The Curse of the Mistwraith (25 page)

‘You did nothing,’ Elaira assured, her mind only half on apology. Apparently there were worse offences than visiting sorcerers of the Fellowship, or even engaging in card games with disreputable apprentice prophets: by the repercussions sensed in the background, Elaira understood that speaking with princes in haylofts after midnight was undeniably one of them. Yet to explain the particulars of her crisis would take by far too much time. ‘I have a scrape of my own to work out of – my personal version of Asandir.’

Arithon grinned and melted unobtrusively into the shadows. ‘Then I commend you to subterfuge and a fast, soft landing in a midden.’

She heard his soft step reach the ladder.

‘Farewell, lady enchantress.’ Then he was gone, leaving her alone with a larger dilemma than the one she had found in the loft at Enithen Tuer’s.

Guardian of Mirthlvain

Cupped like a witch’s cauldron between the jagged peaks of the Tiriacs and the north shore of Methlas Lake, Mirthlvain Swamp was not a place where even the boldest cared to tread. Submerged under vaporous mists, the pools with their hummocks of spear-tipped reeds spawned horrors in their muddy depths that the efforts of two civilizations had failed to secure behind walls. Yet a man did dare the dangers and walk here, on the crumbling stone causeway that remained of an ancient and long over-run bulwark. Grievously shorthanded as the Fellowship sorcerers had been through the years since the Mistwraith’s conquest, never for an instant was Mirthlvain Swamp left unwatched.

The master spellbinder Verrain crouched on a precarious span of stonework with his elbows braced on his knees. A rust-coloured cloak lay furled at his feet and untrimmed blond hair fringed his collar with beads of accumulated damp. He had poised for a very long time, motionless, his large, capable hands with their puncture scars from old bite wounds curled over an equally battered staff.

Wavelets flurried fitfully against the decayed wall, disturbed by something that lurked unseen in the depths; then the waters subsided to oily stagnation. A line creased Verrain’s brows and one ivory knuckle twitched. Black eyes regarded blacker water, both invisibly troubled.

The misted sky reflected in the pool shivered faintly, as if bubbles sprang from the muck underneath and rose in a sequin shimmer; except that no trapped air broke the surface. Verrain pursed lips that a very long time in the past had been the delight of Daenfal’s barmaids. He loosed a hand from his staff and slowly, carefully, extended his arm above the pool.

He spoke in accents as antiquated as the doxies, who were all six centuries dead. ‘Show yourself, spawn of the
methuri.
’

Then he closed his fingers. The ribbon of power he held leashed in readiness uncoiled through lightless fathoms.

Ripples bloomed to a curl of froth as a whip-thin tail sliced the surface, splashed and vanished.

‘Ah,’ said Verrain thoughtfully. ‘I am not so easily evaded.’ He murmured a word that unbound a restraint: a force like an arrow speared through the murk in pursuit of a creature that zig-zagged in patterns of wild flight.

Muck flurried up from the depths. Then the peaty waters moiled and burst into spray as a serpentine shape slashed through. The snake was narrow, its head the distinctive wedge of a viper. The eyes it pinned on its tormentor were scarlet as jewels, and malevolent.

The spellbinder forced himself not to recoil. Though aware the sculling serpent was fully capable of a strike, he traced a symbol upon the air. A shimmer remained where his finger passed.

The snake stayed trained upon the ward glyph as, crouched on the heels of worn boots, and bare of any artifice or talisman, Verrain transformed thought into power. His palms began to glow faintly. He handled raw energy as though it were solid and twisted it into a strand. The serpent hissed, fighting the ward that held it bound and its tail flicked a silver fin of water into the tangled banks of reed.

Verrain’s forehead ran with sweat. Faster now, his fingers wove spell-thread into a snare which he cast over the creature that knifed the water.

The pool exploded into spray. Unnaturally vocal for its kind, it screamed like a rabbit as the ward clamped over its coils.

The hair prickled on Verrain’s neck as it twisted. He blocked its attempt to dive. The snake screamed again. The spellbinder’s nostrils flared against the vapours thrown off by churning water. Grim with concentration and braced as if for a blow, he released the rest of the energies he had pooled throughout motionless hours of waiting.

Light pulsed across his fine-knit spells. The mesh unravelled in a flash and the serpent’s cry ceased as if pinched. A last reflexive surge shot it full length from the marsh before it fell back, limp.

Verrain snatched up his staff. Fast as a swordsman, he hooked one flaccid coil before it could sink beyond sight. A practised snap of his wrist flipped the serpent clear of the pool. Its dripping four-foot length spilled with a slither on the moss-rotten stone of the wall.

Exposed to full view, it gleamed sleekly black. A row of barbs ridged the length of its spine. Verrain prodded the head into profile. The red eyes were slitted like a cat’s. An ivory diamond patterned the throat; the rest of the underbelly was dark. Verrain pried open the mouth and extended the fangs from their membrane sheaths. Venom seeped out, odourless and diamond-clear; but the drop that splashed the rock left a caustic, smoking stain.

Verrain scrambled back beyond reach of the fumes. His wide, expressive mouth lost all trace of the fact he ever smiled. He had expected this serpent might be a fresh variation; the creatures bent into mutation in past ages to serve as hosts for
methuri
, or hate-wraiths, interbred with persistent success. Although the Fellowship of Seven had exterminated the last of these iyat-related parasites five thousand years back, Mirthlvain Swamp continued relentlessly to brew up left-over crossbreeds.

Diamond-throated meth-snakes cropped up in many forms, ranging from harmless to virulently poisonous. This one Verrain had snared as a formality, never suspecting its bite might carry a cierl-ankeshed toxin. He shuddered to think of the risk he had taken, to Name-trance the creature bare-handed. Weak in the knees, he leaned on his staff and thanked Ath Creator he was unharmed and still standing upright.

Even skin-contact with that deadliest of poisons caused a wasting of the nerves, a screaming firestorm of agony that resulted in twitching paralysis. His body might have lain on this wall and suppurated for days before the life finally left it.

Aware through Sethvir that the Fellowship was taxed thin by an outbreak of Khadrim and the development of the West Gate Prophecy, Verrain frowned. His discovery was not going to please; cierl-ankeshed was a threat that his masters securely believed had been eradicated.

Suddenly drained by his weariness, the spellbinder who was Guardian of Mirthlvain straightened. He shook out his rust-brown cloak, raised up his staff and nudged the dead snake from the wall. The corpse fell with a splash but did not sink. Even as Verrain moved away, his footsteps cautious on the unstable stone of the wall, the ink-black waters behind him boiled up in a froth as scavengers converged in a frenzy to devour the meth-snake’s remains.

Observations

In the city of Castle Point, a raven drops out of misty sky and alights on the shoulder of a sorcerer who wears black, and whose dark, sad eyes are shadowed further by a broad-brimmed hat with a patterned silver band…

Southward, beneath the shattered spires of the old earl’s court, the enchantress of the watch bears report to the Prime that Elaira has culminated an illicit visit to Erdane with clandestine meetings with a prince in a tavern hayloft…

Sethvir, sorcerer and archivist at Althain Tower to Asandir, in residence at the home of Enithen Tuer: ‘
Cross Camris promptly. Trouble pending: migrant strain of meth-snakes with cierl-ankeshed venom confirmed in Mirthlvain swamp…
’

VII. PASS OF ORLAN

The morning following Arithon’s escapade at the Four Ravens, Asandir recalled the horses from the smithy where they had been reshod, then rousted a hung-over Dakar from the brothel that had sheltered him through the night. Whether the Mad Prophet had been sober enough to enjoy the doxie whose bed had warmed him appeared dubious; he sat the paint’s saddle with a pronounced list. Yet the malaise that unstrung his balance seemed not to dampen his complaints.

‘When I pass beneath the Wheel, Dharkaron Avenger’s going to seem like an angel of mercy.’ He crooked his reins in one elbow, cradled his head and managed with well-practised grumpiness to direct his injury toward Asandir. ‘You
said
we’d be in Erdane for two more days.’

The sorcerer replied too softly to overhear; but the effect upon Dakar was profound.

His cheeks went white as new snow. Suddenly straight in his saddle, he swung the paint’s head and promptly spurred down the lane toward the gates. No further protest escaped him, even when the party clattered out of Erdane and turned eastward at a pace guaranteed to inflame his hangover.

Lysaer for once forbore from teasing. Aware that his half-brother had stolen out last night by himself, and disappointed not to have been asked along, he gained no chance for tactful inquiry; Arithon’s night-time outing remained unexplained. No mention was made of the tunic which a peculiarly wakeful Enithen Tuer had snatched off to wash before dawn. Asandir’s mood seemed preoccupied and brisk and had been so since daybreak. Had Dakar felt inclined to be talkative he might have offered a fellow miscreant fair warning: with a Fellowship sorcerer, silence on any topic boded trouble.

Yet Arithon was disinclined to worry in any case. With the mystery behind his mind-block resolved, the cutting edge eased from his reserve. Left less wary than watchful now that he understood the stakes involved a kingship, he trusted time and circumstance would show him an opening to overset Asandir’s prerogatives. Until then, he rode at his half-brother’s side and not even his restive mare diverted him from rapid-fire conversation. Lysaer welcomed the entertainment. Since too much quiet let him brood over the undermining losses of his banishment, he fielded Arithon’s quips in a spirited enthusiasm that outlasted interruptions by fast-riding couriers and packed farm-drays, and once, a dusty band of cattle whose herd-boys yipped and goaded their charges to market.

Then, as with West End, the farmlands thinned and ended. One hard day’s travel beyond Erdane the way became wild and untenanted. The scrublands of Karmak gave rise to forested downs laced with streamlets. The mist seemed alive with the rush of running water and the air keen and brittle with coming snow. More than once, the party started deer from the thickets. If the bucks were royally antlered, their incoming winter coats were flat and lacking gloss; even after summer’s forage, the does were sadly thin.

The mist’s blighted legacy afflicted more than creatures in the wild.

After nightfall, perhaps due to the chill, Asandir relented and engaged a room at a run-down wayside tavern that in better times had been a hospice tended by Ath’s initiates.

‘What became of them?’ Lysaer asked.

‘What happens to any order of belief when its connection to the mysteries becomes sullied?’ Asandir chose not to entrust his tall stallion to the ill-kempt groom, but attended to his saddle girths himself. ‘Desh-thiere’s darkness disrupted more than sunlight on this world. The link that preserved was lost along with the Riathan Paravians.’

The pent-back sorrow in his statement did not invite further inquiry; and if the carved gates at the innyard were still intact, the beautiful, patterned sigils of ward had lost any power to guard. The tavern’s musty attic proved to be riddled with iyats, which perhaps explained the dearth of clientele.

By the time the sorcerer banished the pests the hour had grown late; the commonroom with its great blackened beams stood lamentably empty. While here the accents of outland strangers did not provoke hostilities, still the stooped old innkeeper took care not to turn his back. He served his odd guests in silence, while his wife stayed hidden in the kitchen.

The fare was bland and too greasy; Lysaer left his plate barely touched. Arithon had seen worse on a ship’s deck. After sighs and a martyred show of eye-rolling, Dakar righteously forwent ale for mulled cider and a bowl of the inn’s insipid stew. The bread had no weevils that he could see, so he ate it, and Lysaer’s portion, too. Then he stalked from his emptied bowls to a bed that he swore would have lice and mildew in the blankets.

This failed to secure him permission to retire in the hayloft. Perhaps as a precaution, Asandir sat all night in the hallway, his back against the door panel.

‘Unforgiving as a reformed priest,’ Dakar commiserated to Arithon; yet whether the sorcerer stood vigil to curb the excesses of his apprentice or to curtail further outings by the Master of Shadow, or whether he simply wished space for clear thought, the Mad Prophet was too wise to ask. He flopped crosswise on a mattress of dusty ticking and his chain reaction of sneezes changed into snores that would have done credit to a hibernating bear.

Busy scooping ice from the enamelled ewer of washwater, and striving to rise above low spirits, Lysaer regarded the sleeping prophet with a mix of laughter and distaste. ‘If he weren’t apprenticed to a sorcerer he would have made a splendid royal fool.’

‘What a curse to lay on a king,’ Arithon observed from the corner where, stripped down to his hose, he spread out his blankets on bare floor. A cockroach scurried up from a crack near his foot; he reacted fast enough to crush it, changed his mind and let it race to safety under the baseboard. ‘Not mentioning that every princess within reach would have her bottom pinched to bruises.’

Lysaer splashed frigid water on his face, gasped and groped for his shirt, that being the nearest cloth at hand; the innkeeper was too stingy to provide towels. The prince chaffed his half-brother, ‘I’d say that upbringing by mages left you cynical.’