405.

Spring 5653 Impasse Days later, shivering in the predawn chill of the Korias flats, Dakar the Mad Prophet licked blood from a nicked thumb and cast his stone construct into the shallow current of a streamlet. He ached from the soles of his mud-spattered boots to the uncombed crown of his head. His vision held the treacherous shimmer brought on by overstrained hours of mage-sight. He linked pudgy hands and stretched a kink from his back, then swore aloud for the misery that the landscape offered dim prospects for a trio of fugitives. Driven off the coast road, a rider could find himself mazed amid farmsteads, with their yapping dogs and screaming geese, and where treacher- ous stands of pasture fencing could yield up angry bulls or lethal delays spent backtracking from unexpected cul-de-sacs. The low roll of the fields carried sound far too clearly, and extended visibility for miles. Those expanses too thin for tillage or grazing formed a vast, washed floodplain of poor, stony sand, patched over with scrub too sparse to mask fleeing hoofprints.

Huddled amid a witch-hazel thicket wadded with morning fog, the horses nosed the ground for straggling shoots of sawgrass, ears limp and coats matted into dry whorls of sweat. Felirin could do little to tend them. Salt leached into the raw burns on his hands, though every plain shirt in his saddlebag had been torn up at need to make dressings. Arithon had packed the worst blisters and weals with bur- dock sprouts beaten in egg whites before he himself had succumbed to his backlash. The inevitable penalty he must pay for channeling 406.

FUGITIVE I~RIN~E.

unrefined earth powers with his mage talent blinded left him drained near to incapacity.

Prone amid the stripped saddles with his head cradled on his locked arms, he made small complaint, though the tight-lipped expression he wore when he moved told Dakar how deeply he suf- fered. Nor had the sorrows inflicted at Riverton been lifted by his keeping good faith with his charged duty as Masterbard. Like snags in deep current, that unseen despondency leeched him, ebbing his reserves without letup. He needed henbane tea and a bed warmed with stones to ease the spasms which racked him. But sunwheel guardsmen searched door-to-door. Farmwives would sell him to his enemies out of fear before they would offer him shelter.

Faint go~ck Ym~se6 ~/n~ d~ogge~, misty air. The fog was starting to thin. Dakar clutched his ribs to suppress a chill, aware that the thicket provided inadequate shelter. The mists would lift in less than an hour, leaving horses and riders a sitting target for the oncoming Alliance patrol.

The mare chose that moment to fling up her head and whinny a deafenixt. g inquiry. Dakar swore. "Just let the whole world know we're here, you worthless bundle of dog meat." He dealt a pebble by the streamside a temperamental kick.

The stone arced aloft, but the predictable crack of its impact never happened.

Wary, Dakar glanced up.

Five paces ahead, an inked phantom against mist, a black horse and cloaked rider confronted him, their approach uncannily silent.

Even the clang of shod hooves on rinsed rocks failed to raise telltale clatters. The horse halted, meeting Dakar's sharp start with pricked ears, but no trace of a shy. A ghost eye gleamed like frosted glass through the veils of dawn mist. Under a dark mantle, the rider stirred. A hand unfurled from a gray-banded sleeve, and let the abused pebble drop to the streambed with a murmured phrase of apology.

"You!" Dakar cried. "Did you have to scare a hunted man out of his living skin?"

The Sorcerer Asandir inclined his head in reproof, his regard on the spellbinder's thumb. "You did send a summons."

Dakar glanced down, caught aback, then closed shaking fingers over his still bleeding cut. "We need help," he admitted. "I've scried warning. The patrol I can't shake will close in by noon. If Sethvir doesn't already know, Earl Jieret's had Sight of a public execution, the condemned man being Prince Arithon."

407.

~ANNY ~URTS.

Asandir sat the black stud, patient, but without speech.

The Mad Prophet flushed slowly crimson. "I ask for Arithon's sur- vival," he defended.

The Sorcerer touched the black's neck, soothing it from stamping off the midges which swarmed at its mud-spattered fetlocks.

"Arithon suffers backlash, yes? As well he should expect from his prior experience, when he raised the Paravian mysteries at Jaelot."

"You won't see him?" Dakar demanded.

"He has not asked." The Sorcerer touched his horse again, and as if language had passed between master and beast, the stud backed a half step and wheeled to go. While Dakar stood, helpless, his bleed- ing hand clenched to a frustrated fist, the hooded head turned. Silver eyes met his, and one bristled brow tipped up. "How you've changed," Asandir commented. "I should have expected at least an impertinent question demanding to know where I'm bound."

One moment; two; the birdsong rang loud through the thicket, and the horse stamped. Asandir gave him rein, and nearly too late, Dakar caught the drift of abstruse insinuation.

"Wait!" He surged forward, hopeful, while the stud snorted his annoyance at being checked back to a halt. "Where are you bound?"

Asandir glanced over his shoulder, his mien like graven flint.

"There's a Paravian grimward northeast, did you know? I will be test- ing its guarding boundary for soundness, and since Luhaine is busy, no one will check on my back trail. A foolhardy traveler might stray inside. Should that happen, the perils are unforgiving."

Well aware he was cued, and blanched to hollow nerves by the implied suggestion, Dakar recited, "Kill no beast, break no branch or leaf from a living tree, set no fire and remove no twig or pebble."

"Just so." Asandir's smile seemed lit as a shaft of breaking sunlight touched his mouth underneath his deep hood. "A horse should be muzzled to stop him from browsing. Let Arithon rest, he'll recover.

And bring Felirin with you to Shand. If the friends you have there won't take him in, Halliron's daughter surely will. She's been lonely and morose since her mother's death, and the city could use a new storyteller."

Dakar drew a weak breath to proffer his thanks, but an influx of fog surged between. When the air cleared, both horse and Sorcerer were gone with no sound to mark their departure.

"Did you have a successful scrying?" husked a voice at the Mad Prophet's shoulder.

The spellbinder gave yet another bounding start. "Dharkaron's black vengeance!" he hissed to Felirin, crept up on poulticed feet.

408.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

"Does everyone in creation have to sneak in here and scare me out of my skin?"

"I'm sorry." The singer padded to a halt, his soiled cloak tucked around his shoulders like a blanket. He had always possessed ele- gance, with a handsome, straight nose and cleft chin. Stress made his prominent bones appear gaunt, and the hair that once spilled in waterfall waves to his shoulders now clung to his skull, frizzled and singed like matted wool in the damp. "I thought I heard you say something. Wouldn't you rather somebody checked to make sure you weren't lost in a fit of prescient trance?"

The spellbinder focused his discomfort toward his boots, as if the hard, stony soil underfoot might sprout untrustworthy sinkholes.

"I've had guidance from the Fellowship, after a fashion." "And they said?" Felirin probed.

"Daelion's bollocks!" The outburst set a meadowlark to flight, but did nothing to lift the Mad Prophet's rumpled scowl as he stomped off to untie the horses. "We're to lose our pursuit by crossing through a grimward."

Felirin blanched. Hazel eyes still inflamed from the pyre showed bloodshot rings of disbelief. "You do know it's said that those sites guard the sleep of the great drakes. Perhaps the very ones whose true dreams led this world to the brink of destruction before the dawn of the First Age." He slipped a wrapped hand from the layers of his cloak to discourage a sprig of briar that latched its green thorns in a tassel. "Are those legends true, as the sun was?"

"I never asked," Dakar admitted, his moon face furrowed in dis- tress. "Althain's Warden himself never said. Asandir refused to dis- cuss the grimwards, except to relate they were ceded to Fellowship trust when the old races fled from the continent. Ath knows what those circles confine. I could wish we'd never find out."

Another rolling billow of sea fog shredded itself under sunlight. By the time the horses were saddled, the land would be laid nearly bare.

"I hope you like Shand," Dakar finished, the spur of haste driving him breathless. "Because if we escape from the sunwheel guardsmen, there's a very good chance you'll end up there."

409.

Spring 5653 On the Korias flats at the hour of noon, a headhunter tracker soothes his cringing hounds and refuses to cross the shimmering light which frames the boundary of the Paravian grimward; despite all advice to the contrary, the brash captain from Hanshire swears through his teeth, calls his forty select men, and overrides their quavering dread to continue pursuit of the Master of Shadow ....

Three days later, a gale off Stormwell Gulf brings rain and winds that raze trees like a scythe, and one of those fallen is a patriarch oak which sweeps a sunwheel courier from his saddle; he recovers from a sharp blow to the head, forgetful of the tidings which dispatched him to Avenor: that of the riders who followed Sulfin Evend into the Para- vian grimward, nary a one has returned ....

In the observatory at the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, the last spiraling glimmer of power fades from the grand conjury made to trap Arithon s'Ffalenn; and like old, dried paper, the ancient Prime stirs from her coma and opens sealed eyes to the galling discovery that her quarry has slipped through her net without scathe ....

410.

Late Spring 5653 XII. Grimward ' nside the shimmering, mercurial barrier which bounded the Para- vian grimward, the natural progression of time dissolved. As u spellbinder, Dakar noticed the alarming development when his subliminal connection to sun, moon, and stars became cut off like snipped thread. Footsore, exhausted, and snappish from hunger, he shut his eyes and milked his recalcitrant memory. He retained a shamefully sparse store of facts for his years spent in Asandir's tute- lage. What fragments he gleaned could be counted on three fingers, jumbled as trivia between detailed reminiscence of his past trysts and wistful hours spent wenching.

By contrast, each one of his two-silver harlots stood out with a jewel's exotic clarity. The quirk moved him to teeth-grinding worry, that the fragment of lore that might key their survival would stay obscured by the decadent pursuits of his past.

"Well how was a drunk to know what his life might come to depend on?" Dakar snapped to Felirin's sensible inquiry.

Distempered and soaked in cowardly sweat, the Mad Prophet drummed his heels against his horse and drove its balky steps through the ward's shifting bands of coiled energy. The bard and the Shadow Master rode behind him like shadows, the former reduced to a petrified silence, and the latter, too undone to care where his mare's herd instincts might lead him.

411.

The Mad Prophet wished in jangled irritation that Arithon's wits were not scattered. This once, the other man's unmerciful perception would have posed an indisputable advantage. For his own part, the spellbinder found such exactitude wearing. Escape into thoughts of a lush woman's favors seemed resounding good sense beside the out- right insanity of braving the perils now at hand.

Dakar yanked a wrinkle from the knee of his trousers before he chafed a new saddle sore. He needed no scholar's insight; nothing about a Paravian grimward would seem canny to human awareness.

The location of all seventeen known phenomena might be charted at Althain Tower, but whole years at a stretch, a man might pass those marked sites and encounter no trace of their presence. Through his five centuries as a Fellowship apprentice, Dakar could not remember one time when the Sorcerers did not attend to the grimwards alone.

The protections which turned the inadvertent traveler from a dis- astrous step through their boundaries were laid down with ruthless potency. When the seals required adjustment or rebalancing, the task was always shouldered by Asandir or Sethvir. Their discorporate cob leagues Kharadmon and Luhaine might sometimes assist from the sidelines by misdirecting strayed game or even the occasional two- legged trespasser, but Dakar retained the distinct impression that such places held consummate danger for any spirit left unshielded by mortal flesh.

At any cost, a man must not come to die here. Not unless he wished to be struck from the Fatemaster's Wheel for all time. Of all the trials suffered in Prince Arithon's service, this one trod the surest course to folly.

Dakar tugged a snarl of hair from his mouth, his rude stock of oaths an inadequate quaver as three muzzled mounts bore his small party of fugitives irrevocably into the unknown.

Ten paces ahead, his unsettled senses ripped back into clarity. As if an eyeblink had remade the landscape, the vista ahead showed seared trees and sterile dust, charged in a flat tang of ozone. Currents of wild energy flicked over riled nerves. The Mad Prophet found his teeth set on edge, and his vitals clawed with unease. The interlaced spells which defended this border threw off a debilitating resonance.

Leaves shriveled as they unfolded from the bud, and trees became stunted, shedding skeletons. The blight on the land fed Dakar's dis- quiet; he knew of the Fellowship's aversion to cause harm to anything growing.

Yet in this place, that dearly held tenet had been broken with stark and appalling violence. As if this circle of spelled seals confined 412.

wits ption t, the ~ofa out- e he ling ~ess.

~ at ~se his her !SS.

sk ~l- le )-.

it FUGITIVE PRINCE.

something unworldly that would not respond to the kindlier magics wrought out of natural forces.

The air wore the musk of seared earth and dry rot. What sky glim- mered through the clawed fists of bare branches loured under blank haze, unblessed by the face of sun or moon.

Dakar attributed the eerie, flat murk to the proximity field of the wardspells. He glanced behind. Felirin found courage in lilting gentle nonsense to his horse. Arithon had shaken out of his stupor enough to gaze about. His features might seem as blank as chipped chalk. Yet the man who held his intimate trust could unmask that expression and discern the agonized frustration of a master driven sight-blind to mage talent.

"Keep close," Dakar warned. Exhausted as he was, and unfit to ride point, the others were plainly in worse state. Felirin's wrapped hands fretted and fumbled to maintain a grip on his reins. If hazard threatened, Arithon could scarcely stay erect in his saddle. Which perhaps was as well; Dakar had a nasty stab of intuition that the black sword, Alithiel, should not be drawn in this place.

Its uncanny, bright power framed too stark a contrast to the shad- owy forces he sensed, laced into queer, subliminal eddies by the blameless stir of their passage.

That disturbed awareness was torn short as his mount balked with a jarring snort. Dakar curbed its rank fear. He peered ahead, wary, then gasped in outright awe.

The sere ground gave way to an expanse of polished granite.

Ancient, quarried stone was veined in tangled strata of obsidian and milk quartz, and incised with grand arcs and figures scribed across with Paravian runes of glowing silver.

"You're wise to be jumpy," Dakar cajoled his timid gelding. "But I'm the best chance you have to stay breathing. Throw me off, you'll end up as fly meat."

He dug in his heels, to no avail, until Felirin's more willing gray thought to pass him. The bay's competitive nature reasserted with a bounding start forward. Dakar swore and snatched mane as his horse clattered onto the massive, smoothed block, the mare at its heels, her breath sucked in fast, nervous snorts. The unease of the animals was justified. The array underfoot was centaur work, each dressed stone fitted seamlessly into the next with matchless and uncanny precision.

The charged coils of power in the joined ciphers made living skin bum and tingle in waves, and threatened a ranging headache.

Dakar could take no measure of their strength. The magic knit here reached beyond mortal senses, mighty as time, as stately as the steadfast 413.

JANN WU~TS.

turn of the earth, and wrought on a scale to strike terror armor of knowledge. Through a shrill, singing dizziness, the s counted the eight seals for banishment. His horse skittered over directional, six-sided figures for safeguard, matched to the points, and vectored above and below. These stood laced through ward after ward of containment. He identified an'alt, the symbol for infinity, stamped over and over in ribboned light.

runes he did not recognize at all, but the force in them struck like blades of ice through the thick leather boots in his stirrups.

"I don't think I've ever seen the rune for safe-crossing aligned with so many ciphers to annul power," observed Arithon, ridden up on his sweat-draggled mare.

Dakar swiveled in surprise. "You can read these?"

"Only some of them. My grandfather's library at Rauven was lim- ited." Arithon frowned through a fallen thatch of hair, more than weariness making him haunted. "The resonant harmonics I can hear through my bard's gift are dissonances, all. Not what I'd call reassur- ing."

Then, with no warning, the paved expanse ended. The horses crab- stepped off a razed edge in the stone and into a rustling growth of forest. One heartbeat before, no trees had been anywhere in evidence. To the rear, the rune ring had vanished away into shadowed, random avenues of oaks. The spellbinder took that for an ominous sign. The guarding sigils at the portal had sealed the way closed behind them.

No return course was possible by the path they had entered. If another safe exit to known territory existed, they must endure what- ever perils lay ahead and unriddle the grimward's dire mysteries.

"Ath, where is this place?" Felirin gasped. "No timber of this size grows on the Korias Flats."

"Well we aren't there anymore," Dakar ripped back, testy as he bludgeoned his upended senses to gain the full use of his mage-sight.

Yet a discipline which should have responded like reflex escaped his effort entirely. Trained access seemed blocked. He could trace out none of the underlying patterns to this forest's vibrant energies. The too-sharp barrage of his unrefined vision rattled him down to the pit of his vitals. Sight framed an impossible discrepancy. The foliage of these giants grew out of phase with the season, cinnabar and gilt with the fireburst palette of autumn. The maples, the beeches, and the crowned, ancient oaks soared aloft in vaulting splendor.

No such stand of primal forest should exist inside the fifty leagues separating the grimward's location from the old tracts the clans held in Caithwood.

414.

FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

Dakar withstood his craven impulse to rein in by tugging his beard with brisk worry. "We'll need to make time. There's no guarantee we're not still being pursued, if those guardsmen were fools enough to follow us."

But the terrain itself thwarted haste. No paths cut these wilds.

While the party of riders ducked vines and low branches, their mounts picked their way in uneven steps over ground laced with roots like snagged rope, and through hollows where stones were deceptively quilted in moss deep and lush as a king's robe. Felirin marveled in monologue under his breath, as though he sought to commit such strangeness to verse. Arithon curled on his mare's crest, fists crushed to his forehead in pent-back, dazed misery, leav- ing Dakar to tax his bewildered wits and effectively function as guide.

He soon discovered the impossibility of keeping straight bearings through a grimward. The place was possessed by bewitching strangeness. A man might choose an opening between two pillared oaks, only to find his steps redirected him ten paces further to the left, and on through a different byway altogether. What passed for sun- light shone a pale, lambent gold, with ruled shafts slanting through glades of stippled shade. Maintaining a constant sense of direction should have posed his trail-wise party no difficulty, except the unnerving tricks of the landscape mazed and bemused the aware- ness.

While Dakar puzzled to unravel the anomaly, Felirin broke off his ongoing composition. "Whatever sort of magery's afflicted our senses, we seem to be traveling in a circle."

"Spiral," Arithon corrected, half-muffled through folded fingers.

His speech seemed almost drunkenly slurred, the inflection lapsed back to the antique dialect of the splinter world of his birth. "Don't you hear? A harmonic resonance patterns this existence that guides the placement of each footstep."