LITMIR.BIZ

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had swung toward the land, where the high, russet rock notched the sky in crazed patterns. Tumbled walls crowned the summit, bleached with sun, and the broken, eggshell rims of the keeps which remained of a Second Age fortress. Beyond, unveiled by the sliding shift of vantage as the fishing smack nosed downwind, there arose a trim set of masts stripped of canvas, and a dark, lean hull, rocking serene at her anchorage.

      “Swamp me for a half-wit!” cried the sailhand. “Who’d have risked coin to wager? The Khetienn hasn’t sailed after all.”

      Jieret reached his feet in a rushed, thoughtless movement, and the bucket overset; a wet sludge of sand flooded over the offending set of leathers. “Fiends plague!”

      The language loosed next won a laugh from the boat’s swarthy captain. “Ach, let her go, lad! The deck won’t see harm. For your stripped buttocks, we’ll scrounge a loan from our slop chest.”

      “My naked arse isn’t like to be burned for dark sorcery,” Jieret groused, his distress not at all for soaked garments. He glowered across the closing gap of water. The brigantine’s satin brightwork mocked him back, insolent, unmarred by the damage rough weather might cause to drive her back into shelter. Nor did her decks hold industrious crewmen, but languished untenanted in the heat. Jieret’s foreboding deepened. His liege should be long away from known waters, with no trouble too dire to stay him.

      The hard-run little fishing smack put in and launched her dory over the side. “We’ll hold off for your signal,” said the captain from his squint-eyed perch at the rail.

      Jieret settled into the tender’s stern seat, still damp, but presentable. He brooded throughout the approach to the strand, limned in the flat glare of noon, the shade like slopped ink beneath the cedars. As the craft neared the shore, a figure built plump and round as a partridge bobbed amid the rocks, craned a short neck, then erupted into spectacular strings of epithets.

      The oarsman listened, awestruck. “D’ye suppose yon one caught a hornet in his breeks?” He reversed his stroke, and the dory spun about in the wash of a slack tide breaker. “A collection like that’s a rare masterpiece. Never heard the like, not in any cutthroat dive the length of the westshore dockside.”

      His speculation foundered against a peculiar, chilly reticence as, boots gripped in hand, his profile like the anviled rim of a thundercloud, the muscled young chieftain from Strakewood splashed thigh deep in the shallows.

      “Well then,” the crewman said, stoic. “I’ll be off. Show us a light from the point if ye want passage back to the mainland.”

      Oars creaked. The dory reversed direction, leaving Jieret to wade through the surf.

      The diatribe from the headland hiccuped through a pause, then switched key to outraged recognition. “Ath! It’s yourself!” Jieret forbore to glance shoreward.

      “He’s not with you!” The fat man on the beach hopped the last steps to the tidemark, shook his lard fist, and erupted, “Damn his licebrained, sow-eared, rutting stubborn mind! He’s bent on getting himself killed.”

      Jieret arrived on dry shingle. “Not with me?” he echoed. Stopped erect in noon glare while salt droplets sluiced runnels down his ankles, he gazed from full height into an unkempt, round face and smoldering, cinnamon eyes.

      “Turd-stupid, string-plucking goose,” said Dakar, erstwhile spellbinder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, and known far and wide as the Mad Prophet. He licked bearded lips, then clapped his mouth closed, belatedly aware that the clansman who loomed over him brimmed like dammed acid with temper. Dakar’s layers of mismatched clothing heaved as he dredged up an ingratiating shrug. “Well, maybe not a goose, exactly.”

      “You refer to my liege, Prince Arithon?” Jieret tossed a clipped nod past his shoulder. Behind him, a wing-folded raptor on the settled arc of the sea, the brigantine seemed juxtaposed on the view, a wild thing imprisoned by the natural stone revetments which bordered the harbor basin. “Don’t you dare claim he isn’t here.”

      The Mad Prophet screwed his eyes shut. Wheezing like a martyr from his headlong rush to the beachhead, he raised chubby, exasperated hands and tugged at his fox brush beard.

      Since on their last meeting, Dakar had been the Master of Shadow’s implacable enemy, Jieret added, “We are speaking of the same man?”

      Dakar flounced stiff. “Nobody else drives me to fits of sick fury, and anyway, you should know best. This isn’t the first time he’s had you come chasing his shirttails the length of the continent.”

      Too wary to mind insults, Jieret kept his fierce glower. Dakar for a miracle was not wallowing drunk. Though the clownish, suffused features were still slack from loose living, the spirit inside his dissipated flesh seemed transformed into change. The pouched eyes held a glint of shrewd purpose. A queer incongruity, and one at sharp odds with the Mad Prophet’s scapegrace reputation.

      The silence extended too long.

      “What’s amiss?” pestered Dakar. “Something’s turned wrong. Or Ath’s own Avenger couldn’t have dragged you to sea.”

      “Oh, there’s trouble, well enough.” Jieret parked his hip against a boulder and jammed on his boots to mask his outright anxiety. “Perhaps you’d best say where Prince Arithon went.”

      “Ashore,” Dakar said. Sweating in his seamy, worn clothes, he looked all at once beaten down, just another bit of flotsam cast up by storm to wilt on the waterworn rocks. “His Grace is alone, back on the mainland.”

      Jieret confronted the Mad Prophet’s moon features like a swordsman stunned silly by a mace. “The mainland,” he echoed in stark disbelief. “Please Ath, not now. He can’t be.”

      “Best come up.” Sly eyes swiveled askance; Dakar surveyed Rathain’s tall caithdein, bitter himself with shared sympathy. “You look like you need to be out of the sun, and besides, there’s a risk. We oughtn’t discuss his royal affairs so freely here in the open.”

      Jieret looked blank. “What?”

      “Koriani,” said Dakar. “Damn prying witches and their bothersome spells.” Then he rolled his gaze skyward, remiss. “I forgot. You wouldn’t know how far things went wrong last autumn in Vastmark. The Koriani Prime Enchantress tried her level best to have Arithon s’Ffalenn assassinated.”

      Jieret shot tense, hand clasped on his knife, his color gone shatteringly white. “On my oath as caithdein, is every living faction on Athera dead set to end my liege lord’s life?”

      “Damned near.” Dakar closed his moist grip on the larger man’s elbow and tugged. “You haven’t brought dispatches in with the sloop? Just yourself? Best move along, then.” He nodded toward the cliff path. “I’ve got quarters up in the old fortress.”

      Cicadas buzzed amid the crumbled rock stair that jagged up the flank of the headland. The dry air scarcely stirred, thick with the resin taint of cedar. Gray lichens silted like ash in the crannies, and the only visible inhabitants were the finches, flitting in startled bursts through the vines netted over bent limbs and black needles.

      From the heights, the isle was a fissured, clenched fist, the fretted shoreline worried by tides, and seamed in jagged grottos, hazed over in lavender shade. Here, in the First Age, Paravian seers had held council with dragons, who flew the world’s skies no more. Against the vicious aberrations spawned by the drakes’ wild magic, defenders from four races had languished, besieged, in the cramped, ragged bounds of the curtain wall. Now strewn like kicked block, the last ridge of foundation housed basking, gold lizards which skittered away into cracks.

      The eldest living dragons had spun their dream of desperation and appeal within these baked, cratered keeps, to draw to Athera the aid of the Fellowship Sorcerers. But if any ghost presence from that past remained to haunt Corith’s ruin, the land retained no thread of dissonance. Just bare stone, tuned shrill by the blaze of summer noon, and loomed on the untrammeled song of bundled energies which underpinned all the substance of creation. Centuries of

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