Asandir gasped in sick shock. The inconceivable had happened:
Thunder pealed. For a heartbeat the packed square was rinsed scarlet, a tableau borrowed from nightmare. As Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its foothold, Arithon’s expression shifted from resistance and pain to a hatred that abjured all redemption. In purest, bloody-hearted passion, he howled and wrought shadow in answer to Lysaer’s betrayal.
The air stung under a savage bite of frost and darkness slammed over Etarra.
Night swallowed all without distinction, from Traithe’s raven that yet flew unharmed on its faithful straight course for Sethvir, to four vigilante merchants exposed to the backwash of murdering force shed from the Shadow Master’s person. Cut down in sudden death, they lay twitching and seared amid smouldering brocades. Citizens scattered in fear from a carnage past the grasp of sane experience.
Blackness dropped also like a curtain over the most ill-starred victim of them all, the s’Ilessid prince enslaved and ruined by the usage of Desh-thiere’s loose wraith. Emptied by the powers that had driven him, Lysaer folded at the knees and collapsed against the gallery rail.
A last peal of thunder rattled the mansions that edged the square and boomed off the scarps of the Mathorns.
‘Now,’ Sethvir sent in sorrow. ‘
The armoury that adjoined the south gate wardroom became the Fellowship’s site to regroup after Desh- thiere’s machinations struck the half-brothers. Sethvir by then had secured the stout doors to both chambers. Ongoing assault from the outer bailey by Gnudsog’s squad of besiegers became reduced to muffled thunder by thick oak. Should the sheared-off lamp-posts pressed into service as rams at length splinter down the braced panels, enchantments would remain that none but the mage-trained might cross.
Inside, ill-lit by a single torch, oil and leather and the staleness of old sweat sullied the air with the leftover grimness of past wars. Dust from dryrotted fletchings filmed the floors, smeared by tracks left from Sethvir’s pacing and other marks scoured by the arbalists and pitch barrels he had dragged to clear space between the close- stacked stores.
After, his robe like old blood in the dimness, Sethvir stilled. As if, overcome by reverie, he had forgotten to move between steps. In contrary fact, his appearance masked a concentration so keen, nothing alive could escape him. Beyond distraction from the ram’s thudding impacts, he unreeled his awareness beyond keep walls to measure the pulse of all Etarra.
Like individual currents in a cataract, he sensed the mobs that rampaged through streets battened black under shadow; restive city guardsmen who formed bands and drew steel to skewer any sorcerer they could search out and harry to final reckoning. Sethvir knew families mewed up in locked houses; he touched the spilled blood of the innocent, heard the cries of the raped, knew the rage and despair of the looted. Need left scant space for grief. He could set only small seals of peace.
The effects were infinitesimal: amid dusty cobwebs in a wine-cellar, an infant hidden by its parents ceased its hysterical crying. Three huddled siblings quieted in relief, their terror of the dark given surcease; while in the air high above Traithe’s raven was rescued from blind circling and guided through black sky to safe roost. Yet of thousands of woes the Warden of Althain encountered, he eased but a very few. His greater reserves of necessity stayed poised, as, stone-patient, he scanned the welter of Etarra’s disgruntled humanity, inset with the odd pool of calm that was Traithe’s spell of ward upon the governing officials, asleep and barred inside their council hall.
Sethvir might have found humour in their predicament, had the signal he awaited not chosen that moment to manifest.
‘
On a balcony in the darkened main square, Asandir acknowledged, then stepped into a net of forces held ready to receive him. His foot left the platform of a gallery redolent with spilled wineskins and bruised apples, passed through a nexus of spatial distortion and came down in dust and steel filings on the floor of the south keep armoury.
Sethvir stepped clear as the shadows cast by the weaponracks rearranged to embrace his colleague’s tall form. In his arms, Asandir cradled Lysaer s’Ilessid, unconscious. One jewelled, silk-clad wrist dangled down, and hair fanned gold strands across the shoulder of the sorcerer’s dark robe.
Clear-cut as a cameo, the prince’s profile reflected the inborn nobility of his lineage; no shadow showed of the evil that had blighted life and honour. Unwitting pawn of ill circumstance, Lysaer had yet to waken and feel the change that disbarred him from royal inheritance.
Sethvir avoided Asandir’s eyes, which were steel-bleak. The hands, too fierce in their grip, that crinkled fine lace and blue tinsel; his stance, forced and graceless from the sorrows unspoken between them: that after today’s unconscionable sacrifice, the s’Ffalenn coronation had not happened.
The result did not bear mention, that the precarious Black Rose Prophecy, which keyed Davien the Betrayer’s repentance and the return of Ciladis the Lost, should be left unresolved and in jeopardy.
Desh-thiere had been allowed its ugly vengeance, yet the reunification of their Fellowship they had traded Athera’s peace to guarantee had escaped its conditional link to the future. The drum-boom of the siege-ram allowed no space for regret, that every atrocity that swept Etarra’s streets might have been set loose in vain.
‘Lay him there.’ The Warden of Althain indicated the weathered canvas litter he had braced off chill flooring with upended casks of catapult shot. Asandir shed his burden and knelt to rearrange blue velvets before they became napped with grime and oil.
‘You cannot blame yourself,’ Sethvir said quickly. He did not add empty platitudes, that Arithon might one day rise beyond the day’s betrayals and change heart to embrace his inheritance; that Rathain’s mismanagements and hatreds, now vastly worsened, could somehow be healed without scars.
Left bleak and empty-handed, Asandir slipped his dark cloak and covered the fair-haired prince still left in their charge. Soft as a fall of shadow, heavy wool veiled the glitter of rich threadwork that proved Lysaer still breathed. ‘We were remiss not to look for possession,’ Asandir said finally.
