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than to hurl Arithon's own guilt back against him.
Dakar scraped up the spilled remains of the herb, then gathered pipe and
striker and flint. He bore the items back to the floor by the berth,
heartsick for what must follow.
"You difficult, cross-grained, shadow-binding bastard," he murmured to
the heedless prince as he repacked the stubby little pipe.
"If I do this, I'll never be quit of your memory."
Dakar glared at the stilled form on the berth in a malevolence of sick misery
as he fumbled the striker and managed at last to light the bowl.
Bitter fumes bit the back of his throat as he inhaled. The far more likely
truth was that Arithon s'Ffalenn would kill him stone dead for interference.
The Mad Prophet drew on the smoke, deeper and deeper until his awareness
whirled like motes of dust through a starfield. He was going to have to
overdose just to stay ahead of the other man's blinding fast reflex.
The tienelle's narcotic was unforgiving. If he misjudged by a fraction, he
would lose himself with the prince, with no man aboard the Khetienn trained to
the mysteries to lend either one of them succor.
Settled into drug-heightened mage trance, tight laced in like a spear tipped
in adamant, Dakar readied his t. Then he arrowed a stinging cry of awareness
across the mind of Rathain's prince.
Defenses lashed back, a peal of meshed force that Dakar had no skill to match
except by a shield of stark vision: in the graphic detail impelled through
heightened prescience, he shaped Arithon's own pernicious memory of the
townsmen his act of grand conjury had cut down on the field by the River Tai
Quorin.
Sight collided with s'Ffalenn remorse. Dakar saw the silver-bright flare of
imposed power as royal compassion stung the prince into flash point recoil.
Arithon's defenses shuddered into disarray. Through that momentary gap, Dakar
rammed force tempered like a killing blade. He struck without mercy, armed in
ruthless, unsheathed power.
Arithon's mage-sight had been poisoned by guilt; therefore, in judgment more
pitiless than Ath's angel of vengeance, those deeds that stung conscience
would be turned, reft beyond reach and veiled from recall.
Dakar was relentless. He ransacked what memories he knew in ruthless
succession: the grand failures at Tai Quorin; Steiven s'Valerient and his
lady, now moldered bones beneath a stone cairn in Deshir Forest;
for one boychild spared, a generation lost in bloodshed; then Dhirken;
Lady
Maenalle; and nine other hapless innocents in an armory; Talith's lost
marriage; all these griefs, Dakar swept into the fiery ring of his ward.
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At each turn, Arithon's awareness protested his presumptuous meddling.
The fight in him would not be quenched. This violation of his
innermost privacy roused a vehement storm of prideful temper.
Dakar plowed on, beleaguered. His instinct to show mercy for need must be
utterly stamped out. He held all the weapons. He was inside the
Shadow Master's deepest defenses. Any of a thousand thorny fragments of
happenstance were his to seize and turn, to cut off resistance, no matter how
brave, and to break down spirit and courage into reeling pain.
And even stung and stung again to inward howls of agony, Arithon's nature
would not give way in submission. The man who intervened in the effort to
spare his sanity could do nothing else but meet each tortured obstruction,
then use grief and sorrow to unbalance.
Dakar plumbed layer upon layer of guarded record, through events he had not
shared through experience-memories that extended back to
Arithon's time as Karthan's heir beyond the West Gate, where moral ideals and
the fresh hopes of youth had culminated in an unspeakable interval as a prince
in captivity under another s'llessid king. Laid out like tapestry, the Mad
Prophet beheld the foundations for all that Arithon had become. Through each
turn of event which had shaped a master of shadow rose the silver-gilt blaze
of Fellowship intervention, the instilled gift of Torbrand's compassion. its
influence laid an unmistakable trail to follow: a father's death of an arrow
upon the flame-racked decks of another brigantine; a kingdom lost to blood
feud a beloved grandfather whose every warning and principle had been
disregarded and finally betrayed.
Dakar dug in and occupied, and cut like a scalpel until at long last he
recoiled against the black, entwined web that entrenched the poisoned work of
Desh-thiere's curse. There he turned at bay. That tangle, not even the
Fellowship Sorcerers dared disturb.
And waiting for him there, still armed with enough power to stun was
Arithon's trained awareness, enraged to stabbing malice for an unconscionable
violation of self.
Dakar knew despair. He had achieved no master's training at magecraft:
in born talent, in training, in knowledge, the other man outmatched him.
He was in beyond his depth and pinned with no avenue of retreat. The straits
were not forgiving. Through the mage's reflex that disbarred his try at
rescue, he could sense the ongoing pressure as the effects of the tienelle
coursed through Arithon's body. Should his hold slip, should the diversion of
his presence become unseated, the guilt in the visions he defended would
resume their inflamed sequence and spur on the unwinding descent into madness.
The personal bindings of A course of sheer lo
selfhood, which Dakar for expedience had broken, but that a master's exacting
reflex in defense must be instilled to respect;
aware of only that one barrier that Arithon's counterthrust would hesitate to
cross, Dakar reacted. He claimed the burden of remorse he had stolen and
assumed the full coil as his own.
As he conjoined borrowed memories with the signature pattern of his
Name, the bleeding roots of the other man's compassion became his personal
inheritance. Along with the guilt came every wounding twist of fate that had
arisen to separate a masterbard from his born calling to shape music.
A heartbeat, and the victim was freed from his crippling guilt.
Reason returned, and full cognizance. In a rush fired to bounding expansion
by the tienelle, Arithon's mind unreeled through sharp, unfolding vision into
the lost power of his mage talent.
For him, a wondering, peaceful miracle of insight; for Dakar, a stab of dark
agony the likes of which ground and shattered his being through a paroxysm of
change.
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"Do what you must, " he charged the prince he sought to salvage.
"Transmute the drug's poisons and pull yourself out of this!" He need not
remonstrate that his spellbinder's resource was finite. Nor could he sustain
the weight of Arithon's conscience for one second longer than shocked nerves
could withstand the strain. He was not royal, nor tempered to mastery, nor
disciplined to a masterbard's empathy, but only a fat man born to a spurious
gift of prophecy whose burdens had driven him to drink.
"You are more than that, truly, " Arithon's reply sang back through the
terrible, twinned link. "Else I would be mad, and you would be drunk, and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]