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

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СКАЧАТЬ flesh had succumbed to blank death, then faded to final oblivion.

      Panic raked through, a blind, clawing terror of abandonment. Lirenda could be left here, forever entombed beyond reach of life and movement. She wrestled to breathe slowly as she had been trained. All of her pride and practiced control seemed trampled and torn into shreds. She had no dignity. In gasping, sweaty struggle, she fought herself steady. The need to leap up, to flee headlong without heed for safeguards became almost too overpowering to deny.

      Then abrupt change overset even terror.

      The eruption was cyclonic, an invisible whirlwind of force barbed in malice. The vicious, leading edge had a thousand voices, cursing, crying, tearing with words and far worse: the scything, bitter edges of passionate hatreds all stabbing to flay and draw blood. Even sealed beyond harm, Lirenda felt her mind become milled into fragments, her thoughts consumed by unadulterated violence.

      No prior experience prepared her, although every other ancient focus she had handled harbored such coils of trapped rancor. By nature, all crystals absorbed the essence of spells raised to resonance through their mineral lattice. If the patterns were not cleared, the vibrations over time and usage thrummed into rank dissidence, a resentful moil of caged energies. A stone pressed to heel by the will of many mistresses was wont to reflect twisted spite, or worse, become warped into hideous subterfuge, to turn on new wielders and seek domination in turn. Greatest of all matrixes, the Waystone’s stored patterns spewed forth in unparalleled viciousness.

      Lirenda felt the blast as an obdurate, scorching tide of hatred that strove to unravel her being. Never had she witnessed such forceful malevolence. Her own strength was inadequate. Before such a flux, her deepest defenses would snap like so many dry twigs. She shrank inside the Prime’s warded circle, cowed to a whimpering huddle.

      She was not alone in her terror. The screams of Koriani predecessors who had failed to overmaster the Waystone’s maze of trickery roiled through the crystal’s depths also. Their despair charged the mind, shrank the flesh, and became a scourge defined unto itself; as if those vanquished, consumed spirits sought to lure fresh victims to succumb to the inner flaws that destroyed them. Their bodiless thoughts whirled in tireless search, seeking, prying, scrabbling to exploit any small chink of uncertainty. The peril of their assault was real, unforgiving. Lirenda’s skin rose into prickles of fear. Despite the assurance of Morriel’s wards, the danger sang through like the instant before a lightning strike, with her naked selfhood exposed but one breath shy of oblivion.

      An inflexible truth, that if the Prime Matriarch failed to subdue the roused Waystone, her frail circle of protections must crumple. If those thin lines of power once faltered or faded, Lirenda would be cast to ruin in the turmoil of upset control.

      As never before, the lesson thrust home: to succeed the Prime’s power, a candidate must become nothing less than a faultless instrument. No prime applicant would ever achieve dominion of the amethyst without unbreakable strength and no fault left to admit weakness.

      Then Morriel made her presence known. Her confidence unassailable, she configured the Waystone’s seals of mastery, laid them down in silvered vectors of power, fast and precise as thrown knives. Runes arced into sigils, symmetrical, perfect, to shape raging passions to order. Through the convulsed moil of energies, Lirenda caught the half-glimpsed imprints of past conjuries, the ghost echo of old currents chained through the quartz axis: of storms and disease bent awry or tamed outright; of the very slipstream of time challenged and reversed. She heard, too, the dusky voices of past matriarchs, their words, their deeds, their arguments all melded like the sussurant scrape of dry leaves. Then one last stamp of mastery sheared the whispers away.

      The Waystone’s sullen stew of resistance tore asunder, then surrendered to limpid clarity.

      Lirenda watched, awed, as the limitless vista opened before her at second hand. As often as she had experienced the rushing, exhilarant joy in her mastery of other focus jewels, the Waystone yielded an order of magnitude more. An indescribable passion plunged through her, sensation shaved to an exquisite knifepoint of ecstasy. The fired thrill of self-awareness seized her unaware, left her flushed and craving. She lost herself. Rapture beyond all imagining rolled like sweet thunder down her nerves. As if she stood poised at the pinnacle with all Ath’s creation strung on its axle, turning; and her hand, hers, to grasp the rein and drive the wheel, to prod the harnessed vector of fate to the dictates of her chosen whim.

      Revelation flooded her, a keen exhilaration spiced by addictive longing. She would own this power herself one day. At whatever cost, no matter the sacrifice, Lirenda knew she would pay any price to succeed the Koriani Prime. No risk, even death, would swerve her rightful claim to that heritage.

      Impatient for that hour, the First Senior envied Morriel’s grasp of that seamless course of power. She ached for her chance to let tuned awareness thread through the stone’s lattice and frame the runes into sigils of command.

      The pattern the Prime chose was a basic scrying. Somewhere upon the world’s seas, a brigantine’s keel carved westward. A small mote; a dimple pressed into the wavecrests by a hull hand fashioned of planks and sheathed in a bottom of copper. The metal would be subject to personal resonance, stamped bright in imprint of a man’s desperation, and his all-consuming hope of escape from the geas that hounded his peace.

      Arithon s’Ffalenn sailed west on the summer winds, and Morriel shaped her bidding to comb Athera’s broad oceans to tag his current location. For sheer display, the move was impressive. Water was earth’s most unbiddable element. Salt of itself balked cast conjury. The call through the Waystone arose in a tumultuous torrent, a whiplash of force before which the wide seas must bow to outright demand.

      The search spell released, launched in stamped intent to claim dominance over its target. Yet the connection fell short, maligned by some unseen barrier. Another resonance intervened, then captured its order. Clear sigils were impacted and snarled awry, then diffused away into nothing. The sea appeared lidded by impervious shields, and the scrying failed, its pure force dispersed into aimless puffs of air.

      Lirenda cried out, indignant. “So much for the Fellowship of Seven and their claim of unshakable morals! Look! They have broken the code of their own compact, even acted covertly for the sake of protecting a criminal. Did you plan to catch their hand in the act?”

      But the Koriani Matriarch kept pensive silence. Beneath her hand, the violet sphere of the Waystone shed chill, its heart a thousand spindled planes of trapped starlight. The noosed perils of its focus stayed poised and still as the glint off an unsheathed axe blade. “The Sorcerers have shown a devious cleverness,” she finally said, noncommittal. “That defense ward left no tracks, no afterimage of structural conjury.” The resonant signature of Fellowship work in fact had been absent, as though Arithon’s presence had been masked by an unseen force, or sea itself had joined in conspiracy to hide him.

      That piquant anomaly would keep for later study. Morriel cataloged the nagging incongruity, then moved on, brisk, to the task of granting her First Senior a taste of prime powers expanded through the Great Waystone. She spun the jewel’s focus, sent a new probe unreeling over the far lands to the north, where the ice-sheathed crags of Tornir Peaks tore through the spine of the cape, and seas ripped to white spume off the Gulf of Stormwell.

      Lirenda shared the majestic swoop as the Prime’s channeled powers changed purpose. Delight stunned her. She reveled in a sensation like flight; knew the thrill of rushed passage, as if spirit could soar over jagged summits where no road ran, and Northerly’s trappers never ventured. The foothills were cloaked in a straight shag of fir. There, wolf packs hunted by the new silver moon, the fanned effervescence of hunger and slaughter trailing like smoke in their wake. The Waystone’s precise focus could pick out the frost-point embroidery of the Fellowship wards which bounded СКАЧАТЬ