showed the sad creases ingrained by pack straps and sea chests.

      A glance showed the mayor his game plan was forfeit. The basket of new bread sent up from the oven lay cooling, untouched, on a footstool. The carafe of mulled wine had been shoved to one side, its spiced vintage spurned for the tactical map some churl had unrolled, and impaled at the corners with the wife’s best stag-handled cutlery.

      ‘Prince Exalted,’ the Mayor of Narms greeted in stiff courtesy.

      His court-style bow was acknowledged by the barest, brief nod, and a glance from ice-crystal blue eyes. Preoccupied, the unlaced cuff of one sleeve stripped back to expose his immaculate limb to the elbow, the fair personage of Lysaer s’Ilessid laid his wrist in the hands of the slender young man in the priest’s robe. Still seamlessly focused, he finished his answer to Narms’s worried captain at arms.

      ‘Yes. We know beyond doubt. The Spinner of Darkness has dared to return to the continent. His presence was affirmed well before the hour I set sail from Atainia.’ A regal gesture invited the Lord Mayor to join his dazzling, close company. ‘Very shortly, bear with me, we’ll know where he lairs. My diviner will scry his location.’

      Admitted to the inner circle, the mayor surveyed the prince’s minimal retinue. He recognized the lean grace and searing impatience of Sulfin Evend, Avenor’s Lord Commander at Arms. Three other sunwheel officers in chain mail were strangers, even the headhunter whose muscled frame wore the acid-etched poise of a predator.

      Despite every evidence of prowess on the field, the seasoned men-at-arms gave wide berth to the effete priest. Set apart, that one wore the floor-length, sashed robe of a sunwheel acolyte. His six-strand chain of rank set his station one tier below High Priest Cerebeld. The gleaming gold sigil at the crown of his hood proclaimed his Light-sanctioned talent for augury.

      As a diviner, he was young, a bone-skinny celibate whose cleft chin and pale cheeks showed scarcely a dusting of beard. Hands slim as a woman’s clasped the royal wrist, afflicted with palsy, or else made unsteady by high-strung nerves as he unsheathed a thin ceremonial knife. ‘Your Exalted,’ he warned in a sugar-toned tenor, then effected a quick, neat cut with the blade, knapped from a bleached human shinbone.

      Lysaer did not flinch. His arm stayed relaxed as the blood welled, and the droplets were caught in an offering bowl fashioned from glittering crystal.

      The priest kissed the wet wound, then bound it in silk. His carmine-stained lips intoned blessings to the Light in a whisper that rasped like filed steel through the sigh of the fire in the grate.

      Narms’s mayor looked on, clammy with sweat, and bound to sick fascination. Before this, he had always thought of arcane blood rituals as tales told to threaten unruly children.

      Nor did the СКАЧАТЬ