Traitor’s Knot: Fourth Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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Lord Commander plucked the wax candle from its pricket. Stuck upright, it joined the array on the floor. Snatched light cast his movement in fluttering shadow as he stripped off his gambeson, then advanced to the bed.
He tore off the blankets. Lysaer’s night-shirt was sacrificed, next, yanked away from his wasted frame with a snarl of ripped cloth and burst laces. All but unbreathing, the victim remained slack and pale as a day-old carcass. Careful, so careful, not to brush against skin with even a glancing touch, Sulfin Evend jerked the tucked sheet from the mattress and bundled his stricken liege into his arms.
Lysaer weighed little more than a parcel of sticks. His golden head dangled. Poked from the wracked linens, his bare feet showed blue veins like the crackled glaze on antique porcelain.
Sulfin Evend ignored the valet’s incensed glare, for what must appear callous handling. Enithen Tuer had been adamant concerning her detailed list of peculiar instructions. Charged not to skip steps, the commander knelt. He spilled the Blessed Prince in a naked heap on the stripped surface of the parquet. Vulnerably thin, his muscles were wire, the joint of each bone pressed against parchment skin, and each cadaverous hollow a pool of jet shadow.
No life seemed in evidence, beyond the reflex as the ribs rose and fell to the draw of each shallow breath.
The lit profile alone kept its heart-wrenching majesty, pure in male beauty as form carved in light, envisioned by a master sculptor. Sulfin Evend shrank away from sight of Lysaer’s face. Already savaged by inchoate dread, he refused to give rein to the rending grief that suddenly threatened to unman him. Braced against worse than the horrors of war, he swathed his grip in a wrapping of sheet and tugged the seal ring from Lysaer’s limp finger. The sapphire signet was cast aside, a tumbling spark of scribed light as it fetched up against the rucked carpet. Still shielding his hands, Sulfin Evend grasped Lysaer by the wrists and tugged his yielding frame on a north-to-south axis. The arms he extended out to each side, at right angles to torso and shoulder. He straightened Lysaer’s bare legs from the hip and arranged a cloth yard of space at the ankles. A towel scrounged from the bath pillowed the unconscious man’s head.
Lastly, the wadded bed-sheet was burned. While the flames in the hearth consumed the spoiled cloth, Sulfin Evend addressed the valet. ‘Move your chair. Turn your back. You can’t watch what happens. Whatever unpleasantness follows, you can’t help. My life, and Lysaer’s, will hang in the breach until this foul rite is completed.’
The old servant bridled, outraged protest cut off by the officer’s ice-water eyes.
‘I don’t have better remedy!’ Gruff with dread, Sulfin Evend fought to master the requisite note of authority. ‘If harm overtakes us, you’ll have to trust that the powers that wreak ruin will be none of mine. The last steps will be harrowing. You can’t intervene. Stop your ears. Use a blindfold if you can’t keep your nerves in line through the worst.’
The valet reversed the cumbersome chair. Shivering, he reassumed his perched seat, then fussed his sleeves smooth from habit. ‘If you lie,’ he said, ‘if you darken our world with the death of the avatar given to save us, I will watch you burn with a sword through your heart, I so swear by the grace of the Light.’
Sulfin Evend shoved erect, scalded to running sweat in the glare from the dying fire. ‘As I am born, if I have misjudged, my own captain will do that work for you.’
Past chance to turn back, Sulfin Evend retrieved his wrapped bundle from the table-top. He laid it alongside the poker and basin, then slipped the seeress’s knife from his waistband and discarded its deerskin sheath. The stone weapon was hung from a thong at his neck. Lastly, he peeled off his breeches and hose. The ritual of excision required him barefoot. Since the act of unbinding would invoke a working of air, he could not wear metal, even so much as an eyelet. Stripped down to his small-clothes, Sulfin Evend sucked a sharp breath, wrung by a spasm of gooseflesh.
He knelt at last, swallowed fear, and shoved back his soaked hair, then picked the knotted cords off the bundle. The first layer held numerous ceremonial items given by Enithen Tuer. Beneath, still masked by the fabric of Lysaer’s purloined shirt, were the unclean clay bowl and the bone-knife, wrought to waylay the spirit by the dark workings of necromancy, then raised active by acts of blood-sacrifice. Sulfin Evend left those covered objects untouched. The seeress had assembled two packets of herbs. One, he emptied into the fire. Laced in the fragrance of sweet-burning smoke, he ripped open the other and spilled the contents into the basin. Next, he took up the quill from the wing of a heron, long and grey as a blade, and whispered the Paravian word, An, for beginning.
Power spoke through Athera’s original tongue, a tingle of force that sharpened his gift of raw talent. Brushed by the lost echoes of an ancient past, before mankind had trodden Athera, Sulfin Evend clamped down on the ancestral instincts that whirled his mind toward a blurred haze of vision. He focused his thought to define his intent, then drew the circle of Air with the feather and arranged it, point outwards, at east. West, he painted the circle for Water with a finger dipped wet in the basin. Birch charcoal, soaked cold, scribed the circle for Fire, beginning and ending at south. North, he laid the iron poker, also with the point faced out. The last ward, for Earth, must be written in blood, using the tip of the seeress’s flint knife.
Now committed past help, Sulfin Evend gripped the obsidian handle and cut the dressing off his marked wrist. The blind woman’s instructions rang still through his mind, their cadence exactingly wary. ‘You will make the last circle, beginning at north. Reopen the wound that you made to swear oath. The rite bound you to the land for a term of life service. Used rightly, its virtues will answer.’
Sulfin Evend traced out the glistening red line, for the fourth and last time surrounding himself and the comatose prince, stretched naked as birth on the floor-boards. Then he recited the time-honoured words that called the four elements to guard point.
‘The necromancer’s victim will regain his awareness, about now,’ the elderly seeress had cautioned: and Lysaer had. His sapphire eyes were wide-open. His pupils, distended, were bottomless black, and his limbs, bound in iron possession. First focused by pain, the Divine Prince encountered the horrid discovery that he was utterly helpless. Deadened nerves denied him the power to move or cry out in furious protest.
‘He will feel the halter of power laid on him, but not recognize you as his saviour. Stay vigilant, young man. Set one foot awry, displace any of your circles, and all your protections lie forfeit. Fail here, and you will fall prey to the uncanny forces that bid to break through. The necromancers whose binding is threatened will strive to reaffirm their disturbed ties of possession. You stand in their way, your work seeks to defy them. They will strike you down, if a slipshod step shows them the least little sign of a weakness.’
Lysaer would be terrified. His irate stare reflected no less than the wracking shock of betrayal. His most-trusted field officer surely appeared in league with a shadow-sent sorcerer.
Unwilling to suffer that stark, anguished gaze, forbidden to speak the one kindly phrase that might mend broken confidence, Sulfin Evend ripped the silk hem of the shirt into strips. Wedded to his unassailable purpose, he knotted a cuff around each of Lysaer’s slack wrists. Then he bound each slender ankle in turn. He soaked the dried sea sponge the seeress had given, and using the cloth to avert a chance touch, washed every last patch of bared flesh with the herbal brew in the basin. He had no time to make his ablutions tender. Lysaer s’Ilessid lay supine throughout, unable to offer resistance. His birth gift of light would not rise through the bindings laid down by the knife-cut circles.
The defences were holding firm, a back-handed blessing: even minor instruction in arcane knowledge would have allowed Lysaer to snap the stay set on his will. No such knowledge informed him. Bitterly helpless, shamed beyond pride, he suffered the cavalier handling. Those gemstone eyes burned with a cognizant rage that would have raised scorching light on a thought, and blasted his tormentor down to a cinder.
Silenced by the demands of the ritual, Sulfin Evend could ask for no leave; could not for decency’s sake beg understanding or forgiveness. He gathered the four copper nails from the seeress, then the granite stone pried