depression at the root-cellar’s entrance. For safety, the fugitives holed up inside must stay immured until the next thaw. The bare ground would have to be frosted iron-hard before they dared emerge, first to forage, then to move on.
As wretchedly plagued by the capricious onset of an early winter, only one person alive stayed at liberty to illuminate Arin’s veiled past. Dakar the Mad Prophet sulked in shadow beneath the bleak spire of Althain Tower, buffeted by the cruel north wind. He needed no seer’s gift to forecast the squeeze of the crisis: beyond doubt, his accursed role in Prince Arithon’s past would run him afoul of the Koriathain.
Dakar had crossed their filthy agenda before, even quashed the wily gamut of their probes in his time as a crown heir’s appointed protector. Under Fellowship auspices, in lawful standing as Asandir’s agent, he had been the target of their baneful plots often enough to wring him to cold sweats. The fresh prospect woke the spectre of nightmare, since the thankless quittance of his apprenticeship stripped him of the Sorcerers’ backing.
At loose ends, three days later, Dakar reeled yet. From outraged denial, to obstinate dragged heels, to packing his tinker’s haul of possessions, he loitered outside the tower’s shut gates, abandoned to his own devices. The warded locks were fastened, behind him. Ahead, the worn spur of the north trade-road seamed the barren wilds of Atainia; daunting, inhospitable terrain for a traveller stranded afoot.
Southward, the ancient track flanked the iced current of the Isaer, passed the massive node that harnessed the lane force at the Great Circle, then met the cross-roads at the crumbled Second Age ruin, where the river’s head-waters welled from an underground cavern. Asandir’s journey lay that way, en route to the mountain outpost that sheltered a persecuted clan enclave.
Fed to the teeth with the hazardous affairs of his former master, and festered to a grudge like a canker, Dakar turned his back and set off for the nearest town habitation. Weeds snagged at his boots. Too short-strided for the rough ground, he stumbled across stony gullies washed through the wheel-ruts. Few wagons ventured this desolate land, laid waste since the tumult of a First Age battle, with bleak, scoured hill-tops whipped to thin dust, and vales that whispered of keening ghosts, slagged yet by the glassine pits of past drakefire.
Solitude gave Dakar too much time to brood. Independence did not leave him care-free. His tuned awareness picked up the warped flow of the lane flux, unbalanced still by the echo of ruin a wrathful dragon had unleashed at Avenor. Disharmony and disease still choked the realm of Tysan, a condition unlikely to find a reprieve under the True Sect’s doctrine. If such weighty matters correctly belonged under Fellowship oversight, Dakar had suffered the Sorcerers’ company too long to stay blinded by ignorance. Aggravated, each step, he vented and kicked a loose pebble.
The spiteful impulse injured only his toe. While the missile cracked off a boulder and bounced, the Mad Prophet hopped on one foot and let fly. ‘May Dharkaron Avenger’s immortal black horses drop steaming dung over Asandir’s field boots!’
The Sorcerer’s footwear, likely as not, would walk scatheless through the encounter. Worse, the maligned gravel would imprint the curse, since the Athlien singers had vanished. The Mad Prophet yanked his flapping cloak tight and sullenly shut down his mage-sense.
If he must blister his tender soles and spend brutal nights in the open, he would endure the unpleasantness without the bother of a refined connection. More, if the crux of Fellowship need pressured him to volunteer to safeguard Rathain’s hunted prince, he was older, and finally wise to the fact the position was star-crossed! Riddled with pernicious pitfalls and foes, with the man himself given to powers and strengths unimaginably dangerous.
‘Damn all to Sethvir’s manipulative maundering!’ Dakar swore. The Warden’s almighty earth-sense knew how keeping that post had wrecked the last footing for a friend’s trust. Dakar could not weep. Not anymore. His recriminations were long since spent for an anguish that could not, in life, be erased. His unsavoury duty in Halwythwood, and again, after warning, at Athir, had unequivocally served Fellowship interests through the betrayal of Arithon’s personal integrity.
If the royal victim ever discovered the secret price paid then to win his survival, Dakar understood what his hide would be worth! In his shoes, the guilty party would run, never to shoulder the lash of reprisal from the infamous s’Ffalenn temper.
‘Murder would be kinder,’ Dakar muttered, and pumped on short legs to hike faster.
He reached Lorn three days later, puffing and tired, with chafed heels and both ankles blistered. The town was no place to cheer dismal spirits: little more than a barnacle cluster of dwellings attached to the rocky northcoast, sandwiched between a clouded, pearl sky and the pewter shine of the winter breakers. Dusk had fallen. Under the smeared smoke from the chimney-stacks, the rimed cobbles in the narrow streets sheltered the slink of scavenging cats, and the briny miasma of fish guts. The years since the revival of navigation had shrunk the port back to an isolate haven for mackerel boats.
The market lay deserted, where by day the garrulous matrons diced and salted down the dawn catch. The risen, raw wind already had chased their benighted gossip indoors. As eager for comfort, Dakar steered between the bleak, wharf-side warehouses and the netted thatch roof of the chandler’s. The hot glow of lamp-light steamed the roundels of the sole clapboard tavern when he shoved his bulk through the squeaky plank door.
Conversation quieted before him, replaced with the owlish stares by which grizzled, backwater salts measured an outsider. Even the urchin stopped begging for scraps and turned round eyes towards the cloaked stranger.
Dakar surveyed the coarse company, daubed in the thick shadows from the tallow lamps slung from the ceiling beams. Unattached men sprawled at the trestles, flushed with drink as they elbowed to cuddle the barmaids. Others with wives and young children at home downed their pints and hob-nobbed with friends. The widows with black scarves tied over their hair, and the ham-fisted matrons crammed into the corner nooks, while the wizened elderly snoozed by the hearth, too arthritic to haul twine on the luggers.
The acquaintance Dakar sought was not present.
Aware if he ventured abroad that the doors would be closed to late lodgers, he waded inside over mud-brick floors tracked gritty with sand. The taint of wet wool and sweat was ingrained, and the attitude jaundiced as the offal dumped out for the sharks. Lest such contempt be mistaken for welcome, the muscular landlord propped against the bar priced his beer to fleece strangers.
His brew would be sour as pig swill, besides. Dakar might have matched the extortion with coppers spell-burnished to gleam like silver, but the clam stew with hard bread he wanted sold for only three pence. He seated himself on an empty bench, ordered supper, and ate. Talk of nets, sails, and weather resumed, pointedly directed around him.
He was not left to mind his anonymous business. Another woman tucked into one corner was equally shunned by the locals. Although she wore the same smock blouse and wool over-dress, her lily-white fingers had never flensed a wet cod. The sigil she pitched against Dakar’s aura flicked his nerves like a scuttling spider.
The Mad Prophet choked. He blotted the chowder broth sprayed through his beard and slurped onwards. Apparently innocuous, stupid, and fat, he measured the execrable nuisance: Prime Selidie’s rapacity wasted no time. Already, he was pinched in a trap laid by the Koriathain. More, the power that hounded him was no trifle. The witch had more sisters stationed nearby, equipped with the force to shred his defenses.
Cornered, alone, he was tacitly warned to accede in quiet surrender.
Dakar spat out a mauled clot of gristle and sopped up the last driblets of gravy. Bedamned if he meant to move before he settled his dinner. The enchantress could fume herself purple meanwhile. Tysan’s dogmatic aversion to sorcery meant a sister reliant upon a quartz focus dared not wield her blatant craft in the open.
Inspired, Dakar belched, clutched his middle, and yowled. ‘This vile soup is tainted! Does the house poison guests? I’ve been gouged before for the price of a bed when bad stew laid me low with a belly-ache!’
A smatter of laughter arose, cut by the inn matron’s roar from the kitchen. ‘Going