Always made to feel unnatural before others endowed with the nurturing, female instincts, Lirenda arose. She closed a chilled hand over the icier brass of the latch. Her untamed thrill of anticipation never showed as she set herself to violate her Prime's most guarded confidence. Aware that such elaborate defenses might stem from a need to thwart observation from the Fellowship, Lirenda loosed the bar. She pushed the portal inward, pressured by passions she had striven all her life to contain.

The door swung wide to a whisper of pressed air. Darkness beyond hung like unmarked slate, sliced through by shining lines of argent.

Morriel's spell construct sheared across gloom in breath-stopping, mas- terful splendor. Circle upon square, each interstice sang in meticulous balance, multiple layers of enchained sigils looped in knots like fili- gree wire trapped in felt. The weave displayed an unnerving complex- ity, centrally anchored by a stayspell which fixed its point of origin in 212.

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the past. Lirenda found herself mazed into wonder. Those entangling radiants resisted translation, nor could dazzled eyesight track every spiral, which channeled the conjury's influence outward to arc through an unformed future.

At a predestined moment, this majestic array of spells would resolve and shape an event of Morriel's design. "Merciful maker!" Lirenda breathed in awe.

Imagination foundered. The effects of stark beauty and sheer terror stopped her breath. Sparked to hot jealousy and raging despair, she knew beyond question her skills were inadequate to match such a broadscale endeavor. If Morriel Prime had passed the Wheel into death, that one shortfall might brand her successor forever. Lirenda coveted the knowledge not yet in her hands with a passion of savage proportion.

The paradox stymied her raging ambition.

Either she waited to assume the supreme mantle of her order, or she lived all her days galled by the loss of an irreplaceable legacy. A live Prime Matriarch or a shriveled corpse: the cipher which entan- gled her destiny lurked in fusty darkness, coiled inside of those per- ilous, dagger-edged spells.

The peeress's tentative inquiry shattered her furious thought. "Did anyone survive?"

Lirenda called back through the entry, "I'm not sure yet." She drew a steadying breath, freighted with smells of dank stone and charred herbs, but no reek of corrupted flesh. An untrustworthy reassurance, since the might of the inaugural stayspell itself would arrest the pro- gression of decay. Nor could she plumb the silence with spells. Wards drawn and laid on the axis of the earth were not permeable. Even cur- sory review showed the outermost circle demarked a sealed pocket in time.

The purpose which guided the construct stayed hidden. To know Morriel's fate and recover the Great Waystone, her successor must bridge those dire protections, then walk the convoluted maze to its center.

"You may enter the observatory," Lirenda informed the peeress.

"I'll need a wise senior to keep vigil."

Three tentative steps masked in rustling cloth; then the stunned gasp as the enchantress arrived and shared sight of the construct's magnificence. "First Senior, for prudence, the safest course would be a ritual cleansing to unmake every line of that patterning."

"I know. Yet we daren't." No flutter ruffled Lirenda's poise as she cupped the spell crystal strung on silver chain at her neck. "The 213.

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importance of this design must be paramount. How dare we counter- mand our Prime's signal will? I fear worse, to unravel the least vector of power without knowing the reason for her act of self-sacrifice."

The peeress smoothed back a loose wisp of hair, ill at ease in the face of necessity. "Be cautious, First Senior, for all of our sakes. With the world brought to strife by the works of cursed princes, the Kori- ani Order cannot afford to lose both Prime and successor."

Lirenda stared back, her eyes impenetrable as flawed amber "I will not fail. And Morriel might still be recovered alive."

Too aware the ordeal would test every facet of her training, she dis- patched her final instructions. "Stay alert. If the energy flow in the sigils tums sour, don't rely on the wards of containment. Collapse the construct immediately, and close the door with a grave seal."

The peeress stepped back, torn into reluctant discomfort. "Your will, First Senior."

But already, Lirenda forged ahead. The chain in her hand stitched cobalt reflections across gloom as she bent her trained mind through the crystal, then dangled its focus as a pendulum over the rimwards of Morriel Prime's outer circle.

Just as a mirror would give back the light, the quartz caught vibra- tions in resonance. Attuned through its matrix, Lirenda allowed the stone's captured energy to suffuse the waiting, blank eye of her con- sciousness. Guided by discipline, she allowed Morriel's work to imprint its pattern in her mind.

Guard and defense, the ward showed her emptiness, a fathomless well of negative space to freeze breathing flesh and stop the heart.

The crystal spun deosil on its chain. A hint of a smile bowed Lirenda's rose lips. She advanced a half stride widdershins, her quartz poised above the figured ward. Its clear facets flashed like flaked mica, whirling faster, then faster still. Lirenda took another step. The jewel flared brighter, a blue spark gouged out of stygian dark. Still the fleezing void gripped its interface, translating through to her mind.

The draw of the circle was steady in deception, its blankness cloaked in a numbing, seductive sense of peace. Lirenda stayed guarded. A Prime Matriarch's protections were to be feared. Any gap in her personal defenses, and the ward's shrouding vacuum would sweep past control and smash her link to conscious memory. An infi- nite expanse of null energy would draw spirit from flesh, and see her lost utterly and forever.

Lirenda trod the rim of the construct, her palms lightly sweating, the chain between her pinched fingers a vibrating thread whirled by a 214.

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crystal tuned to madness. Step upon step, she sought the one cipher of opening that should be wrought into every formal conjury fash- ioned under Koriani auspices.

Another pace, another; the spinning quartz raised a faint, waspish hum from the chain. The darkness with its smells of tarnish and dust shrouded the edges of vision. Light-headed with strain, Lirenda forced burning eyes back to focus. She refused the undermining dread, that Morriel's design might have omitted the sigil she required for access.

That moment the chain jerked. Its tethered crystal snapped the links rigid and hung as if nailed to the earth.

Lirenda wrung out a sigh of relief. Her nerve was iron and her left hand precise as she raised power and engaged the prime successor's cipher through the heart of her focus crystal. The quartz flared acid yellow in reply. As that key answered its matching lock, a handspan arc of the ward circle flickered from blue to acidic gold. The access point opened.

Lirenda crossed the abyss. Dread forces held in abeyance through her passage scoured her nerves into tingles. Her skin felt scraped by razor-edged steel and her vision blanched into static. She had no per- ception, no balance, no will. Only faith assured safe completion of her step. Reason and substance reassembled at last as her foot came back down on solid stone. She was through. The blinding veils tore away.

Around her, entombed stone and dusty darkness hung with an alkaline scent of chalk. Hemmed by the impeccable vibrations of the wards, Lirenda settled her riled senses. Her course was committed.

From the moment she engaged with the spell's inner workings, the sigil which granted her entry would fade. Should Morriel still live, the pattern must be followed through to its end without disturbing the least, subtle vector of laid force. Had Morriel died, Lirenda must survive to contain whatever raging chaos had brought her Prime Matriarch's downfall.

Possessed by a clean, analytical calm, Lirenda surveyed her prospects. Behind her, the defense wards glimmered their fixed, arctic blue. Ahead, scribed in lines like hot fire, the active core of the con- jury blazed like a slow fuse, bound to its preset course. The slate slabs underfoot wore a glimmer of chalked sigils, the inaugural runes dimmed to spiderworked tracks where the energy had consumed itself in completion. Among them, Lirenda picked out bronze pans of spent ashes arrayed at each point of the compass. The scents of charred herbs had long since melded into the ambient dust, yet the 215.

~:~i: ~ JANNY WURTS placement tied the construct through space and distance in ritual alignment with the land.

Lirenda wadded her cloak hem and skirts into the grip of cramped fingers, that no haphazard eddy could smear the febrile chains of dead ciphers. She eased her way along the inner rim of the ward cir- cle until she found the Paravian rune, An, which meant prime, or one, or beginning, and without which no work of Koriani spellcraft could be engaged on Athera.

The significating figure interlaced with that rune seemed a knot- work of arcs, configured with maddening intricacy. Lirenda paused there, confounded. This elaborate work of conjury did not frame the foil she expected against interference by Fellowship Sorcerers. Ham- pered by the unsettled light, the Prime Senior freed her quartz and chain for another arcane sounding. She dangled the crystal above the faint chalk lines, hopeful, yet no residual energy remained for the stone to recapture in resonance. She had no alternative but to retire the sigil, lend it a spark from her own conjured will to trace its origi- nal vibration. The quartz as her focus, she bent her will through the matrix. A lifetime of training enabled its virtue to channel her talent into an applicable force.

She stilled curiosity to listening silence, then threaded a tenuous connection. The lines on the floor responded and flared a fleeting, subliminal purple. Their imprinted resonance surged through the quartz link, and touched her ready awareness.

She grasped that the construct framed the individual Name for a man, but no more.

Her sounding of his analog presence stormed through her like tide, an unassailable, blanketing warmth of connection that shattered all pride and restraint. Lirenda could summon no breath for denial; her stunned mind allowed her no grace for retreat. His innate compassion sheared like struck lightning across the quartz interface, to flash-burn her frozen emotions. Unwanted fascination held her in thrall, while integrity unraveled before a force like winged song, an aching, pure expression of melody that pealed through her woman's heart and filled all the hollowness within her.

Lost as she touched what could never be hers within bounds of the Koriani Order, Lirenda cried out. However she cringed and postured, this one man held the potential capacity to know her. His intuitive awareness could strip away pretense and lay bare the self she kept hidden.

Every buried sorrow escaped from containment as water might burst from shocked glass: all of a young girl's mute yearning to refute 216.

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her mother's withering criticism. Cosseted by wealth and strict expectations, hounded to polished deportment, Lirenda still harbored the sawing, helpless misery left by her childhood feelings of useless- ness. Her bleeding retreat from self-expression, then the refuge she carved out of rigid perfectionism had matured to a gnawing ambi- tion. Hurt long denied now became pleasure thwarted, until the mask she wore ripped away. Her present existence became useless motion, a dance step play of meaningless shadows.

Inner barriers crumbled as the male presence tied through Mor- riel's spell invited her to discard empty posturing and anneal her whole being into change.

Stranger to herself, spun giddy by a siren call to cast off restraint and embrace the freedom of laughter, Lirenda understood that her armor of reserve might dissolve at a touch and bare her vulnerable heart. One man might command such power to change her. She gasped, torn through by a savagery of need beyond the bounds of her past experience. Fear snapped her poise. She gave way to a firestorm of tears, when in callous fact, she had never before let self-pity over- whelm her.

Her violated pride at last sparked true rage, to stab through rank turmoil and redeem her.

Hurled back into still, dusty dark and the comfortless flare of sealed spells, Lirenda knelt in the suffocating velvet of her formal robes of high office. Her quartz pendant and chain hung slack in her hands, as though bone, flesh, and nerve had been scorched. Ath, Ath preserve, she knew this man's nature, with his devastating, forthright perception of hidden truths. Never mind he was a living danger to the world, with no thought at all for her dedicated life inside the Kori- ani Order. His existence was a threat to unstring heart and mind, then whirl her like a moth to its brainless immolation in a lantern flame.

Alone in chill darkness, Lirenda gasped a vengeful curse on his name. For the lynchpin of the construct Morriel had conjured held none else but the imprinted signature for Arithon, Prince of Rathain.

The discovery wounded like double-edged steel, that the Shadow Master's fate lay entangled with Koriani destiny. Lirenda locked her teeth in frustrated resentment. Of course, the Prime Matriarch must suspect her hidden weakness for the ill-starred Teir's'Ffalenn. No other reason expla'med Morriel's need to tie his movements in dire spells and secrecy.

Lirenda stood. A twisted cry escaped her. Arithon, unholy fires of creation, Arithon s'Ffalenn had been the instrument of disaster to trig- ger the Matriarch's downfall. The irony all but choked her, that he 217.

JANNY WURTS.

might also became the signal turn of fate to transfer the reins of prime power into her impatient hands. The reason why remained twined with the riddle behind Morriel's grand conjury.

Between the glacial glimmer of the defense ward and the surging, core brilliance of active magecraft, the chalked chains of ciphers which keyed the spell's purpose extended in tangling spirals. Lirenda released the crushed links of silver embedded into her palm. Unable to quell the tremor in her knees, she buffed the clammy fog of perspi- ration from her crystal. The misfortune of Arithon's Name as signifi- cator posed a most thorny complication.

Her annoyance found voice in startling venom. "Merciful Ath, prince, if Morriel's died of this, you'll regret the light of day that saw you born."

Lirenda grasped her quartz and rapped out a cantrip to raise a spark of illumination. Its firefly glow caught the rune Shayn, for two, stitched through the seals of a tracking spell. The locus which keyed its activation sprang from a riverside inn along the Ilswater in Tysart.

Slaved to that sequence, Lirenda uncovered the Name form for Dakar, then Caolle's as well, hooked and tagged by the spellbinder's glamour to disguise his native clan accent. The reason for the triad presented no mystery. Morriel had wished to trace Arithon's move- ments. As safeguard against his wily nature, she tied in his henchmen to assure an unbroken connection.

The lines off the third figure held branching complexity. Lirenda recognized the triplicate axis of the seer's rune, then the mazed ciphers for diversion and secrecy, joined to trigger threads for a deli- cate array of spring traps. The spell became more than a straightfor- ward scrying. Morriel had wrought against the code of the Koriani Order to curtail the freedom of a prince.

Lirenda refused to pass judgment for that transgression of found- ing principle. Arithon s'Ffalenn was a catalyst of unprecedented and volatile potential. Discomfited herself by unruly attraction, she saw too well how his influence had once spoiled the faith of a promising young initiate. Perhaps in the greater reach of her wisdom, Morriel Prime saw past Elaira's tragic defection to some threat to the sister- hood at large. Or worse: the might of this construct may well have been raised to shield Lirenda herself from temptation. Koriani code held no recourse. Any romantic entanglement would disbar her from prime succession.

"Never that," the First Senior avowed, shamed by demeaning pos- sibility. Hatred scorched through her, that the man could exist with potential to tear the least flaw in her loyalty.

218.

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She pressed on to shed her embarrassment. Meticulous strings of sigils fanned into a widening net, until Arithon's movements were not only traced, but stalked outright. As the first chains of circum- stance branched right and left to rearrange destiny and entrap, Lirenda felt no surprise. By then, leading evidence established his role as Morriel's earmarked quarry. The progression unfolded with diabolical care, the Prime's plot stitched unerringly through Arithon's machinations at Riverton to suborn Lysaer's royal ship- yard.

Lirenda deciphered the unwinding course of events, forced to admire the artistry of invention, as a bard's salty repertoire made the Laughing Captain a haunt for sailhands and shipwrights. Through a season's cagey dealings with Cattrick, while Dakar blunted his wor- ries through drink, Morriel's neat craft passed unnoticed. Spring trap and trigger, Arithon's course became flanked in a narrowing channel, scribed in surreptitious power and plain chalk.

Lirenda paused to stretch a cramp from her hand. The crystal on its chain had warmed from hard use. She nestled it between her palms and chanted clearing cantrips, while her arcane connection to a frag- ment of happenstance reeled on to display a spectral recast of a dia- logue spoken days since. The trace resonance of sound preserved by spent sigils cast whispered echoes through the deadened air of the observatory...

'When's the next launching?' murmured a flaxen-haired bard in a voice unmistakably Arithon's, while from a tucked pose in a scarlet- cushioned window seat, the broad-shouldered master of Tysan's royal shipyard weighed his every word with the slit-eyed contention of a lynx.

'Next week,' Cattrick drawled. 'The gilders are still fussing with her brightwork. If the riggers and splicers are left to their gnashing row over top- ping lifts, the shakedown could stretch a bit longer.' A pause for a smile of provocative, white teeth. 'You know this brig's going to be tougher. The disappearance of the last was blamed on green officers, so this time they've assigned the tried and trusty.'

The bard sheared a needle-bright chord from his lyranthe. Under his hands the music held laughter, belied by the shaded intensity of the gaze stilled and trained upon Cattrick. 'Your craft is the building of excellent ships. My share of the fun is to steal them.'

The spelled record dimmed, faded back into fusty trails of chalk.

Lirenda blinked, brought back to herself. She had screened the 219.

JANNY ~URTS.

final spent frames of the construct. Ahead stretched the fire-strung nets of live power, preset for events yet to come.

The interface with the present spread at her feet, and the next sounding she touched would be volatile. Contact might jar the uncoil- ing precision of the spe11's influence. Arithon s'Ffalenn still possessed trained awareness. Blind instinct could warn him if she raised a dis- turbance. Now, the least misstep would unbalance the conjurjz The smallest disruption of pent power could destroy her if an inadvertent move chanced to unravel the delicate bindings.

Lirenda blotted a forehead rinsed in sweat. Around her, the obser- vatory seemed a sealed tomb; cold dark wrapped its core of inferno.

Loop upon loop of slaved power lay spring wound and cocked, awaiting the moment of release. Lirenda strove to read the fine lines inked like magma across the dark. The dazzle whirled her to dizzi- ness, and the Great Waystone remained beyond view. Aware she must risk direct contact through visions, she knew visceral fear. The danger before her was no longer malleable. Should she once lose con- trol inside those nets of voracious power, naught would remain of frail flesh and bone but an immolated silt of white ash.

Carried by her unbending determination, Lirenda stilled her awareness. Blank as cooled glass, she stamped down her traitorous, cringing unease, raised her jewel on its chain, and doused its bared facets in the surging, live current of the spell. As the upending rush of seer's vision claimed her, she braced herself to receive...

The taproom was jammed to an airless, close heat of packed bodies and uproarious noise. By nightfall, drawn in from the frost and the leaden chill of coastal winter, every yard craftsman and beached sailhand in Riverton crammed into the Laughing Captain. Celebration ruled the hour. That day had seen a successful royal launching. The new brig rode at anchor behind the seawail, sparkling with lanterns hooked to her yards as the riggers tied in her last running lines. The crew selected to man her for shakedown attended the madhouse festivity. They sat apart, under orders to moderate their drink.

Despite the close eye of an iron-willed captain, they howled with laughter and accepted the beer mugs passed across by congratulatory friends.

Only the bard at the settle had elbow room. With the same stilled decep- tion of a storm's sunlit eye, he stirred the jammed room to a feverish, wild energy through a reeling succession of dance tunes. The crowd responded, and stamped, and roared with fine spirits, dry tinder raked for the spark.

Dakar's clumsy, inebriated trip came perfectly timed to fetch against a bald sailor. The pair of them toppled in a tangling heap, and a trestle crashed over to a flying gush of spilled beer. A bystander's screeched insult provoked 220.

PRINCE.

a swung,fist. From behind their captain's cordon, several of the brig's crew laughed and shouted in scathing amusement. As though uncoiled from a spell, an agile little caulker whose dinner had been upset snatched a pitcher from a barmaid's laden tray. He hurled its foamy contents to silence the ridicule and doused their small pocket of decorum. Through yells of blind outrage, the bard's measures changed key, then leaped a surreptitious beat faster. His disingenuous skill burned the very air to abandon, while tempers frayed red, and brawlers set to and sowed mayhem across the packed tap- room...

"Dharkaron curse the man's effrontery!" Lirenda swore as scried vision dissolved and freed thought.

Lysaer's handpicked sailhands had been fearlessly targeted, and a fool's guess could forecast outcome. To sideline the men of unswerv- ing crown loyalty assigned to choice berths on the brig, the boneset- ters in Riverton would be given a busy night's work. Arithon would claim his diabolical triumph as the scheduled shakedown raised sail with an alternate crew.

Burning to uncover how Morriel's construct might serve the s'Ffalenn prince his comeuppance, Lirenda mapped a parallel strand in the weave. She found a fresh spring trap interlinked to a marvel of scried forecast, and already engaged by the Riverton launching. The construct arced across distance and time, and conjoined with another, inset with the trefoil seal of a sworn obligation. Some m'mor Name who bore oath of debt to the Koriani Order received his call to deliver due service.

In the stale dark of the observatory, under roof beams nicked scar- let by the agitated light thrown off by arcane powers, the First Senior set her will once again and pitched her crystal to imprint its moment of due consequence...

Amid the gaudy appointments of an Etarran hall of state, a lanky scholar with soft hands arose from his self-conscious bow. Clad in wine velvet, his bristled, white hair tamed by a cross-laced silk ribbon, he raised his chin to squint at the imposing, blond figure on the dais. Fingers damp, and heart pounding, he offered up the aged vellum he had asked private audience to deliver.

"Milord Prince of the Light, my translation is done. By Koriani request, the fruits of rare knowledge are to be freely given to your cause. What you hold in your hands is an early-Third Age treatise on the lost arts of ocean navigation."

221.

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A deep, rolling thrill pricked Lirenda to gooseflesh. Morriel, in col- laboration with Lysaer, against Arithon; the piquancy of that manipu- lative use of politics raised a sharp gasp of astonishment. Seldom before had a Koriani Prime used power to move sovereign players as pawns. Lirenda traced the spell's ranging reach toward the future.

Curiosity fed now on the drive of ambition, she saw the sealed dis- patch from Cattrick which would soon prompt Prince Lysaer to assemble a picked following and leave Etarra in whirlwind secrecy and haste. Cause to consequence, the mighty construct converged, with Arithon flushed into desperate flight. Once he took to the sea, the grand plan would close on him, its culminating force dovetailed into an ingenious, orchestrated opportunity. The last stroke would fall amid the stormy, broad swells of Mainmere Bay. Lirenda reached Aft, the rune of closure, and the construct's cycle showed the end game to crown its set purpose.

Morriel's clandestine trap would strip Arithon defenseless, then bind his mettlesome fate into impotence through Koriani captivity.

On her knees before the last sigil, Lirenda pressed narrow palms to her lips to stifle vindictive laughter. Humiliation lanced through the rags of her mirth, that Morriel should judge her too fragile a vessel to bear knowledge of Arithon's defeat. If the Matriarch died of such overweening arrogance, fate's backhanded justice was worthy of Dharkaron Avenger.

Lirenda regarded the inner circle of traced, dusty ash and singed herbs. The arced patterns of ending and ward were precise. She sobered to fact, that the old Prime had left no loose ends. Past the dribbled stubs of dead candles, beyond the ceremonial braziers burned cold on their stands, the amethyst Waystone gleamed in sullen quiescence. No vestige of strayed power smoldered unchecked to draw backlash. Lirenda would require no ritual rune of passage to cross this last ward of protection.

These vital defenses, set to shield the spell's creator from the scald- ing blast of fused energies, had been breached long since. The break had been instant. No vestige of guarding virtue had survived long enough to bleed away through attrition.

Lirenda raised her skirt hems in shaking fingers, irrationally reluc- tant to disturb the fine lines whose sigils had failed to protect. She encountered the reason for the lapse soon enough. A girl scarcely sworn to initiate service lay sprawled across the perimeter, hands out- flung on the charred slate floor. She breathed in a queerly arrested rhythm, her hollowed, pale features stamped in frozen panic by the passage of arcane forces.