Lysaer’s outrage drilled into his turned back as he hammered. Sulfin Evend held steadfast. The seeress’s dry voice instructed from memory, ‘You must break the bowl, next. Ah, no! Foolish man, you will never unwrap it! Those sigils incised on the rim channel power. Harm could strike at you, through your unshielded vision, or worse. The unclean powers engendered by necromancy might open a portal within your defensive circles. Keep the bowl veiled. Use the stone. Crush the clay through the cloth. Now, be warned. The act will cause pain, for the resonance of shed blood on that vessel will harbour far more than residual spell-craft. As the sigils are shattered, their forced bond will release. The matrix that shackles the spirit will break, and Lysaer will feel the unpleasant shock as it happens.’
Sulfin Evend braced his nerves. Rock in hand, black hair soaked with sweat, he groped through the masking layer of cloth and sorted the ugly contents by feel. Then he aimed for the bowl and brought the rock down with all of his war-hardened strength.
Pottery smashed with a muffled thump, and Lysaer s’Ilessid screamed. High and thin as a wounded rabbit, his keening note sawed the stark fabric of silence and extended beyond all endurance. Aching, Sulfin Evend crashed the stone down again. Blow after blow, he hammered into the cloth, and pulverized the burst fragments. Lysaer whimpered and cried. He howled in agony. Contorted spasms wracked his splayed form. His back arched. The ties that entrapped him tore his fine skin, as his vibrating heels drummed the floor-boards.
Horrified, Sulfin Evend pressed on. Lysaer’s distress would not ease, while he faltered. Reprieve could not happen before he enacted the full course of the banishing ritual. His hand shook. His eyes blurred with tears. He exchanged the stone for the black-handled knife, and rinsed the blade in the basin.
Enithen Tuer had warned of worse yet to come. Back in her attic, Sulfin Evend believed that she mocked him. Now all but unhinged by the force of his pity, he realized she had exhorted him out of heart-felt compassion.
A wiser man might have listened and walked free: more than a life debt attended this balance. Yet the choice of that moment was forfeit, and the hour too late to turn back.
Sulfin Evend lifted the flint dagger point over his liege’s navel. Lips sealed, throat locked, he cut swiftly. The small flesh wound welled scarlet: the indented scar that once tied the cord to the mother filled and ran with the blood of the child. Sulfin Evend pronounced the birth name of his prince, then phrased the Paravian invocation for prime power. He capped his appeal with a plea that was mortal, common to all of humanity.
‘I demand this man’s freedom! By right of birth, by right of life, by right of spirit, by the right of the undying light that sources his greater being, let him reclaim the pure truth of his wholeness. He is, himself, sovereign, alive by free will.’
‘You will then cut the cords,’ Enithen Tuer had instructed. ‘By your born talent, one by one, you must feel them. Leave the one you will find at his brow! You must not touch that tie! If you slip, brave man, if you strike that last bonding, even by chance, you will do worse than destroy the victim you have set your very self at risk to preserve. Not only would you bring yourself under attack, you would call forfeit Lysaer’s first claim to autonomy. His will would be lost, forever enslaved through your act to the undying web of the necromancers.’
Sulfin Evend cleaned the stained knife. Left hand raised, fingers spread, he sounded the space above Lysaer’s straining body with testing intent. Where he detected the invisible threads of resistance, he slashed the stream of energy crosswise with the black flint. At each cut, the air thrummed with vibrations past the range of his natural hearing. Lysaer shuddered and cried. Tears streaked down his temples. He recoiled, flinching, as though each encounter that disturbed the cords left him burned. Sulfin Evend barred his torn heart. Beyond mercy, he quartered the prince’s stretched flesh, up and down, across the torso, at each ear, and over the crown, then down every strained limb. Each methodical pass, he nipped the bands of spelled energy, however small and fine.
Dumb exhaustion set in, then shivering nausea. Sulfin Evend persisted, while Lysaer’s sobs dwindled. Long before the finish, the flesh he worked over subsided to a flaccid chill. Taut skin shuddered and streamed poisoned sweat, while the pounding pulse in the stretched veins of the neck raced as though the victim was set under torture.
Sulfin Evend swiped back his drenched hair. Thread after thread, he tested and sundered, until only the last tie remained. By then, Lysaer’s breathing was broken and harsh, beaten down to the verge of extremity.
‘You may think your liege is near death from shock,’ the seeress had said of this jointure. ‘As you love life, if you care for his spirit, I charge you not to be fooled!’
Set back on his heels, Sulfin Evend regrouped. Weariness wracked him. Every nerve in his body felt sickened. The hearth-fire had subsided to a bed of dull coals, painting the chamber in textureless shadow. Inside the cut circles, the close-woven air seemed as the walls of a tomb, rippled with sullen heat and cloying with blood smell, wet charcoal, and herb smoke. The single man, striving, sensed the trembling web of the cult’s powers coiled tight through the gloom. Sweat burned through his lashes and scoured his eyes, and fear coiled cold in his vitals. Come triumph, or ruin, the dread crux was upon him.
Direct touch at this stage could not be avoided, a pitfall of consummate danger. Enithen Tuer had told him, unflinching: the salvage he staked his life to complete was all but predestined to fail.
‘There is no recourse,’ she explained, unequivocal. ‘The necromancers snared Lysaer by willing consent. Consciously, he must revoke their foul hold. Your prince has to wield the knife by his own hand. His free choice alone can release the last binding.’
Sulfin Evend braced for the final contest. Straddled across Lysaer’s helpless, stripped body, he reached for the left wrist to slice away the silk binding.
‘Your loyal heart will lay open your defences,’ the wise old seeress had cautioned. ‘Since the first moment you severed the auric streams tapped by the cultists to siphon vitality, you will have unsealed a self-contained line of spell-craft. Touch the victim, and the imbalanced conduit will affix to you. Until the remaining cord is destroyed, your strength will be drained to replenish Lysaer. Each moment thenceforward will sap you, brave man. Your prince will revive, and you will diminish. With no effort at all, the bound victim might bring the enemy’s work to completion. He need do nothing more than outlast you.’
Sulfin Evend had met her concern with his fixed choice to go forward. ‘I’ll trust Lysaer’s innate gift of justice will lend me the opening to prevail.’
Yet words were not action. No stringent warning prepared: first contact ignited a welter of pain.
Hard resolve could not reconcile the chain-lightning jolt that slammed through mind and senses. Hurled headlong into vertigo, Sulfin Evend reeled, cut adrift, as the explosive shock flayed his awareness. On blind fear, he grappled. The parasitic evil that leached life and breath could bring him down just as fast as the rush of arterial bleeding. He could not pull back. The die had been cast. Mulish courage was not going to save him. Lysaer would be lost for his fatal mistake: the spelled creature whose savage, blue eyes reviled him would never accept a clean death, far less comprehend the chance of a self-claimed redemption.
Tonight’s ruin would seed a future of ashes.
The paragon who wielded the power of Light would become a puppet, possessed by the will of reanimate shades. His suborned majesty would destroy the very Alliance whose cause was to banish the oppression of Shadow and tyranny.
Sulfin Evend locked down his jagged scream. Beyond help or resource, he cut the silk restraining his liege’s left hand. Pain slowed his reflexes. With humiliating ease, Lysaer’s bone-slender wrist twisted free of his sweaty grasp.
The commander deflected the fingers that jabbed at his face. War-trained to fight, he discarded the knife. A feint, a wild snatch, and he snapped a fresh hold. His two-fisted grip bore down on Lysaer’s forearm, while the spells of the necromancer