Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

Fellowship sanction, they have the right to receive our assistance. But they must ask. And then we can act only by the Law of the Major Balance, inside a prescribed set of limits.’

      A brief pause, while the Sorcerer’s terrible bright eyes turned down and regarded the linked clasp of his hands. ‘I opened a grimward for the sake of Prince Arithon’s safety,’ he said, steel and sorrow gritted through the admission. ‘Thirty-eight sunwheel guardsmen pursued him inside, driven on by duty and hatred. Of those, only one escaped with his life. Willful pride and rank ignorance brought the rest to their doom. Their deaths were chosen, not forced.’

      ‘Why could you not save them?’ the fisherman pressed. ‘The power was yours.’

      ‘The power is mine,’ Asandir affirmed. ‘But not then or ever, the arrogance to enact intervention!’ He sat sharply forward, stern as chipped granite. ‘The compact was sworn on mankind’s behalf, but its tenets were designed to guard the land. Paravians hold our vow against greed and misuse. That grants no authority to impair human freedom, however the trade guilds cry tyranny. We take no license to enact judgment on others, except as the weal of this world becomes threatened. Town councils ignore this, yet the bare facts remain. Humanity exists here on sufferance. Forget at your peril! Your race would be homeless without our sworn surety that Athera’s great mysteries stay sacrosanct.’

      ‘You’re saying––’ began the fisherman.

      Asandir cut him off, ruthless. ‘We who are bound know better than any how a yoke chafes and how spirit can languish without the grace of free will. By Fellowship choice no child born under sky in this place is destined to live as a pawn!’

      ‘I don’t understand,’ the fisherman whispered, mollified at last by the unsheathed pain he had aroused in the Sorcerer who confronted him.

      ‘You couldn’t know, but our people remember.’ The gray-headed clansman stirred in the uncanny stillness that locked the air, between the lisp of turned waters and the matchless, steady breath of the wind, which even now held to the intent of Asandir’s unimaginable control. He glanced at the Sorcerer, who granted a sharp nod of leave. ‘The Fellowship of Seven were drawn here, long past, by the dreams of the dragons that no mind in creation can deny. They were charged and tied by a ritual magic wrought from drake’s blood to ensure Paravian survival. That oath taking gifted them their knowledge of longevity. Record among the clans says their lives stay the course of a service that could last to the ending of time, if need be.’

      ‘The drakes claimed us through the flaw of our own violence, and by the stain of slaughter already on our hands,’ Asandir qualified. ‘We were called as a weapon to destroy the drake spawn that could not be weaned from unconscionable killing. Only when Paravian survival is assured will our lives be set free once again.’

      There passed an interval when only the wind spoke. The gruff, weathered fisherman could not bear to turn his head and suffer Asandir’s magnanimous acceptance. Moonlight edged the tableau in metallic, cold lines, and the lisp of the waves carried the salt tang of primordial beginnings. The Sorcerer sat, rock patient throughout, while the occupants of the sloop who still owned their mortality came to terms with the history of his Fellowship.

      ‘I have never understood,’ the young clansman ventured, made bold by the Sorcerer’s mild tolerance. ‘When the drake spawn were contained, or put down in the wars, were you not given liberty to break the drake’s binding and reclaim your own will once again?’

      Asandir looked up, his eyes bleak with remembrance and his shoulders too straight against the moving weave of the wavecrests. ‘We had only the methuri left to attend. They posed a minor threat, and Ciladis, who hoped to transmute their warped offspring, saw no need to hasten their final disposition. We all failed to foresee how our obligation would compound on the hour that refugee humanity discovered this world of Athera.’

      Now the fisherman looked puzzled. Perhaps out of weariness, the Sorcerer chose to unveil the depth of the Fellowship’s tragedy. ‘The terms of the compact reinstated the drake’s binding all over again.’

      ‘But why?’ The fisherman’s incredulity clashed like snarled thread with the Sorcerer’s shaded, soft sorrow.

      ‘Because once, we were a large part of the reason why humanity needed refuge in the first place.’ The confession was a bald-faced statement of fact, devoid of self-pity or guilt. Long since reconciled to the horrors of past history, Asandir seemed a figure carved out of oak. The sliding foam of the wake, and the stitched needles of reflection the night’s moon and stars streaked across heaving waters were made to seem transient by comparison. ‘We impair no man’s free will by the Law of the Major Balance, that we are charged never to violate. But our peril in these times holds a razor’s edge. For you see, if the Mistwraith’s curse that drives the two princes to hatred wreaks havoc enough to break the compact, the guiding charge of the dragons will reclaim us.’

      The pall of the quiet held nothing of calm, as the old fisherman shrank at the helm of his boat, and the boy slept, oblivious, curled in oilskin. The elder clansmen for decency averted his face, aware as his younger scout was not of the weight of admission forthcoming.

      ‘You don’t understand, still?’ Asandir’s remonstrance came gentle, grief and tears bound in iron that must meet the crucible unflinching. ‘It’s the fear we live and breathe with each waking hour since the Mistwraith breached South Gate five centuries ago. If mankind upsets the balance, if the grand mystery that quickens renewal and life here ever comes to be threatened, then the Paravians who are Ath’s blessed gift to heal the dragons’ transgressions will fade from Athera forever. Our Fellowship will be called to act ere that happens. We will be forced to carry out the directive the drakes set upon us, to ensure Paravian survival no matter the cost of the sacrifice.’

      All the subtle, deft power that now cajoled wind and tide potentially turned to destruction, even to arranging the extinction of the one race whose wants and ambitions brooked no restraint. Spoken language fell short of expression; renewed anguish seemed chiseled by the unconscionable memories stamped into the Sorcerer’s lined face.

      Yet no resonance of bygone sorrow could prepare for the impact as Asandir concluded in stripped pain, ‘We could be forced to call forfeit our redemption, don’t you see? If the compact is broken, then our Fellowship must enact the annihilation of humanity all over again.’

      Only this time, they would be compelled to the act of mass slaughter in full cognizance, causation set into a lens of awareness refined by ten thousand years of arcane wisdom. Sympathy faltered, and language became inadequate to express that stark weight of remorse. No mercy could soften the cruel edge of the paradox. Nor did means exist on a boat under way for the Sorcerer to recoup his privacy.

      Sorry at last for the temerity of his questioning, the fisherman wept at the helm. The clan scouts maintained staid and dignified silence, while Asandir showed the grace of a humbling courage to grant them release from embarrassment. In unstudied diplomacy, he settled back on his blanket roll and slept.

      He stirred once, at slack tide, to fine-tune the draw of the water that propelled the sloop on her heading. No one spoke to interrupt his dialogue with the elements. The boy was rousted up to handle the lines, and the sails were hardened upon the opposite tack to steady the keel against the shift in the current. When the last sheet was cleated, the Sorcerer moved his blanket roll to windward. Again he dozed, his large hands abandoned like driftwood in the hollow of his lap.

      Dawn brightened the waves to opaque, leaden gray. Gulls dipped and called against a sky like smoked pearl, layered with shredding drifts of light fog. The merciless light touched the Sorcerer’s face and revealed his exhaustion, demarked in pinched lines, and sharp angles where the bone pressed against his thinned flesh. No one rushed to be first to awaken him, even when the shoreline of the estuary loomed ahead, notched with the torn sable outline of the forest he had come to spare from the torch.

      Asandir needed no prompting in any case. Cued by the lift of the swell as his binding drove the sloop toward shoaling waters, he spoke the Paravian