Messenger
Four days after the raid that beggared Prince Lysaer in the Pass of Orlan, a messenger was dispatched at speed from the clansmen’s mountain outpost. No matter that the hooves of his horse were dampened by late-season snow; the muffled vibration of his passage was heard and tracked by a mind a hundred leagues distant.
Through the five centuries since the Paravian races had vanished from the continent, wardenship of the tower built to guard their artefacts and culture had fallen to a Fellowship sorcerer. Most days he could be found in a black-beamed chamber that creaked in the unquiet winds, elbows braced on a library table heaped as a gull’s nest with parchments and opened books. Scrolls stuffed the niches in between, trailing moth-eaten ties, or else weighted flat at the corners by oddments of tea-stained crockery and tinted glass inkwells missing corks. Ensconced amid his clutter like a packrat, Sethvir sat with his ankles hooked on a stool. While his hair grew in untidy tufts, and his maroon robe gathered dust and loose threads, he kept and catalogued records, and tracked world events as they happened.
As long as Athera had lain fogbound, he had followed the phases of the moon through the pull of the tides. He felt the daily tramp of Etarra’s drilling armies shake the earth alongside prints in dry dust traced by fieldmice. A missive scribed in blood that had passed through flame, then rinsed off in brine from the face of a thrown bit of slate, touched him in fourfold vibration; amid the voices of a billion dropped stones, that one he noted and marked apart. He sensed the grand music of the planet’s twelve power lanes, and the warp through weft lacework of energies still channelled over land and air by the residual dance of Paravian mystery.
So long had Sethvir’s mage-sense been twined with the thunderous chord of world life-force, that his thoughts took on the patterned aspects of stone, with but tenuous hold on the present.
When at length the clang of a sword hilt against the portcullis nine storeys down echoed through the bowels of his sanctuary, Sethvir already knew the name and the errand of the courier; had been aware of both since the moment Tysan’s lady steward had dispatched her rider to his tower.
Limned in the gloom of failing day, the Warden of Althain finished a line of spidery handwriting. He leaned sidewards, rinsed his quill in the tepid dregs of a teacup, then raised eyes of pale turquoise that looked vacuous as sky; but in fact, held a relentless train of review as the interstices of this moment’s event unreeled to bear on the future.
Below him, marring the crystalline cry of first starlight, the swordsman continued to hammer. To Sethvir’s ear, the metallic din bespoke forge-fire, and hill steel, and centuries of unrequited bloodshed. I’m coming,’ he grumbled in a tone as tart as an old hinge. He stood up. Dust and bits of scribbled paper settled on a floor already littered with outworn quill pens and the dropped caps of inkwells. The sorcerer sneezed, peered down as if touched to unwitting delight by the faded weave of the carpet, then stumped in his over-sized fur buskins to the casement, which had been unlatched for days, banging and creaking in the gritty north gusts off the desert.
The bulwarks of Althain Tower were fashioned of granite, stark and grey, the rough-chiselled grooves of a desperate need softened under green seals of lichen. Sethvir crossed his arms on the sill, took absent notice of a hole chewed by moths in his sleeve, then leaned through the casement and peered down.
‘I’m not at all deaf,’ he chided gently.
Below him, lent an ant’s perspective, a shaggy bush pony stood with its hip cocked, its reins looped through the elbow of a man in the undyed leathers of a clansman. The shoulders energetically working flinched and stopped. The visitor glanced up, sheepish, from the tower’s locked entry and hurriedly sheathed his sword. While the reverberations from his pounding subsided to a rumble, then a whisper, he called, ‘I beg your pardon. Sethvir of Althain?’
Outlined against dusk by a halo of blowing white hair, the sorcerer grinned like a pixie. ‘Your lady wishes me to bear a message to Arithon, Prince of Rathain. No, don’t speak. I know the contents. What makes you think I’ll deliver it?’
Hotly flustered, Maenalle’s courier said, ‘The caithdein of Tysan asks. She said you were the only spirit in Athera who would know where to seek the Shadow Master.’
Sethvir hooked an ink-stained knuckle through his beard. For a moment he appeared to forget himself, as well as the anxious emissary down below. His gaze encompassed the deepening arch of the heavens as if the answers to unwritten riddles could be read in the white ice of cirrus clouds.
Deferential to the ways of great mages, the courier waited, while his pony dropped its head and cropped the weeds that grew wild over the tower’s sole door sill.
Presently, Sethvir answered. ‘I’ll commit the Lady Maenalle’s message to a parchment inscribed to Arithon s’Ffalenn. But tell her: the scroll will be delivered at the time of my choosing.’
The courier eased in relief. ‘She will be satisfied.’ He gathered up his pony’s reins, prepared to mount and ride immediately.
Sethvir’s eyebrows arched at the lapse implied in his hospitality. ‘No need to rush off. I have oats for your horse in the barn. It’s a very long road back to Camris, and tomorrow will be wretched with rain. You’d do better to weather the storm here. Have a bath, and a bed, and whatever you can scrounge from my larder. Certainly there’s plenty of good tea.’
While the clanborn courier hung poised between uncertainty and blind courage, Sethvir withdrew from the casement, his voice a diminishing echo from the unlighted cavern of the library. ‘Bide there. I’ll be down to unfasten the gates.’
He moved on at sharp speed that belied his dreamer’s appearance; take the stairs too slowly, and the courier would be mounted and gone at a pace his road-weary pony did not deserve. The company of a Fellowship sorcerer had harmed no man; but legend told of many who had emerged changed from the experience. Whether Maenalle’s appointed courier would prove exempt from fate’s handling was a fine point Sethvir was loath to promise.
Eviction
After the confiscated brown gelding, Faery-toes, kicked his stall doors to slivers, bit every groom within reach and knocked the head ostler off his feet, the alderman of Jaelot’s under-secretary at last seized the initiative to set seal to a writ to dispatch the beast to the knacker’s. He grumbled as he waited for the wax to harden. Horse hide, glue and dogmeat were not in high demand; the proceeds from the slaughter of one swaybacked head of stock could scarcely defray all the damages.
The head ostler narrowed his eyes and nursed his bruises. ‘Keep the beast, then, and rack up more costs in wrecked boards.’
The writ was slapped into his hands with the official seal still warm, while in the next room, voices of higher authority heated and flared into argument. The difficulties posed by the horse’s last owner, the fat prisoner consigned by city justice to suffer forced labour until solstice, were never as simply arranged. While the ostler retreated with the horse’s death warrant, invective assailed the secretary’s headache through the shut panels of the doorway, as it had without cease for a week: Dakar took ill in the draughty shacks where the convicts were housed. Poor food made him sick unto misery. His feet swelled from chilblains until he could not arise in the mornings without loud-voiced, piteous complaint.
His fellow inmates used their fists to stop his whining. His moans and his mewling as he languished from their beating disturbed what little sleep they could scrounge after days of backbreaking labour in the mason’s yard, dressing stone blocks for the sea walls that storms crumbled down every spring. With both eyes puffed shut with bruises, Dakar could not see to swing his mallet. Stone chips flew on wild tangents. A guardsman was home with a badly gashed face and an overseer limped on smashed toes.
Packed off to solitary confinement, Dakar passed his hours of punishment with singing. Even cold sober, he had no ear for pitch. The yawling echoes created by his ballads made the prison sentries grit their teeth, then brawl among themselves in driven fits of frustration. A gag was attempted. Dakar somehow