Читать книгу The Ships of Merior - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 19

Some days after the clanborn courier had taken leave of his tower eyrie, Sethvir, Warden of Althain laid out a fresh square of parchment. With one elbow braced against a tome on celestial mechanics whose listed orbs and planetary bodies lay nowhere near his present world of inhabitancy, he pondered; his hands out of fussy habit trimmed pen nibs the way a duellist might whet fine steel. Then, his left hand curled around a tea mug, the sorcerer penned out the message Tysan’s lady steward had asked him to send on to Arithon s’Ffalenn. Moved by purposeful afterthought, he added an inventory that filled twelve close-spaced pages. The items he catalogued had been on Maenalle’s mind, too lengthy for a courier to memorize. Willing servant to her intent, Sethvir let the breeze dry the ink. Then he rummaged through a cupboard, salvaged a battered seal from a tin full of oddments, and secured the document under the device of the ancient princes of Camris, from whom the lady traced descent.

The waning night beyond the casements was the eve of the vernal equinox, by custom a time for the Fellowship sorcerers to gather in convocation.

Althain’s Warden tucked the finished letter into a satchel already packed for the occasion and descended to his equally cluttered living quarters. There he replaced his threadbare robe with another only slightly less ink-stained. Outside, the sky lightened to dusky pearl. Bright-eyed despite not having slept for several days, Sethvir continued down the stairwell.

No cressets brightened the black iron wall sconces. The commemorative statues of Paravians housed on Althain’s ground floor wore a gloom only fitfully broken as the gleam that leaked through the arrowloops jinked across gold braid and trappings.

Sethvir required no torch to see his way past the ranks of marble unicorns; the homed majesty of centaurs that loomed above his head; the waist-high maple pedestals that elevated the diminutive bronzes of Sun Children. If concern for the future burdened his thoughts, here, the past weighed unquiet as well. Through mage-sense, Sethvir felt the vibrational echoes left by the steps of former visitors. In winnowed air currents like moving chiaroscuro, he could trace the tides of old magics, ones wrought by Paravians in subliminal harmonics; and others more recent, of Fellowship craft, that feathered the skin like a tonic. Surrounding all, enduring as bedrock, lurked the guardspells that sealed Althain Tower from the world and its troubles outside.

The sorcerer bypassed the gold-chased panels, built to mask the massive, geared chains and windlass that worked the tower’s grand portal. His satchel slung like a knapsack, he knelt by an inset trapdoor and paused, apparently overcome by reverie; in fact, his mind sharpened in search and coursed outward, beyond Athera’s cloud layer and into deep vacuum through which the stars drifted like lamps.

But the far distant spirit of the colleague who journeyed to study the Mistwraith’s origin returned no response; nor had for an uneasy score of months.

With Lysaer extending his influence into Tysan, the peace could scarcely last. Time to reclaim the cursed princes from the Mistwraith’s geas was growing sorrowfully short.

Raked by a shiver, Sethvir aroused, recalled to those troubles close at hand. A ring-pull lifted to his touch; defence wards dissolved and the heavy stone rose to a stir of moving counterweights. The chamber’s miasma of aged cedar and wool gave way to the draught that welled up, spiked like a storm-breeze with ozone. A stair shaft cut downward into cold dark, limned like dust on ebony by the silver-blue glimmer of the power focus set into the dungeon below.

Sethvir secured the trapdoor behind him and descended. Daybreak was nigh, its song plain to read in the soft, bursting static of the earth lane’s magnetic signature. Althain’s Warden stepped off the landing. He crossed a concave depression paved with lightless black onyx, then the focus itself, of concentric circles over-scribed in Paravian runes, mapped out in pearlescent phosphor. Tingled by the unshielded play of elemental forces, he positioned himself at the pattern’s centre. His feet rested on the apex of a looping star interlace that met in a nexus of five lines.

He closed his eyes, gripped his satchel and waited.

Outside the tower, sunrise touched light through the mists.

A flux of wild energy crested along the lane, and the focus in the cellar floor responded, crackling to incandescent white. The moment sang into a chord of suspension, laced about with dire powers.

Then the dawn sun-surge peaked and passed. The rune circles shimmered to quiescence, and the Warden of Althain was gone. Air displaced by his departure eddied over gargoyle cornices and sighed to final stillness through attrition.

Relocated three hundred and eighty leagues to the southeast, Sethvir opened his eyes. Through a lingering shudder of reaction, he sucked in a breath dank as fog off a retting pond with the taint of mildew and mould. He wrinkled his nose. ‘I’d forgotten how Meth Isle smelled.’

‘That’s possible?’ His host, the master spellbinder Verrain, stood in straight quiet like a cat-tail, furled against the damp in a mud-splashed, brown frieze cloak. ‘I wasn’t sure, I’ve been here so long.’ Full lips that once had wrung sighs from Daenfal’s fairest maidens crooked in humourless irony. ‘Welcome to the bogs of Mirthlvain.’

Sethvir gave his spinning senses a moment more to settle, then stepped off the lichened patterns of a lane focus centuries older than the one at Althain Tower. Gilded with flickers from the rushlight by the doorway, he gripped the wrists of the apprentice mage, who had stood guard over the dread spawn of Mirthlvain for more years than any soul deserved.

‘You have tea?’ asked the Fellowship sorcerer.

His anxious note caused Verrain to grin. ‘My cupboards are stocked.’ He led off up a brick stair, hollowed by moisture and footfalls. ‘The others await you above.’

The pair climbed in darkness alive with the tick and splash of condensation. From some bleak chamber down a corridor, a caged thing chittered and screeled; the echoes cut at the nerves, caused the hair of warmblooded listeners to prickle and stab erect.

‘Karth-eels?’ Sethvir asked.

‘A breeding pair.’ Verrain unbarred an upper doorway to a squeal of rusted hinges. He retrieved a staff of grey ash, while the spill of filtered daylight traced over knuckles left scarred by bites, and claws, and fell scratchings. ‘A new mutation, I fear.’

‘Hardly fresh,’ Sethvir murmured, ‘if these ones you’ve caught are amphibious, with fangs and webbed feet as well as the usual venomed spines.’

Verrain glanced aside in surprise, his eyes so bleak they looked lightless. ‘You’ve seen footed spawnings before this?’

‘Actually, yes. But not for five thousand years.’ In disquiet thought, the sorcerer hitched at the strap of his satchel. ‘Certainly none since the hate-wraiths who caused the aberrations were prisoned in Rockfell pit.’

‘The records in the library don’t list those.’ Verrain ducked to traverse the peculiar, low arches of a connecting hall. One of Meth Isle fortress’s many cats streaked past as he flung back the door to another stairway.

‘No. They wouldn’t.’ Moved to an airy shift of subject, Sethvir said, ‘There’s a most urgent reason why we chose to meet here for the equinox.’

The light strengthened with the climb, warmed to buttery, cloud-hazed sunshine. This far east, the morning was already several hours gone. Windows battened under diamond-meshed grilles opened onto Meth Isle fortress’s vista of slate roofs and terracotta chimneys, tufted under yellow moss and fungus. Tiled gutters with gargoyle spouts loured over a lakeshore scummed with lily pads and beyond them, darker, deeper waters rippled and scaled silver with wind. Mirthlvain’s landscape of steaming mires loomed in the distance, an imprinted silhouette of marsh maple and cypress cobwebbed with trailing, tattered moss.

But the inside air now carried welcoming heat and a perfume of clean burning birch. An orange tabby bounded across the landing to weave against Verrain’s shins. He crossed a marble antechamber inhabited by beetles in lichened corners and led into the grand hall beyond.

Past the braced doors, lofty hammerbeamed ceilings hung splotched acid green from the damp. A black iron cauldron steamed on the hob, and there Sethvir’s host gestured with the flick of a dimple on each cheek. ‘Your tea water. Sufficient to last out the day, I should hope.’

The sorcerer returned a pleased grin, then hastened on to greet the two colleagues who waited, already seated. Other carved chairs with upholstery felted with cat hair sat empty before the stone gryphons that fashioned the table’s massive pedestal.

A white and tortoiseshell tom poured itself from Asandir’s lap as he arose. ‘Sethvir! Come sit. How long has it been since you remembered to eat?’ Tall, windburned, worn lean from travel, he made room for Althain’s Warden, in the process displacing a sleepy kitten.

The black-clad sorcerer opposite hunched over a plate of smoked fish and scones, his mouth too full for speech. But the raven perched on his shoulder swivelled beady jet eyes and croaked.

‘Hello to you too, little brother.’ Sethvir dumped his satchel on the floor and sat, his diffuse gaze no longer bemused, but trained in sharp inquiry upon the quieter of his two colleagues.

Traithe stayed riveted on his food. His wide-brimmed black hat with its tarnished silver band hung from the knurl on his chair arm. The caped sable mantle he still wore failed to mask the tender movements left over from crippling injuries; in the hour of the Mistwraith’s first invasion, Traithe had made tragic sacrifice to unbind the spells on the South Gate portal and cut off the creatures’ point of entry.

When his raven clipped him a peck on the ear, he looked up, his brown eyes dark with affront. ‘Yes,’ he snapped as though to an unwanted inquiry. ‘My scars ache today. But since meeting was called for at Mirthlvain, I presume we save our strengths for something more pressing than small healing.’

Above a twist of frosty hair the raven had tousled, Asandir and Sethvir locked glances. Had Traithe still possessed his full faculties, no one need say that Mirthlvain’s ills were quiescent.

‘Actually,’ the Warden of Althain admitted, ‘this is the closest active focus to Alestron, where one of us needs to pay a visit. A copy of Magyre’s papers has apparently survived and fallen into the hands of the duke’s scholars.’

‘Black powder again?’ asked Verrain, arrived with a stalker’s silence to settle on Traithe’s other side. He had shed his frieze cloak. Lank blond hair tied by velvet ribbons feathered through the ruffles of a dandy’s collar several centuries out of fashion.

Sethvir sighed. ‘The very same old tired story.’ He looked askance at Asandir, who had forgotten to pass on the scones. ‘It’s scarcely on your way, but you’ll need to visit the city before going north to Rockfell to check on the Mistwraith’s confinement.’

Then, mindful the cruellest of Traithe’s distress would not stem from old injuries, Sethvir tucked his hands in his sleeve cuffs. Carefully, aloud, he said, ‘No, I have yet to hear word.’

His inference was to Kharadmon, their discorporate colleague dispatched across the gulf to resurvey the paired worlds left severed by the closure of South Gate. There, for a purpose beyond comprehension, the abomination wrought of mists and trapped human spirits first became amalgamated into the Mistwraith that endangered Athera.

Worries abounded. The icy, lifeless void between stars was inhospitable, even to the bodiless spirit; worse, the alienated worlds presumably harboured the wraith’s greater portion, still at large and potently malevolent. The calamity that resulted from the creature’s confinement here had unveiled frightening truths: for the mist’s bound spirits were intelligent, able to wrest the key to grand conjury from another mind trained to mastery. They had even proved capable of movement and planning across the threshold of time.

Best of any, the Fellowship sorcerers understood the ugly details. The curse they undertook to unravel to reconcile two princes was daunting in scope, and ranged about with perils that lay outside of all augury.

Kharadmon’s journey had been launched at unmentionable risk. If he suffered mishap and failed to return, far more than the hope of the royal heirs’ reconciliation would be lost. The Fellowship itself might never be restored to its original circle of seven sorcerers.

Amid bitter silence, and stalked by the interest of three cats, the raven spread glossy primaries and dived in to peck at the scones. Traithe beat it back to a flurry of wings, snatched the butter crock away, then hissed until the bird retreated to fluff indignant feathers on his chair back. Since mention of one discorporate colleague brought the other to mind, he said, ‘Luhaine has no plans to join us?’

‘Sadly not.’ Sethvir rescued a scone the bird had mauled and dipped up a creamy scoop of butter. ‘The Koriani witches have renewed their efforts to find Arithon.’ He bit down and chewed with absent relish. ‘For equinox, they’ve planned a grand scrying. A circle of twenty-one seniors, to be matrixed through the Skyron crystal. Luhaine’s needed to try and scatter their energies everywhere else but toward Jaelot, a touchy task. We’d rather his influence wasn’t noticed.’

‘Jaelot?’ Verrain’s expostulation re-echoed off the vaults of the ceiling. ‘That cesspit of snobbery and bad taste? Why Jaelot?’

Asandir sighed, the broad line of his shoulders looking tired. ‘The affair involves an exploit of Dakar’s that’s too idiotic to mention. But to redeem the Mad Prophet’s foolishness, Halliron is confined there till solstice. His apprentice naturally won’t leave him.’ The sorcerer hooked his chin on steepled fingers, not needing to add that a stay of such length left Arithon’s identity as Medlir vulnerable, and not just to auguries done on the balance point of equinox. Since the secret of the Shadow Master’s alias was the fragile linchpin that frustrated the directive of Desh-thiere’s curse, Luhaine was bound to be misleading enchantresses for some while yet to come.

‘Well,’ murmured Traithe in dry conclusion. ‘This isn’t so much a convocation as a gossip list of our weaknesses.’

‘From which we can certainly spare a moment for minor healing,’ Sethvir interjected with a glance of prankish triumph toward his colleague. ‘For the task that lies ahead of us tonight, we can’t do without your sense of humour.’

A flick of amusement rekindled the laugh lines at the corners of Traithe’s spaniel eyes. ‘What’s amiss that’s any worse than the monsters mewed up in these mires?’

Turned blankly vague, Sethvir fiddled pastry crumbs out of the folds of his cuffs. ‘The Koriani Council’s pursuit of Arithon s’Ffalenn. But let that bide for a little.’

His wistful glance toward the cauldron moved Verrain to arise and fetch mugs, and steep a pot of bracing tea.

When eventide dimmed the Mirthlvain marshes, the peepings and shrills, the skreels and the croaks of its nocturnal denizens racketed across the shallows of Methlas Lake. The mists had not yet arisen, to lure out the will o’ the wisps and the seeping flares of the marshlights. Unquiet waters lay black as a facet of obsidian, stippled by the light-prints of stars, and one anomaly: a thread of reflection sculled on the shore’s dying currents, cast out into darkness by a firelit casement high up in Meth Isle fortress.

There, around the stone table in a hall dimmed to cavernous shadow, three Fellowship sorcerers hunched in conference. They concluded their survey of far-reaching responsibilities, for they alone had been left as guardians of Athera’s ancient mysteries since the old races’ inexplicable disappearance. Wards of protection that confined creatures dangerous in malice had been checked over world gates and preserves. As always, defences had weakened; four months of difficult travels lay ahead for Traithe and Asandir. The demands on them both were relentless, with their discorporate colleagues committed elsewhere. Of two other sorcerers outside tonight’s active circle, none spoke: the shade of Davien the Betrayer remained banished in seclusion since the hour of the high kings’ fall; Ciladis the Lost, still gone beyond reach, on his failed quest to find the Paravians.

The sole augury that forecast the Seven’s reunity, the last hope to accomplish the old races’ return: all remained jeopardized by the Mistwraith’s curse, and two princes shackled into enmity. Brought at last to that point, and the reason for gathering at Meth Isle, Sethvir peered into his empty mug. The tea leaves scummed in the dregs deceptively appeared to absorb him, while his eyes mapped the sonorous currents of the earth, and the fine, singing tracks of distant stars. ‘It is time.’

Gaunt and silent, Asandir arose. He collected the used crockery, Verrain’s chipped pot with its sprung wicker handle, and the moth-eaten quills filched from the library. With hands that moved much more freely, Traithe rolled up a marked map. He slipped the parchment into its case and across the cleared table, spread the black cloth of his cloak.

Sethvir stooped by his chair to rummage something from his satchel. While the cats piled next to Verrain’s ankles scampered off, and the one in his lap stretched and left, the Guardian of Mirthlvain out of habit used mage-sense to tag the cause of their unrest. But this time no aberrated creature from the swamps had strayed inside to be hunted. Verrain’s query touched the edge of a cold ward, a boundary field laid down to contain a flux of refined vibration. He realized, alarmed, that the Fellowship meant to cast strands. The augury they could wring out of still air and power would be exactingly accurate, and undertaken only at grave need. More disturbing still, the Warden of Althain straightened up and offered him a tin canister and stone pipe.

Verrain need not unseal the container. The pungency that seeped from the dried herb inside charged his senses with dreadful remembrance of its poisons. Shaken, he said quickly, ‘I shouldn’t need tienelle to follow the progression of a strand pattern.’

Sethvir did not back down, but cradled the master spellbinder’s hands within his own tepid palms. ‘Tonight, we’re not sounding the future.’ Fallen into shadow as Asandir made a spell to darken the glow of the fire, the Warden looked oddly wizened; momentarily no sorcerer at all, but an old man rubbed spiritless and thin by a lifetime’s uncountable sorrows. ‘You weren’t told earlier. But the Mistwraith’s curse that sets Lysaer and Arithon into conflict is far worse than a geas of fixation. The knowledge which might shed light on their condition lies two ages back in the past.’

A creeping shudder harrowed Verrain’s nerves. ‘You wish to tune the strands to examine the methuri that created the abominations here at Mirthlvain?’

‘Desh-thiere’s binding over the princes is not far removed from the corruptions effected by the hate-wraiths.’ Asandir folded his lean length and sat with his usual economy of movement. ‘Both arose from the meddling of spirit entities. Both were imprinted into living flesh, with bonds of compulsion that can’t be undone without losing the victim in death.’

As Sethvir’s touch slipped away, Verrain flicked open the little tin, his dimples erased by trepidation as he cleaned and packed the stubby pipe. The biting smell of the tienelle enveloped him, fierce enough to make him cough. Just how a strand casting could be ranged across time, he desperately wished not to learn.

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…

The farsight of s’Ahelas!’ Verrain looked up, shocked by the evidence before him. ‘No one told me Rathain’s prince had inherited the marked gift of his mother’s line along with s’Ffalenn compassion.’

To his sorrow and that of his half-brother also,’ Sethvir affirmed in quiet grief. ‘Both carry the attributes of two royal families.’

Across the table, embattled by raw recriminations, Traithe sucked a fast breath and shut his eyes. ‘Ath’s blessed mercy, I should never have lent him my raven.’

The bird’s guidance changed nothing,’ Asandir disagreed in jarring firmness. Distanced from emotion by the fearful discipline he needed to stabilize the scrying, he added, ‘You’ll see as much once the vibration is refined to show a clear imprint of the aura.’

Unhappiness dwelled like a sore point, that such redefinition was required only to match the shortfalls of Verrain and Traithe; or else for some larger, interconnected reason that remained too elusive to place.

Then Sethvir cut in with an adamance to end Verrain’s laboured speculation. ‘Dare we overlook a single facet? The Mistwraith and its malice are unprecedented. We might need every angle at hand to unkey the riddle of the curse.’

Asandir bowed his head and realigned the augury. Still mazed under influence of the tienelle, Verrain flinched as the image shimmered into a delicate, prismatic fire of patterns. These displayed the character and emotions of Rathain’s prince through the unshielded vibrations of his life-force. The outrage of the merchants showed also, a rinsed flare of ruby that fringed the peripheral edges. But their coarse-textured hatred became discarded like noise before the tight-meshed imprint that was Arithon.

Verrain shuddered, confounded by a warring urge to weep and hold his breath.

The aura of the s’Ffalenn prince sang through the vision in spare and forceful irony, even as Lysaer’s must have done through the hour of crisis when Sethvir and Asandir between them had disentangled him from the possession of the wraith that had sealed Desh-thiere’s vengeance.

Distaste like sand in his gut, Verrain pushed past grief to see more: through passage to Athera by way of the Red Desert, this prince had acquired the matrix imparted by the Five Centuries Fountain, a structure of riddles and spells built and abandoned by Davien the Betrayer in the years before he raised the insurrection to overturn kingdom rule.

‘Fatemaster’s mercy.’ Verrain expelled a sharp exhalation. ‘Both half-brothers came here by way of the Worldsend Gate. Are they equally marked by the Betrayer’s enforced longevity? If so, this geas of Desh-thiere’s could upset the whole continent through the course of five hundred years!’

Sethvir’s hand dropped, warm and steady on the spellbinder’s shoulder. ‘Save thought for more than despair. Davien’s gift of added lifespan might equally lend us grace to achieve the princes’ salvation.’ But in comfortless fact, his platitude held no certainty.

That moment, driven to straight urgency by some unseen cue, Althain’s Warden cried, ‘Now! Jump ahead to the moment of the curse.’

The image in the candle-flame unlocked to kaleidoscopic change; and Verrain felt as a man sent to dam back a cataclysm with only a wish and bare hands.

Lysaer’s bolt struck.

A scintillant flash bisected the sphere of the vision. Seared from palm to right elbow, Arithon recoiled from worse than scorched flesh. Jabbed and enveloped through the crux of half-formed defences, he opened his mouth to scream as he tasted the measure of his downfall.

And peril incarnate closed over him. Lysaer’s killing band of light shimmered and exploded, to unveil the Mistwraith’s covert conjury: the bane-ward of the curse, transferred inside an attack no schooled mind had ever thought to suspect.

‘Slow the sequence,’ Sethvir commanded in a sharp-etched whisper.

Verrain jammed his fists against his temples as the brilliance shed away to unveil the stripped armature of the geas, a serried mesh ugly as flung blood, but never random. The spellbinder who shared its ruthless symmetry could wish his own tears could scald and blind him.

‘Dharkaron witness,’ he managed on a rasped catch of breath. ‘The creature baited its binding with Arithon’s personal imprint.’

‘Lock and key.’ Sethvir’s affirmation came oddly muffled by distance. ‘The bystanders were safe, had we known it.’

Traithe had no comment to offer; and Verrain could only ponder a third time why this scrying should be rewrought in such depth. One glance was enough to establish plain fact: Desh-thiere’s curse and the signature pattern which comprised the extinct methuri held only chance similarity. As the Fellowship certainly realized, no further help for their princes could be garnered from Mirthlvain mire’s dark history.

The present scrying edged forward. In a hideous play of stopped motion, the spell coils netted their victim. Barbed tendrils flung out like grapples and snagged, to shed pervasive currents throughout the s’Ffalenn prince’s being.

His torment, physical and mental, shivered, shocked, and rebounded in a voiceless play of light. Through pain enough to cripple thought, Arithon fought back: in starbursts of mage-fire; in sigils and counterwards knotted and thrashed in harried ink-twists of shadow.

Yet Desh-thiere’s malice had been configured to outflank and countermand every turn of his desperate strength.

Verrain saw the clean bars of will wrapped and smothered, the brilliance of purpose starkly crushed. Through the heartbeat while Arithon’s self-awareness lay slapped back and stunned, the curse spun insidious transformation.

‘Odd, don’t you think, that the creature made its incursion a static one,’ the spellbinder ventured. ‘How much simpler to go the next step and force a degenerative erosion of the spirit.’

Sethvir’s mouth thinned amid a bracketing bristle of beard. His uneasiness stayed unvoiced, that he feared such restraint held a purpose. The Mistwraith had set the princes against each other; it had not overtly destroyed them.

That its works could have done so was plain as the vision unreeled.

Verrain combed through the locked snarl of energies, overwhelmed by the evidence that this geas held no opening for reprieve. Leaving the s’Ffalenn personality symmetrical and intact, the bane-spell had meddled in cruel selectivity. Like a spider staked out in a web, it insinuated itself where hurt would be greatest: across will, emotion, and integrity. It waited, a dread vortex that consumed in cumulative subtlety, even as it pressed the incessant urge to battle its chosen nemesis: to kill Lysaer, and no other, a compulsion harnessed in step with life and spirit and consciousness.

The last coil sliced into place. Scarlet trailers bound close as wire, to vanish without trace in the quicksilver haze of the aura. Conclusion shaped only despair: the curse which shackled the half-brothers was a mirror-image construct that choked envenomed tendrils around every nuance of the victim’s being. To cut or disturb the least jointure would trip a flashfire backlash of dissolution.

Flesh would die and spirit be instantly annihilated. The enslavement at face value might seem less damaging, but its depths were more insidious than any distortion inflicted by methuri possession. Limp as old rags from a helplessness the Fellowship must have gauged in advance, Verrain masked his face in his palms. Five centuries was not enough, he thought sadly, to solve a quandary of such reaching proportion.

‘Well the curse won’t pass to the next generation,’ Sethvir offered to ease the spellbinder’s despondency. ‘Should either prince engender offspring, their heirs will be born unsullied.’

‘Small comfort,’ Traithe allowed, as he gathered his cloak from the tabletop. His resignation showed divided thoughts; whether to bless the mage training that gave Arithon limited means to resist the bane-spell’s directive, or to curse the added peril his schooled talent could present as the conflict renewed, at stakes inevitably more dire.

Made aware by the bound of a cat into his lap that the candle now burned clean of conjury, Verrain welcomed the animal’s small warmth against the chills of withdrawal and grief.

Dawn shed a leaden glimmer through the casement. Dulled as wind-beaten linen in its light, Asandir stretched, his move to arise cut short by Sethvir, who exchanged a weighted glance, then bent to recover his satchel.

‘You’re headed north,’ the Warden of Althain said, settled erect with his hands full. ‘I’d be obliged if you could deliver this to Arithon when his apprenticeship with the Masterbard ends.’

Asandir’s eyes snapped up, keen-edged as steel raised to guardpoint. ‘Not so soon!’ he exclaimed. Then in brittle capitulation, he reached across the table and relieved Sethvir of the satchel. Once his grip closed over the ties, he knew the list of its contents. ‘Nautical charts and Anithael’s navigational instruments? Why?’

‘Arithon asked for them,’ Sethvir replied in painful, unsmiling directness. ‘He hoped to hasten Halliron’s passage to Shand. But the sea may have to answer a more urgent need, and the letter Lady Maenalle sent as well.’

The grievous implication hung through suspended quiet, that the six years of peace Arithon had bought since the massacre at Strakewood forest, that he had wrested from his fate by denying his half-brother any viable target to strike at, might be threatened well before any means lay at hand to challenge the Mistwraith’s fell binding.

Unless and until Kharadmon came back successful from his quest, the hands of the Fellowship remained tied.

Traithe jammed on his hat to mask trepidation.

Afflicted by more personal ties to the princes, Asandir pushed back his chair and strode out with a speed that shed draughts and snuffed the spent flicker of the candle.

Verrain could only clench his knuckles in cat fur, his throat closed against questions too fearful to ask, and his eyes flooded from what he hoped was flung smoke from the wick that glowed briefly and blinked out.