Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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“I don’t understand,” Lirenda said.
“You should, given more time and experience.” Morriel qualified in that etched, acid tone she used to restore equilibrium. “The key lies in the foundations of Fellowship philosophy, First Senior. The Sorcerers’ mastery keeps Paravian precepts. The Seven are bound, and must live by the Law of the Major Balance, itself a stricture of permissions. They believe earth and air, in fact, all solid matter, to be spun from animate spirit. Nothing they do, in craft or in deed, can proceed without an exchange of consent. So they have trammeled us. Our Waystone’s signature pattern has been given to all that has form in this world; and by Sethvir’s knotted conjury, all physical matter in existence has been empowered to refuse its channeled force of intervention.”
Before Lirenda’s outrage, Morriel ran on, her rancor fired now by the ancient sting of balked rivalry. “Oh, we’re not helpless. Our order can still tune a circle of seniors into focused unity through the stone. We can still curb disease, and even, turn armies. But only to bend influence upon conscious, living beings, and these have wills of their own. Over the earth, against even the lowliest storm, our Waystone has been robbed of power.”
The wide-ranging impact undermined at a stroke the triumph of the Waystone’s recovery. For the order’s major spell crystals were themselves irreplaceable. Brought in when the Koriathain first settled Athera, the stones’ offworld origins set them outside the scope of the Paravian-wrought earth link. Only those select conjuries channeled through their matrices could escape Sethvir’s observation.
Now, the Waystone’s Named signature had been disseminated abroad by the Sorcerer. The unique, patterned aura of its influence lay hampered in ties of recognition. Its forces had been disempowered through rejection by all things over which the Fellowship’s compact held sway.
Lirenda regarded her Prime Matriarch, shadowed under her hood of pale silk like a hunting spider noosed in spun gossamer. “What will you do?”
“Whatever I must.” Morriel stroked skeletal fingers over the polished, sullen facets of the Waystone. “The Fellowship of Seven have no given right to curtail our Koriani powers. I will go myself and present my demand at Althain Tower. The Sorcerers will heed, or be sorry. I will gain back our autonomy.”
Summer-Winter 5648
In late summer, amid the long train of scholars who bring musty ship’s rutters, and the flocked parchments of archived maps, and even, from Erdane, new proof that the Isles of Min Pierens exist in the margin of a faded merchant’s lading list, a brawny craftsman bows before Lysaer s’Ilessid, and says in his broad southcoast accent, “Your Grace, I’m named Cattrick, and I’ve come to apply for the master’s position in your new shipyard at Riverton…”
At twilight on the autumn equinox, while the day fades to night and two seasons shift balance on the fulcrum of change, three Fellowship Sorcerers at Althain Tower seal the next layer in the construct which has commanded their unsparing efforts for a year; and clean power spears out in a ruled, white line to pierce the very nadir of the heavens…
On the wide moors of Araethura, while winter’s diamond dusting of frosts silver the stems of sere grasses, the child, Fionn Areth, survives his first year, while his mother weeps for the auguries yet to entangle his future, and his father stands taciturn and silent…
Winter 5648-5649
On the morning that Arithon’s brigantine rounded up and backed sail off the wind-blasted sands of the far continent, the Fellowship Sorcerer who was Warden of Althain perched in a sun-baked window seat. He could have held that pose for hours, or even days, hunched like a ruffled gray pelican in the comfort of his moth-eaten maroon robe. The lined, ivory knuckles of one hand clutched a sheaf of curled parchment. The other wielded a black swan’s quill, fussed sharp as a dandy’s rapier point. The pot last used to dip his nib nestled between his braced knees, a tipped fraction shy of a spill. Stray stains and a threadbare shine to his velvets showed Sethvir’s small care for vanity. Mere ink could be left to run where it would while his provenance spanned all the world.
Through the gift of the Paravian earth link, Sethvir sensed the distant, salt splash as the Khetienn’s anchor plunged to bite into the pearlescent sands of the shallows. Amid myriad sounds, just one patterned resonance of changed air: he heard shouted orders from a half a globe away, to brail tanbark sails to squared yards at the end of an arduous passage. Caught between lines of small, precise script, the Sorcerer furrowed his seamed brow. Then the poignancy of the moment overcame him.
He laid his temple against the old stonework and wept.
If the sea gave the Shadow Master a temporary shelter from the hatred raised among townsmen against him, his cherished hope of finding a haven on Athera’s far continent was misled. Sethvir knew as much, aggrieved by the secrets necessity had forced him to keep. Kathtairr, the far land, was familiar to him as the creases grained in his own flesh. Distance offered no obstacle. The grand earth link bequeathed him, moment to moment, its endless, weary vistas of ocher and gray. Sun scorched and blasted by the elements, the continent fanned like a snag of singed cloth cast on the jewel-toned sea. Its rivers were dry, or ran poisoned and alkaline. Its shoreline extended, league upon league, as blank, rippled dunes and swept desert.
Sethvir ached for the tragic truth. To the last sand grain and rock, from the cracked, dusty summits of each nameless mountain to the seared, crumbled fissures of the valleys, the land mass beyond Athera’s vast oceans was naught but a lifeless waste.
Even in the early centuries of the Third Age, at the height of their power and ascendancy, the Paravians had shunned the place.
Arithon would find no reprieve in Kathtairr from the bane laid on him by the Mistwraith. If he gained brief escape through the time he spent searching, for each year that passed, Lysaer s’Ilessid would breed more killing sentiment against him. The longer the Khetienn’s absence extended, the higher the stakes laid against the Shadow Master’s life.
Between Sorcerers, the issue had already been thrashed to exhaustion. In desperate truth, their Fellowship dared not spurn the smallest borrowed margin of time. They would, and had wrested from Arithon’s blind need that span of uneasy peace. Trapped themselves in a race to stave off disaster, they labored to avert an unmentionable peril, compounded since the hour of the Mistwraith’s confinement.
Sethvir straightened, blue-green eyes grown airy as mist. His fingers draped loose across the unfinished last paragraph on his parchment. The quill slipped, forgotten, to drift on a whisper to the floor. Amid his sprawl of opened books, stained tea mugs, and his cluttered, stray oddments of feather and stone scavenged from excursions through the meadows, he looked for all the world like a beak-nosed little grandfather, abandoned to senile daydreams.
In contrary fact, the Sorcerer’s trained focus ranged far beyond his tower library. Immersed in the broadscale vision of the earth link, the split train of his awareness encompassed all things, from the mighty pull of Athera’s riptides, to the rustle of solitary grass stems. The busy tracks of ants reached his ear, and the singular signatures of sand grains banked in the gullies of the deserts. Sethvir could count at whim the cries of the owl and the albatross, riding the wind’s thermal currents. He sensed the grind of polar ice, north and south, and the thundering shear of each floe calved into the briny arctic seas. The planet itself played its living chord through his consciousness. He knew, like a heartbeat, the molten toss of core magma and the eerie, static pulse of its array of magnetic power lanes. Amid the vast, milling chord of flux and event, two precise notes snagged in dissonance. Sethvir narrowed his sight to frame these, his brows tugged into worry like muddled crochet.
A listening minute later,