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

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      Unsinged by the Prime’s focused ire, blissfully intent on sloshing the dollop of cinnamon butter just added to flavor his tea, Sethvir shrugged. “What you think doesn’t matter. Your crystal has been recognized, and earth will abide by its own nature.”

      He might have said more, but Luhaine snatched the opening to expound. “Stone and soil, you must know, are susceptible to energy. Like the mind of a mimic, they will copy and retain the patterns of induced vibrations. No made spell under sky could remand that given property.” Warmed now to his subject, the invisible spirit ran over the Prime’s reedy protest. “And anyway, the conundrum’s not linked to a balanced equation. To invoke the attempt to dominate a planet would create an unsolvable backlash. Where could the discharge from such a raised force become grounded? Earth itself would reject the called power to bind it into subservience! Even if this were a mutable truth, how could its awareness of your great crystal’s resonance be masked? The memory of land is scribed in the language of epochs. It endures across cataclysm. Ath Creator did not gift its being with forgetfulness.”

      “Then give me a spell of illusion for blinding concealment,” Morriel demanded.

      Sethvir looked up from his mug, his eyebrows tipped in patent injury. “Just because you accuse me of deceit doesn’t mean I’ll change my character to become so.” He glanced across at Iyan, who held the spoon in locked jaws, as if he sensed the tensioned undercurrents to words deaf ears could not hear.

      Althain’s Warden set down his tea. He turned his back, gave the mute servant’s arm a kindly pat, then vacated his chair to share the cushion in the window seat.

      Balked by his move from polite negotiation, Morriel shifted target and accosted Asandir. “Indeed, the hour has come to discuss that arrow once loosed in Vastmark.”

      Ghost quiet on his feet, the Sorcerer who arranged the Fellowship’s field work moved his tall frame and claimed Sethvir’s empty chair. He slid the filled tea mug aside and laced his fingers over crossed forearms. “You provoked an attempt to assassinate Arithon s’Ffalenn by fanning Duke Bransian’s urge for blood feud.” His riposte matched hers like testing, cold steel. “No light matter.”

      “For that you hobbled the powers of our Great Waystone, admit it,” Morriel accused. Eyes like jet bead bored into the Sorcerer’s of impenetrable, mirror-glass gray. “You protect Rathain’s prince, peril that he is. A mage-trained master fallen under curse of violence will incite more deaths than that one, on Duke Bransian’s arrow. I’ll say what I think. Your Fellowship has never regarded the people on this world as more than expendable ciphers.”

      “We’ll set aside the question of whether you’re qualified to make any judgment on that.” Asandir gave no sign he was perturbed. “The issues are separate, in fact.”

      “I see.” Morriel raked up a disdainful cough. “The nature of an inanimate earth and its resistance to change weighs more than our Waystone’s potential to spare cities with children and families from the misfortunes of storm or disaster?” She stabbed a stiff finger from beneath her layered fortress of blankets. “Condemn yourself, Sorcerer, by those answers already given.”

      The tallow dip flared, streamed by an affronted swirl of draft. But whichever discorporate Sorcerer roused up for rebuttal bowed before Asandir’s prior claim to defense. “Lady Morriel, where are your grounds for dispute? Athera’s land and natural resource were never placed at humanity’s disposal.”

      “Which point is moot, since your precious Paravians have left their ancestral ground.” Morriel jabbed home her point. “Will you endorse bloodshed just to hold your lofty place as guardians of their abandoned heritage? While you mourn for vanished unicorns, our cities slide further into violence. Your Teir’s’Ffalenn is too perilous a presence to leave at large in the world. I see you’re not blind to the flaws in his nature. If your Fellowship won’t act to curb his lethal cleverness, our order must. Lysaer’s rule offers selfless governance, a fair concern for the needs of society. The obsessions the Mistwraith has driven him to embrace will fade without fuel if Arithon is removed as his target. I find no justification whatsoever for restraint. How should any one life be worth the thirty thousand left dead at Vastmark?”

      “Because we are not speaking for one individual, but of the survival of all life on Athera,” Kharadmon snapped with blistering irony.

      “That is the root of our quandary,” Asandir admitted.

      The clipped note to his speech arrested Morriel’s tirade. She narrowed seamed eyes and read closer, disturbed by the precedence that Luhaine permitted his rival’s remark to stand unchallenged. Through the coarse, ruddy flare of the tallow dip, past the vicious play of static thrown off by the unshielded Waystone, she at last interpreted Asandir’s stark patience for the stillness of a desperate uncertainty.

      “What have you done?” she whispered point-blank. Then in knifing accusation, “How is our world set at risk?”

      “The peril is not new, but an ongoing extension of the trouble begun when man first created the aberrated mists of Desh-thiere.” Asandir sat forward. “If I may?” He caught up the Waystone in long fingers, impervious, as though it possessed no more hazardous an aura than a chunk of unwarded glass.

      The Prime Enchantress bridled. Convinced he had the effrontery to mock her by degrading her grand focus as a scrying stone, she gathered herself to revile him. Yet he did nothing but pass the jewel back across the table.

      “Your jewel sets off a disturbing dissonance,” he temporized as he ceded its cold weight into her protective grasp. “Better we ease the distraction before the next subject is explored.”

      Morriel Prime tugged a silk shawl from her knees and veiled the sullen glimmer of the Waystone. She felt disgruntled, manipulated, and pricked by the awareness that Asandir’s gently innocuous request urged dismissal of her complaint. She would not be side-tracked from her mission. Nor would she be lulled by the informal nature of Sethvir’s bachelor hospitality. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. Placed firmly on guard, she must anticipate their ploys, even as they offered diversions that led off on tangents.

      “Are the wards on Rockfell Pit gone unstable?” She settled the Waystone in the hollow of her lap and waited in rankling patience.

      “Those defenses are secure,” Kharadmon assured from his overhead vantage above the door arch. “But Desh-thiere was divided upon its entry to Athera. The greater concentration of its fog was turned away, as we have unsettling proof. The uncontained portion cut off on the gate world of Marak is anything but a dead entity.”

      Lapped like a mummy in quilts and thick shadows, her reed voice stripped to suspicion, Morriel said carefully, “Dead or not, those wraiths should have no thread of connection to exploit. Unless you’ve contrived some harebrained scheme to restore the old portal to Athera?”

      “Ath forfend, never that!” Sethvir interjected, then submerged once again in his voiceless communion with Iyan. An inimical pause seized the chamber, strung out on the hiss of the tallow dip. Asandir turned his hand palm down on bare wood to thwart a visible urge to strike a fist. “This is properly Kharadmon’s story,” he said in quick discomfort.

      Luhaine withheld all opinion, nor did he interrupt as the nexus of his discorporate rival drifted down to settle amid the used-up spread of light supper.

      “The tale plays more like nightmare,” the Fellowship’s most incorrigible prankster confessed in chilling sobriety. Over the untidied jetsam of dishes and a tea mug abandoned brimful, Kharadmon СКАЧАТЬ