Checkrein

      Summer 5648

      For Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, the rage still burned white-hot, even eight months after her failed attempt to assassinate the Master of Shadow. Due to the intervention of a bungling, fat prophet, Arithon s’Ffalenn still breathed. Morriel shut her eyes. As if by cutting off the daylight which flooded her quilted chair by the casement, she could deny the thorny fact the prince still walked on this side of Fate’s Wheel. Old, withered, reduced by years and longevity spells to a husk of sagged flesh wrapped over porcelain bones, she endured the weary pulse of blood through her veins; each heartbeat a throb of endlessly unquiet pain.

      More than anything she wished the oblivion of death.

      Yet the haven of final rest lay beyond reach. First she must unyoke the chains of command and transfer the massive burden of prime power to the hands of a proven successor.

      Forty-three women before this had perished attempting the trials of succession. Fear remained, to poison all pretense of patience. The years spent training the current candidate might be wasted, despite all her promising talent.

      Morriel breathed in the humid sea air of the southcoast. Decades of handling critically potent forces had chafed her senses to unwonted sensitivity, until the ceaseless barrage of sound, form and smell besieged the desperately held order of her mind. Even removed to this high tower, confined in isolation above the sleepy commerce of Thirdmark’s narrow streets, Morriel battled the distractions. The moldered damp of age-rotted stone, even the salt crystal scour of the breeze through the casement flushed her thoughts to patternless noise. Her cognizance at times felt strung thin as cobwebs, until the air currents themselves seemed to separate into voices. Each passing second tapped a pulsebeat against her dry flesh.

      Moment to moment, she denied the seductive lie. Inanimate matter could not quicken in sentient vibration. She would not permit inert reality to rock off reason’s track, slip the boundaries of discipline, and seduce her to embrace dreaming madness.

      She had handled too many sigils of power in the course of her unnatural, long life. The very currents of her aura had been sealed into containment, to interrupt, then deny nature’s cyclic rhythm of death. Attrition thinned the veil between senses and perception. The spin of bridled power eroded Morriel’s control, until one day no bulwark would remain upon which to snag the purling thread of insanity.

      The Koriani Prime endured with the dangerous knowledge that her age was now more than ten centuries. She had clung to breathing flesh far too long. None of her predecessors had dared test the limits so far beyond earthly balance.

      Her will on the matter had been gainsaid by fate; and now, yet again, Arithon’s persistent survival reduced all her works to futility. The augury she held as fair warning galled most for its absolute, ruthless simplicity: this last living scion of Rathain’s royal line would disrupt the Koriani destiny, destroy a body of knowledge that stretched back into history to the time before catastrophe and war had driven humanity to seek refuge on Athera.

      Morriel listened to the cries of the gulls skimming the breeze above the tideflats. She had never felt so wretchedly helpless. Her acquired depth of vision only mocked her. Earth turned, day to night, careless, herself a mote on its skin no more significant than any other unsettled speck of dust.

      While the Master of Shadow plied the ocean aboard his brigantine, his unformed destiny hung over her sisterhood’s affairs. One malignant chain of latent events would snap a succession unbroken for thousands of years.

      Morriel endured, her frustration contained. As the Khetienn embarked into unknown waters, Rathain’s prince would lie vulnerable to any bout of mischance water and gale could mete out. Her opening arose to spin a new plot over the wreckage of the old. A dry smile crimped the Matriarch’s pale lips. No step would be wasted. No other enchantress in the order need share in the fabric of her design. The first move in play could be masked to advance the training of Lirenda, First Senior, selected and groomed, but as of this hour, unprepared to survive the rigors of the accession.

      On the eve of summer solstice, while the Fellowship Sorcerers worked in concert to complete an arduous conjury that had immersed them for over a year, the Warden of Althain would be least inclined to take meddling notice of accidents. The Koriani Prime snatched her-moment.

      The bar of warm sunlight slanted through the casement and cooled to a soft flush of red. Morriel soon heard the rustle of silk she anticipated in the stairwell. Her chosen First Senior arrived on the moment appointed. Such precise obedience was not petty. For a candidate to show less than perfection in all things carried the risk of ill consequence. One woman alone could wield the full might of the Koriani Order. A small lapse of discipline on that scale of power could deflect the course of history, even harrow and scorch the green earth.

      The latch grated, gave, and the door swung open. A gush of sea air displaced the miasma of dank stone. Then the shuffled step of the deaf steward who had replaced witless Quen, but who admitted the arrival with the same simpleminded devotion.

      First Senior Lirenda presented a regal figure, slender, tall, and purposeful. Groomed and graceful as a panther, she wore hair like dark satin sleeked into a single, coiled braid. Her feet kept a dancer’s light tread on stone floors. The fine, sculptured bones of her wrists were set off by the gold-banded sleeves denoting her high office, and her violet silk mantle flowed off her lithe form like water poured from a vase.

      She bowed before her Matriarch. Even in obeisance, her manner maintained innate breeding.

      Morriel recalled the same trait in the child. Lirenda had always owned an elegant self-possession, that bone-deep assurance lent by wealth and background that touched servants to instinctive deference. This morning, the drifting perfume of the rose petals she used to sweeten her clothes chests came tanged with a trace scent of brimstone. Apparently the crates which sealed the new fiend banes had been troublesome to pack off to market.

      Yet if the oversight arose from the duty novice’s instructions, or a boy ward had shirked his assigned labor, Lirenda showed no irritation. Her oval features stayed smooth as a cameo as she murmured the ritual greeting. “Your will, matriarch.”

      That metallic, alto voice betrayed no curiosity, which was well. Morriel prolonged her survey of the prime candidate, her eyes like probing black quartz. Power forgave no shortcoming. Distrust of arcane practice within the walled towns had redoubled since Lysaer’s charge of dark sorcery against the Master of Shadow. The Koriani Order could ill afford to risk becoming mired in the backlash of frightened reaction.

      “Sit,” Morriel commanded in a brevity that stabbed.

      Lirenda settled to a rustle of skirts on the bare stone ledge of the window seat. Against failing light, her body affected a cat’s aloof . poise; her expression settled to waiting. But beneath that unapproachable, aristocratic polish, her mind seethed with ambition. The predatory spark in those pale almond eyes never slept.

      Morriel opened at due length, “The time has come for the first trial to prepare you for mastery of our Great Waystone.”

      Watchful eyes smoldered into full flame. “At last,” Lirenda murmured.

      “You’ll use every minute before nightfall to prepare,” said the Prime, and waved her peremptory dismissal.