vintage spurned for the tactical map some churl had unrolled, and impaled at the corners with the wife’s best stag-handled cutlery.
‘Prince Exalted,’ the Mayor of Narms greeted in stiff courtesy.
His court-style bow was acknowledged by the barest, brief nod, and a glance from ice-crystal blue eyes. Preoccupied, the unlaced cuff of one sleeve stripped back to expose his immaculate limb to the elbow, the fair personage of Lysaer s’Ilessid laid his wrist in the hands of the slender young man in the priest’s robe. Still seamlessly focused, he finished his answer to Narms’s worried captain at arms.
‘Yes. We know beyond doubt. The Spinner of Darkness has dared to return to the continent. His presence was affirmed well before the hour I set sail from Atainia.’ A regal gesture invited the Lord Mayor to join his dazzling, close company. ‘Very shortly, bear with me, we’ll know where he lairs. My diviner will scry his location.’
Admitted to the inner circle, the mayor surveyed the prince’s minimal retinue. He recognized the lean grace and searing impatience of Sulfin Evend, Avenor’s Lord Commander at Arms. Three other sunwheel officers in chain mail were strangers, even the headhunter whose muscled frame wore the acid-etched poise of a predator.
Despite every evidence of prowess on the field, the seasoned men-at-arms gave wide berth to the effete priest. Set apart, that one wore the floor-length, sashed robe of a sunwheel acolyte. His six-strand chain of rank set his station one tier below High Priest Cerebeld. The gleaming gold sigil at the crown of his hood proclaimed his Light-sanctioned talent for augury.
As a diviner, he was young, a bone-skinny celibate whose cleft chin and pale cheeks showed scarcely a dusting of beard. Hands slim as a woman’s clasped the royal wrist, afflicted with palsy, or else made unsteady by high-strung nerves as he unsheathed a thin ceremonial knife. ‘Your Exalted,’ he warned in a sugar-toned tenor, then effected a quick, neat cut with the blade, knapped from a bleached human shinbone.
Lysaer did not flinch. His arm stayed relaxed as the blood welled, and the droplets were caught in an offering bowl fashioned from glittering crystal.
The priest kissed the wet wound, then bound it in silk. His carmine-stained lips intoned blessings to the Light in a whisper that rasped like filed steel through the sigh of the fire in the grate.
Narms’s mayor looked on, clammy with sweat, and bound to sick fascination. Before this, he had always thought of arcane blood rituals as tales told to threaten unruly children.
Nor did the men-at-arms appear to relish their role as close witnesses. Some shuffled their feet. Others looked elsewhere as a basin of water was tipped into the offering bowl. Blood swirled in pink patterns, stirred by the bone knife. When the mixture blended to translucent pink, the diviner placed the vessel at the center of the tactical map. He floated a wafer of cork on the water, then rubbed a steel needle with a square of black silk until it acquired a charge. There followed another incantation, an invocation to divine Light, while the magnetized needle was arranged on the cork float. The construct revolved on its bed of stained water, then stalled to oscillation on a north-to-south axis. The strangled quiet magnified the rustle of the diviner-priest’s silk sleeves. Finished praying, he cupped the fluid-filled bowl. Chain mail clinked in partnered response, as Sulfin Evend adjusted the lay of the tactical map. When the poised needle and the compass rose matched up in cardinal alignment, he reset the abused table cutlery and secured the curled corners of the parchment.
The mayor strangled his self-righteous protest. Stilled as the men-at-arms, and as morbidly curious, he edged in to observe the proceedings. Tension heightened the senses. The magnified sound struck by every small movement cast echoes off stripped-stone walls. The puddled snowmelt tracked in from the street smelled dankly sharp, and the chill hung pervasive, as though the log fire in the hearth failed to cut through the cloth of a suspended reality.
Faint as the draw of air through screened silk, the diviner’s sped breaths, as his fluttery hands opened a pearl-inlaid coffer and drew out a filament of gold chain. He touched his smeared lips to the copper cone affixed to the end. Blood and spittle dulled its metallic shine as he deployed the tuned weight above the map as a pendulum.
‘Prince Exalted, by the blessed Light of Truth,’ he intoned. ‘Ask. State your divine will.’
Lysaer s’Ilessid regarded the spread parchment, his eyes honed to steel-edged purpose. ‘Find the location of the Spinner of Darkness and show us his course of intent.’
Around the plank trestle, the onlookers hung rapt as the diviner-priest bowed his head. His delicate hand ceased its trembling. Settled into a trance like carved rock, with pale eyes blanked into vacancy, he quieted the listening lens of his mind. Now made the clear conduit for Prince Lysaer’s destiny through the ritual link of the blood magic, he allowed the unconscious deflections of nerve and sinew to drive the dangling pendulum. The copper weight rocked to quivering life at the end of its tether of chain. Its point danced over the parchment’s inked landmarks as the priest of the Light swept its progressive arcs above the mapped features of Tysan.
‘Oh, come,’ snapped Sulfin Evend, his annoyance a whip through awed stillness. ‘We haven’t just crossed Instrell Bay in dead winter to seek a quarry holed up on our back trail!’
The priest sniffed, offended. ‘The Master of Shadow is the get of a demon. As prime servant of evil, he could be anywhere.’
As the Lord Commander drew breath to sneer, Lysaer s’Ilessid intervened with a glance. ‘When the time comes for warfare, would you ask a diviner to sharpen your steel?’
‘Point taken.’ Sulfin Evend backed off, thumbs hooked like talons in his sword belt.
If his Hanshire-bred arrogance accepted dark practice in stride, the Mayor of Narms poised between welded fascination and the urge to give way to panic-struck flight. Despite creeping dread, he could not tear his gaze from the consecrated pointer tracking across the spread map. The transition struck him to a gut punch of fear when the random gyre of movement twitched into a smooth, defined swing. The diviner-priest tested, edged the chain gently northward. The arc slowed, died out; then disintegrated into unsettled shivers. Passed southward once more, the movement regained its east-to-west rhythm, as if questing the source of perturbation. Over the barrier range of the Tiriacs, along the western trade road, the copper weight’s arc became agitated.
Drawn across the inked site of the city of Karfael, it changed motion again, reversed in an arc toward Avenor. There, it settled at last to a rhythmically circular spin over Tysan’s royal seat.
‘False reading,’ the priest murmured. ‘Blood will call to blood, foremost through the tie of close kinship. Your royal son will shortly be bound for Karfael, did you know this?’
A dazzle of jewels marked Lysaer’s drawn breath, as light nicked the studs on his doublet. ‘He’s fifteen years of age. Old enough to start cutting his mother’s apron strings, I would say. Nor can a prince gain a ruler’s discernment by staying too close to home. My garrison commander at Karfael is competent. If he can’t be trusted to steer a headstrong boy from youthful high spirits and folly, we are lost before we ever raise arms against the true minion of darkness.’ Through a smile of grave humor, the prince signaled for his priest to proceed with the scrying. ‘Quarter the Kingdom of Rathain, if you please.’
The priest moistened his stained lips. Seized in ecstatic trance, he wet his fingers with a freshened mix of blood and saliva, then reanointed the copper weight. The chain whined, disrupted. Like a hound pulled untimely from a hot scent, the weight thrashed and trembled in confused little jerks that zigzagged without clear direction. The diviner carried on with unruffled calm, in exacting, small increments, casting across every detailed feature of Rathain. When the forest-clad coves along Instrell Bay showed him no quiver of alignment, he combed over the wastes of Daon Ramon Barrens. Next he quartered the ice-clad peaks of the Skyshiels. There at last, the pendulum deflected, then thrummed into an agitated spin.
‘He’s there! Oh, well done!’ The Divine Prince shot erect. Shared excitement stirred through his men like a storm charge. Even Narms’s mayor