cached within: volumes of knowledge too dreadful to be shelved with the Paravian archives at Althain Tower.
Selidie had rancorous bones aplenty to pick with the Seven and a vengeful personal score outstanding against Davien for centuries. Which ferocious awareness scarcely prepared him for her next scalding strike. Dazzled nearly blind and hammered to his knees, Davien seized the moment to palm a flake of stone from the wreckage. The fragment yet retained the grant of permission to stand ward and guard for him in free partnership.
Also, within, the eidetic stamp of the violence that had snapped the harmonic working asunder. Davien tapped the mineral’s matrix and grasped the aggressive thrust of the Prime’s motivation: a fury that echoed from her past failure to best Sulfin Evend. Thwarted plots to separate Lysaer from his steadfast war-captain’s moral influence had balked her order’s intentions. Again poised with the True Sect priesthood as agent under her thumb, Selidie raged to find a new obstruction guarding Lysaer’s vulnerability. Hell-bent, the Prime sought the secret that sheltered the sen Evend heir, Daliana.
Davien sorted his counter-moves, appalled by the stakes. Barraged under the lightning shimmer and crack of the Prime’s hostile charge, he seized the split second and sounded the chip for the remnant of his burst ward. Since mineral forgot nothing, the imprint remained, a plan configured to perfection well before the disruptive attack.
But set-back dealt him an unforeseen shock: the founded circle had included no safe passage for crossing, and Kharadmon’s wise retreat had never occurred. The discorporate’s choice to take cover in hindsight posed a drastic mistake.
Davien dared not risk that appalling disclosure with his resource taxed under fire. Pitched on the defensive with the Prime unaware of his colleague’s collateral peril, he stared down disaster and pressed the end game.
The stone fragment held the template of the wardspells already designed to withstand a hostile assault. Davien wielded the pattern. A further split second’s reckless intent engaged other forces that no Fellowship Sorcerer before this had been hardened to bear.
His hands flared into unnatural fire: a shimmer azure as gas-flame, and reactive beyond all imagining. Naked flesh and blood, Davien’s finger-tips unfurled the prepotent aura possessed by Athera’s great drakes.
The phenomenon, until now kept shrouded, exposed how profoundly Dragonkind’s dreaming had changed him. The volatile power sparked to his will and ripped the air with an ozone-spiked crack. The elements screamed. The staid cliff-face before him ignited to the might of his focused desire and restored the pulverized statue. Reshaped in completed manifestation, the sentinel gryphon gargoyle engaged its guardian spells at one stroke.
Prime Selidie’s thrust tangled in the matrix.
White fire met blue with a shriek that cracked bed-rock. The ground rumbled and shook, while the elements bled light, a wild coruscation that fountained aloft and unfurled the shimmer of an aurora.
Prime Selidie’s lightnings snuffed instantaneously.
Socked by the earthquake punch of the recoil, Davien wrestled, hands locked, and vised his thoughts still. Crouched with singed hair, seared clothes smoking, he regarded the blackened ash dusting his skin.
“I’d rather the meddling Prime was not privy,” he gasped, while a land-slide of stones ploughed into the vale with a thundering roar. “Insolent shade! Were you endangered?”
“The question is moot!” Kharadmon’s presence unfurled with a whoosh. “If the Prime was desperate before, you’ve just torched the core of her insecurity.” The shade added, thoughtful, through a chattering storm of loose gravel and carbon, “I had not expected that move to protect me. If this force-majeure bequest of Seshkrozchiel’s is behind your feckless delinquency, consider my grievance reproved. Your absence from the crisis at Northgate was justified.”
“Do you think?” gasped Davien, unable to muzzle a vicious onset of the shakes. Kharadmon’s damnable perception was true. He had not stabilized even wayward control of his untoward legacy. Until he mastered himself, a drake conflict was the last conceivable place Althain’s Warden would wish to dispatch him.
Summer 5923
Diversion
While The Hatchet’s elite dedicates seized the rogue galley and ransacked an empty cabin, their absent quarry braved the gale’s aftermath aboard a lugger festooned with nets. Another soaked fisherman swathed in stained oilskins withstood the search in plain sight. No one glanced sidewards at men seining cod. Particularly one whose chapped chin itched with several days’ stubble.
Few ever beheld the Light’s avatar without the groomed panoply of his state dress. Yet true human dignity owned no such pride. Lysaer fielded the grimy discomfort with astonishing equilibrium. Instrell Bay tossed to a moil of cross chop, the hazard of a gentleman’s razor apt to risk a slit throat. Vanity cheerfully balked at testing a new valet’s expertise: particularly one curled up in green misery, seasick and suffering the back-lash from a True Sect examiner’s invasive probe.
Dace groaned in a berth, too ill to do aught but heave up his guts in a basin.
The Light’s avatar was not wont to fraternize. Court etiquette instilled by his royal birth maintained a cool distance from the mean lives of his servants. Yet a buried facet of his character emerged under the anonymity of borrowed oilskins.
Stripped of his state status, Lysaer sat on the drenched deck, learning to mend a frayed halyard from the youngest sailhand, aged nine. Two bent heads and two sets of hands, the smaller pair correcting, spliced the hemp plies to thread the masthead sheave without binding. Lysaer’s care-free laugh floated back on the wind. The boy’s flush reflected no awe. His eagerness guided an aristocrat’s fingers, unfamiliarly shorn of seal ring and jewels under the dousing spray.
The storm eased at dusk. Breeze slackened, and night fell dense as spilled ink. Crammed below with the off-watch crew, Lysaer ate rough fare from a common pot. Dace peered at his liege by the reeling swing of the lamp, braced for patronizing indifference. Instead, blue eyes lifted, Lysaer noticed his servant’s wakeful regard.
“Has the headache eased? Then you need to eat something. Perhaps a bit of broth will stay down?” The hand that offered the bowl lost no elegance, raw with blisters and slivers of rope.
Dace always had grasped the quality that once earned Sulfin Evend’s relentless loyalty. Not before this had he seen the humility behind tonight’s earnest solicitude.
He could not refuse the gruel and spoon, regardless of his queasy stomach. His liege tucked him under the blankets again when the bland nourishment failed to settle. Dace recuperated, excused from his duties, while the fishing lugger ploughed up Instrell Bay, rounded Atainia, and smashed westward into the frigid waters wreathed in pale fog and afloat with the summer’s calved icebergs. Here, where the perilous reefs met the current of the polar ocean, Lysaer tended the nets, glued in fish-stinking sweat alongside the hard-working crew.
Yet shared labour never led him to confide. Whatever purpose took him to north Tysan stayed shrouded in self-contained silence.
A servant dared not presume to venture an inquiry. Though his unsettled awareness suggested the avatar courted disaster, Dace lacked the effrontery to broach the perils of an unknown decision. Close enough to touch intimate flesh, and prized only for quiet efficiency, the steadfast valet must watch what unfolded and hone his perception to compensate.
The lugger meantime tacked her wallowing course off the desolate coast of Atainia. She plied her nets. Shrouded in mist, she dropped her anchor at last off Miralt Head in the grey hour past sunrise. There, gently rolling, she awaited the breeze, while the settled calm sheened the swell salmon pink and mercury as a polished mirror.
Dace worked on deck in the half-light. Supplied with a heated bucket and soap, he took a razor to his liege’s neglected grooming. The rigid jaw being scraped exposed his liege’s clamped tension. Yet Lysaer withheld criticism or encouragement. Dispatched along