The search spell released, launched in stamped intent to claim dominance over its target. Yet the connection fell short, maligned by some unseen barrier. Another resonance intervened, then captured its order Clear sigils were impacted and snarled awry, then diffused away into nothing. The sea appeared lidded by impervious shields, and the scrying failed, its pure force dispersed into aimless puffs of air.

Lirenda cried out, indignant. "So much for the Fellowship of Seven and their claim of unshakable morals! Look! They have broken the code of their own compact, even acted covertly for the sake of pro- tecting a criminal. Did you plan to catch their hand in the act?"

But the Koriani Matriarch kept pensive silence. Beneath her hand, the violet sphere of the Waystone shed chill, its heart a thousand spin- dled planes of trapped starlight. The noosed perils of its focus stayed poised and still as the glint off an unsheathed axe blade. "The Sorcer- ers have shown a devious cleverness," she finally said, noncommittal.

"That defense ward left no tracks, no afterimage of structural con~ jury." The resonant signature of Fellowship work in fact had been absent, as though Arithon's presence had been masked by an unseen force, or sea itself had joined in conspiracy to hide him.

That piquant anomaly would keep for later study. Morriel cata- loged the nagging incongruity, then moved on, brisk, to the task of granting her First Senior a taste of prime powers expanded through the Great Waystone. She spun the jewel's focus, sent a new probe

77.

{ANNY WUI~TS.

unfeeling over the far lands to the north, where the of Tornir Peaks tore through the spine of the cape, and white spume off the Gulf of Stormwell.

Lirenda shared the majestic swoop as the Prime's channeled ers changed purpose. Delight stunned her. She reveled in a like flight; knew the thrill of rushed passage, as if spirit could s~ over jagged summits where no road ran, and Northerly's trap~ never ventured. The foothills were cloaked in a straight shag 0t i: There, wolf packs hunted by the new silver moon, the fanned e~~ vescence of hunger and slaughter trailing like smoke in t}~eir ~'a~ The Waystone's precise focus could pick out the frost-p~,~nt er~bro~ dery of the Fellowship wards which bounded the Sorcerer's !'rese~ Through the lens of Morriel's vision, the knitted intricacy of tt~eir c0r.

jury looked like crocheted water, random patterns twined i~to ~'

accord beyond grasp of matter and logic. The Sorcerers' works ~,e:!

like no other conjuries, their core of fey mystery fraught with ?eri~ and gloved in an unearthly beauty.

Lest those secretive riddles beckon the mind into circling, ~q~adnes!

Lirenda marveled instead at the creatures the wards kept imt~,r~s0pec Here flew the last deadly packs of winged predators b~-~,t~ght'~i breathing life by the dreams of the bygone dragons. Most r~t~ r~ero~ of the surviving drake spawn, black Khadrim clustered on it~dges0!

volcanic rock. They warbled unending songs of bloodlust. More 0t them crouched, armored tails curled over their needle-sharp talon!

Warmed by the mud pots, they dreamed, ever restless, drinking ~r memories of the whistling dissonance as high-altitude air thru~r~ec over thundering, taut wing leather. Here and there, a long, p~rr~ head arched up and breathed flame. Others jo'med in, until the ~t~>~ raked scarps became necklaced with brands like a festival.

Northward, Morriel bent the axis of the Waystone, over ~,e,~'~ mailed in ice, or snagged in batts of drifting cloud. Here, on t!~' ri~ walls which bounded the Gulf of Stormwell, lay the mountai~' li~.

ing heart, no longer cold, but aflame and bleeding the earth's ~t~itc?

mineral through shattered seams and caldera. The peaks at the N~,rt?

Cape were unstable, a brutalized vista of riven rock. Here, earth ~ elements raged in endless war. Volcanoes like angry, fuming behe.

moths hurled hot rock and cinders. Magma spewed scarlet lacew0r~ into the boil of gray breakers, ever ripping their voracious, tide- driven channels between the shores of the Trow Islands.

"There," Morriel said, lxer voice the thin tone of dropped porcelain~ Lirenda sensed the small peak singled out, its flanks carved lam- bent by lava flows.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

"We shall cap that vent in the earth's crust." Morriel spoke without arrogance, without even the prideful overtone a child might show a trapped butterfly.

She brought the focus stone's power to bear, a wheeling spin like forced vertigo. Then, in bursting white lines, she framed the grand seals into sigils. Overwhelmed by their magnificence, Lirenda could not discern whether the Prime traced the figures over the amethyst's surface, or whether she called them up, blazing, from the grar/ite dis- cipline of her mind. Some she recognized, for mastery of rock; domi- nance of earth; the interlaced patterns for repression and joining and guard. Others seemed disquietingly changed, indecipherable despite a haunting familiarity. The train of the construct shaped an unquiet strangeness that razed her to upsetting chills. Her rational thoughts were flicked on wild tangents to recoil into confusion.

The spell towered, bloomed, achieved finished perfection. Then, like the flight of an arrow from bowstring, the sharp, singing hum of release.

Perception overturned, kicked through an explosive cascade of change. Lirenda screamed with the upset as something spun wrong, and cognizance unraveled with the unbound, wild fury of a thunder- clap. All order dissolved, then mastery and rule, leaving dark like the aftermath of carnage. Next, the slipped threads of power hurled into backlash. Chaos clapped down. For one yawning instant, natural law wrenched off course. Every sane tie to reason unhinged, as if torn from the span of creation.

The impact slammed through the mind, then froze there in stopped reverberation. Lawless disorder coiled into itself like craze marks pressed through crushed crystal.

Then the moment cracked free and passed. The earth turned serene. Summer stars burned untouched. Lirenda recovered herself, gasping and dazed, on the tower felted in the mild air of a bay shore night in Thirdmark. Etched in the eye of her mind, she still saw the volcanic basin at Northerly, and the fuming, scarlet lava jetting uncapped through the darkness.

Next she became aware of Morriel's speech, pronouncing maledic- tions in a quavering, vitriolic whisper.

"Matriarch, are you hurt?" she asked, stressed and shaken, in need of reassurance for herself.

She held on through a racked draw of breath, while the Prime expressed rage in a rising, thin shriek. "Damn them all to the dimmest pit of Sithaer! Fellowship meddlers! Curse their hands and their eyes and the tongues in their mouths. Let them suffer for this!

79.

~ANNY WURTS.

May they die, every one, unmanned and weeping, helpless unloved and alone!"

Lirenda cowered at the tirade, afraid to move or speak, as~ Matriarch spun, her features seamed bone in the starlight. "lAth happened? Ath forbid I should have lived to see the day! The Fetl~ ship held our Waystone in custody for five centuries, and oh, we ~ fools to have believed they never tampered."

"But Sethvir promised me our Waystone was untouched!" Lire~ cried. The order's own tests had assured the Warden's statement'

no falsehood.

"Ah, untouched indeed." Morriel's malice changed to bitter a~ ration. "Sethvir did not lie. He did not disturb our stone. Clever fi that he is, he never had to. He simply imprinted the Waystone's nature into every cranny of the world through the earth lind gained from the Paravians. And damn his wretched cleverr he laid no ward on Arithon, nor broke any thread of moral princ The same trick just upset my scrying." "I don't understand," Lirenda said.

"You should, given more time and experience." Morriel qual in that etched, acid tone she used to restore equilibrium. "The ke~ in the foundations of Fellowship philosophy, First Senior. The So ers' mastery keeps Paravian precepts. The Seven are bound, and ~ live by the Law of the Major Balance, itself a stricture of permiss They believe earth and air, in fact, all solid matter, to be spun animate spirit. Nothing they do, in craft or in deed, can proceed ~ out an exchange of consent. So they have trammeled us. Our ~ stone's signature pattern has been given to all that has form ir world; and by Sethvir's knotted conjury, all physical matter in tence has been empowered to refuse its channeled force of interventic Before Lirenda's outrage, Morriel ran on, her rancor fired no'

the ancient sting of balked rivalry. "Oh, we're not helpless. Our ~ can still tune a circle of seniors into focused unity through the s We can still curb disease, and even, turn armies. But only to influence upon conscious, living beings, and these have wills of own. Over the earth, against even the lowliest storm, our Way~ has been robbed of power."

The wide-ranging impact undermined at a stroke the trium1 the Waystone's recovery. For the order's major spell crystals themselves irreplaceable. Brought in when the Koriathain first s~ Athera, the stones' offworld origins set them outside the scope c Paravian-wrought earth link. Only those select conjuries charu through their matrices could escape Sethvir's observation.

8O.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

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 pol- ished, sullen facets of the Waystone. "The Fellowship of Seven have no given right to curtail our Koriani powers. I will go myself and pre- sent my demand at Althain Tower. The Sorcerers will heed, or be sorry. I will gain back our autonomy."

81.

Summer-Winter 5648 Three Seasons In late summer, amid the long train of scholars who bring must~ ship's rutters, and the flocked parchments of archived maps, ani!i 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'~ ~!

position in your new shipyard at I~iverton .... "

At twilight on the autumn equinox, while the day fades to nigh~ and two seasons shift balance on the fulcrum of change, three Fellow- ship Sorcerers at Althain Tower seal the next layer in the construct which has commanded their unsparing efforts for a year; and dea~ 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, sur- vives 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.

III. Sentence.

musty s, and in the bows "Your ster's ~ght 11ow- truct :lean ,f the ting sur- ~t to On the moming 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 dis- tant, salt splash as the Khetienn's anchor plunged to bite into the pearlescent sands of the shallows. Amid myriad sounds, just one pat- terned 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

83.

JANNY ~VURTS.

hatred raised among townsmen against him, his cherished finding a haven on Athera's far continent was misled. Sethvir as much, aggrieved by the secrets necessity had forced him to ke~ Kathtairr, the far land, was familiar to him as the creases grained ~ his own flesh. Distance offered no obstacle. The grand earth link bequeathed him, moment to moment, its endless, weary vistas 0t ocher and gray. Sun scorched and blasted by the elements, the c0n~.

nent fanned like a snag of singed cloth cast on the jewel-toned sea. I~ 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 the~ power and ascendancy, the Paravians had shunned the place.

Arithon would find no reprieve in Kathtairr from the bane laid ~ him by the Mistwraith. If he gained brief escape through the ti r~~, he spent searching, for each year that passed, Lysaer s'Iles~id :~ul~ breed more killing sentiment against him. The longer the Kh~t~t'~tl~'i absence extended, the higher the stakes laid against the Shado~~' Nla~- ter's life.

Between Sorcerers, the issue had already been thrashed to e~.t~z~s.

tion. In desperate truth, their Fellowship dared not spurn the s~alle~t borrowed margin of time. They would, and had wreste~ tr~r~ Arithon's blind need that span of uneasy peace. Trapped then~-~.t~'~ in a race to stave off disaster, they labored to avert an unmenti, ~,~bl~ peril, compounded since the hour of the Mistwraith's confine~.r~t Sethvir straightened, blue-green eyes grown airy as mist. His ~ ~,r~ draped loose across the unfinished last paragraph on his parc~~:~,~,~t The quill slipped, forgotten, to drift on a whisper to the floor. Amid h~, sprawl of opened books, stained tea mugs, and his cluttered, stray odd- ments of feather and stone scavenged from excursions through ti~ meadows, he looked for all the world like a beak-nosed little grandra- ther, abandoned to senile daydreams.

In contrary fact, the Sorcerer's trained focus ranged far beyond i~.i~ tower library. Immersed in the broadscale vision of the earth link, tt~.

split train of his awareness encompassed all things, from the migi~t?

pull of Athera's riptides, to the rustle of solitary grass stems. The b~s~'

tracks of ants reached his ear, and the singular signatures of sand gr~ ~t~s banked in the gullies of the deserts. Sethvir could count at whim ti~, cries of the owl and the albatross, riding the wind's thermal curre~t~

84.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

ted hope of ;thvir knew im to keep.

. grained in earth link y vistas of ~, the conti- ned sea. Its ! extended, err.

~ and rock, rain to the ~s beyond ht of their ne laid on ~e time he id would Khetienn' s ow Mas- exhaus- smallest ed from ~raselyes ~tionable s fingers ~chment.

kmid his ray odd- ugh the ~randfa- 'ond his ink, the m~ghty he busy t grains 'tim the lrrents.

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 predse notes snagged in dissonance. Sethvir narrowed his sight to frame these, his brows tugged into worry like muddled cro- chet.

^ listening minute later, the Sorcerer moved on. Past the world's motley cloak of spun cloud, he traced the wheeling arc of the moon through deep vacuum, then left its grand dance to encompass the thin, singing tracks carved by stars.

The deeps of the void in between were not lifeless. A massive, near-complete ward construct spread for arc seconds in space. In fan curves, through ruled lines and joined angles that transected time, an intricate chain of seals spindled taut in lace point and sapphire, their phantom imprint a gemstone's planed facets cut intaglio on the dry dark. To the paired entities who labored to close the last gaps in the symmetry, Sethvir sent word, 'Arithon's made landfall on the far con ti- ller.'