Contact snapped. Dakar lost the unreeling thread of true vision as the lane’s crest subsided with daybreak. Tumbling unsupported amid the flux, he stretched to recapture the dialogue still exchanged in the Tiriac foothills. The ephemeral moment slipped beyond reach. Desperation, concern, and his forced need to know unravelled his grip. Set boundaries tore, fast followed by the chaotic surge that kindled his unbridled prescience … and vision spiralled him forward in time, to an afternoon meeting two fateful days hence. Late sun would be streaming in blades through the arrow slits in the keep where Duke Bransian conducted closed councils …
A blank interval later, the Mad Prophet aroused to a deafening chorus of bird-song. Daybreak had fled. The new morning was grey. His overhead view through the pines showed a lowering sky that threatened cold rain. Dakar sat up, befuddled. The storm’s rising gusts harried his clothes and buffeted his spinning senses. He rested his aching head in his hands. His breaths came too fast. The galloping pound of his heart pained his chest, and sweat trickled under his collar. He scrubbed a stray beetle out of his beard; brushed scattered leaves from his shirt front.
Through disorientation, he groped to recall why he perched on a rock in the woods.
‘Fiends plague,’ he grumbled. The horse he had ridden had broken its bridle and wandered away while he maundered. Its thrashing excursion had carried it down-slope, where it browsed, munching leaves.
Dakar started to curse, then coughed, ripped double by nausea. The sickness recalled his troubled night; then the shattering of his tranced vision of Jeynsa, leading into an uncontrolled fit of prescience. After-shock always destroyed his digestion. Dakar gouged at his temples. What had he foreseen? He retained no memory, not the least clue. His chill lashed up goose bumps. Such bouts of amnesia foreran events of dire consequence. When the auguries escaped him, they always came true.
Black dread harrowed him to his feet. A clutched pine branch saved his wracked balance.
Cruel fragment, what knowledge he had bought no comfort: Jeynsa s’Valerient should be nowhere near the hostilities in East Halla. The short-handed Fellowship could not intervene. Since the risk of informing the Teir’s’Ffalenn was tantamount to insanity, the Mad Prophet rallied his wits. He clawed his snapped reins from the tree trunk, determined. He had no choice now but to waylay a fishing boat, brave a rough crossing, then plead for a stay to send Jeynsa home through the auspices of Melhalla’s caithdein.
Dakar clenched his jaw. Stumbling with sickness, he set after his horse. At least his wild talent had claimed him where no eavesdroppers could hear him raving. Yet though he believed that the rogue prophecy had been lost, on two deadly counts, he proved wrong.
Late Summer 5671
Observations
Far south, in the Koriani enclave at Forthmark, the seeress attending the lane watch at dawn importunes the sisterhouse peeress: ‘I ask leave to present a fresh record in crystal directly to Selidie Prime. We have captured the imprint of a true prophecy, made by the spellbinder, Dakar. He fumbled his boundaries in his distress, and the flux running through the quartz vein in the Skyshiels disclosed our view of the event …’
In a seamless, domed chamber of rock, Davien the Betrayer regards a black pool welling up from a virgin spring; the water sheets over a carved ring of ciphers, raising rainbow mist, through which a drop falls, unveiling the prophesied scene to unfold two days hence in Duke Bransian’s citadel …
Raced south by galley from Highscarp, the first-hand account of the sorcerous strike at Etarra reaches the port town of Varens; and mounted state couriers depart at speed: one to Lysaer s’Ilessid, commanding from Tirans, while two other riders pound on through the night to Perdith, bearing sealed orders for dispatch by sea to raise Kalesh and Adruin to arms …
Late Summer 5671
Prime Selidie granted the unscheduled audience to review the captured lane imprint just picked up from the Fellowship Spellbinder. More, she called in her seniormost staff: opportunity walked in Dakar’s slipshod vigilance, given his tight association with the crown prince targeted as her sisterhood’s quarry.
‘We have gleaned forewarning of a momentous event that will shift the course of the Alliance campaign at Alestron,’ the duty watch seeress pronounced. If her ambitious claim at first raised disbelief, the purloined content of Dakar’s late vision unfolded with clear vindication as she unveiled her imprinted quartz. There, etched in light through a west-facing arrow-slit, the scene foretold to occur would take place inside what should have been a warded keep within Alestron’s citadel …
There, the duke glowered across an oak table left grooved by the ropes that strapped spies for interrogation. Prophetic sight showed the scarred boards spread across with a chart, salt-stained from last use on a galley. The corners were weighted with Parrien’s whetstone, a tankard with dents left by Sevrand, and two impaled stilettos, pinched from Mearn. The youngest brother s’Brydion never relinquished such prizes, except under bitter duress. Mearn presently stood, decked out as the dandy, a negligent shoulder braced to the stonewall. His claret doublet agleam with seed pearls, he held the drawn blade from his shirtsleeve in hand, paring his nails like a dilettante.
That warning, no one who knew him misjudged: Mearn’s affectations infallibly masked the murderous bent of his rages.
The duke’s wife, Liesse, was advised to tread softly. Her mere female presence an invasion of male authority, she had positioned her raw-boned frame in between her quarrelsome spouse and his snake-tempered younger brother.
‘You want the truth?’ Mearn contended. ‘We’re pickled.’
Bransian sweated in mail shirt and helm. Brows knitted, he leaned upon planted fists, spitting nails over the tactical map, which already reflected the blood-letting frenzy touched off by the grey cult’s demise at Etarra. The inked shore-line of the East Halla peninsula lay inundated by the enemy. Black blocks representing the massed Alliance force threw long shadows across the wood plugs used as counters to mark the defenders: two veteran strike companies in the field under Vhandon, and the garrison troops entrenched by Keldmar’s directive to safeguard Alestron’s unharvested crops. Longer shadows striped the Cildein’s scrolled waves, cast by the carved hulls representing Parrien’s fleet of armed galleys. While they matched the sea-going might of Kalesh and Adruin, their numbers were too sparse to counter the warships inbound from Durn and Ishlir.
The advent of autumn could only bring worse. Elssine and Telzen downcoast flew the Sunwheel. Their standing companies would flood in, hard followed by spearmen and horse from Shaddorn. Then that menace soon to be augmented by Sulfin Evend’s massed muster, sweeping the towns on the southcoast under the false avatar’s banner.
Tottering piles of blocks sketched the outcome: the duke’s men would be hard-pressed to hold their field entrenchments long enough to secure the harvest.
While Liesse laced tight fingers, too canny to comment, Mearn flipped a nail paring out of the arrow-loop, and glared, slit-eyed, at his brother. ‘Stewed,’ he insisted, ‘and for stiff-necked pride. On the hour you jettisoned Arithon’s goodwill, we might have attempted to reason with him.’
‘Reason? With a bastard stripling whelped on foreign ground, witch-bred in descent from no less than Dari s’Ahelas?’ The duke bristled, his wiry beard shot with grey, except for the side singed to frizz during yesterday’s testing of