Traitor's Knot Part 23

Cloth stirred at length, then a whispered breath, drawn against the gla.s.s-etched stillness. 'They wanted your child?' Lysaer asked, too quiet.

Sulfin Evend swallowed. 'In exchange for arcane service to my family. Yes.'

The blunt question followed. 'By your Lord Mayor's knowledge, the Koriani Order has placed demands such as this one before?'

Stiff under the weight of his father's shame, Sulfin Evend spoke out. 'The sealed bargain with Hans.h.i.+re's ruling council is renewed with each generation. Before the obligation demanded of me, the sisterhood has asked no more than buildings, or land, or sometimes a t.i.thing of labour. The obligation began in the years of the uprising, when our mayors asked service, and provided a safe haven for enchantresses who were in flight, or left homeless at large on the country-side.'

Diamonds flared like white ice; the Blessed Prince had stepped forward. 'Liegeman, your life is bound under regency law. Give me the knife.'

Sulfin Evend did not recoil from the touch as the weapon left his willing hand. Sworn man to master, he held still for the sentence: exoneration or execution of a summary justice. One thrust might finish his life in a second. Sulfin Evend clamped down on his shuddering nerves. Somehow, he kept himself standing.

From his side came the verdict, glacial in delivery. 'I will take my protection from those I can trust. Not from factions who think to play me for a game-piece. Once, on Corith, I gave the Koriani Order my warning. I will not have my Alliance suborned! The needs of my people are not put to usage for gain. Ladies, consider this audience closed! Meddle outside your soft nest here at Hans.h.i.+re, force any man for his seed in duress, and I promise, such dealing will see you arraigned! I will tear down your sisterhouses, stone from stone, and put your ranked seniors to fire and sword for criminal oppression and acts of dark practice!'

Stunned himself by the resounding force of that closure, Sulfin Evend startled to the incongruous, warm touch as his prince placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. 'Come away, Lord Commander. You'll retire to my galley. There, be a.s.sured, you'll receive your due rest and the courteous welcome that this town of Hans.h.i.+re and your own blood-kin have denied you.'

Early Winter 5671 Reversal Two days after their Matriarch's failed effort to capture the Prince of Rathain, Forthmark hospice's high-ranking senior enchantresses remained exhausted and beaten limp. Stiff with the bone-deep ache of defeat, the Prime Circle lately called back into session kept to the comfort of their cus.h.i.+oned chairs. They might yearn for the sleep today's duty denied them. Yet the tradition surrounding a novice's oath-taking required their presence as witness.

Before their worn faces and critical eyes, Lirenda did not share the suffocating panoply of their formal red-banded robes, or a weighty mantle of purple and silver. Demoted to the grey s.h.i.+ft of low service, she shouldered the brute work of screening the young girls gathered for their induction into the sisterhood. Five had been presented for today's review.

The paltry number displeased the Prime. Enthroned on her couch, flushed under draped silk and the jewel-strung net confining her jonquil hair, Selidie confronted the last of the untested candidates with slitted, lynx eyes. Her blame for the short-fall wore an enemy's name: Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had instilled the changes that reshaped the surrounding territory. The Vastmark tribes that once had backed him in war were no longer severely impoverished. s.h.i.+ps now moved the wool trade, disbanding the network of brokers. In the hard years, when misfortune and shale slides reduced the flocks, shepherd parents no longer sent daughters to Forthmark to spare them from wasting starvation.

Today's applicants ranged in age from four years to ten, lined up in a s.h.i.+vering row in the hospice atrium. Streaming light from the windows struck their brushed hair and scrubbed skin, and hazed the coa.r.s.e nap on their clothing. They stared at their feet, or fidgeted, faces pale with a justifiable nervousness.

Amid silence that tagged the least movement with echoes, a creeping chill pressed the air: the Great Waystone itself lay unveiled to record their novice's oath. Since the induction process could not be rushed, the jewel's raised focus would not be released for somewhile yet to come. Through the lengthy pauses, the day's pet.i.tioners to the Prime came and went, their low talk a droning back-drop.

Lirenda endured the unbearable tedium. Attached to wealth, and fine clothes, and the cosseting of high position, she detested the depth of the probes required to determine each candidate's fitness. The intimate sounding of a girl's inner faculties felt like the pinch of tight shoes, replete with the mental suffocation left from their disadvantaged backgrounds and former experience.

The two cherubs gone first had been gutter-snipe orphans, charity cases taken in from the dock-side stews of the southcoast. Their minds had been dim, cluttered with memories of hunger and sores, and summer rains spent huddled under piles of fish-rancid packing crates. Neither child showed a glimmer of curious thought. Life's hards.h.i.+ps had already crushed them. Oppressive fears wounded their brilliance of spirit; malnourishment stunted their hope.

Lirenda told over the time-worn, sad patterns. Here again, the imaginative sensitivity that fore-promised arcane potential had been ground too far down to break out of stoic resistance.

Now finished with the third child in line, the disgruntled enchantress aroused from her disciplined trance. She wrapped the paired quartz spheres that held the child's imprint and pa.s.sed the bundle across to the waiting peeress. Then, slaved under the Prime's directive, she declared the candidate's fitness. 'A grey robe, and no schooling for rank. Her destiny lies with the hostels.'

The girl curtseyed, trembling, as the peeress's touch guided her on to Prime Selidie's chair. At eight years of age, she knelt to swear oath: to grow up and shoulder the menial tasks of laundry, or cooking and child-care, or to fill some minor niche of secretarial work. If she developed gentle hands and a kind nature, she might progress to a.s.sume convalescent care of the infirm.

'Next, please step forward,' Lirenda intoned.

The skinny, older candidate presented herself. Her hair hung dull brown, and her chilblained hands were a crafts child's. She could have been expelled from apprentices.h.i.+p for laziness; or her parents might have offered her up in exchange, to fulfill a past oath of debt. The rare applicant, these days, would be a volunteer, encouraged to serve by her family.

Moved to yawning distaste, Lirenda selected two more quartz spheres cleared to a state of blank dormancy. Careful to keep her touch s.h.i.+elded in cloth, she said, 'Give me your hands, child.'

The paired crystals were placed into the offered, chapped palms. 'Hold these, place your thumbs on their surface, and wait. When I ask, give them back over to me.'

Those basic instructions might last for minutes, or extend as long as an hour if a child's grasp lacked the vigor to imprint the stones' matrix. Throughout, Lirenda endured her cramped perch, forced to wait in subservient boredom. To her right, the frightened girl-child now taking oath knelt and laid her palms against the faceted Great Waystone. Standing opposite, the house peeress gloved her hands in white silk, then touched the imprinted spheres to each side of the uns.h.i.+elded amethyst.

Then, prompted carefully, the lisping orphan recited her lines. 'I, Nayla, declare myself free to bind oath to the Koriani Order, From this breath, this moment, and this word, until death, I exist to serve, this I vow. My hands, my mind, and my body, are hereby given to enact the will of the Prime Matriarch, whose whole cause is the greater good of humanity, this I vow. All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow. . .

The raw power of words, spoken over by thousands across a history that bridged generations, unleashed the energy of a living force. The ancient crystal remembered: each named initiate, and each former prime, extending back to the dawn of the order, before cataclysmic war had sent a dest.i.tute enclave of mankind to beg for settlement on Athera. The amethyst focus that had recorded the order's past origins retained each initiate sister's embedded imprint. The young, open heart and the vulnerable mind could not be less than swept away by the torrent.

Lirenda recalled that branding, first thrill. The answer to every stark longing had seemed within reach on the moment when she sealed her oath. Declared as a candidate for the prime succession, she had never foreseen the shaming failure that would cast her down and deny her the ultimate glory of accession to supreme rank.

Nor would today's girl-child glance aside from her rapture. Enveloped in bliss, she would not yet comprehend the binding scope of her promise, or fully grasp that a single, willed word from the Matriarch could deprive her of life, or limb, or intelligence.

The formal invest.i.ture wound onwards toward closure: '. . . And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.'

As sworn novice, the young girl arose and received the Prime's kiss on both her flushed cheeks. Her smile shone radiant, as Selidie intoned the time-worn phrases of closure. 'Nayla, may you serve peace and charity with dedicate grace. Wear the order's mantle with pride.'

The hospice peeress released the imprinted spheres into a basin of salt water for clearing, then bestowed a white ribbon, to be sewn on the sleeves of the grey robe today's young initiate would wear until death. The child bent her knee in a dutiful curtsey and received her due leave to depart.

Lirenda looked on, wrung to ferocious envy for that talentless chit's simple freedom. She suffered the prolonged wait, while the next, raw-boned candidate completed her crystal imprinting. Once the energies in the paired spheres became gravid, Lirenda gathered them back in hand. The girl candidate watched, anxious, as the adult who would determine her future closed the stones in her grasp and engaged trance, then fused her awareness with the replicate pattern imbued within the reactive matrixes that now mapped the flow of polarity between the candidate's right side and left side balance.

For Lirenda, as always, the moment of full immersion felt as invasively horrid as drowning . . .

. . .vision turned dim. As her senses became felted under a muddle of random thought and jagged, disordered emotion, she thrashed to escape the suffocating contraction as her state of trained clarity compressed downwards into tight s.p.a.ce and m.u.f.fling darkness. Imprisoned, Lirenda felt her private self strip away, until her eighth-rank awareness squeezed into a mould that was abhorrently other: she knew abuse and cold; the memory of filthy hands, scratching fleas, and smells that revolted the senses. Sunk into a mora.s.s of self-pity and need, she lost even the hardened spark of her rage. Defeat became helplessness that numbed, then putrefied, leaving knots dense and solid as brick. Beliefs became walls. Despair framed a cage. Under the murk, just barely smouldering, she encountered one stubborn ember that survived the strangling defeat of adversity. She touched on that point. All but deaf and blinded, she blew the breath of expanded knowledge against that pinched glimmer of hope.

True talent responded. The small spark became flame. Into that flickering promise of light, reflected in faithful, quartz imprint, Lirenda applied the meticulous discipline of her developed awareness. From raw potential, she mapped the latent channels that opened, then traced where they might be coaxed to expand.

Yet the narrow vessel reached its capacity too soon. The influx of forces jammed still and backed up. Lirenda suffered the wretched constriction, forced to remain in rapport until she had a.s.sayed every sigil of testing, one exhaustive level at a time . . .

In due course, Lirenda recovered herself. The unfettered range of her power resurged like circulation restored through a cramped limb. Breathless and damp, she p.r.o.nounced the result.

'She is for the sisterhouse.' Shown the peeress's smiling pride, Lirenda added the rest. 'A first-rank talent, confirmed, with potential for third, if she masters her fear and responds to the training to release her conditioned resentment.'

Yet the candidate was not ushered away to declare her obedience over the Waystone. The morning's proceedings had been interrupted when the seeress who minded the lane watch arrived, bearing an urgent report.

Her hushed phrases threw a scatter of echoes through the vaulted stone chamber,'. . . inbound message from the fifth-ranked, stationed at Hans.h.i.+re . . . Morriel's past hope is ended . . . now lost our option to secure a possible candidate for prime succession off the branch line of s'Gannley. We are desolate, Matriarch. The effort has failed, in no small part due to a new interference engaged by the Fellows.h.i.+p Sorcerers.'

The set-back exposed an on-going sore point: that no talent with ninth-rank potential now trained under oath to the Koriani Order. That short-fall had posed a critical problem for the last prime, caught facing the dissolution of extreme old age. Morriel's straits had been desperate enough to risk forcing the birth of an infant candidate, conceived through an oath of debt. The strategy had been set to cover the deficit, should Lirenda's initiate pa.s.sage to ninth rank fail: a critical safe-guard, made meaningless after the usurpation of Selidie's life-span. Young again, Morriel had s.n.a.t.c.hed the victory from death and bought herself a twisted reprieve.

Since her heinous crime had gone undetected, the eldest senior delivered her placid opinion. 'The random induction of orphans eventually should provide us with the requisite gifted talent. Let the wretched idea of planned breeding be dropped. The risks outweigh the benefits. That branch lineage derives from a caithdein's legacy, and would tend toward offspring with headstrong will and ungovernable independence.'

Lirenda wrapped and pa.s.sed off the imprinted quartz, desperately straining to track the course of the on-going debate. Last chance of reprieve, she raged against ebbing hope, that the proven a.s.set of her eighth-rank talent might see her released from her insupportable punishment.

Selidie leaned back in her carved ivory chair, bored composure suggesting the set-back at Hans.h.i.+re posed no more than a trivial inconvenience. 'Wait or not, we have set a better alternative in motion already' She gestured her bandaged hand to cut off the tiresome discussion. 'As prize, or as forfeit, we shall shortly know if the inducement set forth is sufficient. Given development, I fully expect that our sisterhood's short-fall will be most handsomely met.'

Chafed frantic, Lirenda burned to hear more. But the seeress was dismissed to resume her post. Scheduled business would continue: the screened candidate awaited her oath of invest.i.ture, and the last child in line had yet to undergo testing.

Yet the snap of Selidie's spoken command halted the ceremony forthwith. 'All are excused! I require Lirenda. The oath and the last screening shall wait.'

The will of the Prime was held above question. The Senior Circle arose, gave obeisance, and filed out, while the sisterhouse peeress hustled to gather her bewildered charges. 'Here, child!' she whispered. 'My dear, ask me later.' Her admonishment silenced the girl's disappointment. 'Our simple task is to obey.'

Once the chamber had cleared, Lirenda was summoned, her powers to be used as the vessel to extend the Prime's eyes and ears. The demand would be arduous, no sharp surprise. By the terms of imposed sentence, Selidie could expend her schooled talent like riches poured out of a jar. 'You will engage in trance while I align the Great Waystone to cast a scrying over salt water.'

Lirenda knelt as bidden. Puppet to the Prime's least command, she laid her hands on the stinging chill of the amethyst. Contact wrapped her senses in harrowing cold, a brief agony. The Prime's master sigil reached through with clamping force and claimed her receptive contact. Insatiably demanding, it grappled her being and jerked forth a quickened thread. The unravelling plunge dropped her through spinning darkness. Her being became a spun line that hurled through a portal of purple fire. Now nameless and faceless, poised over what felt like the eye of the world, Lirenda received the Prime Matriarch's directive: 'Find Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. Watch and listen for as long as it takes! I would have the name of the place where he plans to make his next landfall.'

A command sigil blazed red as a sign-post. Aimed arrow of purpose, the bound spirit dropped through the gateway framed at its heart. Now tempered as a tool, her consciousness broke through and emerged into the scald of bright suns.h.i.+ne, and ocean-fresh air, spiked with the pitch tang of oak.u.m . . .

'. . . how aware are they?' Dakar the Mad Prophet was saying. Seated cross-legged on the warmed planks of a s.h.i.+p's deck, he resembled a dollop of suet rolled up in a knot of old rags.

'I don't actually know,' mused the Prince of Rathain, poised intent by the pin-rail above him.

Something banged in the hollow s.p.a.ce belowdecks.

Arithon paused. Equally rumpled in torn breeches and soiled s.h.i.+rt, he raised dark eyebrows at the shouts that erupted from the depths of the Evenstar's hold. To judge by the cursing, her sailhands encountered some fouling nuisance involving pinched fingers and ballast rocks. Though the brig where he lounged was left becalmed in the aftermath of a seasonal storm, the cant of the timbers beneath his braced feet bore a distinct list to starboard.

Planking shuddered to another booming report of a large stone being s.h.i.+fted to port.

Dakar winced with his eyes shut. 'If the crew keeps on fumbling boulders like that, we'll spring all the dastardly seams in this tub long before the keel's sitting level.'

Arithon grinned. 'You happen to be sitting on Cattrick's best work. If he ever hears of your slanging remark, you'll become dropped meat underneath his bludgeoning fist.'

'We have to reach sh.o.r.e, first.' Dakar's jaundiced attention s.h.i.+fted and measured the vital figure above him. 'Who needs Cattrick's rough temper? That look on your face spells trouble, right here.'

Impervious to rancour, Arithon pursued the lapsed thread of his earlier reasoning. 'Fiends don't appear to originate thought.'

Dakar's horrified flinch also failed to swerve him off topic.

'. . . or emotion. At least, when I ply them with musical tones, they don't respond, except by reflection. They experience by imprint, without innovation. Complex patterns will draw them with insatiable greed. That's probably why they fixate upon our intense feelings and delight in our rage and frustration. The innate creativity of conscious awareness lies outside their range of experience.'

'They are drake sp.a.w.n.' Dakar's emphatic shrug dismissed a conundrum far better dropped now, without further tinkering speculation.

'Fragments of awareness,' Arithon ploughed on. His gaze surveyed the sail crew at work on the mast-head, then the drifting, puffed clouds overhead; ignored outright, the Mad Prophet's furious, mouthed cue to be still at once and stop speaking.

Dakar signalled again, his chopped gesture ignored: as ever, such galling perversity seemed ingrained in the fabric of Arithon's character.

'. . . beings conceived from an experimental idea that was never balanced into completion.' Through yet another shuddering crash, and Feylind's yell of admonishment, the Master of Shadow reconsidered the shapeless sack by his feet. His mood of suspect mildness remained throughout his bout of oblivious monologue. 'Davien's notes were explicit. He explained iyats as raw energy granted the willful drive to exist. They sustain as parasites, feeding off borrowed charge, but lacking the self-aware memory of an ent.i.ty able to grow and evolve. That explains how a sigil was fas.h.i.+oned to hold them. And yet, I imagine coercion through force may have been a bullying waste.'

Dakar stared, aghast. 'No,' he blurted. 'You couldn't. Dharkaron's Spear drop you for taking mad risks, you can't try such a d.a.m.nfool ploy, now!'

'Iyats crave complex patterns,' Arithon repeated. Eyes level, hard as the glint off chipped emerald, he finished his razor-edged point. 'They might, therefore, respond, led on out of straight fascination.'

'Arithon! Be quiet!' Harried past subtlety, Dakar ripped at his beard. 'The Koriathain are onto your game-board, again. Their forsaken sigil's turned active.'

'Some minutes ago, yes. The dissonance stings. But I have no intent, now or at any time, to grant their meddling wiles even one step off my chosen course.' The Master of Shadow turned his head aft. 'Feylind! The men aloft, have they restrung the topsail halyard?'

'Almost,' the captain's reply floated forward. 'The cracked sheave's repaired. The boy's catching his breath before s.h.i.+nnying back up to the mast-head.'

Arithon's manic interest flashed into a grin. 'Let's whip up a little experiment, shall we? Could Teive perhaps pa.s.s me a suitable line? Then call the hands down from the crow's nest.'

Dakar loosed a martyred breath through his teeth, then clambered aside to make way for the crewmen descending the ratlines. 'Are you dead certain you ought to try this?'

Arithon laughed. 'Sure as the scryer's eye tracking my back!'

He received the coiled line, then bent and untied the knotted strings securing the sack. A lightning-fast reach, and his fingers emerged, grasping a glint of rarefied light. Two days of experimentation had let him define the precise frequency required to shadow a fiend. Tuned in to the range of their volatile energies, the sliver of effort required to stay them had been reduced to an artful subtlety.

Trapped iyat in hand, Arithon engaged mastery and tightened his intent into crystalline focus. His etched purpose defined the sequence required to raise and rethread the lift for the topsail halyard. Then, ordered thought framed as template, he let the iyat soak up the imprint.

'Stand clear,' he cautioned. He placed the flaked rope, then loosed the charged fiend from his grasp.

The iyat dispersed to a wisped shred of light and faded from view altogether. A drawn second pa.s.sed. The sailhands watched, riveted. Another moment, while the grousing quips from the hold rang on the windless air. Then the rope twitched. Snake-like, its hemp coils stirred in possession. Sprung out of its coil, it unreeled in a vertical rush, aimed for the topmast crow's nest. The end threaded through the appropriate block, swooped back down, then veered awry in a gleeful dive toward the wallowing swell of the Cildein.

Arithon, laughing, snapped off a fresh shadow. His timely move stripped the fiend from the rope, while Teive's thrifty reflex captured the flailing end before valued cordage lost itself overboard.

'f.e.c.kless creature,' chided Arithon, thoughtful. Mage-sight let him track the creased bolt of distortion left by the fiend's streaking departure. 'We'll just have to try the manoeuvre again.'

'You shouldn't,' Dakar grumbled. 'You're likely to find the rope turned as a whip, if not hanging you up by the throat.'

'Free will, my Prophet, in law and with strictures.' The Master of Shadow delved back into his warded sack with enthusiastic delight. 'No starved creature bites the hand bearing gifts. I only have to toy with the mix. You don't think my demand can be tailored to taste? Shall we find out which frequency dazzles a fiend and which drives it to intoxication?'

The on-going trial required three attempts. The deck-hands observed with opened mouths, then played the stakes, taking bets. They slapped their knees and yelled ribald encouragement, while the fiends that had ripped them to shambles and shreds were cajoled into rerigging the topmast tackle. Arithon plied his mastery and refined his touch. His subsequent pranks grew flamboyant. When he set an even dozen to st.i.tching a rent sail, Feylind whooped and cried tears, doubled over in gales of mirth. If a needle was lost, and three fiends defected, the nine that stayed on did a pa.s.sable job.

None complained of the uneven st.i.tching.

Which dalliance did nothing for Dakar's nipped frown. 'We still have a scryer riding that sigil,' he reminded with acid remonstrance.

'Trust me, I know.' Arithon caught his breath. A snared fiend in hand, he nodded in deference toward Teive. 'We're fit to bear sail?'

'Oh, aye,' the mate said, easy candour restored. 'The boys just sent word. Our ballast's restacked. Give us a fresh breeze, we've just got to bend on the canvas.'

In fact, the brig's keel rode trim again. Her hull settled tight in the water as ever, except for a stripped patch of sheathing.

'Welcome back, ladies,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn. He glanced briefly downward, as though something pained him: and the eye of the scryer, far distant in Forthmark, spied the green edge of metal, pinned underneath his placed foot.

All the while, the active sigil of tracking had been removed from its original fastening. Under the opportune gift of a calm, s.h.i.+fting the brig's ballast had raised the watermark high enough to let a swimmer down on a rope. Short work, from there, to spring the fastening nails and pry off the thin sheet of copper. The inscription had not been disrupted, or destroyed. Pressed flat to the decking, unremarked until now, the aggressive sigil now covered a second inert inscription fas.h.i.+oned from charcoal.

Bound into live scrying, the Koriani observer had barely that moment to ponder the cipher's significance. The mark bore no trace of resonant power. Masked out of view, obscured by the Prime's sigil, its form became vexingly hard to discern. Since the figure was copied, it might be recognized as Selidie's own construct, lately used to incite a rank plague of fiends. The slight caveat distinguished: that this configuration had been reversed, line for line executed in mirror image.

Arithon, meanwhile, had not paused to laugh. He now sang a lyrical phrase in Paravian. Two days in recovery, his clear tones struck the air and revived the remembrance of flame: and a coal, once reduced from a living tree's heart-wood, retired to the call of the element. The charcoal mark quickened. Held in pa.s.sive contact, pressed overtop, the copper-scribed sigil captured the pattern in resonant sympathy.

The Master of Shadow seized the moment and flipped the bright fleck in his hand. 'Well, ladies, you've had more than plenty of warning to let go and back off your d.a.m.ned spying!'

He flattened his palm. This time without pause to temper his thought, he tore off his stayspell of shadow. The iyat he held unfurled and reclaimed its lost freedom. Gifted the limitless bait of live charge, it darted straight down, drawn first by the brightened promise of fire, then hooked by the vortex of the active sigil, still linked through the Waystone's roused focus . . .

Lirenda possessed no resource to break off the scrying's engaged connection. Denied personal autonomy, she could not frame a banishment or disengage the great amethyst. No critical step in evasion was possible without orders, made on the Prime Matriarch's initiative.

Then the moment flashed past. The iyat crashed in like a vengeful, shot arrow, consuming the energies of every last stay laid down for guarding protection. Unable to warn, Lirenda suffered the burn of wild forces as the fiend snagged the raised field of the Waystone. Chaos erupted. Sucked down, whirled under, then punched blind and witless, Lirenda lacked voice for her agony. She could not breathe, could not think, could not feel her own heart-beat. A whisker from death, she raged, helpless.

Then the Prime's shriek of fury shattered the dark. 'Alt!'

Lirenda snapped free. Dropped limp on the carpet, wrenched dizzy and heaving, she regained a grip on her up-ended senses. Prime Selidie stood above her, wrestling to quell the raging might of the Waystone. Her mastery was contested with virulent force. The loose fiend inside had no mind to relinquish a feast of near-limitless power.

Its fight was not scatheless. As energetic contention flared and whirled through the jewel and torqued the spin of its axis, a sawed note of vibration ripped through structured quartz, chopped short by a spang like snapped wire. A crack sheared one side of the great jewel's matrix, spreading a crackle of craze marks that threatened to shatter the sphere.

'Alt, d.a.m.n you, Alt!' the Matriarch howled, desperate. Splashed by filth as Lirenda spewed on the floor, she rammed through the last sequence of ciphers.