Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ slaughter went on, unrelenting.” Before listeners strangled into shocked quiet, the damning account unfolded. Impelled now by passionate outrage, scene after scene of inhumane practice were described in the fisherman’s slow, southcoast accent. “Those wretches who fled were killed from behind. Any who survived to launch longboats did so by shielding their bodies behind corpses. Their valor and desperation made no difference. They were cut off as they sought to make sail. Every galley turned in flight was run down and fired at the mouth of the inlet. No vessel was spared. Even a fishing lugger burdened with wounded was razed and burned to her waterline. Mercy was forbidden, at Arithon’s strict order. By my life, as I stand here, and Dharkaron as my judge, the killing went on until no man who tried landfall was left standing.”

      The fisherman stirred, came back to himself, and shifted his feet in self-consciousness. “All that I saw took place before the great rout at Dier Kenton Vale.”

      The last line trailed into appalled, awkward stillness. City officials sat in their numbed state of pride, pricked down the spine by an incomprehensible fear. Their poise like struck marble, every veteran commander sweated inwardly, forced to accept that the wretched, slaughtered companies could as easily have been their own men.

      The moment hung and then passed. Deep breaths were drawn into stopped lungs. Bodies shifted and hat feathers quivered, and humid hands fumbled through scrips and pockets in quest of comforting handkerchiefs.

      Then the floor loosened into talk all at once.

      “Ath show us all mercy!” The minister of the weaver’s guild fanned a suety face with the brim of his unwieldy bonnet. “What sickness of mind would drive a human being to command such a letting of blood?”

      “The killing appears to have been done for no reason,” the Khetienn’s deserter stressed mournfully. “No one who landed at the Havens survived. The wyverns there scavenged the corpses.”

      But the ambassador from Havish weighed the sailor’s lidded gaze, that darted and shied from direct contact. Instinct suggested this witness had withheld some telling fact from his speech. For malice, perhaps, or personal rancor against his former captain, he might slant his account to spark vengeful impetus to Lysaer’s ongoing feud.

      “But Arithon s’Ffalenn never acts without design.” The passionate impact of Lysaer’s rebuttal spun electrifying tension in contrast. “No man alive is more clever, or sane. This Spinner of Darkness would have his reason, cold-blooded, even vicious, to have timed and effected such slaughter.”

      Lysaer stood, fired now by conviction which no longer let him keep still. The light shimmered across his collar yoke of diamonds, template to his distress. “We know the scarps above Dier Kenton Vale were splintered into a rock fall. Earth itself was suborned as a weapon to break the proud ranks of our war host. If the rim walls in that territory are prone to slides, the ruin rained down on our troops was a feat beyond all bounds of credibility. What if more than exploitation of a natural disaster were the cause? Could sorcery in fact have been used to cleave a new fault line? Even weaken the structure of the shale?”

      Disturbed murmurs swept the benches. Feathers rippled and velvet hats tipped, as men shared their fears with their neighbors.

      “Arithon s’Ffalenn was born to mage training!” Prince Lysaer exhorted above the noise. “Through his seemingly wanton slaughter at the Havens, could he not have tapped the arcane power to rend the very fabric of the earth?”

      On orchestrated cue, the shriveled little man in scholar’s robes started up from his unobtrusive dreaming. “The premise is not without precedent,” he affirmed in a drilling, treble quaver. “There are proscribed practices that herb witches use to tap forces of animal magnetism.”

      A stunning truth. Every common man-at-arms who ever bought an illicit love philter had observed the filthy practice.

      “These distasteful creatures will slay a live animal, then cast binding spells from the spilled effervescence of its life essence. How much more potent the power to be gained, if the sacrificial victims were human?” The scholar cast his accusation above an uneasy, incredulous anger. “Be sure, the massed deaths of five hundred spirits would be enough to cleave the very mountains in twain to wreak that unconscionable destruction on our troops!”

      “The question is raised,” Avenor’s deep-voiced justiciar sliced through the uproar. He nodded in respect to his prince, then addressed the bound clansman. “If the Master of Shadow engages dark magecraft, the preeminent arcane order on this continent has not stepped forth to denounce him. The Fellowship Sorcerers have not spoken. Nor have they acted to curb his vile deeds. The Warden of Althain himself is said to feel each drop of blood spilled in Athera. Every death at the Havens would be known to him. Why should he let this atrocity pass?”

      A mayor in the front row raised an imperious fist. “The opposite has happened, in practice!”

      A scathing point; more than once, the Sorcerers had stood as Arithon’s spokesmen.

      Havish’s royal ambassador stiffened, then stamped down his urgent protest. In even-handed fairness, hard against their better judgment, the Fellowship Sorcerers had also endorsed today’s return of the princess’s purloined ransom. Lysaer’s avoidance of that truth was duplicitous. Pained by the loyalty due his own king, the ambassador endured through the unjust malignment, while Avenor’s justiciar widened the charges in his sonorous, gravelly bass.

      “What is the Fellowship’s silence, if not evidence of collaboration? By this lack of intervention, events would suggest that the Sorcerers may support all of Arithon’s actions against us.”

      “They gave their vaunted sanction to Rathain’s crown prince,” Etarra’s Lord Harradene allowed. “If the Fellowship stands together as the Shadow Master’s ally, the consequence can’t be dismissed. They may have become corrupted. If they deem the use of dark magecraft as no crime, Prince Lysaer, as the public defender of the innocent, would naturally be obstructed in his legitimate claim to rule Tysan.”

      The clan prisoner’s sharp protest became shouted down by another voice as accented as his own. “Now there’s a braw, canting spiel, well fitted for a mealymouthed lawyer!”

      Mute on the benches, the ambassador from Havish shut his eyes in relief.

      Volatile as spilled flame in the red-and-gold surcoat of Alestron’s unvanquished clan dukes, Mearn s’Brydion, appointed delegate of his brother, sprang up in pacing agitation. “While you bandy conjecture in mincing, neat words, let us pay strict attention to procedure! If this slaughter at the Havens ever happened, where’s hard proof?” He cast suspicious gray eyes toward the sailhand, impervious himself to the looks turned his way by townsmen distrustful of his breeding. “Or will you sheep dressed in velvets let yourselves be gulled by the word of a man disaffected?”

      As the deckhand surged forward, flushed into outrage, Mearn raised a finger like a blade. “I’ve not said you’re a liar! Not outright. Arithon’s a known killer, that much I grant. I witnessed the debacle he caused in our armory. But whether his slaughter of these companies at the Havens took place as a blood crime, or some cruel but expedient act of war, the killing was done on the soil of Shand. Can’t mix your legalities for convenience. Town law won’t apply to a kingdom. Under sovereignty of Shand’s founding charter, as written by the Fellowship of Seven, Prince Arithon’s offense is against Lord Erlien, High Earl of Alland. As caithdein of that realm, the Teir s’Taleyn is charged to uphold justice in the absence of his high king. The question of Prince Arithon’s guilt falls under his province to determine.”

      “What СКАЧАТЬ