LITMIR.BIZ

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life in our hands is sacrosanct, and your will, no one’s other than your own. But mankind’s place in Athera has never been a born right.” This was straight fact. The ancestor of every human alive had first come as a refugee begging for sanctuary. “Settlement here was permitted under strict terms by the compact sworn between our Fellowship and the Paravians.”

      “Did you think kingdom law was written at our whim?” Kharadmon sat forward, his trickster’s flamboyance razed away. “The original charters were drawn by our hand, but to the old races’ auspices. Their strictures are not mere rules to be overturned for some upstart mayor’s convenience.”

      Not to be outdone, Luhaine plunged on to lecture, “For the acts you have initiated, for setting your seal to chained slavery, and for seeking to supplant Ath’s order and the Law of the Major Balance, you have defied the tenets mankind was charged never to violate.”

      “Now you know.” Sethvir tucked folded hands beneath the spilled fleece of his beard. Diminished by sorrow, he appeared to read his next lines from the whorled grain of waxed maple. “Our Fellowship keeps a trust with the Paravians. Each human child birthed here lives and dies on the sufferance of our intercession. We stand surety for mankind, all their works, all their laws. Yes, even for their greed and their strivings that could mar every facet of this world. Understand this. We guard and nurture as we can, but our service is not to our race.”

      Althain’s Warden paused. As if the air to drive spoken words bound him mute, he looked aside, the set to his shoulders gone bird-boned and frail. He seemed an old man without mystery, outworn by relentless attention to detail and a shackling burden of care. “There exists no compromise, no quarter. Any man to defy the compact, who breaks the first order set down by the Paravians, must be cast outside our protection. You will leave Althain Tower. None here would misuse grand conjury to upset the fate you pursue. Nor shall we mourn, or answer your cries when the justice of the old races falls upon you and the followers you seduce into blindness.”

      “You will not break me by intimidation,” Lysaer said. “I stand as the shield for my people.”

      Sethvir bowed his head.

      No second chance followed, no gap for reprieve. The image forms of Kharadmon and Luhaine whisked out like gale-blown candles.

      Lysaer felt their presence encircle his form in cold air, while the adept slipped her hood and bared features of frost-brittle clarity. “The ways of the Paravians are not those of men. They are not born of earth, but sprung from the prime source itself.” Her upraised finger accused him. “Woe to you, prince. The wrath of Athera’s true guardians is no light fate to invoke.”

      An actinic burst sheared the chamber as a rune seal flamed above Lysaer’s head. The cipher blazed yellow-white, then faded to violet. Sensation followed, a sourceless wind of fine energies that hazed through all the five senses. Lysaer experienced no physical discomfort. But the vibration rocked on through his mind. Something inside of him howled wild protest for the irrevocable step being taken. His awareness became pierced by untenable loss. No grief ever savaged the heart to such depths, as if for an instant he had gazed upon paradise, then plunged for all time into darkness. He wept. Ugly, racking sobs closed his throat as something unnamed and brilliant slipped away and consigned him to friendless desolation.

      The hurt sieved and tore him, needles through silk, until he felt nothing but numbness.

      Then Asandir was beside him. Firm hands took his arm, drew his faltering step away from the King’s Chamber and into the black chill of the stairwell. Lysaer reeled as though drunk. Plain air turned his head. The stairs felt absurdly hard beneath his feet, and the shadows pooled under the sconces held menace like teeth, lurking unseen to gnaw flesh.

      Lysaer called on his gift to blast out the darkness, but no spark answered. His limbs seemed battened in felt. Again he stumbled. A Sorcerer steadied him. The touch was raw power and limitless strength clothed over in gentleness that plunged a dull ache to the bone.

      “You are deceivers,” the prince insisted. “Betrayers of your own principle to shield Arithon.” His voice seemed a stranger’s, and his commitment to honor no more than the soulless whine of spent wind.

      Asandir pressed ahead, bundling his charge between the stilled ranks of statuary. Their mystery had gone strangely dull; now, the centaurs, unicorns, and sunchildren seemed nothing more than exquisitely beautiful carvings. Lysaer felt remorse, and then wondered in leveled, pure logic why he should pause for regret. The tricks of the Fellowship were evasively subtle. The guiding hand on his flesh was creased by the bridle rein, ordinary, no more than a common old man’s. Still the contact was comfort and animal warmth; then even that simple solace was gone as Asandir released him by the trapdoor to the vault.

      “Go down.” Winter drafts bit deep where the Sorcerer pointed.

      Lysaer locked his jaw, sliced again by a glass-edged sorrow. He spoke fast and bitter to fill the void. “The mayors who fear you, did your Fellowship disown them the same way?” Steadier now, he seized the giddy nerve to laugh. “I’ve read the musty old records of the uprising kept at Erdane. They speak of retribution and vengeance to be claimed for the blood of the murdered high kings. Yet five hundred years have passed. Nothing happened.” The freezing, dry air braced him back to banked rage.

      “The Paravians are gone,” Lysaer insisted. “They might never return. Yet you still threaten and raise dread in their name. I say humanity deserves better than empty rules and the coercive threat of your sorceries. I shall spread truth, that your compact has no foothold in present-day governance.”

      Asandir still said nothing. At the base of the stairwell he stopped, unnervingly inscrutable. His hands hung still at his sides, empty and large knuckled as a quarryman’s. Lysaer looked away, unbeguiled by that traitorous semblance of humanity. Before him spread the concave Paravian focus, its patterns strung across in mazed chains of ciphers, white quartz embedded in onyx. Then, touched to life by some spark of bound magecraft, the demon sconces blazed into flame. The Sorcerer’s taut face became etched in copper; then that warmth erased to unyielding, struck iron as captured lane force flared the pattern lines active.

      “Step forward,” said Asandir. “Your people are waiting at Avenor.”

      Lysaer turned his back. He walked in unvanquished pride to the center point of the focus. “I will see mankind released from your tyranny. Justice will follow war. The land will be given a peace free of shadows, with no help from absent Paravians.”

      No word came back. Only Asandir’s signal to Kharadmon and Luhaine, who poised, unseen, to engage gathered power for the transfer. Then chaos clapped down, and time came unhinged. All links to the senses dissolved through a fireburst of light. Spinning vertigo remained, slashed once by the twined cipher of a sorcerer’s mark that spanned the whole axis of creation. Through the deluge of static and the keening explosion of channeled energy, Lysaer came aware of a far-off sibilance of speech…

      “…say something fast to avert panic,” his captain at arms called out in shrill urgency. “Just name the event as a portent of Ath’s favor, and hurry. If the mob’s left to think our prince was abducted by sorcery, we’re going to see mayhem and riot.”

      No brave line of pikemen could stand their ground if the dais became stormed by panic. Since the play of uncanny, shimmering light seemed the least of two evils, the chancellor had no choice but step into the breech. His orator’s shout rose above the crowd’s stunned astonishment.

      “There will be alms!” Forced to a desperate semblance of calm, he improvised, “As you see, the Prince of the Light obeys higher forces! He goes where he’s needed upon instant notice. Are we children to pine for his continuous presence? The shadow-banes are blessed. Let them be disbursed by our own public servants, and leave his Grace free to shoulder the burden of our defense!”

      Just as the mob subsided from its milling roar, the light of Lysaer’s gift shimmered clean once again. Restored, riled and whole, to his ceremonial dais at Avenor, he was fully exposed to the public eye and the stupefied shock of his officers. The moment was his to recoup what advantage

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