The Ships of Merior (47 page)

He went on to speak of the First Age legends, that preceded the time when Paravians or men came to settle the five kingdoms. Before them had lived the greater drakes, creatures of a vast and wild beauty, but ancient in clever intelligence. From the riddle of Ath’s deepest mysteries, they spun dreams that Named, their unbridled ambition to expand the living fabric of the cosmos. Theirs was a deeply mistaken belief that higher mastery could be theirs for the taking. But they forgot, in their pride, that the Creator founded the birth of the world in compassion. In the end, the fruits of the drakes’ making escaped their control altogether.

‘Let me be plain,’ Asandir said. ‘The dragons did not originate evil, they spun energies that embodied senseless destruction. Their meddling with the mysteries
spawned fearsome predators called Seardluin that lived for the dark thrill of killing. These creatures are not fables. Our Fellowship saw the last of them die at the close of the Second Age, and we count ourselves favoured to be alive. Athera still harbours drake-spawn that survive from that era: the lesser iyats are among them. Wyverns and Khadrim still fly and mate, but if any of the greater worms yet lie deep in volcanic caverns, they are diminished, and have abjured the temptations of true-dreams. Since the Paravians vanished from the continent, Sethvir keeps continual watch.’

The sun mote slanted with the day’s progression; Asandir’s seated frame slipped gradually into shadow. Not one of the s’Brydion brothers held mesmerized and listening ever noticed the change as his speech took on the soft, rolling cadence of the Paravian tongue. Whether his voice wove a seer’s spell, or whether power enspelled the words themselves, only the sorcerer could have said. His meaning formed in direct imprint upon the mind, beyond definition of sound and symbol; the brothers experienced the past through Asandir’s recounting, as sharply as though they stood witness.

A herd of deer grazing in a misted vale suddenly raised their heads, listening. There came no warning, no sound, not even the shower of dew from disturbed grass; just a sudden, explosive burst of motion as something massive and dark erupted from the brush beside the dell. A ripple of muscle under black, maned hide; a blurred feline shape and a lightning swipe of claws; then the scream of a dying animal. The herd bolted, spun, and bolted again, but the predator circled them, faster. A snap of a scaled tail, the gore of a horn, and another deer went down, tawny legs threshing; then another, neck-broken in the clash of fanged jaws. Too swift to flee, with a sinister, blurred grace, the Seardluin killed
and killed again, until the dell lay bathed in steaming carnage, and the last doe lay gutted and still.

Threaded underneath the immediacy of vision, Asandir’s account wove in sorrow. ‘The Seardluin killed for sheer rapture, as a weasel may, drunk on the thrill of its senses. Perhaps, like the dragons, they could sense forces of animal magnetism loosed in fresh-spilled blood, and such power fed their excitement. Whatever warped inclination drove their nature, they would slay until the soil itself was sodden muddy red. The great drakes themselves lost young to their predation.’

The rest, written in scripture preserved at Althain tower, told how such depths of misguided ignorance came to be offered enlightenment through the brightest of power and knowledge. The Creator sent a gift to heal the ruin the dragons in their arrogance had set loose. Alone of all worlds, Athera became blessed with new children of Ath’s making. The Paravians became the affirmation that order bound all structure into balance. Their kind embodied the divine example, that the quickened life misbegotten through the drakes’ feckless dreaming might in time be redeemed.

‘And so came the three blessed races to Athera,’ Asandir explained. ‘Centaurs, Ilitharis, whose strength was to nurture the growing earth, and defend it with then-blood if need be. Ath sent the small ones, the Sun-children, to celebrate life’s undying joy. Lastly, the Creator gave the Riathan, the unicorns, who formed the living bridge, the linked connection to all that is and will be. To stand in their presence is to know, unsullied, the unconditional love that embraces all things that exist.’

The histories preserved in Althain Tower catalogued the course of two ages of tragic confrontation. The world was both bright and desolate, since even the shining grace of the Paravians failed to turn the Seardluin’s
ungovernable viciousness from the heat and passion of the kill. The creatures organized into armies, and bound the drake-spawn into fell service. Wars were fought, and tragedy abounded, and Paravians lost their lives until their numbers dwindled nearly past hope of recovery; in those days, even the greatest and oldest of drakes mourned and repented for the suffering unleashed by their tampering.

‘Our Fellowship was drawn here by drake-dream,’ Asandir confided at last. ‘The power of old dragons has a very long reach, and it chose us because we were deemed masters without parallel in the terrible arts of destruction. The engine we had taken to flee the horrors of our past was plucked from its transit across the deeps between stars. Crater Lake in Araethura marks the site where the forces arisen from the drakes’ desperate need hurled it earthward. We were given our deliverance there from the guilt and the agony that harrowed us since our acts. And though bloodshed by then was abhorrent to us, we fought to ensure Paravian survival until the last of the Seardluin lay dead.’

For the Fellowship, responsibility had not ended with the Second Age. Men came to Athera, refugees cast loose by the very cataclysm their earlier works had engendered. The home worlds left decimated were cinders, now, and elsewhere, survivors suffered wretched, ugly lives, doomed always to repeat the terror and the tragedy of their past, for they sprang from a society ruled by want and senseless fear, and they knew of no other way to live.

The Paravian races had fulfilled Ath’s directive by ending the strife arisen through the dreams of the dragons. Since a peace bought through war was never their Creator’s intent, to ease their sorrows and their losses, Athera’s rich lands were ceded to their inheritance. Theirs also, the decision whether mankind should have leave to settle in cohabitation. At the council where
humanity’s fate was debated, the Fellowship interceded.

‘A covenant was sworn,’ Asandir said, gruff with the wear of a service that spanned inconceivable centuries of strife. ‘We Seven undertook responsibility for ensuring the steps were never taken that could engender the mens for mass destruction, For the sake of the Paravians, this world is protected, and shall be for as long as men endure.’

Around the oaken table, the s’Brydion brothers sat, dazed sober by the aftershock of visions. Parrien’s knife lay abandoned to one side, its point impaled amid a creped litter of ribbons. Mearn regarded a chewed nail, this once in his life wholly still, and Keldmar’s keen rivalry with his next oldest brother was displaced by unwonted respect. Mollified by visions of unicorns dancing, or stately, tall centaurs with stag-horned crowns and dripping, battle-red weapons, Bransian scrubbed his scabbed knuckles through his beard. ‘Our culverin, then, is to he forbidden.’

‘I will say plainly that black powder is a first step on that path that led your forebears to destruction.’ Asandir straightened, as if flicked by a creeping small frisson of chill. ‘A first step, and a tiny one, of seeming insignificance. But the insidious progression of change its use will bring is well known to us. The result over time would spoil the green earth, then breed an enslavement of the mind beyond your most dire imagining.’

The time had come to broach the subject of choice. Asandir clamped his hands on his forearms, his expression gone desolate as a man eaten hollow by old pain. ‘Your family is not the first. Once, we sent men with inclinations such as yours to dwell in the splinter worlds through South Gate. They, in their turn, built a civilization based upon the machines that are proscribed here. The misguided, self-blinding madness inherent in such ways created the scourge you have known as the Mistwraith, and our greatest grief. The Paravians were
driven from the continent by its dominance, and the restoration of clean sunlight has not recalled them.’

‘Then the Fellowship’s covenant failed after all,’ Duke Bransian observed, surprised by the poignancy of his sorrow.

Asandir sighed before that painful truth. ‘Desh-thiere’s ills are ours to put right if we can. The choice you face is no less cruel a quandary.’ He drew a fast breath, backlit now by the beat of noon sun against the stone beyond the arrow slits. ‘You may allow Fellowship intervention to excise all memory of your culverin and the powder that kills.’

He encompassed the brothers in a glance sheared to purpose that perfectly disallowed pity. ‘Or else you shall not leave this chamber for the rest of the days of your lives.’

‘That’s no choice!’ cried Mearn, spiked to his feet by raw outrage.

Asandir looked at him, desolate. ‘That’s the sole option in the Fellowship’s power to offer while our active numbers are diminished.’ He surveyed each brother in turn. ‘Think carefully. I can’t stay here beyond sundown.’

Minded to raise protest, Mearn gave way before Bransian’s right to speak first. ‘No need to dally here quibbling. The culverin will be forgotten, as you wish.’ The Duke of Alestron raised his chin in a concession that held bravado and the rags of mulish dignity. ‘You have my consent. Do what you must and be done with us.’

The others must choose their course separately,’ Asandir said. In what seemed idle habit, he extended a forefinger to configure a pattern on the tabletop. If to direct eyesight, no design appeared evident, the far fringes of peripheral vision sometimes tagged his tracery in hair-fine trailers of phosphor. Upon closer study, the effect would be mistaken for the glister of reflection touched across lines of puddled water.
Too earthy to dwell on any puzzle wrought of mage-craft, Parrien pressed his back against his chair, lips curled in a tomcat’s grin. ‘I don’t much fancy being held here while my betrothed ups and marries some beardless rival. It would be a chill bed with only memories of a culverin to lie with. Do as you wish with me, Sorcerer.’

Keldmar snapped off a nod. ‘Me also, though I won’t pretend I like it. We earned that culverin through five years of hard work, not counting for injuries and the powder burns.’

Last to capitulate, Mearn said, ‘We’d be free to pursue yon muckle clever spy?’

Asandir spared no second thought. ‘Pursue all you wish. He’s a difficult man to catch.’

Mearn gave his scowling, ungracious acquiescence, and for a second the room seemed to blur. The books, the varnished secretary, the bronze stands of the candelabra with their wax-dribbled sockets all rippled as if marred by a wash of pressed air. The smells of baked stone and sheared steel and musty parchment acquired a transcendent edge of clarity. Then darkness crossed sight like a footprint.

Restored to cleared senses, the brothers sat alone around their table. A space lately occupied by a sorcerer lay vacant, the memory of his presence gone with him. Sunlight angled in yellow bars from the arrow slits, shot through a haze of stirred dust motes.

First to move, Parrien rubbed thick fingers at his temples. ‘Ath,’ he said, bewildered. ‘What possessed me to drink myself stupid on wine?’

Keldmar’s bleared gaze fixed and focused on the dangling remains of burst straps. ‘Which of you oafs turned soft and released the fat prisoner?’

Through the vociferous, insult-slinging quarrel that followed, not one of the s’Brydion could agree on any culprit, nor could they recall what had immured them
in close conference through a night and half the next day.

There’s a spy running free while we scrap over nothing!’ Mearn interrupted in withering disgust.

Duke Bransian shoved to his feet in a jangle of displaced armour, shouldered his youngest brother from the arrowloop, and bellowed down to the sentry on duty to roust out his best troop of lancers. Beneath his enthusiasm like sand in a blister rubbed a queer and infuriating hunch: that the fugitive sorcerer who had ruined his armoury was by now beyond reach of reprisal.

The double-crossing criminals can’t hide themselves forever,’ said Keldmar, still glaring at a span of empty oak.

Parrien knuckled bloodshot eyes and ground out a derisive snort of laughter. ‘They will if you don’t stir off your arse. Are you corning?’

Ignited to a madcap race to muster weapons, four brothers pounded shouting down the stairwell to launch their belated hue and cry.

‘We’ve found where to send Elaira on her assignment to compromise Arithon s’Ffalenn,’ the Koriani First Senior announces to Morriel Prime; in hand she holds the day’s report from the sixth lane watch:
The smuggler’s brig
Black Drake
has sailed to recover the riches held for the Shadow Master’s use by Lady Maenalle; and the cove specified for final delivery will be south, at Merior by the Sea…

In Althain Tower, on the verge of twilight, Sethvir pauses between penned lines of manuscript to receive Asandir’s news from Alestron: ‘The brothers s’Brydion hold no more memory of black powder or culverin; Rathain’s crown jewels are recovered for return to storage at Althain Tower. Luhaine has destroyed the drawings and dismantled the moulds at the bronze founders’. Since the explosion in the armoury was too widely witnessed to recontain, sadly, Arithon must stand as our scapegoat…’

In a cell beneath Alestron Castle, an imprisoned guardsman languishes with a whip-torn back; and through each hour of his agony, he renews his cold vow of vengeance, to take down the Master of Shadow whose tricks had undone a lifetime of honest service …

Immersed in sulky bouts of brooding since the disaster in Alestron’s armoury, the Mad Prophet evolved his own brand of consolation. Since the Shadow Master’s wiles could turn even the acts of an adversary to abet his most secretive design, Dakar would ease his stung pride and blunt the horrid quandary by drinking himself senseless as deadweight.

Through the four-week voyage down the continent’s east coastline, while Rathain’s prince acquired the crazed instincts of a packrat and a variety of seasoned lumber from the millwright’s in Telzen, Dakar sucked down beer, and rum when he could supply himself, with the joyless abandon of a fish. No brand of liquor could obviate the unpleasant truth: the prince whose affairs he was geas-bound to share was accursed by Desh-thiere. Over time, the destructive drive which had seen thousands slaughtered in Strakewood must re-emerge with intent to kill Lysaer, who once had been Dakar’s best friend.