aded the [ expedi- vast and ,n, green ould set th's fell IF clans, fers his t stared t quest ,uld be ,ry few ~e uni- 'rible a wning ?hild's ntis to )rsook Para- ~nt by harge Else quar- rays, stay aged )oul- med hells :hill, ~st a FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Between a breath and a heartbeat, the Mad Prophet was gone, van- ished into the raw cotton mist as if his presence had been knit out of dreams. Jieret was left to the desolate splendor of the cliff head, con- sumed by worried thoughts, while the throaty crash of flood tide slammed white torrents over the seamed rocks below. Suspicion remained. The Mad Prophet had not disclosed all he knew. A shiver touched Jieret as he measured how subtly the spellbinder had changed.

While playing the drunkard, Dakar made it easy to forget his five centuries of study under Fellowship auspices.

Disarmingly masked behind vexed words and bother, the fat prophet scored his clear point: he could have exerted his trained will at any moment, used powers of sorcery to set one blustering, young clan chief firmly into his place.

Jieret flushed, then loosed a chagrined shout of laughter. He checked the hang of his weapons out of habit and started back toward the ruined fortress.

For Arithon's sake, Dakar had indulged him. Whatever reason underlay the vicious slaughter at the Havens, the shifty little spell- binder had entrusted Rathain's prince with the dubious benefits of his loyalty. From that, the realm's caithdein must salvage what peace of mind he could; his liege would not sail westward into peril with- out an ally to guard his left shoulder.

"Though Ath Creator," Jieret ripped out, as if air itself would carry his balked temper back to the Mad Prophet's ears, "I'd rather be boarding the Khetienn myself than turn'mg tail back to Rathain."

Summer 5648 Checkrein For Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, the rage burned white-hot, even eight months after her failed attempt to as sinate the Master of Shadow. Due to the intervention of a bunglil fat prophet, Arithon s'Ffalenn still breathed. Morriel shut her eyes.~ if by cutting off the daylight which flooded her quilted chair by ~ casement, she could deny the thorny fact the prince still walked this side of Fate's Wheel. Old, withered, reduced by years longevity spells to a husk of sagged flesh wrapped over porcel~ bones, she endured the weary pulse of blood through her veins; e~ 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 unyo the chains of command and transfer the massive burden of prit power to the hands of a proven successor.

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

Morriel breathed in the humid sea air of the southcoast. Decades handling critically potent forces had chafed her senses to unwonte sensitivity, until the ceaseless barrage of sound, form and sine besieged the desperately held order of her mind. Even removed this high tower, confined in isolation above the sleepy commerce ~ Thirdmark's narrow streets, Morriel battled the distractions. T~ 7O.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

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 botmdaries 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 bul- wark would remain upon which to snag the purling thread of insan- ity.

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, ruth- less simplicity: this last living scion of Rathain's royal line would dis- rapt 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 malig- nant chain of latent events would snap a succession unbroken for thousands of years.

Morriel endured, her frustration contained. As the Khetienn embarked into tinknown waters, Rathain's prince would lie vulnera- ble 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.

71.

JANNY ~7UQT$.

The first move in play could be masked to advance the Lirenda, First Senior, selected and groomed, but as of this unprepared to survive the rigors of the accession.

On the eve of summer solstice, while the Fellowship worked in concert to complete an arduous conjury that had ' ..m~n~ them for over a year, the Warden of Althain would be least indh~ take meddling notice of accidents. The Koriani Prime snatchl moment.

The bar of warm sunlight slanted through the casement and c0~ to a soft flush of red. Morriel soon heard the rustle of silk she ar pated in the stairwell. Her chosen First Senior arrived on the rn0~ appointed. Such precise obedience was not petty. For a candida show less than perfection in all things carried the risk of ill c~ quence. One woman alone could wield the full might of the K01 Order A small lapse of discipline on that scale of power could d~ the course of history, even harrow and scorch the green earth.

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

First Senior Lirenda presented a regal figure, slender, tall, and poseful. Groomed and graceful as a panther, she wore hair like c~ satin sleeked into a single, coiled braid. Her feet kept a dancer's li tread on stone floors. The fine, sculptured bones of her wrists we~ off by the gold-banded sleeves denoting her high office, and her ~ let silk mantle flowed off her lithe form like water poured fror vase.

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

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

Yet if the oversight arose from the duty novice's instructions, ol boy ward had shirked his assigned labor, Lirenda showed no irril tion. Her oval features stayed smooth as a cameo as she murmtw the ritual greeting. "Your will, matriarch."

That metallic, alto voice betrayed no curiosity, which was we Morriel prolonged her survey of the prime candidate, her eyes li 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 unapproach- able, aristocratic polish, her mind seethed with ambition. The preda- tory 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 mur- mured.

"You'll use every minute before nightfall to prepare," said the Prime, and waved her peremptory dismissal.

The massive, polished sphere of the Koriani Waystone stood unveiled under starlight, planed filaments of captured reflection spiked deep in its shadowy heart. Even seated, eyes shut, a full span away, First Senior Lirenda felt the amethyst's aura soak into her stilled senses. With her mind diamond clear from an exhaustive course of ritual, the dark crystal's presence chilled like the breath of a predator: lethal, unforgiving, and charged in pitiless peril. The stone was as ancient as the order itself. Over a thousand prime matriarchs had wielded its dire focus since the cataclysm and war which had cast an uprooted humanity from its homeworlds. The jewel's deep lattice was said to encompass them all; their unquiet memories; the imprint of each departed prime's experience mazed like etched knotwork beneath its stilled facets.

At times in past history such knowledge meant survival. The records in the crystal could not be replaced. Nor could they be trans- ferred. Stones mined in Athera fell under the Fellowship's compact with the Paravians. The knowledge from outside worlds was pro- scribed. Limited to those crystals brought in by the order, every Matriarch since had no choice but to adopt the fixed practice, that its original set of jewel matrixes must be maintained without cleansing.

No stranger to the contrary properties of first focus stones, Lirenda required firm discipline to stamp down her apprehension. Her gnaw- ing unease was no phantom. The Great Waystone's secrets were held at perilous cost. Twined through the stored experience of the former JANNY WURTS.

matriarchs' collective memories ran vicious, ingrained the coiling, sullen residue left layered by centuries of arcane crammed together and entangled into dissonant, unquiet knots.

One day, these must become the prime candidate's trial The protections Morriel laid down for this first exposure were~ bidding enough to intimidate. Lirenda resisted the urge to break ~ cipline and steal a glance through cracked eyelids. Agai~st the ~ fabric of summer night, she felt the formed lattice of wards stab~ flesh like the prick of a thousand fine needles. The passes the ?r~ completed to frame each new sigil raised dire cold, and the sa!: damp that freshened the sea breeze came whetted by a bitter taint~ ozone.

Minutes passed. Through the still blaze of stars and the tidal dra~ of the moon on the western horizon, Lirenda followed the ?ain~ shuffle of the Prime's steps, circling, tirelessly circling. The low, t~~t whisper as the Matriarch chanted in rhythm to align each i~qtrica~ chained set of runes. Perception itself drowned. Sensed impressi0~ strung out to elastic proportions, as if moving time and the trestle: dune grass had slowed to congealment in amber.

Elsewhere, the world turned untouched. From the tide 70~!

beyond Thirdmark's harbor, a curlew called. A kicked cur yel?ed,~ the fish market alley, and the martial jink of steel as the wall walc changed guard reechoed off the city's gabled roofs. Sounds reac~e~ Lirenda as if muffled through gauze, and then not at all, as her ,~x'ar, hess submersed, ringed about by ambient power.

When Lirenda's consciousness became a joined circle, sealed ini relentless isolation, the Prime Enchantress said, "We are readv ~~ begin."

Instructions followed, the husk of each syllable sandpaper s'~,~ amid Chat enforced web of stillness. "Do not look upon the '~avst~?

as I raise its grand focus. To try. is to beg for destruction. My se~ ~;~ tections cannot shield you from direct interaction with the ex~'~ unless you maintain perfect balance. No matter what hal~,l~,:r~ through temptation or disaster, remember you follow as obserx, e~ Stay passive. On pain of annihilation, however much you feel trau.

matized, do not exert your conscious will outside the bounds of r~,.

ward ring."

One second passed in unbearable suspension. Lirenda foug~'

down the dizzy pound of her pulse. Then in shared resonance, ~ plunge snatched her up in a rocketing, exhilarated rush, as Mt)rrie.

Prime bent her will and invoked the Great Waystone's focus.

Stark silence descended. Wide as old darkness, deep as the floor 0t

74.

~r ~e Y.

~f FUGITIVE PRINCE.

oceans, the stillness reigned absolute. Lirenda felt walled in cable black glass, reduced to a dust speck captured and pris- ~ 0ned in jet. Of her Prime's guiding presence, no sign remained, as if her aged flesh had succumbed to blank death, then faded to final oblivion.

Panic raked through, a blind, clawing terror of abandonment.

Lirenda could be left here, forever entombed beyond reach of life and movement. She wrestled to breathe slowly as she had been trained.

All of her pride and practiced control seemed trampled and torn into shreds. She had no dignity. In gasping, sweaty struggle, she fought herself steady. The need to leap up, to flee headlong without heed for safeguards became almost too overpowering to deny. Then abrupt change overset even terror.

The eruption was cyclonic, an invisible whirlwind of force barbed in malice. The vicious, leading edge had a thousand voices, cursing, crying, tearing with words and far worse: the scything, bitter edges of passionate hatreds all stabbing to flay and draw blood. Even sealed beyond harm, Lirenda felt her mind become milled into fragments, her thoughts consumed by unadulterated violence.

No prior experience prepared her, although every other ancient focus she had handled harbored such coils of trapped rancor. By nature, all crystals absorbed the essence of spells raised to resonance through their mineral lattice. If the patterns were not cleared, the vibrations over time and usage thrummed into rank dissidence, a resentful moil of caged energies. A stone pressed to heel by the will of many mistresses was wont to reflect twisted spite, or worse, become warped into hideous subterfuge, to turn on new wielders and seek domination in turn. Greatest of all matrixes, the Waystone's stored pattems spewed forth in unparalleled viciousness.

Lirenda felt the blast as an obdurate, scorching tide of hatred that strove to unravel her being. Never had she witnessed such forceful malevolence. Her own strength was inadequate. Before such a flux, her deepest defenses would snap like so many dry twigs. She shrank inside the Prime's warded circle, cowed to a whimpering huddle.

She was not alone in her terror. The screams of Koriani predeces- sors who had failed to overmaster the Waystone's maze of trickery rolled through the crystal's depths also. Their despair charged the mind, shrank the flesh, and became a scourge defined unto itself; as if those vanquished, consumed spirits sought to lure fresh victims to succumb to the inner flaws that destroyed them. Their bodiless thoughts whirled in tireless search, seeking, prying, scrabbling to exploit any small chink of uncertainty. The peril of their assault was

75.

JANNY WURTS.

real, unforgiving. Lirenda's skin rose into prickles of fear.

assurance of Morriel's wards, the danger sang through instant before a lightning strike, with her naked selfhood one breath shy of oblivion.

An inflexible truth, that if the Prime Matriarch failed to roused Waystone, her frail circle of protections must thin lines of power once faltered or faded, Lirenda would be.

ruin in the turmoil of upset control.

As never before, the lesson thrust home: to succeed the Prime's a candidate must become nothing less than a faultless prime applicant would ever achieve dominion of the amethyst unbreakable strength and no fault left to admit weakness.

Then Morriel made her presence known. Her confidence able, she configured the Waystone's seals of mastery, laid thern, in silvered vectors of power, fast and precise as thrown knives.

arced into sigils, symmetrical, perfect, to shape raging order. Through the convulsed moil of energies, Lirenda caught half-glimpsed imprints of past conjuries, the ghost echo of old rents chained through the quartz axis: of storms and disease awry or tamed outright; of the very slipstream reversed. She heard, too, the dusky voices of past matriarchs, words, their deeds, their arguments all melded like the scrape of dry leaves. Then one last stamp of mastery sheared the whispers away.

The Waystone's sullen stew of resistance tore asunder, then dered to limpid clarity.

Lirenda watched, awed, as the limitless vista opened before her second hand. As often as she had experienced the rushing, exhilara~: joy in her mastery of other focus jewels, the Waystone yielded order of magnitude more. An indescribable passion plunged throu~i her, sensation shaved to an exquisite knifepoint of ecstasy. The firec thrill of self-awareness seized her unaware, left her flushed and cra~'.

ing. She lost herself. Rapture beyond all imagining rolled like s~~:ee~ thunder down her nerves. As if she stood poised at the pinnacle all Ath's creation strung on its axle, turning; and her hand, her~ tc grasp the rein and drive the wheel, to prod the harnessed vectors'

fate to the dictates of her chosen whim.

Revelation flooded her, a keen exhilaration spiced by addi~ti~'e longing. She would own this power herself one day. At whatever cost.

matter the sacrifice, Lirenda knew she would pay any price to ceed the Koriani Prime. No risk, even death, would swerve her right- ful claim to that heritage.

76.

the the but FUGITIVE I)RINCE.

Impatient for that hour, the First Senior envied Morriel's grasp of that seamless course of power. She ached for her chance to let tuned awareness thread through the stone's lattice and frame the runes into sigils of command.

The pattern the Prime chose was a basic scrying. Somewhere upon the world's seas, a brigantine's keel carved westward. A small mote; a dimple pressed into the wavecrests by a hull hand fashioned of planks and sheathed in a bottom of copper. The metal would be sub- ject to personal resonance, stamped bright in imprint of a man's des- peration, and his all-consuming hope of escape from the geas that hounded his peace.

Arithon s'Ffalenn sailed west on the summer winds, and Morriel shaped her bidding to comb Athera's broad oceans to tag his current location. For sheer display, the move was impressive. Water was earth's most unbiddable element. Salt of itself balked cast conjury.

The call through the Waystone arose in a tumultuous torrent, a whiplash of force before which the wide seas must bow to outright demand.