The Curse of the Mistwraith (44 page)

The nearer of two page-boys hastened from the corner and unbarred the door.

Lirenda swept past as though the liveried child were furniture. She curtseyed with a brisk swirl of silk, alert for the twitch of Morriel’s hand that allowed her permission to rise. Exhilaration flushed her cheeks as she shed her cloak with its ribbons of rank sewn in bands at hood and hem. As the remaining boy took her garment, she dared a direct glance at her superior. ‘It has begun.’

‘Show me.’ Spider-still amid the arranged folds of her skirts, Morriel closed lightless black eyes. For a space the chamber held little for sound and movement beyond the crackle of flames in the hearth. The page avoided clumsy noise as he set the latch on the armoire door and crept back to his place.

Lirenda cupped the crystal strung from a chain at her throat, dampened her thoughts and dropped her inner barriers to permit her superior free access. Power flowed like current from mind to mind, focused to frame recall of two images gathered through lane-watch…

Half a world away, across an expanse of ocean, sudden sunlight lances through a tear in streaming mist and shatters into sparkles against the wavecrests.
Ancient enough to have living memories of the natural world before Desh-thiere’s conquest, Morriel did not gasp aloud. As if the vision were empty of wonder, she pressed on workmanlike,
to a later view of moonrise over an island fortress whose roofless keeps notch an indigo sky…

‘Corith,’ Lirenda identified, breaking trance in the solar of the old earl’s palace. ‘In the isles of Min Pierens to the west.’

Morriel checked the interruption with a raised finger. ‘I see as much.’ On an edge of sharpness, she said, ‘Our fifth lane watcher has reported an increased concentration of the mist overhanging the site of Ithamon?’

‘Exactly.’ The First Enchantress pressed eagerly to conclusion. ‘The Fellowship’s royal protégés must have set Desh-thiere’s hold under siege from there. Why else should its grip loosen elsewhere?’

Morriel disregarded the insolence. Three weeks had passed since the princes with Asandir had taken up residence in ruined Ithamon: here came first proof of their doings there. With the last attempted scryings on their activities an unmitigated failure, that the Mistwraith should now show signs of weakening offered exciting developments. But to rejoice over supposition would be blindness akin to folly. ‘I suggest our duty lies in knowing how the princes who are responsible come by their powers.’ Morriel’s brow furrowed in speculation. ‘After all, they accomplish a feat their Fellowship benefactors cannot duplicate.’

Lirenda’s eyes brightened. ‘You suggest we try another scrying into Asandir’s affairs at Ithamon?’

A cracked laugh issued from the alcove. ‘The idea suits you, does it?’ For an interval Morriel stared into distance. ‘It pleases me to try.’ A snap of dry fingers called a page to attend her. ‘Fetch the chest that contains the focus jewel of Skyron. Be quick.’

Unremarked by a glance from either enchantress, the boy bowed and let himself out. As his nervous footsteps dwindled down the corridor, Morriel stroked her chin with a fingernail. ‘I would tap the fifth lane and trace the eddies created by the events at Ithamon, yes. But subtlety is needed. Our efforts must blend with the pulse of the land itself, until chance affords us opening and Asandir leaves the princes’ presence.’

‘But they work from one of the Compass Point Towers,’ Lirenda objected. ‘What source of ours can breach Paravian safeguards?’

The old Prime’s look sparked daggers. ‘A defeatist attitude ill becomes your office.’

Lirenda inclined her head. ‘I stand corrected before my better.’

Morriel made a moue of disgust. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite.’ In a shift of weight that eddied the scents of herbs and moth poison upon the air, she folded crabbed hands in her lap. ‘For all your diligence, your ambitions overstep your knowledge.’

The chamber abruptly seemed chilly as a tomb. Disadvantaged by her posture of obeisance, Lirenda stifled irritation. The Prime was apt to be querulous when the weather ached her bones; and only the foolish bridled at truth in her presence. Lirenda held herself in submission until her senior at length relented.

‘Were you not keen to replace me, you would be of worthless character. But if it is envy of the Fellowship’s power that drives your desire to humble Asandir, beware. You will earn yourself the misstep such weakness deserves. You may rise.’ Rings flashed as Morriel motioned for her First Enchantress to be seated on the footstool by the hearth.

The chamber offered no other chair; the pages, as they waited, knelt on bare floor. But Lirenda suffered the inconvenience; wedded to supremacy the Prime might be, but her mind was quick and devious.

Across a quiet dense with the scent of lavender, the aged crone tartly qualified, ‘We shall defeat the Paravian wards by simplicity, First Enchantress. Our weapon shall be compassion.’

Lirenda tautened to eagerness. ‘Arithon chose the tower Kieling,’ she mused unthinkingly aloud.

‘Precisely.’ Rather than take umbrage at the lapse, Morriel continued, ‘The Teir’s’Ffalenn unknowingly ceded us opening, since initiate Elaira’s escapade at Erdane. The enquiry we made concerning her misconduct in the Ravens’ hayloft has left us a faultless imprint of innocent, unconditional love.’

There lay the clue Lirenda had overlooked, and in honesty would never have thought to examine. She cursed her shortsightedness, as logic unfolded the method’s diabolical symmetry. Asandir could not stand watch every hour that his princes fought the Mistwraith. Overawed as Fellowship mages were wont to be over any and all things Paravian, he would expect Kieling’s wards to shield out unwanted scryers in those intervals while he minded his other affairs. The richest innuendo of all was that his princes should have been untouchably secure; and so they would be, except for anomaly.

‘Kieling’s defences will detect no threat if our probe is masked behind our record of Elaira’s care for Arithon. We will win through,’ Morriel concluded, her lips pursed, her eyes hooded and her hands still as claws in her lap. ‘So long as we observe only, and make no move to interfere.’

All along, Morriel had anticipated the advantage that Elaira’s misplaced feelings might provide. The admiration Lirenda gave her Prime was enraptured and pitiless as a predator stalking to kill; for the stakes of this hunt were as deadly. Envy could not colour fact: that the Fellowship of Seven had held ascendancy over affairs on the continent for far and away too long.

‘Yes,’ Morriel said in uncanny response to pure thought. ‘It suits me to try their authority. This time. When you’ve finished acting dumbstruck, we may start.’

A flush touched Lirenda’s cheeks, for the page-boy had returned from his errand. He stood before her, fairfaced and formal as an icon, the iron-bound box that held the focus crystal of Skyron offered in trembling hands.

‘Lead the probe,’ came Morriel’s nettled instruction. ‘This is your test, if you think yourself fit to succeed me.’

Excitement overrode Lirenda’s distaste for the role she had been commanded to execute. She accepted the coffer, keyed the release of the wards and lifted the crystal that lay like an ice shard inside. Tawny eyes fixed on the jewel, she stilled her inner consciousness until the room and its shadows fell away, swallowed by the stone’s pellucid depths.

Her awareness settled. Poised in tranquillity that allowed the creation all possibility and none, her selfhood encompassed paradox. Lirenda became the spark to seed holocaust, and the ice to quench all heat. She was light that could sear away sight, or darkness of a depth to crack rock: hers was the oblivion of the Veil between the void, perfect peace or ultimate stagnation. She was nothing, all things, every pitch and vibration that formed the warp and weft of Ath’s Creation.

The Skyron focus framed her into a discipline that banished personal opinion. And yet, controlled as she was, demanding of excellence as her ambition required, she had to fight not to shudder as the Prime joined the link and connected her through the matrix to the crystal’s reservoir of stored energies. Elaira’s trial record was drawn forth and a set of personal emotions over-rode Lirenda’s selfhood with an intimacy as stifling as suffocation.

Unable to speak or escape, she could only feel. The sensation forced upon her became a turbulence that transported – to a cheerless cellar in a fire-scarred inn where Elaira had lived through early childhood. In a raw and cruel detail, Lirenda experienced the misery of a hovel shared with beggars, and scabby, disease-ridden prostitutes…

Shivering in noxious rags and the sour, shedding leathers of spoiled furs, she remembered wakeful nights spent listening to the wet, tearing coughs of the old man who looked after her as he lay wasting of lung-sickness. Friends were all the wealth a child of the streets might possess. Food, shelter and belongings could be wrested away; as an orphan, disciple of thieves, Elaira well knew
how easily. But love and good memories could outlast misfortune, even death.

Until the hour her fledgling talents had led her into straits with the town constable, who sold her into Morvain for rearing in Koriani fosterage, Elaira had made her life rich with caring.

Entangled in the Skyron link, Lirenda felt the mannered austerity she had cultivated as a rich man’s daughter give way before simpler joys that lured her toward destruction like a siren’s song. Wrenched awry by distaste, she forced her violated senses not to pull back and break trance. Her burning ambition to gain a prime’s ultimate power and knowledge lent her strength. She embraced disillusion, accepted the forge-fire of emotion that comprised Elaira’s nature for her own, as Morriel and the demands of the scrying into Kieling Tower required.

The matriarch’s prompt reached her across a haze of distance. ‘Nicely done. Be ready. I shall tie into the lane-force now.’

Morriel’s praise reaffirmed concentration. Though prepared for a shift in perspective, the touch of the fifth lane’s powers did not kindle as Lirenda expected. Trapped in Elaira’s persona, she experienced as the girl would have done, a sensation as wretchedly unpleasant as a drenching cloudburst. Fighting abhorrence and instinct, Lirenda endured this shocking, alien perspective of a spirit attuned to spellcraft through water, when she herself was all fire, unalterably opposed. She must not falter, nor even flinch in disgust, even as self-identity became immolated by Elaira’s unruly passions.

As trance discipline reduced the fifth lane’s energies to a shimmering play of static, Lirenda drifted, embraced by the high, sweet vibration of earthforce. Since Morriel manipulated the scrying, her First Senior’s altered consciousness could not track the flow of time. The next sensation Lirenda experienced was a view of translucent blue twilight over snow-clad hills.

The merlons of an embrasure jutted upward in silhouette; illuminated by what she first took for torchflame, three figures clustered in a semi-circle. Two stood, while the other crouched with hands tucked under the elbows held pressed to his sides. By dint of clothing concocted from what looked like frayed layers of rags, Elaira’s awareness identified the stout person of Dakar the Mad Prophet. The light proved not to be flame, but a spark that seemed fuelled by nothing beyond empty air.

Presented with a view of dark cloaks and hoods harried close by wind to hide the faces inside, Lirenda by herself could not differentiate between the royal half-brothers. Elaira’s more exacting perception discerned at once that one figure was taller. A twist of blond hair flicked loose by a gust established and dismissed him as s’Ilessid. Fixed at once on the smaller man, the imprinted pattern that comprised Elaira’s subjective reaction was swept by an ungodly thrill.

Framed by magelight and a backdrop of louring fog that imposed false dusk upon the scene, Arithon raised his head and looked around. Recognition suffused his glance as if
he could sense the Koriani contact bridged through from Camris by crystal.

As acting surrogate for Elaira, Lirenda felt scorched by that gaze. But the rapport that would have quickened her sister initiate to excitement only tantalized the First Enchantress as elusively as the receding edge of a dream. She shivered. As if touched to recoil by empathy, the s’Ffalenn prince on the parapet frowned. He tossed back his hood in sudden tension as a man might measure an opponent. Through a space while the winds whipped his dark locks into tangles, his hand flicked a gesture to Dakar. Captivated by the movement’s instinctive grace, and spontaneously struck by stray recall, Lirenda shared a past memory –
of those very same fingers plucking
straw from her hair with a tenderness impossible to forget.

Morriel’s voice jabbed through the diversion in a whiplash tone of command: ‘Do not get involved, First Enchantress!’

Lirenda struggled to bridle Elaira’s fascination as Arithon knelt before Dakar.

Whispered words passed between them. Then the Mad Prophet’s face rearranged in pure devilry. ‘You’d never dare.’

A lift of Arithon’s chin gave challenge as he rose back to his feet. ‘Ah, but I would.’ Beneath laughter, his voice held a dissonance like mallet-struck iron. Were Lirenda in control, she would immediately have severed contact; but Elaira’s entrancement hampered judgement. The scrying enchantress dwelt a second too long and Arithon s’Ffalenn seized his opening.

He called to Lysaer, who raised his hands. For a heartbeat, the half-brothers centred a gathering vortex of pent power. Then light speared skyward, virulent as summer lightning. The hollow, booming report of heat-stressed air thundered outward over ruined Ithamon. Lirenda saw the Mistwraith boil clear with a howling clap of wind, to be razed aside by shadow that iced its vapours into a spindrift fall of new snow.

Then, impossibly, Koriani safe-wards crumpled, and the concatenation of reaction surged past shields and into the Skyron focus. Lirenda was tossed physically head over heels. She had no chance to feel bruises. A second surge erupted from Lysaer’s clenched hands, followed by another and another, until her eyes were dazzled sightless and hearing was stunned by rolling waves of sound. The link between the earl’s court and Ithamon buckled into pinwheeling chaos as the lane connection surged into backlash.