Still less did it seem they should be able to manifest themselves here, so far south! Their once-mighty powers were circumscribed now, pent-up and curtailed so that the pain-eating predators among them might no longer slake their obscene appetites upon humans and other ground-dwelling beings. And yet I seemed to feel something reaching for me, grasping my poor pounding heart with claws of ice and slowly – so slowly – tightening its grip. The chest spasm was tentative and entirely bearable, but my feeble old legs now refused to support my body and I subsided onto my knees, eyes still locked onto that dreadful blazing sky.
I have said that the night was strangely quiet. I was aware of this anomaly almost at the same time that I realized it was not quite true. A ghostly sound was discernible at the very limit of audibility, a sibilance that ebbed and flowed like surf, all the while overlaid with a complex rustling that almost resembled speech. I had first heard its like some sixty years ago, as I lay dying on the Desolation Coast of Tarn. The Coldlight Army had blazed above me then in all its awful strength, jeering at my mortal frailty, ridiculing the notion that a pathetic creature such as I might be able to frustrate its devilish entertainment.
‘But I survived in spite of you!’ I managed to croak, shaking a fist at them. ‘I used your own twisty rules of magic to thwart your schemes. Do you want to know how? It’s simple: I never told you my true name! I’m Snudge, but I’m not Snudge. What d’you think of that, Lights?’
Above me the luminous draperies and glorious colored beacons flared in response to my puny effort at defiance. The faint crackling sound intensified momentarily and I felt a crushing agony behind my breastbone. The pang subsided almost at once and I slowly exhaled, sagging back onto my heels and then sprawling sideways to rest against the trunk of a small tree, eyes shut tight.
Was the pain really of their doing, or was my aging heart simply giving out at last as I dreamt of my old enemies? I waited motionless, in fearful anticipation of a more violent attack that would finish me; but none came, and at length I relaxed, reassuring myself that the lethal capabilities of the Lights were indeed extinct. They could do me no serious harm. I, Deveron Austrey, called Snudge, would live.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the sky was empty except for the rich expanse of southern stars.
The grand scheme to unite the four disparate realms of High Blenholme into a single Sovereignty was conceived by my first master, Conrig Wincantor, later to be nicknamed Ironcrown, while he was still very young.
Growing up as Prince Heritor of Cathra, the richest and most powerful of the island realms, Conrig idolized his remote ancestor Emperor Bazekoy, the towering personality who first vanquished the great Continental nations of Foraile, Andradh, and Stippen, then set out to wrest control of Blenholme from the Salka and the other nonhuman monsters who had inhabited the place since the dawn of time. The year that Bazekoy’s conquering army sailed up the River Brent marked the beginning of the Blenholme Chronicle.
After a long and glorious life, the emperor chose to return to the island to die – influenced, according to legend, by a dream of Great Lights. Over a thousand years later his remains, interred in Zeth Abbey, were destined to play a strangely influential role in the life of Conrig’s father, King Olmigon of Cathra – as I have already described in the first volume of this Boreal Moon Tale.
Conrig’s own reign began in Chronicle Year 1128, with a triumph and what seemed to be an appalling tragedy. A great sea-battle and a climactic storm in Cala Bay resulted in the defeat of King Honigalus Mallburn of Didion and forced that ill-fated monarch to accept vassal status in Conrig’s new Sovereignty of High Blenholme. As a condition of Didion’s surrender at Eagleroost Castle, in a move that stunned most of the high nobility of Cathra, Conrig divorced his Tarnian wife Maudrayne Northkeep – presumed by him to be barren after six years of turbulent marriage – and pledged to wed Princess Risalla, the younger half-sister of Honigalus.
Although I was only sixteen years of age at the time, I was already closely attendant upon Conrig and serving unofficially as his Royal Intelligencer by virtue of my secret wild talents. Thus I was one of the horrified witnesses who saw Maudrayne calmly put her name to the bill of divorcement, then throw herself off the castle battlements into the wintry sea forty ells below.
I was also a member of the large party who subsequently combed the ice-covered shore rocks for Maudrayne’s body. My uncanny seekersense was then extremely powerful; nevertheless I was unable to detect any trace of the poor suicide. In the days that followed, both the Brothers of Zeth and Conjure-Queen Ullanoth of Moss utilized their magical talents to hunt for the woman Conrig now termed the Princess Dowager, scrutinizing not only the shoreline but also the interior regions of the island, on the improbable chance that she had somehow survived. The searchers found nothing. It was decided that the body must have been carried far out into Cala Bay, to be lost in the frigid depths.
After a month of official mourning, Conrig quietly married Risalla Mallburn. His profound condolences had been dispatched to Tarn, Maudrayne’s birthplace and the only island nation not yet accepting the Edict of Sovereignty. Tarn’s ruler, the High Sealord Sernin Donorvale, reacted with predictable fury to his favorite niece’s public humiliation. In the year following her presumed death, Sernin rebuffed Conrig’s demands that Tarn join Cathra, Didion, and Moss in a unified High Blenholme, even when the Sovereignty ‘reluctantly’ cut off trade with his corner of the island, leaving Tarn at the mercy of rapacious mainland merchants and pirates. Forced to purchase food and other needful commodities from the Continent at inflated prices, the once-wealthy domain grew more and more impoverished and vulnerable.
The injurious effects of the Wolf’s Breath volcanic eruptions which had caused widespread crop failures on the island, shut down Tarn’s all-important gold mines, and precipitated the political upheaval that inspired Conrig’s scheme of unification – were now only a bad memory. Eastern Didion recovered from the famine that had devastated its largest cities. Its pragmatic ruler, Honigalus, rebuilt the capital city of Holt Mallburn that had been devastated by Conrig’s invading army. He regained the trust of Didion’s independent-minded timberlords, whose cooperation was vital to the restoration of his country’s shipbuilding industry, paid off the war reparations demanded by Conrig by building a new fleet of naval vessels for the Sovereignty, and did his best to keep a lid on his fiery younger brother Prince Somarus, who remained implacably opposed to Conrig’s hegemony and considered Honigalus a traitor for having capitulated.
In the tiny kingdom of Moss, which enjoyed First Vassal status in the Sovereignty thanks to Conjure-Queen Ullanoth’s magical assistance to Conrig during the war with Didion, things were apparently tranquil. The queen’s insanely ambitious younger brother Beynor, who had briefly occupied the throne until his imprudent ventures into high sorcery incurred the displeasure of the Beaconfolk, had fled to the desolate Dawntide Isles to live with the Salka monsters. Whenever she gathered strength enough to pay the pain-price to the Beaconfolk, Queen Ullanoth made use of a powerful magical tool, the moonstone sigil Subtle Loophole, to keep watch on Beynor…and to observe other events transpiring here and there about High Blenholme. Part of this intelligence she shared with her sometime lover, High King Conrig. The rest of it she kept to herself, while she quietly pursued thaumaturgical studies and pondered the possibility of seizing control of the Sovereignty herself when the time was ripe.
Early in the spring of 1130, when most Tarnian ports remained icebound and the majority of that nation’s fighting ships were still hauled up ashore, High Sealord Sernin learned that a large fleet of freebooters had set sail from Andradh on the Continent, intending to seize Tarnholme and the other important port cities of Goodfortune Bay – the only section of the Tarnian coast that remained reliably unfrozen in winter. Poised in the mountains above Tarnholme to reinforce the sea invasion was a ragtag but formidable army of insurgent warriors loyal to Prince Somarus, led by robber-barons of western Didion.
Facing an impossible situation, Sernin and his Company of Equals swallowed their pride and sought aid from the Sovereignty, pledging fealty in return. Conrig agreed only after Tarn bowed to draconian conditions. The High King dispatched his new navy to beat off the Andradhians,