see? The scar remains, yet. Though your body has knitted, and the ritual cuts are closed over, the etheric mark you still bear is not healed. Lie calm. Here is safety. Nor are you teidwar. Spirit who serves the true light, and this land, D’aedenthic himself has delivered you.’
‘Fire Hands?’ whispered Arithon in puzzled translation. The desert-folks’ habit of speech often wound through convoluted, layered meanings. Since given names rarely were spoken aloud, he guessed with a wry twist of irony, ‘Kewar’s Sorcerer. You know him? Then I must apologize. Given the choice, I would not have burdened your people with my infirmity.’
The crone clicked her teeth. ‘We asked. Yes, harken! You are here because your distress is our provenance.’
That direct claim shot Arithon’s eyes open. As refined vision darkened to sensory sight, he stared upward: into crinkled, brown features, framed in wind-tangled snags of white hair. The woman sat against the wide, lucent sky, tinted aqua by on-coming daybreak. Her fringed head-dress was patterned with the beautiful yarns the tribes spun from silk and dyed goat hair. The gaudy colours seemed fit to stun his uncertain grasp on recovery.
‘Your problem, old one?’ He searched her burled face. Respectful, as Masterbard, he chose to use her cultural phrasing for absolute clarity. ‘I don’t see how our lines cross. Therefore, I don’t understand.’
She cackled, amused. Seamed fingers brushed his cheek like a child’s, while her patience chided his insolence. ‘Lines! They are ancient. Older than Biedar have lived on Athera. Mother Dark has shown us your name for that long. The winds speak your voice, at each birthing.’
‘I don’t see how our lines cross,’ Prince Arithon restated, the edge to his tone all but warning.
‘Torbrand’s get! Truly.’ Black eyes glinted. The elder settled back on her heels. Ever restless, the breeze whirled stray sand on the blanket through the moment she peered at him, slantwise. ‘You wish to leave, naked?’
Outplayed, not yet irritated, Arithon sighed. ‘Fire Hands was remiss not to leave me a cloak.’
‘He knew you that well,’ the old woman agreed. Her dry grasp shifted, cupped over the frown that troubled his brow. Since he was tired, he chose to allow her: the touch brought him sleep that carried him, dreamless, into the gold of new morning.
Since the desert tribes travelled by night in deep summer, he was not aware of the strong, younger hands that tucked him in a litter and bore him into a cairn of stacked rocks. He slept the day through. When sundown came, the aged crone rubbed his wrists and his feet with sweet oil, and set a fresh warding to ensure that he did not awaken. Her nod roused the camp. The young men who stood guard shouldered the litter again, then resumed their careful trek eastward under the slender sickle of the waxing moon.
Arithon rested. The trackless, black wastes erased the night’s journey from memory, while the wheeling stars passed overhead without record. The soft lilt of voices, and the bright ching! of the goat-bells glanced off his unhearing ears.
No nightmare struck until the dark just past midnight, when the spirit tide ebbed, and frayed boundaries were most wont to weaken. The horror that stalked was not real, not present; but the dream-state both altered and rippled the veil, blurring the line between time’s world of substance, and the vistas beyond, that lapped at the unfettered mind.
Hammer to anvil, the emotional impact shuddered through breathing flesh. Arithon thrashed. The insufferable feeling lived with him, still: a remembered horror that had occurred, as his being was drawn by arcane constraint, then forced into shackling bondage. The experience of being disbarred from death shocked a howl that began in his viscera and opened his throat in raw agony.
A callused palm muffled his outcry. Other hands, agile and youthfully strong, caught his battering wrists and his ankles. While spoken words that meant nothing tried and failed to bring surcease to his torment, he struck out with deranged ferocity.
‘Nay so!’ rapped a voice of incisive command. The restraint – not bloodied rope ties, or wax seals – fell away.
Abruptly freed, Arithon curled on his side. A knot laced into himself, trapped in misery, he trembled, until a tentative, kindly touch laid a strung lyranthe against his clenched fingers.
His shuddering breath took in the familiar: a fragrance of citrus-waxed wood and old varnish. The clean scent of the resin used to stiffen the instrument’s tuning pegs raised the forgotten echo of joy. Closed fists unbent. Tortured, Arithon reached out and stroked the cool, silken finish of shell inlay and gemstones. These had voice in the darkness. A beauty that whispered through mage-sense, imprinted by generations of masterbards, each devoted, unswerving, to harmony. Most recent of these, Halliron sen Alduin, still seemed to be chiding him with the wise vehemence given to elderly men before dying: ‘If a masterbard’s music can one day spare your life, or that of your loyal defenders, you will use it …’
Successor now bearing his mentor’s title, Arithon fought the surge of his nightmares to listen. His outer ear heard the brushed voice of the wind, drawn across ten courses of silver-wound wire, with the bass drone strings, thrumming beneath. No matter how emotionally raw, his sensitized talent could not refuse their sweet resonance.
Arithon gasped a ripped word of gratitude. Reunited with the heirloom lyranthe last played at Sanpashir to raise the lane flux in transfer two years ago, he shoved erect and acknowledged the desert tribes’ generous stewardship. Then he gathered the instrument into his arms. His trembling clasp traced over the fretboard. Desperation guided his tuning. When the first chord rang out in corrected pitch, he immersed his torn faculties into the weaving of music.
His measures plunged into the well of blind fear. Sliding falls carried him deeper. He wrought his brutal despair into melody, carving out the courage and calm to plumb the most ravaging depths. In harmony, he sought to shatter the terror and break the cycle of endless reliving.
He would heal by such art, though recovery took days. The Biedar crone allowed him that space. Her dartmen pitched camp and kept watch at her bidding, until the afflicted had played his horrific dreams to a state of prostrate exhaustion.
Then their journey resumed, with Arithon litter-borne. Once they reached the haven of Sanpashir’s deep caverns, they slipped into the womb of the earth. In the split cavern they called by the Name of the air, they granted their guest a tight, warded circle of privacy.
There, his days passed in silence. By night, his cascading spill of struck notes drilled through rock and wind and raised tears in the far-sighted eyes of their gifted.
That incongruous, sheet-silver curtain of sound was the first thing to greet the outland intruder brought in tribal custody from the sea-side. Herded in before dawn a moon’s quarter hence, this one the Biedar still held under blindfold. Town-born, he had come uninvited, bearing forged arms to the headland. Because his outspoken protests were ignorant, his escort maintained their precautions. Besides the rag, this trespasser’s wrists were lashed behind his stiff back.
Since sunrise eased the dread pull of rank dreams, the new arrival need not bear the heart’s cry of the other guest’s lyranthe for long.
While the final, struck notes spun dying echoes through the maze of Sanpashir’s caverns, Sulfin Evend was pressed, stumbling, down a steep incline of stone. The deft hands of four dartmen guided him through the narrows that guarded a cul-de-sac. There, the tied cloth was pulled from his eyes. A silent young woman swathed in veils cut the rope from his wrists. She replaced the rough bonds with soft rag, more graciously knotted in front of his waist. A damp cloth was offered to cleanse his dust-caked face. Then dried meat, sour cheese, and an unleavened biscuit were set into his anxious grasp. For the first time since setting foot on the shore-line, Sulfin Evend was permitted to eat and drink on his own.
His escort of silent, robed dartmen remained. They tracked his least move with inimical, dark eyes and answered none of his questions.
Then, as now, they refused to soften despite his peaceful entreaty.