LITMIR.BIZ

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his tenancy.

      ‘Far better for everything if those meddlesome Koriani had never set foot on Athera!’ He hissed past a balustrade in the Second Age library, goaded to a brisk, snapping breeze since the Prime Matriarch’s instructions had dispatched Lirenda to Araethura.

      Elaira’s renewed role in her sisterhood’s affairs boded the worst sort of trouble. The Fellowship Sorcerers were already spread thin. Their concern now redoubled since the Koriani had failed in their first attempt to take Arithon as their order’s string-puppet captive. Luhaine knew best of any: their ancient Prime Matriarch would not abide her defeat. The enchantresses’ current intervention in Araethura gave warning of a new strategy, with no Fellowship Sorcerer at hand to track their intent through surveillance.

      Nor was Luhaine complacent. He spun drafts of chill air down seven flights of stone stairwells, whipping the settled dust of two ages into tight, frenzied spirals in his wake.

      He stormed past the landing, a miniature tempest that shrilled through the cracks in the strapped oak doors to the storeroom, which held the Second Age talismans and artifacts. Among the locked coffers and shrouded sword hilts, alongside the ash shafts of arrows with points of chipped crystal, and the gem-studded shields whose arcane properties included wards for the banefire of dragons, he sought the one item fashioned by Fellowship hands.

      The golden hoop had been wrought by Ciladis the Lost shortly after the Mistwraith’s invasion. The gentlest, most sensitive of the Sorcerers had endowed his creation with a cipher of scrying to forecast the revival of pure sunlight.

      The device had never been observed to perform its prime function. Sethvir had banished the sunloop to storage on the sorrowful hour when Ciladis had passed beyond contact, his search to locate the vanished Paravians ended by his disappearance. Sore grief remained. Despite repeated efforts to trace Ciladis’s whereabouts, no Fellowship Sorcerer ever learned what fate had befallen him. Althain’s Warden had shelved the sunloop out of heartache, an inadequate gesture to distance the agony of an unresolved mystery. Remembrance still haunted, of the small-boned, walnut-skinned colleague who had immured himself for silent, futile hours, sifting phantom auguries and combing the infinite loom of existence for reprieve from the fogs of Desh-thiere.

      Luhaine sought the sunloop now for reasons of acid efficiency. In that hour, the device’s fine-tuned spells of observation offered his best means to trace the events that might threaten the land held in trust by the Fellowship’s compact.

      Through the advent of midnight, the first-level storeroom lay cloaked in darkness, its sole arrow slit masked by the board ends of shelving, and Sethvir’s scrawled spells against rot. Cold air poured in, an invisible black current that sheared like a blade across Luhaine’s purposeful presence. The tidy, round chamber held no trace of mice, only the bracing, spiked scent of frost riming the stalks of dried meadow grass. Sethvir might disregard his personal appearance, but his catalogues and antiquities were maintained with immaculate care. No dust layered the floor. Ancient records did not molder, and the oiled leather scabbards on ceremonial knives did not deteriorate from dampness.

      Luhaine wended his way between the bound coffers and wrapped armrings, bagged in flannel against tarnish. Here lay the massive, gold-banded horns once carried by centaur guardians, the rims chased in runes with Names of forests that remembered the first song of Ath’s creation. Amid crowns once worn by Paravian high kings, and the crystal and bone flutes the Athlien played to honor the rise of summer stars, Sethvir kept the jeweled scepter that had belonged to the brightest of their kind, Cianor, who was named Sunlord. But in this hour of the world’s need, the fire-wrought bronze dragons that bore the spoken powers of prophecy lay dormant, sleeved in pale silk. In passing, Luhaine shared the echo of memory, a sigh out of time for past glories.

      Even he must bow to the history enshrined in this place. The treasures housed at Althain were the stuff of past legend, with their marvels and wonders, and their uncanny perils to entrap the unguarded mind. Luhaine ranged the collection in wary respect, despite his hurried passage.

      He found the sunloop in its mother-of-pearl stand alongside the whistle the Masterbard, Elshian, had carved from a tine of Shehane Althain’s right antler. The placement gave testament to Sethvir’s remorse. One blast from that whistle would frame a note to defy time and space, and dispatch help from the tower’s current Warden. As if, in hindsight, the Sorcerer who normally shouldered the post regretted not sending the artifact with Ciladis against the perils of an unknown journey.

      Too late now, to wish past mistakes might be salvaged. The Fellowship Sorcerers themselves were shorthanded, with one of them crippled, and another, even now, gone past the veil into mystery. Blunt-nosed, ever-practical Luhaine settled, a viselike well of cold coiled around the sunloop’s filigree stand. A nimbus of light clung and shimmered off the delicate metalwork. The cast-gold circle still held the unearthly elegance that set Ciladis’s character apart. Abalone inlay threw off misted rainbows where the far-flung spells of vision ranged dormant, a whisper of suggestion smothered within a cruel and unanswering silence.

      As always, the radiant grace of the sunloop made Luhaine feel coarse as old smoke. Still worse, the faint sense of shame and betrayal, as he tapped into the gossamer web of fine energies and changed the significating rune from a figure of joy to one that harkened to discord. Light plunged into darkness as the spell’s focus reversed its original polarity.

      The scene that formed in the loop’s clouded center showed him the prelude to ruin …

      The visioning revealed the white-marble floors of Avenor’s grand hall of state, rebuilt from ruin in Tysan. Under the costly, clean glow of wax candles, two high officials conferred.

      One hulked solid as weather-beaten rock from his hard-bitten years of field service. An unshakable presence, with his clipped beard and wedged forehead, Lord Harradene had served as Etarra’s Lord Commander at Arms since the death of his predecessor at Valleygap. The other beside him, who flourished a sealed requisition, was dark haired and neat as a ferret. His gold-trimmed surcoat might be cut fine as a courtier’s, emblazoned with the sunwheel of Avenor’s royal guard, but the sword and steel dagger that hung at his waist showed the battered, dull scars of hard fighting. Young for his high position at court, he spoke with a brisk, sharp-tempered confidence, to which the older veteran deferred.

      ‘I presented your petition.’ A furtive flash of teeth, though the eyes remained inimically still as poured nickel. By the sliced vowels of the man’s accent, Luhaine identified Sulfin Evend, lately invested as the supreme commanding officer to spearhead Prince Lysaer’s armed offensive.

      The speaker resumed with a focus that matched his purposeful bearing. ‘His Grace of the Light has heard your appeal. Your men will not quit the field before winter without chance to snatch back the victory.’

      Lord Harradene’s thatched eyebrows rose, dislodging a scowl like a logjam. ‘We’ll get more troops? That’s laughable! They can’t possibly arrive before the cold weather puts fodder in critical shortage.’

      Sulfin Evend’s nerveless response affirmed his reputation for sharp swordplay and vicious strategy. ‘His Grace won’t send troops.’ Light shifted like misted pearl over his silk as he strode past the niche of a casement.

      Harradene flanked like a shambling bear, canny enough not to waste words.

      But Sulfin Evend quickened for challenges; his razor-sharp smile provoked. ‘Avenor’s treasury’s too tight. The trade guilds all know it. They’ve seized up their ears and their purse strings. The ones with paid spies are all squalling like stoats. Can’t be more funding until our Prince of the Light inspects his shipyard at Riverton and sets the launchings there back on schedule.’

      Before Harradene’s bull-roaring protest gained force, the lean fingers, with their ancestral gold ring, snapped up the sealed state parchment. Sulfin Evend’s grin widened, oiled as the fox with a chicken clamped in its teeth. ‘Don’t let your joy spoil the fun. The Prince Exalted has granted you means to roust out your pesky clan renegades. You now hold permission to set fire to Caithwood to clear out the cover that hides them.’

      Lord

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