The tearful child whimpered. The forward one shrank in tainty from the sting of her mild disapproval. Morriel offered boys no false reassurance. They would do best to fear her, friends and associates they made in maturity should share respect for her office. Like white-painted iron in the winds that keened off the waves of the bay, she also withheld missal. Her eyes fixed ahead like sheared chips of slag, and were unmoving marble.

The rift happened then, without any warning at all.

In one seamless second, she no longer inhabited the chilly autumn courtyard in Capewell. Ten centuries blurred; the friable webs of per- ception unraveled. The green fields of her village childhood resurged and wrapped her in sun and the fragrant, honeyed heat of summer haze. The boys who rolled tussling and yelling amid the new- sprouted barley were her dark-haired, dark-eyed little brothers.

Sprites who clung to her ruffled skirts while she simmered berries into preserves; who brought her their skinned knees and elbows to be nursed; who secreted live beetles inside her jars of dried rose petals.

She loved them like an addiction.

When her talent came on too strong to deny at sixteen, her parents had sent off the young plowman who sued for her handfasting. Deaf to her pleas and her stormy bouts of rage, they sent her dowry to the Koriani Order and pledged her to lifelong service. The boys became the tie that broke her heart. Scene followed scene as she suffered for their loss, huddled under blankets in the echoing, vaulted stone of the dormitory. She wept for her brothers, while merchants' daughters from Cildom bemoaned their lost gowns and jewels, and sly-faced craftgirls from Narms vied to take illicit lovers before the day they came to swear vows, and seal themselves forever to the celibate ways of an initiate enchantress.

Then the years, passing, and the demands of strict learning claimed all their youthful rebellion. Study of crystals, then endless practice with the sigils of power erased their differences of station.

Girls became women, at one with the Koriani Order, and few thoughts remained of the families abandoned in childhood.

The regrets which survived were the strong ones. Even after a 152.

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thousand years, Morriel Prime would not suffer her pages to resem- ble the brothers who had grown and gone on to mortal death. No one alive remembered their faces; how they had fared, or where they had breathed their last. If they sired descendants, those too were vanished into forgotten obscurity. The folk who had known them were genera- tions lost; their near kin gone to crumbled dust.

"Prime Matriarch?" A soft voice, then a tentative touch to her shoulder drilled her thought like electrified pain.

Morriel started. Her senses upset, awash in blind static. The moment became nightmare as she fought to reorient. Buffeted by the incongruous, fishy tang of winds blown off of salt water, she knew blank confusion more vast than the infinite dark beyond the veil.

Then eyesight returned with a burning, sharp rush. Two robed seniors waited to one side. Their inquiring, smooth faces should have been known to her. Yet her memory would yield up no names; their identities blurred into thousands of others, until rank and personality failed to take on any semblance of importance.

The panic hit then, a slippery, dark wall too sheer for trained calm or reason. Fear yawned before her, that she might never recover her sense of time and place. Morriel shut translucent, webbed eyelids.

She willed her breath steady while the trip-hammer pound of her heart threatened to burst through the walls of her chest. Years of forced discipline let her clasp the quartz pendant at her throat. The focusing properties of its matrix should let her grope out the right thread of recent memory.

But that remedy failed her. Sharp, questing thought slid past her guard and mired in the stone's composite layers of stored imprints.

She had outlived her time. The crystal she wielded held a thousand years of memory, too long a span for a reactive mineral to stay in unbroken contact with breathing flesh. Past due for cleansing, any stone's burdened matrix would develop an ornery character.

Its obstructive nature mocked her now, as if to expose her rank weakness. She regained no connection to the facts she required, but fell into the deluge of residual memories left behind by former primes: the disparate, echoed fragments of bygone personalities, strained at random from her use of the Great Waystone.

Morriel choked back a scream, beat down the visceral terror, that her last recollection of her name and identity might be mazed into the stewed thoughts of dead predecessors.

That instant, like a pane of snapped glass, the disorientation cleared away. As if the cogs of her mind had never once slipped, Mor- riel recognized the swept, white stone of the courtyard at Capewell's 153.

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orphanage. Against mortised coping and soft, southern marble ished by weathering rains, two small boys stood before her in fled obedience, shivering in the north wind.

Though they must learn in due time to wait on her needs, today's lesson was unduly harsh; Morriel blinked Fightless, jet eyes, chilled herself, and uneasy. If age had eroded her grip on self-command, she had small choice but behave as if no lapse had upset her sound judg- ment. "Have my new pages taken to the seamstress to be fitted for proper livery."

"Your will, matriarch." The younger initiate shouldered the task, though the bands on her robes marked a rank far above petty errands.

The middle-aged enchantress stayed silent in respect while the courtyard was cleared of small boys.

Morriel refused any moment to compose herself. The dread could take root like moss in dim comers, that a second slip might over- whelm her. Until Lirenda was fully trained to replace her, she must permit no breach of faith in her competence. "You bring news?" she prompted, then gestured her formal leave to speak.

The enchantress gave proper obeisance, and said, "Matriarch, our clairvoyant received word from the lane-watcher stationed in Tide- port. She wished you informed that Arithon of Rathain has made his return to the continent."

Morriel's interest took fire. "In Tysan? I thought so!" She wheezed through a gravelly laugh. "Very well! The hour has come to start f0rc- ing the Fellowship's hand." A snake's eye glitter of diamond pins loured from under her hood as she delivered imperious instructions.

"I'll require a closed audience with your most gifted clairvoyant. She will send my instructions through the lane-watchers. Afterward, summon your two newest initiates and direct them to attend me in the observatory. Once I have admitted them, let no one interrupt or unseal the chamber until I emerge or give leave."

The enchantress in attendance showed surprise. Such obvious steps to undertake a grand conjury would not usually proceed with- out steps to inform the First Senior of momentous events. "You don't wish a messenger sent on to Lirenda at Valenford?"

"How dare you ever think to question my rule!" Morriel cut back in distemper.

"I bow to your will, matriarch." The initiate took chastened leave, the displeasure of her Prime like the stab of an auger at her back.

The observatory built into the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell was an edifice evolved through the contrary styles of seven centuries. The 154.

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dainty, five-sided bronze cupola and the fancifully shuttered case- ments which overlooked the town's roof peaks were the latecoming 0maments of folly. Mossy stone walls and the flint sills of old revet- ments bespoke grimmer beginnings as a watchtower. From its origi- nal vantage, merchants had counted inbound ships at the quay. The stone had been reset with arrow slits later, when townsmen fortified against vengeance-bent clansmen through the unsettled years of the uprising. The observatory built on when the keep was roofed over now served as a chamber consecrated for fine magic.

The inside air had gone musty since the pierced shutters were darkened with sheets of tarnished silver. Candles of incense-soaked wax fluttered on the shelves of the sills. The inviting, cushioned benches that once lined the walls were reframed as cupboards with bronze hinges. Door fronts and portals had all been replaced with unpainted oak panels, cut green, dried in fire, then inset with the knotty, counterlooped copper of a thousand runes of ward. Each latch had been painstakingly welded, then sealed by tin sigils with guard spells to deflect any outside prying. The old, timbered floors were flagged over in black slate, unpolished to accept the scribed traceries and seals of forced power.

There, an emaciated predator poised over a webwork of ciphers, Morriel Prime crouched with a sliver of chalk in her hand. If the con- struct she patterned against the Fellowship's constraints showed a calculated, terrifying complexity, its driving plot was most simple: since the Sorcerers placed undue value on Prince Arithon's life, he was himself made the key to arrange their coercion.

Capture the Master of Shadow as a pawn, and for fear of the threat lying latent upon Marak, the Seven must bow to Koriani demand.

Better than most, Sethvir must own up to the stakes: Morriel would seize upon any provocation to see the Teir's'Ffalenn dead. Indeed, the Prime deeply preferred to end his misspent royal life to forestall the prophesied threat to her succession.

Between each tormented step of her labor, the withered, old Matri- arch cursed the crux that bred such necessity. With spiteful care, she etched chain after chain of linked ciphers in her wretched, crabbed script. Here and there, as line crossed line, or a finishing sigil raised latent energies, a sulfurous light flared from the contact. Shed glare lined her hooked profile, fleeting as the flit of a sunbeam. The air became glued into uneasy clarity, until the tapping scrape of her chalk ripped the quiet like the snap of flint-struck sparks.

Morriel shuffled another step, closed another circle. The rune signs might skip like torn stitches beneath her palsied, frail touch, yet the 155.

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vectored arcs laid to move summoned forces stayed precise, scribed by a master mason using a pin compass and cord. At the c ter of the floor where the sigils converged stood a low tripod.

looped in a silver cradle and masked in black silk, the Waystone stood waiting, center point for the uncoiling layers of riel's enveloping snare.

Regarding its draped globe in stifled apprehension were the young initiates Morriel had chosen to serve her. Though the tered, fireless chamber was chilly, both girls clasped the folds of gray robes. Fresh from their novitiate, wholly by experience, they waited to give what was asked. When their straightened up from her scribery and bid them to place at the north and south poles of her construct, they accepted their in stilled dread.

"Be seated," Morriel commanded. When she asked them a deep trance, they knew, but dared make no protest. They take active part in this spellcasting, but serve as its passive As their Prime required, energy, talent, even life force itself become siphoned from them. By the strict oath of obedience to the'~ order, their Prime Matriarch could demand any sacrifice against the needs of greater humanity.

"For the mercy of the world," Morriel exhorted them, "do exactly as you are told. I will be threading your personal energies through the Great Waystone. No margin exists for your weakness."

Minutes passed, sluggish under the weight of pent powers. The Prime visited both initiates in turn and collected the summoning crystal each one wore at her neck. She traced each with a sigil, then performed the Prirne's invocation to claim and attune their personal powers under her dominion. Time assumed the drugged torpor of dreaming as the circles upon the observatory floor were called active and dedicated to the secret, dark side of the moon. Mystery pulsed through the febrile veil which tied life to its housing of flesh. The paired initiates felt as though a misdrawn breath might shatter the whole firmament of creation into eddies of glittering current.

Then Morriel spoke a word in command. She clapped withered hands, and the spells of prime power claimed the girls, spirit and mind.

All now lay in readiness. The Koriani Matriarch advanced to the tripod. She slipped off its covering cloth, the smoothness of silk a cruel contrast to her ruined flesh. Her skin had grown so translucent with years, at times, she seemed but a spectral shadow, unreal to her own tactile senses.

This moment the allure of death's peace left her hollow. She sorely 156.

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missed Lirenda's support. If a relapse of blocked memory should daim her now, she had no one to anchor her through the perils which lay ahead. Each time she raised the Waystone's great focus, she shoul- dered the risk that her will might become overwhelmed. Yet the stakes at play to arrange tonight's plot had never before been so dire.

Age had unstrung her sure grasp of self-awareness. Should the cross- grained old jewel finally defeat her, the Koriani Order must continue.

Lest this hour's work come to frame her last act, the untried girls who backed this spell's pattern were expendable, as the handpicked suc- cessor to prime office was not.

Steeled, heart and will, by fatalistic resolve, Morriel cupped fleshless palms around the faceted amethyst. Its cold pierced in dousing waves to her marrow as she eased into trance. Perhaps for the last time, she locked horns with its spite and grappled to wield its dire focus.

If Fellowship meddling had curbed the stone's reach, its innate strength was untouched. Charged to the familiar, freewheeling exhil- aration, restored to the pinnacle of power and command, Morriel bent will to accomplish her desire.

If Sethvir had granted the earth backdoor wisdom to encumber the stone with permissions, the works of man were exempt. She still ruled quarried stone and the milled timbers of buildings, bridges, and diked roadways. The signature energies of individuals left vulnerable through trusting, blind ignorance remained subject to the Waystone's spelled influence. Although the Teir's'Ffalenn's training as a master mage made him elusive prey, his return to the continent had occa- sioned him to accept other company on the road. The former clan war captain, Caolle, offered as volatile a personality as any tracking enchantress could wish. The signature seals of the spellbinder's glam- our which disguised him with scars and slurred speech tagged his presence. Each move he made flared small pulses of static through the world's tracery of magnetic current.

Searched out by the Waystone's piercing focus, Caolle's course blazed like a beacon. Past, present, and future, his movements could be scryed as cleanly as text marked on parchment.

Given such infallible guidance to dog his liege's footsteps, the Prime became the more cautious. The weavings to entrap the Master of Shadow must be wrought with consummate care. Dakar was a Fel- lowship spellbinder, and guarded. Though Arithon's talents were left blank and blinded since his past misuse of grand conjury, he still held a masterbard's arcane hearing and a trained mage's eye for nuance.

The disharmony raised by hostile intent would unsettle his keen sense of empathy.

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The interface must therefore be indirect. In velvet-gloved Morriel wrought. From the riverside tavern where her quarry slept, she quested among the dust in the floorboards. Her search yielded three flecks of stubble left from Arithon's grooming. Bei0re the inn's chambermaid arrived to sweep, minute sparks of energy flared in the candleless gloom. The Prime's first tendril of sp~'llcrafl embraced those cut snippets of hair, then wound their purl0ined essence, ephemeral as spun moonlight, into a personal signature to guide the course of her snare.

Next, the Prime Enchantress launched into deep augury. She traced the course of event yet to come, sounding the probabilities of Arith0n's close movements as he mounted his foray in Tysan. She narro~'ed the vast might of the Waystone into tightest, fine focus, and targeted those actions her quarry was likely to take. Then she played the full r~T~e 0i probabilities and allowed for the utmost array of cont'mgencies.

A trap of such delicacy could not follow a schedule. Chanc~ action held too wide a range to predict the precise timing of event. l~ther than structure her plot into a single, inflexible binding, th~, l'rin~e instead tied its course to multiple chains of tagged markers.

This board in a bridge that Arithon might cross on his travels: ~10r- riel set a hair-fine tendril of spellcraft into the wood's grain that would trigger in response to his passage. Here the wax lamps in a taver~'s taproom were hazed in small spells of recognition; there, a ferryma~t's rope on the shores of the Ilswater became twined in ciphers of watch Next, signposts en route to Riverton were tied into the growing tapestry, then people drawn in as well. That official in the royal shi?- yard who would need to be bribed or misled; a cipher of listening ~'as laced through his jeweled chain of office, keyed to Arithon's v~ice.

Specific cobblestones in certain city streets; the carvings on doorl~,bs or lintels; then the gate latches of every harborside inn: all because knotted into the weave of an ever so subtle array of spellcraft.

Morriel was patient. She had need to be thorough. One overlooked possibility, and the whole linked network would fail. Her grand con- struct was shaped, one step to the next, through infinitesimal incre- ments of care. Then each separate facet was masked in a glamour.

Dakar's watchful eye must be made to turn elsewhere, through a loosened board set to cause him a stumble; or else the lurking pres- ence of her embroidery of seals must be groomed to mimic the natu- ral resonance of stone, or wood, or wrought metal.

Across the path of Arithon's future, Morriel seeded her small barbs and hooks. To these, in ingenious, connected succession, she attached the seals and small ciphers to drive Arithon into her net. This rumor 158.

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would find its way to the lips of a street beggar; that hunch would prompt a certain volatile clansman to raise a round of inquiry and search. When the orchestrated moment arrived for the coup, Arithon s'Ffalenn would be flushed from cover and hazed into desperate flight.

Morriel burned reckless power, affirmed and cross-checked every venue of possibility. Her labors cased options until no choice her quarry might try could win free of her invidious design. She adjusted and fine-tuned; twined tortuous traps in tight spirals.

On this hour, when every likely auspice came aligned, an ancient book from the Koriani Order's closed libraries would fall into the hands of a scholar who owed a sworn debt of service. The knowledge and the man would make their way to Lysaer; then war galleys would arm and cast hawsers and sail. The Mistwraith's curse would engage with its victims, and in the heat of its geas-bent obsession, the s'Ffalenn pawn could be spirited away.

A criminal who endangered society would be curbed, and the Fel- lowship of Seven be served its timely comeuppance.

Only the last, great sigil of ending remained to seal the chain of augured event. Tinged nitrous violet by the glow of the Great Way- stone, Morriel grimaced like a skull. Never had she worked so elab- orate a conjury upon resources pressed to such limits. While the daylight hours fled into night, then the starry sky paled and birthed the new dawn, she sensed a deep-down, burning discomfort. She had drained reckless power and now suffered sharp warning her strength ran dangerously low.

She pressed on, wrung what she needed to steady herself from the pair of initiates bound to her use through the Waystone. Were the crystal not restored back to unfettered potency, mankind's rightful legacy would stay jeopardized; the Koriani charge to restore civiliza- tion to lost grace would remain threatened by Arithon s'Ffalerm. Mor- riel did not equivocate. She spent ruthless force to shape that last cipher, and set final linkage between the disparate, trip-wire elements arrayed to bring Rathain's prince to defeat.

At the last, the squared circle of sigils dragged at her mind like spilled needles. Exhaustion leached her will, pulled like unseen fin- gers against her weak housing of flesh. Willful as old iron, the Kori- ani Prime reached out again to tap the initiates who stood as her anchors.

Something went wrong. The smooth flow of power summoned to her hands ripped through a sharp hesitation. One of the young women rejected the sacrifice, perhaps touched by the sudden, cutting panic of instinctive self-preservation. Betrayed in her need, Morriel 159.

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felt the balance of raised spells veer awry. She screamed in rebu~ The forces she grappled seemed shadow and flame, two opposite ele- ments bent toward unbiddable destruction. Lacking her flawless and rigid control, the whole construct could fold into backlash.

Morriel perceived no safe avenue. Poised at the crux, taxed past the limit of her visceral frailties, she grappled harsh fact: without months of recovery, she could never retrace all the steps of this complex c0n- jury. Should this construct tear itself asunder, the iagged vibrations 0f its collapse would burst even the most rigorous protections. Sethvi~ would stand warned. The priceless opportunity to suborn the Fellow- ship would be thrown away for one faithless initiate's weakness.

Fury seared through Morriel Prime. Well aware her demands must claim the life of the loyal enchantress who held firm, even still, she engaged her act for necessity.

Power flared up, too bright, too frenetic. Morriel lashed lawless forces into order, used the channel of the Waystone to reaffirm her cleared will. She jo'med the last sigil. Her drawn-out, wrenching cry 0f effort rocked the room. Then the dregs of her strength bled away.

Slumped in collapse, her cheek laid to rest on the burning-ice sphere of the amethyst, she gasped out the ritual chant to blinder the jewel's roused focus.

No space to wonder, that these words might shape her last act. Her heart raced and throbbed. Each breath rasped like steel filings in her throat. Vast blackness devoured her senses. While the fires in the heart of the great crystal blazed low and flickered at last to quies- cence, the spark of her will bled away.

Morriel Prime closed her eyes. Alongside the risk she might never reawaken, she measured the sum of her efforts.

A momentous labor was done. Time and the unwinding course of events would spring string upon string of chained triggers. Let the scryed snares in her construct play through, and Arithon s'Ffalenn would walk a doomed path into capture. First Senior Lirenda would be called to assume the mantle of prime power. If she held strong, if she proved a fit vessel, the memories of past Primes locked into the Waystone would rise up to channel and guide her.

Morriel rested content with the chance she had snatched back lost hope, and salvaged the legacy her sisterhood preserved for posterity.

With the Fellowship brought to heel and the Shadow Master curbed, the Koriani Order could preside over mankind's freed future.

160.

Autumn 5652 Marvel [:~ ~' his diplomatic visit to Etarra in the eastern Kingdom of Rathain, ~. ~aer s'Ilessid and his sumptuous state retinue would avoid the Ii~a l dein passes. Ship's captains seldom dared the North Cape, where tidal rips cut the inlets of a savage, volcanic shoreline. The overland routes through Camris to MiraIt Head were preferred by the autumn L~~'avans, as wayfarers and trade goods raced to meet the last of the .~tbound trade fleets. Before winter churned Stormwell Gulf to a stew of ice floes and spindrift, a raffish breed of northcoast galleymen ;t',~ t uiged their sharp rivalries, driving their oarsmen in relentless, fast t~.~ssage to the ports across Instrell Bay.

Late warmth was wont to linger in the scrub-grown flatlands of Karmak. Each year the alkaline soil of the plain lay ground to fine powder by the ox drays. Leaves and brambles entangled on the verges and wilted under a coating of grit, while air draped like gauze in late-season haze bore a windborne tang of churned dust. The progress of Lysaer's cavalcade raised muffled thunder in the pow- dery footing. The endless squealing of cart axles, the chink of brass harness, and the sifting grime fouling their trappings drove the prince's guard to clenched teeth. Tempers flared, and armor chafed, and meals came infested with sand.

Six days beyond Erdane, the low ground still stretched the same on all sides. A tireless sun stabbed glare off the rocks, and the horseboys were too parched to whistle.

FIoro. the mettlesome company chosen to spearhead the prince's 161.

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retinue rode in a squint'rag, watchful wedge. They slapped at which lit on their horses and cursed others that escaped to bite flesh.

"We should make MiraIt Head by tomorrow noon," ventured the company's captain, a grizzled former headhunter with a craggy pro file and tough hands like silk on his reins. The hair on his wrists sprang in tufts through caked grime as he scraped gritted sweat from his chin. "That's if the camp cook can pack up his crockery without hounding his fool scullion for laziness."