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

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       III. Sentence

      Winter 5648-5649

      On the morning that Arithon’s brigantine rounded up and backed sail off the wind-blasted sands of the far continent, the Fellowship Sorcerer who was Warden of Althain perched in a sun-baked window seat. He could have held that pose for hours, or even days, hunched like a ruffled gray pelican in the comfort of his moth-eaten maroon robe. The lined, ivory knuckles of one hand clutched a sheaf of curled parchment. The other wielded a black swan’s quill, fussed sharp as a dandy’s rapier point. The pot last used to dip his nib nestled between his braced knees, a tipped fraction shy of a spill. Stray stains and a threadbare shine to his velvets showed Sethvir’s small care for vanity. Mere ink could be left to run where it would while his provenance spanned all the world.

      Through the gift of the Paravian earth link, Sethvir sensed the distant, salt splash as the Khetienn’s anchor plunged to bite into the pearlescent sands of the shallows. Amid myriad sounds, just one patterned resonance of changed air: he heard shouted orders from a half a globe away, to brail tanbark sails to squared yards at the end of an arduous passage. Caught between lines of small, precise script, the Sorcerer furrowed his seamed brow. Then the poignancy of the moment overcame him.

      He laid his temple against the old stonework and wept.

      If the sea gave the Shadow Master a temporary shelter from the hatred raised among townsmen against him, his cherished hope of finding a haven on Athera’s far continent was misled. Sethvir knew as much, aggrieved by the secrets necessity had forced him to keep. Kathtairr, the far land, was familiar to him as the creases grained in his own flesh. Distance offered no obstacle. The grand earth link bequeathed him, moment to moment, its endless, weary vistas of ocher and gray. Sun scorched and blasted by the elements, the continent fanned like a snag of singed cloth cast on the jewel-toned sea. Its rivers were dry, or ran poisoned and alkaline. Its shoreline extended, league upon league, as blank, rippled dunes and swept desert.

      Sethvir ached for the tragic truth. To the last sand grain and rock, from the cracked, dusty summits of each nameless mountain to the seared, crumbled fissures of the valleys, the land mass beyond Athera’s vast oceans was naught but a lifeless waste.

      Even in the early centuries of the Third Age, at the height of their power and ascendancy, the Paravians had shunned the place.

      Arithon would find no reprieve in Kathtairr from the bane laid on him by the Mistwraith. If he gained brief escape through the time he spent searching, for each year that passed, Lysaer s’Ilessid would breed more killing sentiment against him. The longer the Khetienn’s absence extended, the higher the stakes laid against the Shadow Master’s life.

      Between Sorcerers, the issue had already been thrashed to exhaustion. In desperate truth, their Fellowship dared not spurn the smallest borrowed margin of time. They would, and had wrested from Arithon’s blind need that span of uneasy peace. Trapped themselves in a race to stave off disaster, they labored to avert an unmentionable peril, compounded since the hour of the Mistwraith’s confinement.

      Sethvir straightened, blue-green eyes grown airy as mist. His fingers draped loose across the unfinished last paragraph on his parchment. The quill slipped, forgotten, to drift on a whisper to the floor. Amid his sprawl of opened books, stained tea mugs, and his cluttered, stray oddments of feather and stone scavenged from excursions through the meadows, he looked for all the world like a beak-nosed little grandfather, abandoned to senile daydreams.

      In contrary fact, the Sorcerer’s trained focus ranged far beyond his tower library. Immersed in the broadscale vision of the earth link, the split train of his awareness encompassed all things, from the mighty pull of Athera’s riptides, to the rustle of solitary grass stems. The busy tracks of ants reached his ear, and the singular signatures of sand grains banked in the gullies of the deserts. Sethvir could count at whim the cries of the owl and the albatross, riding the wind’s thermal currents. He sensed the grind of polar ice, north and south, and the thundering shear of each floe calved into the briny arctic seas. The planet itself played its living chord through his consciousness. He knew, like a heartbeat, the molten toss of core magma and the eerie, static pulse of its array of magnetic power lanes. Amid the vast, milling chord of flux and event, two precise notes snagged in dissonance. Sethvir narrowed his sight to frame these, his brows tugged into worry like muddled crochet.

      A listening minute later, the Sorcerer moved on. Past the world’s motley cloak of spun cloud, he traced the wheeling arc of the moon through deep vacuum, then left its grand dance to encompass the thin, singing tracks carved by stars.

      The deeps of the void in between were not lifeless. A massive, near-complete ward construct spread for arc seconds in space. In fan curves, through ruled lines and joined angles that transected time, an intricate chain of seals spindled taut in lace point and sapphire, their phantom imprint a gemstone’s planed facets cut intaglio on the dry dark. To the paired entities who labored to close the last gaps in the symmetry, Sethvir sent word, ‘Arithon’s made landfall on the far continent.’

      “Past time,” Kharadmon’s brisk comment flung back. Discorporate since mishap overcame him in the course of Second Age violence, the ghost Sorcerer added his usual caustic fillip. “He’s Torbrand’s trueborn descendant, with the same nasty temper when his dignity’s rankled, or his principles. When he sails back empty-handed, will you have a ready answer? He’s bound to demand why our Fellowship never warned him that Kathtairr’s seared lifeless by drakefire.”

      “Mind well, Kharadmon,” a fruity, morose voice admonished. “If you fritter away words restating prehistory, there won’t be a living land left for anyone’s ship to return to.” Luhaine’s gloomy nature had scarcely improved since his body had perished in defense of a deposed high king. Once a corpulent scholar who preferred cautious order, in five hundred years, he had yet to savor his free-ranging existence as pure spirit. Nor had his tart rivalry eased into shared commiseration as a shade. “In case you’ve gone drifty, we’ve work to complete before the advent of solstice.”

      “Oh, dance on it,” Kharadmon retorted. A ripple of energies shot through by stars, he set to in exuberant relish. “You scold like some humorless grandmother with nothing to do but knit mufflers and roust up windy criticism.”

      Luhaine chose to ignore him. “Do I surmise we’re summoned back to Athera?” His prim query was presented to Sethvir alone, the inflection all plaintive acid. “The timing’s a gross inconvenience, as you see.” The earth link would show that one last charge of power drawn from the lane tides at winter solstice would see their long labor complete. This first stage protection was urgent, and indispensable, against perils too dire for delay.

      ‘You’re СКАЧАТЬ