The Curse of the Mistwraith (48 page)

Arithon found himself weeping. Not only for himself, and the deadness of his senses, but for the beauty of common weeds, and the unendurable complexity of the shed husk of a beetle’s wing. He saw again, through finer eyes, the resonance of Paravian presence, and saw also that the coarseness in a clod of horse dung was held into balance by the same singing bands of pure energy. In Asandir’s pass across the ruins of Ithamon, Arithon realized just how shallow was his own knowledge, and how inadequate. In punishing clarity, he understood the scope of just what he had abandoned when he had left Rauven, and yielded himself to another will, another fate, another calling; now, most bitterly, the loss would repeat and compound, as he assumed a second unwanted crown.

Then Asandir closed down his field of concentration. Released from that terrible mirror of truth that embodied a Fellowship mage’s awareness, Arithon came back to himself and recalled the dangers that had prompted the search.

For all its awesome depth, the scrying disappointed. Tumbled stonework had harboured nothing untoward, only the mindless tenacity of lichens living dormant under the mantle of winter night. The sorcerer had unreeled his probe past the city’s edge, across untold miles of Daon Ramon’s heartland, but no sign had he encountered anywhere of those aspects of Desh-thiere that had launched attack with such startling virulence.

No movement could be found but the flight of night-hunting owls; no death beyond the grass roots grazed by hares; no sound but the play of wind through dry brush. The Mistwraith’s fog was just that – mist coiled cold in the hollows, lifelessly damp and inert.

Asandir snapped off the last of his vision in a curtness born of frustration. ‘I cannot find it.’ His voice held a scraped edge of pain, not for humiliation that his resource seemed short for the task, but for failure and heartsore apology, that the Fellowship’s oversight had imperilled two princes whose safety was his charge to secure.

‘But how can that be?’ Dakar cried, his hands too cramped to pick up the spoon to stir the stewpot.

And Arithon wondered the same. The arts of grand conjury were wrought from the force that quickened the universe. Asandir’s vision had but confirmed Rauven’s teaching: that all things were formed of energy, arrangements of bundled light that were subject to natural law. The awareness of this truth, defined to absolute perfection, granted the mage-trained their influence. To know a thing, to encompass its full measure in respect was to hold its secrets in mastery. Life-force was the basis of all power; as a confluence of collective entities, Desh-thiere’s consciousness should have been vividly plain. That its nature could in any way stay hidden seemed outside of sane comprehension.

To anyone trained to the subtleties of power, it felt as if an evil of unknown proportions had sown chaos across the fabric of natural order.

His plaintiveness a mask for desperation, Dakar said, ‘What in Athera could escape the vigilance of the Seven?’

‘Nothing of Athera.’ Arithon shifted gaze to the sorcerer, his earlier antagonism set in abeyance. ‘I was blind to the Mistwraith’s aspects also, until the moment they chose to attack.’

Asandir stirred. ‘Neither strands nor seer can read Desh-thiere, only its effects. That this trait may also apply to the moment we know as the present is dangerous enough, but pursuit of the reason must wait. My first concern stems from need to build sound defences, that our efforts don’t call down some worse threat.’

Dakar watched, afraid to move, as Fellowship mage and s’Ffalenn prince shared a deep understanding. Jolted to fey sight by the combined effects of exhaustion and fear and disillusion, for a split second, Dakar perceived the scintillant brilliance of Asandir’s being in mirror-image, alike except in dimension to the pattern that was Arithon.

Then the trickster play of firelight and the fusty smell of drying wool over-rode the spellbinder’s fickle talent. The tableau shrank back to the unremarkable: a careworn, weatherbeaten old man in a rumpled mantle bent over a younger one left limp and tired.

To the Master so narrowly delivered from the malice of the Mistwraith he had pledged to subdue, Asandir said, ‘Sleep. Let the problem bide in my hands until morning.’

A gentle edge of spellcraft laced the words. Calm to a depth that transcended pity, Asandir waited for the prince he had betrayed to sort his feelings. Although the offering of serene rest might have been rebuffed by a thought, Arithon capitulated with a gratitude that gave the sorcerer startled pause. Despite the new depths of yearning unveiled through tonight’s shared scrying, no grudge remained in this prince who had been shackled in guilt to a fate he had not wanted. The very s’Ffalenn compassion that sealed the trap in the end prevailed to bring absolution. The wounding begun in Caith-al-Caen, that no effort at indifference might heal, would be carried into kingship in selfless silence.

Humbled by a forgiveness he had never expected to receive, Asandir stood stunned and still. Then he smiled as if touched by light, reached out with hands that could wring raw force from bedrock, and in a visible effort not to fumble, rearranged the blankets around the Master of Shadow. He tucked the musician’s fingers with their contradictory scars and callouses into the warmth of dry wool and set a binding of peace upon his handiwork.

When at length he straightened to address his apprentice, his face had assumed the bleakness of glacier-scarred granite. ‘We have a full night ahead. Lysaer had none of his half-brother’s protections, and we must not presume him unharmed. Luhaine has been called to our aid. Kharadmon is already back at Althain, since Sethvir believes our princes’ encounter could key insight into how Traithe came to be crippled. If we cannot unmask the nature of the enemy, we must determine what lets it slip at will through any but Paravian safe-wards. Otherwise, there can be no restored sun, for we’ll have no means to contain the part of Desh-thiere that is spirit.’

From his refuge on a bench by the settle, Dakar caught the poker from its peg. Clumsy in movement, his stocky calves dangling above the floor, he leaned to stir up the fire. The fact he had neglected to mind the supper-pot this once in his life did not irk him. ‘If the thing is alive,’ he surmised in reference to the Mistwraith, ‘we cannot follow through and kill it, can we?’

‘
If
it is alive,’ Asandir corrected, impatient as if drawn on wire. ‘If the life-forces we witnessed were not born of illusion, if it is a being or beings embodied into mist, think, Dakar. We let our princes “kill” it, reduce its confining vessel of fog, what then will be left?’

Hunched as a terrified child, the poker dangling from deadened hands, Dakar whispered, ‘Pure spirit. Ath’s mercy, we’d actually be setting the thing
free.
’

‘So I fear, my prophet,’ Asandir allowed. ‘If, like our disembodied colleagues of the Fellowship, the creature as unfettered spirit could shift its vibration and continue to manifest in this world, so I most desperately fear.’ He followed with swift instructions that called for another trip out into the inclement night to set more wards of guard over the inner citadel.

Dakar glared at the stewpot, and the hot supper that must, of necessity, be eaten in savourless haste. With his chin cupped in his hands, and the ratty muffler he felt too chilled to shed trailing in twists about his ankles, he looked morose as a vagabond evicted from an alehouse. ‘Now why couldn’t I have chosen to be a tinker?’ he demanded of the leaping fire. ‘Fixing holed pots would be better fun than banishment of invisible ghosts at night in a wind-plagued ruin.’

‘I agree,’ snapped Asandir. ‘Now get moving.’ Crisper than a whipcrack, the sorcerer stepped to where Lysaer lay under tidy heaps of blankets. ‘If we don’t make certain this prince took no hurt from Desh-thiere, the leaky pots in this land aren’t going to matter very much.’

Backsearch

The blizzard whirled in off the Bittern Desert, and eddied snow through the casement fanned a diamond dusting of ice across the carpet in Althain Tower’s copy chamber. Sethvir’s ink-pots had frozen with their quills stuck fast where they stood; yet the sorcerer appeared not to care. Clad in rumpled robes, his hair raked into tufts like some itinerant roadside fortune-teller’s where he had savaged it with his knuckles, he glared at the dregs in his tea mug, cooled now to a mush of bitter leaves. As though the turnings of the world could indeed be read in the floating debris, he addressed a chamber that appeared to hold only books. ‘The damage, if that broad a term can apply to an attack of such focused proportion, has already been done.’

Kharadmon’s voice replied out of empty air, near a hearth heaped with ash that had not been raked since Asandir’s departure. ‘But then the disturbance left by the Mistwraith’s meddling should be obvious. To wit, a contradiction: Luhaine and Asandir found nothing amiss with Prince Lysaer.’

‘They checked in depth, I know,’ Sethvir said, brusque since the past night’s report from Ithamon left him frustrated. Barring self growth and maturation of character, Lysaer was, spirit and flesh, the same young man who had entered Athera through West Gate.

The Warden of Althain cocked his wrist, idly swirling his tea leaves as if the point in debate were not dire, and demanding of his closest attention. To Kharadmon, he admonished, ‘You’re analysing the nature of the universe, based on one view through a keyhole.’

‘Analogies again?’ Cold air swirled snowflakes across the chamber; when embodied, Kharadmon had tended to pace, and as spirit, his restlessness was constant. ‘Which keyhole, then? Back your theory.’

A rise of tufted eyebrows evinced Sethvir to be miffed. ‘Hunch,’ he corrected. He set the tea mug aside with contradictory care; as if soggy herbs could change nature at whim, and become brittle and subject to shatter. ‘My keyhole is present time, and Traithe’s plight should bear out my conjecture.’ His inkstained fingers cupped air. An image flickered to life as defined as a flame on a freshly lit candle. The reflected scene was not new. Time after weary time, in strands and in fire, the Fellowship sorcerers had reviewed the moment of South Gate’s closing, and the fate of the colleague who had singlehandedly stemmed the disaster…

The porphyry pillars of South Gate reared white-edged in the static flash of stressed energies. Weather-forces skewed out of balance and a storm-charged sky raked the earth with lightning. Thunder slammed and rain sheeted like a fall of silver needles through the hellish play of light. Even after five centuries the view could still inspire dread, as Desh-thiere erupted through the portal between worlds. It came on, gale-driven masses of fog like the boiled over brew from a witch’s cauldron. Toward the streaming influx at the gate, a lone figure
ploughed its way forward: Traithe, fighting a cyclone of disturbed air that twisted his robes, and harried his progress to a standstill…

There the image poised, with Traithe’s face obscured behind the wind-flagged fabric of his sleeve. One hand raked out to fend off what seemed empty air, or perhaps a questing tendril of mist. Even locked against motion, the recalled moment from the past was confused by the violent extremes of the light.

‘We interpreted the turbulence as wind-shear,’ Sethvir murmured, ‘caused by the current through the gate. Now, I think differently.’

‘An attack by Desh-thiere?’ Kharadmon’s stillness was telling. ‘The vortex centres upon Traithe, true enough, but its content is no more than mist. Sentient life force is nowhere in evidence.’

‘Apparently.’ Sethvir loosed his binding, and the vision continued forward once again. The sting of its following sequence hurt no less, for being a foregone conclusion…

The revealing sleeve cracked away as Traithe raised his hands. His expression no longer reflected the calm of a sorcerer in control of his craft, but revealed a man in abject agony. Thunder reverberated, cut through by his scream as storm and mist tightened down into a whirlwind that battered him to his knees. He rallied in an extremity of effort. Power answered. Raw, white and wild as elemental lightning, it stabbed down at his call, wrapping like light-jagged wire around his wrists and arms. It flowed untrammelled into his embrace, flowering into dazzling brilliance that slapped the eyes like a nova, blinding, impenetrable and dedicated to ruin. The Mistwraith recoiled, radiant with an afterglow of live charge. Its coils rolled back and separated, to lay
bare the pearlescent span of South Gate. During the moment while its invading flow was interrupted, a charred figure in spark-shot robes dragged itself up from prostration. It raised hands seared with burns and traced a seal of binding upon the air. Broken with agony, Traithe croaked out the Names that comprised the chant of ending. And like a sling cord released from great tension, spells sheared asunder; the webwork of time bonds and energies that enabled South Gate as a grand portal parted like singed silk, and dissipated.

The Mistwraith’s connection was severed, its vapours denied further invasion. Rain lashed across the soil between the dead gate. It pocked light-edged arrows in the puddles that interlaced into streamlets of runoff. Traithe remained, a cramped silhouette that could have passed for a pile of discarded rags, but for the fact that he wept with the deep, shaking sobs a child might utter in pain and terror.

Again the image paused; and like a file scraping rust from old steel, Sethvir’s commentary resumed.

‘What if the backlash that maimed Traithe was not the mishandling of grand conjury we first supposed? By intent, our colleague may have caused his own binding to be grounded through his flesh. The sacrifice makes sense, if in desperation, he sought to burn out an incursion of the enemy.’

Cryptic as always, and now on the far side of the chamber, Kharadmon said, ‘You suggest Desh-thiere’s aspects besieged his mind.’

‘Yes. Traithe opened himself to its essence, to find its Name, and gain ascendancy over it. He should not have been vulnerable,
unless the beings he sounded were out of phase from our time sense, removed from our present a half-step into the future.
’