The Ships of Merior (16 page)

Sethvir unkindly answered his thought all the same.
Time’s riddle is only opaque to those senses attuned through the flesh.’

Verrain’s horrified start shot the canister lid in a clanging arc to the floor. ‘Ath forfend! Can’t we ask Luhaine to handle this?’

But already Asandir had slipped beyond hearing. His tall, dark-robed form lay slumped across the table, his cheek cradled on folded arms. His flesh was a vessel emptied of spirit, with Traithe already set in anguished silence by his shoulder to stand ward and guard.

The plain fact could not be forgotten, that just such a perilous scrying had stripped Kharadmon to discorporate status. Verrain snapped a flame off a finger tip that trembled and ignited the herb in his pipe. As drug-laden smoke twined in ghostly step to the dance of some aimless air current, he called on six centuries of discipline to wrest his uncertainty aside. Then he drew on the stem and gasped as the tienelle’s drug whirled through his senses like wildfire.

Vertigo upended him in a savage, exhilarant rush. There followed a glass-sharp awareness that scoured his dross of flesh, until the stillness of the room compressed his ears like cotton and his eyesight gained hurtful clarity. The lofty, crystalline expansion of awareness overturned him like a plunge from great height. He clung to his chair in desperation to stay anchored, while around him the floor lost its semblance of solidity. Changed perception showed him the layers of dizzy energies that bound its cool stone into matter.

Verrain fought to master the reeling hyperbole that savaged him. As Sethvir’s expectancy jabbed through his trance, he recalled his place and purpose: for the knowledge to redeem Athera’s cursed princes, Asandir now twisted the flow of time. The thread of his existence hung poised in suspension on the threshold between life and death.

The spellfield the sorcerer laid out above the black
cloth on the tabletop had limits; its influence encompassed little more than the span of one cubic yard. But the resonance where its edges grazed up against the present raised a whine past the limit of hearing, and a flesh-stripping ache that made human bone marrow shiver and jump like kicked mercury. Hazed by indescribable discomfort, his blond hair strung limp with sweat, Verrain cobbled a grip on his frayed consciousness and spun out three filaments of light.

Sethvir raised power and spoke. An answering resonance of mage-force tingled outward as his words parted drug-heightened senses like razors, touched the strands hanging poised against darkness, and set over them a signature that gave Name.

Ruled in parallel with the life-currents that endowed Ath’s creation, the filaments quickened, interleaved into patterns the trained mind could unriddle at a glance. Verrain called forth another strand, and another, while through some unseen linkage with the time-pocket carved out by Asandir, Sethvir spoke Names upon them that recreated constructs of
this
stone, and
that
mud-pool, then seeded them with plants, insects, salamanders and trees in their individual; teeming thousands. Here lay like pen strokes the growth and death of moss. There, in skeined interlace, the play of breezes through reed beds, ringed with black water scribed by stitched curves that marked the life-dance of fishes. In glowing, intricate splendour against a dark like layered velvet, a mile square portion of Mirthlvain’s mire became replicated in a linear analogue of patterns.

Transfixed by awe, and a harmony that wrung him breathless, Verrain wept as he realized: the bogland he viewed was still governed by nature. The creatures there had yet to be enslaved, corrupted and cross-bred to birth the monstrous perversions induced by the hate-wraiths’ possession.

Softly out of shadow, Sethvir said, ‘Commence.’

Verrain felt the hair stir at his nape as channelled power sparked through the strands.

A pent sense of danger prevailed, like the quaver of a note too long sustained, or the chill of sharp steel masked in cloth. Now, any misplayed distinction between the quick force of life and the raw burn of elemental energy might sunder the time-ward’s fragile balance and rip Asandirs spirit from flesh. Verrain trembled in his battle to keep the herb’s explosive prescience tied in to geometric augury as Sethvir alone called forth the final strand, then shaped it to the Name of the
methuri.

The matrix mapped an origin Verrain had studied only in ancient text: here, in spikes and jagged angles, he
experienced
the leaked bit of storm charge that had displaced half-formed beings from the thought-shaped, nether-realm of drake-dreams. In twists and snagged knotwork, he saw anomalies that to this world were half demon, half monster, change vibration and emerge to rampage and slay. The original
methurien
were creatures deranged by pain, animate consciousness torn into breathing life from an existence of shadowy apparition. Their bodily deaths on Paravian weapons had served only to release their twisted essence as free wraiths.

His centuries of handling the cross-bred abominations left behind as their legacy could not prepare Mirthlvain’s Guardian for the concentrated, driving hatred the
methuri
had embodied. Needled breathless by passions bent and whetted for destruction, Verrain felt his consciousness twist to escape. The drugs in the tienelle gave no quarter, but held his awareness channelled open through the shivering flinch of full contact.

‘Steady. Hold steady,’ Sethvir cautioned.

Verrain’s fingernails split under the force of his grip on the table as the first wraith ensnared a live victim. The moment of its possession was terrible to witness: clean-edged lines that delineated a mouse unique unto itself in Ath’s creation flickered and spiked into a chaotic
jumble that, even two ages later, seemed to shock the night air with scream upon scream of torment. Verrain stung as though every nerve in his body had been sieved out and scorched in hot acid.

Locked into step with the strands’ unfolding sequence, he watched the signature pattern of the mouse blur, coil, then fix in a flare of cold fire into something wholly wrong, in mind and matter remoulded to a parasitic hybrid that was irrationally, unthinkably
other
. What moved and breathed in the heart of the strands’ reflection was a thing outside the Major Balance, the warp and weft of its birthright wrenched contrary to natural law.

Revolted to spasms of dry nausea, the spellbinder clamped hands to his lips until the blood felt squeezed from his fingers. He compelled himself to abide as Sethvir broadened his study: and snakes, insects, otters and frogs all suffered possession in turn. The moment of change in each case was sliced free of time and dissected; line for line, contortion for mauled contortion, the maligned detail of the hate-wraiths’ workings wrung out in white pain from their victims. Life-force itself became impressed and internally warped until only the husk of the body remained, to spawn its altered, aberrant offspring. The warped things birthed from such breedings in turn became subservient to the whim of the host.

Drenched in a cold sweat, Verrain tracked Sethvir’s analysis of the past as
methuri
abominations insinuated a rift in earthly order, to knot a linkage through the breathing essence of spirit and the energy coils that underpinned fleshly matter. The conclusion in the strands was most clear. Not only would separation trigger the dissolution of bodily substance, but the wraith in possession could unkey the quickened flesh and impose wilful change with impunity.

Aghast, Verrain whispered, ‘You think Desh-thiere’s curse upon the princes may work in a similar way?’

Sethvir looked up, the strand-wrought, desecrated
patterns imprinted in frosty reflection upon his emotionless eyes. ‘That’s what we’re here to determine.’ He succumbed to a shudder, as if his detachment gave way and the horrors reeled off in cold augury overcame him in one slamming wave. Then he blotted damp palms on his sleeve cuffs and spoke a single clipped syllable. The knit mesh of forces that energized the strands bled off in a crackle of sparks.

Asandir drew a racking breath and stirred, while Traithe stepped aside and dropped into a chair as though his knees had failed him.

For an interval spanning several minutes, nobody cared to try speech.

Verrain finally pushed upright and made his unsteady way to the hearth to unshield the fire and brew tea. The toxins in the tienelle had left him dehydrated and queasy; spurious starts of vision still snatched through his senses like flares. Tired to his bones, his hyper-sensitized awareness cringing even from the rub of the grey tom just returned to bask by the settle, the spellbinder struggled for the self-command to weather the withdrawal and transmute the herb’s fatal poisons.

Behind him discussion continued, Fellowship voices mazed in grim echoes as comparisons were drawn from their study of the
methuri
, and the Mistwraith’s curse on the princes. Verrain rubbed stinging eyes, unable to quell his ripping shudders as true-sight relived the hideous aberrations the strands had etched into memory. The hissing splatter of boiled over water yanked back his straying thoughts. Cold and sick unto lassitude, he bent to mind the cauldron. He could never regard the monstrosities of Mirthlvain in quite the same fashion again; dangerous as they were, and vicious, still, they deserved his full measure of pity.

The chance that two sons of Athera’s royal lines might suffer a similar disfigurement offered horror beyond sane belief.

Braced by hot tea and determination, Verrain reclaimed his chair. He realized with renewed disquiet that the Fellowship prepared another scrying. Though this next divination was simple and harmless, an image drawn from straight recall, Asandir looked hollow-eyed. His craggy profile jutted into hot light as his large-knuckled hands attended the task of striking fresh flame to a candlewick. The wrist Traithe raised to put aside his raven trembled in apprehension.

Even Sethvir seemed on edge. Mantled in tawdry burgundy velvet, his collar caught with hair like snagged fish line, he raised eyes touched to fevered brilliance and regarded each of his colleagues. ‘We’re caught in a critical moment.’ To Asandir, whose part was to draw the scrying, he said obliquely, ‘Will the reliving in depth be too much?’

‘Ath have mercy, it will become so, if uncertainty leads me to procrastinate.’ Asandir’s distress was noticed by the cats, who streaked from dim corners to crowd his lap, lace through his ankles, and vie for the chance to offer comfort. His strong hands moved, returning their attentions in rueful, saddened irony. ‘Little brothers, I’m truly grateful. But our night’s work isn’t through yet.’

The sorcerer’s words reached triangular pairs of ears and imparted uncanny understanding. As clear in their disdain of spell currents as a chance-met douse in cold water, the cats dashed off in a twitching flinch of back fur, a shaking of paws and scything jerks of offended tails.

Verrain might have chuckled at their haughtiness had the moment been less distressed. Whatever troublesome development was afoot, the sorcerers gave no explanation. Asandir set aside the rusted striker and poised in concerned stillness. While his fierce eyes closed, that alone had witnessed the moment when Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its victims, the oddity recurred: this same
exhaustive search had been accomplished years since, in the hour the disaster had befallen.

The spellbinder’s puzzlement became crushed aside by a rising wave of bright force. Power coalesced, great enough to melt rock or ignite metal like a twig of dry tinder. Over the dusky weave of Traithe’s cloak, carved out by will and clean conjury, Asandir’s augury reformed the sphere of the candle’s fire, to recreate an event six years past when Etarra’s teeming thousands had turned out to celebrate the crowning of Rathain’s sanctioned prince…

Spring sun flooded over the royal banners, streamered in Rathain’s colours of silver and green. On a gallery overhanging the city’s wide square, above the surge of a multitude, one man’s gold hair and fine jewellery flared in caught light as he raised his arms in sudden violence. His words scribed no sound in the window of Asandir’s re-conjuring; the instant Desh-thiere’s fragmented wraith enacted its possession over Lysaer s’Ilessid, he raised his gift in a lightning-bolt attack against an enemy singled out…

Despite knowledge that the Mistwraith’s vengeance had exploited Lysaer; that its meddling distortion of the justice a benevolent past conjury had grafted into the s’Ilessid royal line had lent it the leverage to wreak ill, nothing could prepare for the naked, wasting passion launched against the Master of Shadow. Racked by a spasm of visceral revulsion, Verrain watched, riveted, as the moment continued to unfold.

The light-bolt sheared on, a fateful, white arc of fire that tore a scream from roiled air. The black-haired victim
who was its sure target thrashed to escape, while two terrified, burly merchants held him pinioned at wrists and knees. The sword he might have turned to cut his way free as well had not been in his hand. He ignored his captors’ efforts to wrest the blade away. To Arithon s’Ffalenn, all else lost meaning before the attack set against him by his half-brother.

Pinned like a moth to a card by a needle of sick fascination, Verrain saw the crystalline flicker that sheeted through the burn of Lysaer’s assault: an unexpected, warning blaze of Paravian spellcraft released by Arithon’s heirloom sword. Then the weapon was wrenched away, to fall in mute motion to the pavement.

As Rathain’s disarmed prince raised his hand to shape shadow, Sethvir interrupted like the slap of a whip striking flesh, ‘Stop it there.’

In control that disallowed pity, Asandir locked the scrying. Like a reflection cold frozen in a mirror; or a jewel spiked through a ravelled plane of darkness, he held a fragment excised out of time.

The result felt as rendingly ghastly as a dying man’s drawn out scream. Again, Verrain wondered why the Fellowship sorcerers should distress themselves to launch this irrelevant review.

Arithon s’Ffalenn had tipped his face skyward. Eyes widened to a tourmaline blaze of anguish, he tracked a raven that arrowed in flight above the mob etched motionless in the square. The hand cocked back in the first blooming burst of cast shadow showed his fingers flexed in concentration. The directive to guide the spell’s homing was set for Traithe’s bird, dispatched at need to find Sethvir. A heartbeat shy of disaster, the prince’s concern lay unmasked, not for himself, but for
a wasp’s nest of ramifications: that if the Fellowship sorcerers went unwarned of this crisis, far more than his own life and destiny were going to fall forfeit in consequence…