LITMIR.BIZ

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white and gold.

      His stance held straight as an arrow nocked to the drawn bow. He perused the assembled dignitaries, nestled like plumed birds in roped pearls and winter velvets; acknowledged the military captains with their muscled impatience; then diverted, to touch last on the single man in the chamber born to a laborer’s status. One whose stiff, uneasy stillness stood apart from languid courtiers like a stake hammered upright in a lily bed.

      “How I wish the threat posed by the Master of Shadow were due only to the meddling of Desh-thiere.” A disarming regret rode Lysaer’s pause. Then, as if weariness cast a pall over desperate strength, he relinquished his advantage of height, sat down, and plunged on in bald-faced resolve. “But far worse has come to bear on this conflict than rumors of an aberrant curse. This goes beyond any issue of enmity between the Shadow Master and myself. Hard evidence lies on record in the cities of Jaelot and Alestron. Twice, unprovoked, Arithon s’Ffalenn wielded sorcery against innocents with destructive result. Now, in the course of the late war in Vastmark, a more dire accusation came to light. Since it may touch on the case here at hand, I ask this gathering’s indulgence.”

      The prince beckoned for the plain-clad man to mount the stair to the dais. “Your moment has come to speak.”

      The fellow arose to a scrape of rough boots, his occupation plain in his seaman’s gait and hands horned in callus from a lifetime spent hauling nets. Too diffident to ascend to the level of royalty, he chose a stance alongside the accused clansman. His embarrassed gaze remained fixed on his toes, unscuffed and shiny from a recent refurbishing at the cobbler’s.

      “I was born a fisherman at Merior by the Sea,” he opened. “When Arithon’s brigantine, the Khetienn, was launched, I left my father’s lugger to sign on as one of her crewmen. Under command of the Master of Shadow, I bore witness to an atrocity no sane man could sanction. For that reason, I deserted, and stand here today. Word of his monstrous act at the Havens inlet must be told, that justice may come to be served.”

      Then the words poured from him, often halting, tremulous with remembered horror. Too desperately, he wished to forget what had happened on the summer afternoon as the Khetienn put into one of the deep, fissured channels, where the high crags of Vastmark plunged in weather-stepped stone to the shoreline of Rockbay Harbor. Today, pallid under the window’s thin sunshine, the seaman recounted the affray, when two hundred archers under Arithon s’Ffalenn had dispatched, without mercy, a company five hundred and thirty men strong.

      “They were murdered!” the sailhand pealed in distress. “The vanguard were cut down in ruthless waves as they scrambled, exposed on the cliff trails. More fell while launching boats in retreat. They were dropped in their tracks by volleys of arrows shot out of cover from above.” The long-sighted seaman’s eyes were raised now, locked to a horrified memory. As if they yet viewed the steep, shadowed cliffs; the wave-fretted channel of the inlet; the still-running blood of men broken like toys in the brazen, uncaring sunlight. As though, beyond time, living flesh could still cringe from the screams of the maimed and the dying, scythed down in full flight, then tumbled still quick in their agony into the thrash of the breakers.

      “Such slaughter went on, unrelenting.” Before listeners strangled into shocked quiet, the damning account unfolded. Impelled now by passionate outrage, scene after scene of inhumane practice were described in the fisherman’s slow, southcoast accent. “Those wretches who fled were killed from behind. Any who survived to launch longboats did so by shielding their bodies behind corpses. Their valor and desperation made no difference. They were cut off as they sought to make sail. Every galley turned in flight was run down and fired at the mouth of the inlet. No vessel was spared. Even a fishing lugger burdened with wounded was razed and burned to her waterline. Mercy was forbidden, at Arithon’s strict order. By my life, as I stand here, and Dharkaron as my judge, the killing went on until no man who tried landfall was left standing.”

      The fisherman stirred, came back to himself, and shifted his feet in self-consciousness. “All that I saw took place before the great rout at Dier Kenton Vale.”

      The last line trailed into appalled, awkward stillness. City officials sat in their numbed state of pride, pricked down the spine by an incomprehensible fear. Their poise like struck marble, every veteran commander sweated inwardly, forced to accept that the wretched, slaughtered companies could as easily have been their own men.

      The moment hung and then passed. Deep breaths were drawn into stopped lungs. Bodies shifted and hat feathers quivered, and humid hands fumbled through scrips and pockets in quest of comforting handkerchiefs.

      Then the floor loosened into talk all at once.

      “Ath show us all mercy!” The minister of the weaver’s guild fanned a suety face with the brim of his unwieldy bonnet. “What sickness of mind would drive a human being to command such a letting of blood?”

      “The killing appears to have been done for no reason,” the Khetienn’s deserter stressed mournfully. “No one who landed at the Havens survived. The wyverns there scavenged the corpses.”

      But the ambassador from Havish weighed the sailor’s lidded gaze, that darted and shied from direct contact. Instinct suggested this witness had withheld some telling fact from his speech. For malice, perhaps, or personal rancor against his former captain, he might slant his account to spark vengeful impetus to Lysaer’s ongoing feud.

      “But Arithon s’Ffalenn never acts without design.” The passionate impact of Lysaer’s rebuttal spun electrifying tension in contrast. “No man alive is more clever, or sane. This Spinner of Darkness would have his reason, cold-blooded, even vicious, to have timed and effected such slaughter.”

      Lysaer stood, fired now by conviction which no longer let him keep still. The light shimmered across his collar yoke of diamonds, template to his distress. “We know the scarps above Dier Kenton Vale were splintered into a rock fall. Earth itself was suborned as a weapon to break the proud ranks of our war host. If the rim walls in that territory are prone to slides, the ruin rained down on our troops was a feat beyond all bounds of credibility. What if more than exploitation of a natural disaster were the cause? Could sorcery in fact have been used to cleave a new fault line? Even weaken the structure of the shale?”

      Disturbed murmurs swept the benches. Feathers rippled and velvet hats tipped, as men shared their fears with their neighbors.

      “Arithon s’Ffalenn was born to mage training!” Prince Lysaer exhorted above the noise. “Through his seemingly wanton slaughter at the Havens, could he not have tapped the arcane power to rend the very fabric of the earth?”

      On orchestrated cue, the shriveled little man in scholar’s robes started up from his unobtrusive dreaming. “The premise is not without precedent,” he affirmed in a drilling, treble quaver. “There are proscribed practices that herb witches use to tap forces of animal magnetism.”

      A stunning truth. Every common man-at-arms who ever bought an illicit love philter had observed the filthy practice.

      “These distasteful creatures will slay a live animal, then cast binding spells from the spilled effervescence of its life essence. How much more potent the power to be gained, if the sacrificial victims were human?” The scholar cast his accusation above an uneasy, incredulous anger. “Be sure, the massed deaths of five hundred spirits would be enough to cleave the very mountains in twain to wreak that unconscionable destruction on our troops!”

      “The question is raised,” Avenor’s deep-voiced justiciar sliced through the uproar. He nodded in respect to his prince, then addressed the bound clansman. “If the Master of Shadow engages dark magecraft, the preeminent arcane order on this continent has not stepped forth to denounce him. The Fellowship Sorcerers have not spoken. Nor have they acted to curb his vile deeds. The Warden of Althain himself is said to feel each drop of blood spilled in Athera. Every death at the Havens would be known to him. Why should he let this atrocity pass?”

      A mayor in the front row raised an imperious fist. “The opposite has happened, in practice!”

      A scathing point; more than once, the Sorcerers had stood

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