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

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СКАЧАТЬ like crocheted water, random patterns twined into an accord beyond grasp of matter and logic. The Sorcerers’ works were like no other conjuries, their core of fey mystery fraught with perils and gloved in an unearthly beauty.

      Lest those secretive riddles beckon the mind into circling madness, Lirenda marveled instead at the creatures the wards kept imprisoned. Here flew the last deadly packs of winged predators brought to breathing life by the dreams of the bygone dragons. Most murderous of the surviving drake spawn, black Khadrim clustered on ledges of volcanic rock. They warbled unending songs of bloodlust. More of them crouched, armored tails curled over their needle-sharp talons. Warmed by the mud pots, they dreamed, ever restless, drinking in memories of the whistling dissonance as high-altitude air thrummed over thundering, taut wing leather. Here and there, a long, narrow head arched up and breathed flame. Others joined in, until the stony, raked scarps became necklaced with brands like a festival.

      Northward, Morriel bent the axis of the Waystone, over peaks mailed in ice, or snagged in batts of drifting cloud. Here, on the rim walls which bounded the Gulf of Stormwell, lay the mountains’ living heart, no longer cold, but aflame and bleeding the earth’s molten mineral through shattered seams and caldera. The peaks at the North Cape were unstable, a brutalized vista of riven rock. Here, earth and elements raged in endless war. Volcanoes like angry, fuming behemoths hurled hot rock and cinders. Magma spewed scarlet lacework into the boil of gray breakers, ever ripping their voracious, tide-driven channels between the shores of the Trow Islands.

      “There,” Morriel said, her voice the thin tone of dropped porcelain.

      Lirenda sensed the small peak singled out, its flanks carved lambent by lava flows.

      “We shall cap that vent in the earth’s crust.” Morriel spoke without arrogance, without even the prideful overtone a child might show a trapped butterfly.

      She brought the focus stone’s power to bear, a wheeling spin like forced vertigo. Then, in bursting white lines, she framed the grand seals into sigils. Overwhelmed by their magnificence, Lirenda could not discern whether the Prime traced the figures over the amethyst’s surface, or whether she called them up, blazing, from the granite discipline of her mind. Some she recognized, for mastery of rock; dominance of earth; the interlaced patterns for repression and joining and guard. Others seemed disquietingly changed, indecipherable despite a haunting familiarity. The train of the construct shaped an unquiet strangeness that razed her to upsetting chills. Her rational thoughts were flicked on wild tangents to recoil into confusion.

      The spell towered, bloomed, achieved finished perfection. Then, like the flight of an arrow from bowstring, the sharp, singing hum of release.

      Perception overturned, kicked through an explosive cascade of change. Lirenda screamed with the upset as something spun wrong, and cognizance unraveled with the unbound, wild fury of a thunderclap. All order dissolved, then mastery and rule, leaving dark like the aftermath of carnage. Next, the slipped threads of power hurled into backlash. Chaos clapped down. For one yawning instant, natural law wrenched off course. Every sane tie to reason unhinged, as if torn from the span of creation.

      The impact slammed through the mind, then froze there in stopped reverberation. Lawless disorder coiled into itself like craze marks pressed through crushed crystal.

      Then the moment cracked free and passed. The earth turned serene. Summer stars burned untouched. Lirenda recovered herself, gasping and dazed, on the tower felted in the mild air of a bay shore night in Thirdmark. Etched in the eye of her mind, she still saw the volcanic basin at Northerly, and the fuming, scarlet lava jetting uncapped through the darkness.

      Next she became aware of Morriel’s speech, pronouncing maledictions in a quavering, vitriolic whisper.

      “Matriarch, are you hurt?” she asked, stressed and shaken, in need of reassurance for herself.

      She held on through a racked draw of breath, while the Prime expressed rage in a rising, thin shriek. “Damn them all to the dimmest pit of Sithaer! Fellowship meddlers! Curse their hands and their eyes and the tongues in their mouths. Let them suffer for this! May they die, every one, unmanned and weeping, helpless and unloved and alone!”

      Lirenda cowered at the tirade, afraid to move or speak, as the Matriarch spun, her features seamed bone in the starlight. “What’s happened? Ath forbid I should have lived to see the day! The Fellowship held our Waystone in custody for five centuries, and oh, we were fools to have believed they never tampered.”

      “But Sethvir promised me our Waystone was untouched!” Lirenda cried. The order’s own tests had assured the Warden’s statement was no falsehood.

      “Ah, untouched indeed.” Morriel’s malice changed to bitter admiration. “Sethvir did not lie. He did not disturb our stone. Clever fiend that he is, he never had to. He simply imprinted the Waystone’s signature into every cranny of the world through the earth link he gained from the Paravians. And damn his wretched cleverness, he laid no ward on Arithon, nor broke any thread of moral principle. The same trick just upset my scrying.”

      “I don’t understand,” Lirenda said.

      “You should, given more time and experience.” Morriel qualified in that etched, acid tone she used to restore equilibrium. “The key lies in the foundations of Fellowship philosophy, First Senior. The Sorcerers’ mastery keeps Paravian precepts. The Seven are bound, and must live by the Law of the Major Balance, itself a stricture of permissions. They believe earth and air, in fact, all solid matter, to be spun from animate spirit. Nothing they do, in craft or in deed, can proceed without an exchange of consent. So they have trammeled us. Our Waystone’s signature pattern has been given to all that has form in this world; and by Sethvir’s knotted conjury, all physical matter in existence has been empowered to refuse its channeled force of intervention.”

      Before Lirenda’s outrage, Morriel ran on, her rancor fired now by the ancient sting of balked rivalry. “Oh, we’re not helpless. Our order can still tune a circle of seniors into focused unity through the stone. We can still curb disease, and even, turn armies. But only to bend influence upon conscious, living beings, and these have wills of their own. Over the earth, against even the lowliest storm, our Waystone has been robbed of power.”

      The wide-ranging impact undermined at a stroke the triumph of the Waystone’s recovery. For the order’s major spell crystals were themselves irreplaceable. Brought in when the Koriathain first settled Athera, the stones’ offworld origins set them outside the scope of the Paravian-wrought earth link. Only those select conjuries channeled through their matrices could escape Sethvir’s observation.

      Now, the Waystone’s Named signature had been disseminated abroad by the Sorcerer. The unique, patterned aura of its influence lay hampered in ties of recognition. Its forces had been disempowered through rejection by all things over which the Fellowship’s compact held sway.

      Lirenda regarded her Prime Matriarch, shadowed under her hood of pale silk like a hunting spider noosed in spun gossamer. “What will you do?”

      “Whatever I must.” Morriel stroked skeletal fingers over the polished, sullen facets of the Waystone. “The Fellowship of Seven have no given right to curtail our Koriani powers. I will go myself and present my demand at Althain Tower. The Sorcerers will heed, or be sorry. I will gain back our autonomy.”

       Three Seasons

      Summer-Winter 5648

      In late СКАЧАТЬ