./~,N N ~7unT$ drip of condensation down nitrous walls seemed common to cells everywhere. Nor was he stranger to the twinge of stiffeneel bruises, or the dull, throbbing aches brought on from an unconsciou~ night lying supine on dank floors.

A headache of exceptional virulence made him feel as if demons with steel hammers played carillons on the bones of his temples.

Through excruciating pain and the soured taste of vomit, Dakar ~t clutched his crown to keep his skull from flying to pulverized bits between his fingers. His brain felt like jelly mashed through a sieve.

The evils of strong drink were never so punishing. By contrast, vile sickness and palsy never failed to afflict him after an episode of pre- ,..~k.~,'~c~.

Against the grandiloquent maceration of his hangover, a racket of echoes spiraled down a stairwell: "... disorderly conduct, attacking royal guardsmen, not to mention disrupting the peace at a public function." The speaker added in nasal superiority, "There's certain to be a stiff fine."

Dakar plugged pudgy fingers in his ears, too late to evade the dis- mal conclusion. "Those who can't pay get hard labor on the hulks towed out for dredging the harbor."

The talker scraped to a stop outside the barred cell gated shut with riveted-steel strapping. "He's in here. You did say the man you want's the fat loony?"

Dakar cracked an eyelid and winced through a spearing dazzle of torchlight. "Is it night, or next morning?" he rasped. He could not recall why he felt nagged by a shadowy sense of urgency.

No one gave him answer. Outside the cell, hatched in squares by forged bars, Caolle flourished the slate he carried to overcome the glamour which slurred his clanbom accent. His tough, swordsman's hands scrawled sincere imitation of a yokel's straggling script, then thrust the message under the turnkey's beaky nose.

"You say he was drunk?" the jailer huffed. "That's no excuse.

You'll find the offense with the minor charges listed after disorderly conduct. The fat wretch is your friend? Then toss a penny in the t'lde to give dame fortune her due. If the raving idiot hadn't been sotted witless, our guards would've seen him spitted beside that pack of condemned barbarians. Best take him in hand. He won't have a long life, showing pity for that breed of felons."

Caolle scratched out a new sentence, then flipped his slate like a tray and cast a chiming spill of coins over the letters which spelled, 'fine, paid in full.' Then he tipped his laden tablet toward the turnkey.

Gravity obliged; the gold pieces slid. The jailer watched what FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

amounted to a generous year's salary tumble toward the stinking, runneled floor. Decision became reflex. His spidery fingers swooped to capture the bribe. "This is irregular," he grumbled, in no haste to unhook the keys from his belt. "The city's grand magistrate ought to be called to preside over due process."

Caolle proved impervious to argument. He snatched the loose key ring, tongued the iron in the lock, and clashed open the hasp and grilled portal. Dakar cringed from the clangor of iron. His evasion saved nothing. His rescuer caught his wrist and hauled him headlong from his noisome nest in the straw.

"Damn you, for bingeing," Caolle muttered as he towed his redeemed miscreant toward the narrow turnpike stair.

Dakar moaned. "Let me stay. The risers are too steep."

When he tried to collapse, Caolle shook him. "Sober up, fool!

You're needed." Steel shackles in putty, his hold never loosened as the Mad Prophet stumbled and tripped. "Arithon's taken with some sort of fever."

"If you have to shout," Dakar groused, "at least wait until we're outside."

"I'm not shouting." Caolle slammed shoulder first through the upper-landing portal, and chivvied his charge through the magis- trate's chamber, a cavernous space of scarred wooden benches and the fetor of old sweat and dried ink. The Mad Prophet shivered as they passed the justiciar's dais, then the prisoner's dock with its rows of forged rings for manacles.

Torches still burned by the entry. Gagged by a billow of oily smoke, Dakar missed his stride. His fragmented vision resurged and gave birth to a hollow spasm of alarm. He bludgeoned dulled senses to gauge the turn of the stars. Only two hours left before dawn.

Caolle was still energetically speaking, his words unintelligible gibberish to the sentries standing bored watch by the portal. "We have trouble afoot. Those clansmen who died were Lord Maenol's own cousins. They would scarcely have wasted their lives in a town without the most dire reason."

Dakar lagged again as full memory returned like a battering onslaught of cavalry.

"Don't mind the guards," Caolle snapped in abrasive impatience.

"I bribed them on my way in."

The Mad Prophet gave up his effort to shield his tender eyes from the sconces. Tugged stumbling into the sea-damp night, and a mist like dew-sodden velvet, he grumbled in plaintive injury, "You needn't tear off my arm. I know the message those couriers carried."

283.

~ANNY WURT$.

"What?" Caolle plowed to a tumultuous halt. "Ath, man, you spoke to them?"

"No." Necessity and pain made Dakar succinct. "Their execution wakened my prescience. And Arithon's not ill." He broke off, wrung by a pestilent shiver.

Caolle suffered the delay in steaming, clamped patience. Around them, the clogged air clung like silt. Lights from the wharves shot ruddy spears through the tenements, and seepage off the overhang- ing eaves splashed echoes through the darkened alley. Dakar ground on between dry heaves. "We're in deadly trouble. If I'm right, your liege has been touched by the madness of Desh-thiere's curse."

Never slow to grasp threat, Caolle began running. "Then some- one's told the s'Ilessid prince we've compromised the shipyard?"

"Worse," Dakar panted. Even crimped like a bolster, he made every effort to match the increase in pace. "Lysaer's marching on Riverton with a fighting company at his heels. They would've arrived yesterday, but clansmen from Korias slowed them down. Lord Maenol's messengers died to bring warning. We have maybe two hours left to force Arithon away before a royal cordon seals the gates."

"Much easier said than accomplished." Caolle added a string of pungent epithets. Too real, that Earl Jieret's dreamed vision might happen on Riverton's fresh-bloodied scaffold.

The Laughing Captain's upper story lay dark, the candles set burn- ing to guide patrons to their rooms long since drowned in sooty wax.

The door to Arithon's chamber was closed. No light leaked under the sill.

Dakar stalked down the corridor, his flesh napped with chills as he touched Caolle's sleeve. They had agreed he should disrupt the bard's privacy first.

A board squeaked underfoot. The hallway with its ingrained tang of lye soap and floor wax, and the stale fust of overused bedding raised too clear a memory of another tavern hallway, and the Shadow Master hurled outside reason.

No lingering pinch of guilt plagued his royal Grace this time, but the proximity of Lysaer himself. Dakar rolled back his sleeve cuffs.

Perspiration snaked down his neck. If he misjudged and the fatal bal- ance tripped, disaster would follow beyond any power to contain.

The unlocked door latch gave at a touch, the plink of the bar like a cry against silence. Unnerved by apprehension, Dakar eased open the panel.

284.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Darkness met him, thick as warmed felt and stamped with indis- tinct shapes. The mullioned casement latticed diamonds across a rect- angle of indigo sky. The feeble, ruddy gleam of coals in the grate brushed the textured bedhangings, and scattered sequin reflections over the yams of gold tassels. Steeped in the mingled fragrance of cit- rus oil and beeswax which toned the wood of the Masterbard's lyran- the, Dakar searched the gloom.

His mage-trained acuity found nothing amiss. The silk shirt and pearl velvet breeches Arithon had worn the day before were draped over a chairback, creased by an ornate clasped belt. The bard's full- length cloak hung in order from its peg. His wrapped instrument rested on the clothes chest. The accustomed coils of refined wire lay on the marquetry table by the casement, nicked to scarlet glints where the light caught; nearby, the spare winding pegs and pearl-handled knife the Masterbard used to trim lyranthe strings. Everything kept its accustomed place, except for the item that counted.

The Paravian-made sword was not on its hook by the armoire.

Dakar shrank to a stab of alarm. Innocuous stillness became sinis- ter as he moved on and surveyed the bed. The hangings were tied back: recessed in the shadow of the dagged velvet curtains, the blan- keted outline of a sleeper. Dakar shut burning eyes in relief, then advanced in quick stealth to take down his quarry unaware.

Movement sighed from the shadow behind, a friction of leather against cloth. Dakar caught his misjudgment a split second before a chill pinpoint pricked at his nape.

He swore in venomous constemation. The uncanny attunement of his mage-sense informed that the irreplaceable blade he required now threatened to skewer his neck. Lost, his one chance to deflect Desh- thiere's geas; the sword's enspelled virtue would only deploy if the defender held to a just cause. In Arithon's hands, the malignment of the curse would keep its defense spells dormant.

"If you plan to wreck the peace, make your stroke count," Dakar accosted. "You were awake."

"In fact, I never slept," said Arithon s'Ffalenn in his most abrasive ill temper. "Whatever else did you expect?"

"Not words of brotherhood and courtesy." Dakar chattered on in the spurious hope he could mask Caolle's presence in the hallway.

"Your promise to Lord Maenol has become a bad risk. If you know Lysaer's coming, we'll agree, you can't stay here, no matter how ugly the fate of chained clansmen."

"But I can," Arithon contradicted. "I've a launching in two days, and plans I've no wish to abandon."

285.

JANNY.

If the voice held its usual pared sting of mockery, speech offered an untrustworthy gauge of a masterbard's state of mind. Dakar cursed the sword, which forestailed his need to turn around. Even in dark- ness, his trained senses must discern more than Arithon wished to reveal. The inimical bite of the blade turned informant as a f'me- grained tremor ran through its steel.

"Arithon, hear me. You're not yourself." Through the pound of his heart, hammer to anvil against the wound pain of his headache, Dakar forced himself to keep talking. "If you stay, you'll be letting Desh-thiere's curse overset your mind and integrity."

The sword moved, as if Arithon noticed the price of its bearing pressure. "And what if I planned this to be the last bloodbath?"

Dakar gathered up the rags of his courage and spun face about in the darkness. "If you had," he said, tremulous in terror and entreaty, "then as I was born, I'd not stand here." He pitched all his resource to unmask the man facing him, and desperately wished he had not.

The sword blade divided the air in between, an obsidian line against a less palpable darkness. Arithon no longer wore his delicate pale-haired disguise. Alert and reverted to his natural coloring, he had also cast off fancy clothes. "Since I didn't cut you down as you came through my door, you may accept my invitation to leave."

"You know I can't do that." Dakar licked dry lips. His headache redoubled, the throb of forced blood at his temples a trip-hammer misery of pain.

Arithon said nothing. Reclad in fitted riding leathers, his form seemed sheared out of black watered silk. He did not look deranged or demonic. Excised by the curse from the encumbrance of loyalties, he looked ready to scythe down any obstacle in his path.

"I won't move aside," Dakar said in ultimatum. "To get past, you'll just have to kill me."

A tensioned thread of suspension snapped. Mage-tuned intuition sensed the event as a frisson of vibration shot through the weave of Ath's creation. Only then, too late, the Mad Prophet realized what his tactless handling had cost. Until this instant, Arithon had been aware, and still fighting the pull of curse-driven directive.

"Stand me down at your peril," came his silken invitation from the dark.

The infinitesimal shift in tone speared chills down Dakar's spine.

Opened to mage-sight, he witnessed the change as the last sane con- trols burned away.

Now wholly ruled by the Mistwraith's design, the Shadow Master showed the fixated viciousness of a cat as it tracked a lamed kill. "I'm 286.

FUGItiVE I~RINCE sure the whole Fellowship would applaud your good sense for dying to stop the inevitable."

"Mercy on us all," Dakar whispered, unable to outface the ferocity in those unprincipled green eyes.

This was what Earl Jieret stood down at Minderl Bay; and another time as well, on the banks of Tal Quorin, when as an orphaned child, the boy had thrown himself between Arithon s'Ffalenn and the abyss of geas-bent destruction. The Mad Prophet was made of no such stern stuff, to stand firm as a friend's private self came undone. Nor did he own even that child's advantage: the direct, binding tie of a blood oath sworn in amity, while Arithon still commanded his mage talent.

"Could I remake my choice, I'd be far from this place." Yet even Dakar's cruelest honesty had lost any power to wound.

"Drunk, surely," Arithon mocked. "Or else buried to your short hairs in some willing woman's flesh. You'd have been better off."

However one might ache to hear regret in that tone, none existed.

Then, "You've interfered enough," the Master of Shadow said.

Without further warning, he attacked.

Dakar escaped the first sword thrust because his knees gave way as he ducked. He had poor success with the well of bleak shadow which clapped down and masked his trained sight. He resorted to magecraft, begged help from the air, then drew on its reserves to fash- ion a banespell to stop Arithon. The exchange of raw force settled chill through the room as warmth fed the draw of his need.

Before Dakar framed the seal to balance the conjury, the energies ripped from his grasp. The next breath he drew sheared his chest like white frost. Just as before, the effect of the curse let Arithon wrest his own powers against him. He gasped, coughed, wrung his lungs empty before killing cold stopped his heart.

Dakar's warding cantrip emerged as a whisper. "Avert!"

Defense and counterspell locked and unfurled. Barely in time; through a ratcheting, starved breath, Dakar heard a low, trilling whis- tle. He felt the ward bend, like stress applied to a green stick clenched in his fingers. The sound built and focused, and the symmetry of the spell suddenly let go and twisted. Whatever fell package of magecraft rained down, the shock lanced Dakar's nerves like spilled needles.

He rechanneled the worst. Backlash smote the floorboards. Wood squealed and burst into smoking cracks under the kick of wild ener- gies.

Half-paralyzed by pain, Dakar resisted. "Arithon, don't!"

But pleas could not save him. At his peril, he dared apply no more talent. Arithon's refined ear picked up the vibrations of sorcery.

287.

.IANNY WURTS.

Though the powers were not of the Shadow Master's making, he had knowledge enough, and a fearsome command lent through his trained gift for music. He would simply keep on retuning the pitch to aug- ment and reverse summoned forces.

Edged steel sliced the darkness. Dakar blundered clear. The sword snatched a rip in the doubled-up cloth of his shirtsleeve. He rolled to evade the next cut. Each desperate move, each flurried thought but entrenched the bite of the spell turned hostile against him. His flesh felt stitched with white-heated wire. Each effort to think cost him agony. He denied his need to enspell a release. Any arcane defense would only be hurled back in hostility against him.

If he could not fight back, he still held Arithon's given power to bind. Dakar rushed through a string of entangling cantrips, then laced these through with the true power of Name, enforced by ritual permissions. The stayspell deployed and sealed. If the mangling pain seemed to let go a fraction, or the blind of wrought shadows relented, the sword hissed down in a cut to his head like the howling descent of pure vengeance.

Dakar flung open the door to the armoire to break the force of the blow. Lacquer-worked ebony jounced to the scream of turned steel.

Chipped abalone pelted his knuckles. He rammed the slivered door hard into his attacker and deflected the following thrust. Something hard bashed his shoulder: the pommel of the sword. His arm went numb, and he crashed into a chair. Through a rain of split rungs and a mire of bard's clothing, he snatched what defenses he could. Rolled fabric muffled his bludgeoned forearm. The chair seat made a tempo- rary shield.

The sword Alithiel whined off wood and snicked a hungry tear through the silk. Dakar gained a scratch instead of an amputation, but the sting rocked his mental equilibrium.

"Saved," he wheezed, while the blade zinged and clanged, "by the shirt off your back." As the barrage whittled slivers out of the chair seat, shrill fear and the limpet throb of his hangover impelled him to inane hysteria. "You know you've gone mad. Arithon."

No word came back. Only the clang as a murderous riposte gouged another scallop from the wood. Splinters rained down on the spell- binder's cheek. Flat on his back like an upset turtle, Dakar cringed as stout oak gave way in his hands. A whimper escaped through locked teeth.

One heartbeat; two; the lunge he expected would come to impale him never fell. Dakar heaved in a raxed breath. He recouped the pres- ence to map a defense ward and cast another snare across the doorway.

288.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

He felt Arithon sense the surge of channeled energies. Braced, he absorbed the counterpull as the strength of his binding by permission was grappled, and then sorely tested. Now aware he was bound, Arithon eschewed all attempt to match sorcery. He smashed the glass casement instead.

"No, you don't." Dakar clambered clear of the mangled chair, then shed on the fly the entangling veils of silk shirt. The belt he retained, and swung like a sling, which Arithon's blade intercepted.