The Curse of the Mistwraith

Winter wind slashed through Lysaer’s hair. He recovered a ratcheting breath, discovered his eyes squeezed shut and his hands locked rigidly to the side-boards. When he mastered the wits to risk a look, disbelief shocked him like icewater. Tower, vault and pattern were wholly swept away. Through a dissolving haze of blue sparks and an after-stink of ozone, he beheld a changed landscape and mist silvered with new day. Under a brooding grey sky, gusts raked through feathered brown grass, stripped trees and black, striated rock that gouged through soil and dead briar. Lysaer felt dizzied, sick and disoriented. He was still battling to reconcile his shaken nerves, when the impossible solidity of the land, the rutted dirt lane the dray thundered down and the flying clods gouged up by the horses, who raced ahead in stark fear – everything pretematurally made real by the loosening coils of grand magic – tilted hard sideways and overturned.

‘You’re going to faint,’ Asandir said with incisive clarity from a point somewhere inside the wagon.

Vertigo swallowed Lysaer’s sight. He sensed no pain as his gold-thatched head banged into a sack of iron cooking-pots, but heard only the clang of impact melded with words made blurred through a distance of fading awareness. ‘Ath’s mercy on you, prophet, for I’ll show none if the s’Ilessid heir falls out.’

The Paravians called the place Caith-al-Caen, Vale of Shadows, by the dawn of the Second Age. Common usage corrupted the name of the ruin there to Castlecain, though from a vantage halfway up a mist-cloaked hillside the reason seemed obscured. The site never held any fortress. All that remained of the clay and thatch croft where Cianor Sunlord had been born were hummocks where orchards had stood. Yet as Asandir wound his way over ground that once had held gardens of scented, flowering trees, his eyes saw beyond bleak mist and sere landscape. If he looked with his mage’s vision, the shadows, the memories, that abiding resonance of mystery that lingered wherever the old races had cherished the earth skeined like star-lit thread through the cross-laced, dead canes of briar.

Ballads held that a place beloved by unicorns never quite lost the aura of their presence. At Caith-al-Caen, the adage held true; while Asandir strode through weeds napped like velvet with dew, his peripheral vision and the limits just beyond hearing entangled him in echoes of the past. Here, when the splendours of the Second Age were yet young, the Riathan had gathered each solstice to renew the earthpowers and to rejoice in the turn of the seasons. The ecstasy in their music had marked the very soil, and now wind itself mourned the loss. Even after a thousand years, the land remained blessed with a grace that haunted. An energy coursed through the soil that glorified life; even under Desh-thiere’s curse, the hills each spring put forth a knee-high carpet of flowers and rowan still thrust through the bracken.

Now, under winter’s frosts, only the spirits lingered, ethereal as shadings in silverpoint, their dance songless and silent. The sorcerer walked, careful not to look too closely to either side. The memories of too many friends watched his back with pity and reproach. Sorrow had scribed too many creases around his eyes, and hope had eased too few.

‘Dael-Farenn, kingmaker!’ lisped the wind as it curled through his hair. ‘What have you done with your hope, your dreams, your joy? The dance is not ended, not yet. For the song will renew with the sunlight.’ Could Asandir close his ears he would have; but the hearing of a mage went beyond reliance on the flesh. The voices and the spirits dogged his innermind, each step; he would answer their pleas, but at a cost that anguished to contemplate.

He crested the rise. Beyond spread the hollow where the Ilitharis Paravians had first Named the winter stars. The place retained a serenity that would abide through ages still to come, however much strife marred the world. Informed of the Master’s presence by a bright-edged spill of lyranthe notes, Asandir stopped dead. His hands and his throat tightened. As though touched by his sharp trepidation, the voices on the wind palled to murmurs and the spirits swirled away, brilliance dimmed; while through a perception that threatened to unman him, Asandir heard Arithon play Maenalle’s gift with a touch unfettered by bitterness.

Arpeggios rippled and soared, linked by grace-notes that revealed, like unfinished tapestry, the latent promise of the bard. Cut diamonds had less clarity. The s’Ffalenn heir already possessed a skill that could pierce the heart; offered freedom to pursue his desire, and given the right master, his talent could be refined to a grace that held power to captivate.

Woodenly, Asandir pressed forward. His deerhide soles grated over stone, deliberate warning to the minstrel that solitude had been breached. Arithon glanced over his shoulder, saw his visitor and smiled. The reflexive, hair-trigger wariness that on prior occasions had hardened him never arose. As if his licence to share the risks in quelling the meth-snakes had triggered catharsis, the music flowed from him unchecked. By the lyrical, ringing undertone, no Fellowship sorcerer could mistake that this time the s’Ffalenn heir played to share unconditionally.

Asandir fought his wish to turn away, to retrace his path to the valley and leave Caith-al-Caen to the spirits and the bard; instead he steeled his will and assimilated the hurtful whole: his mage’s vision showed him the colours of Arithon’s aura shot through with absolute trust.

The final steps toward the hollow became unbearably hard to complete. Asandir managed, though the wear left by centuries of service suddenly bore down on him and the wind pried his hair and clothing like the tug of hostile hands. He reached the stone where Arithon sat and regarded the mist and the shadows until the song reached its natural end. When the last note faded into stillness, he settled at the Master’s side.

‘Why?’ he asked softly, though in depth, he already knew.

Arithon settled the lyranthe into the crook of his elbow and answered the question’s drift. ‘I finally had proof that your promise of free will was genuine.’ Green eyes turned, but Asandir could no longer meet them. Unperturbed, where in a more guarded moment he might justly have taken alarm, Arithon continued. ‘I challenged my right to self-destruction and was shown an open door.’ He paused, looked down and his hands opened. ‘You’ll forgive my cantankerous behaviour, I hope. I’m capable of better, as you’ll see.’

Asandir masked a flinch, for the words the Master had chosen had echoed those of another s’Ffalenn ancestor, caught in an equally untenable position. And in the moment when memory and pity stole speech, Asandir shared in fine-textured empathy the unshielded confidence of a friendship.

The offering itself was a rarity for a man unaccustomed to companionship: a lonely boy, raised in the company of elderly mages who had all loved him at a distance. He had grown without a mother’s affection, but hereditary compassion had turned him from resentment. He readily forgave what he did not understand, and defined his joy through his competence. Praise for his achievements kept him from discovering the depths of his isolation, the cost of that misapprehension still yet to be paid.

The true friend, the caring lover, could absolve all hurt from the growth that inevitably must be forced upon the grown man. The lesson might be learned through care and happiness, that the self-worth Arithon instinctively sought in music was a separate thing from accomplishment – had Desh-thiere and a crown not hung between.

Asandir hid bitterness. His own role disallowed mercy. Inwardly connected the Master might be, and strong as well, but along with his confidence came infinite power to wound. Asandir came close to recoil as another image touched his consciousness: a young girl’s face, with shy, smiling lips, eyes like aventurine, and ash-brown hair caught up in braids. Arithon had wanted to kiss her but women confused him; while walking in the hills to gather herbs they had spoken of music and poetry and then of things more personal. And trembling in his arms she had admitted that his powers, the given gift of Shadow he had laboured so long to master, frightened her. He had let her go, not knowing what to say.

The girl’s name had been Tennia, Asandir recalled from the clutter of past recollections he had probed after breaking the Curse of Mearth; the events themselves were not new, nor the regrets they had left marked in memory. The sorcerer’s gall and surprise stemmed instead from distinction that now, his insight into Arithon’s consciousness was openly given in trust.

Asandir watched the winds comb the dry, frost-brittle grasses with bleak eyes. This time, in keenest irony, inherited s’Ffalenn compassion had set the reins into his grasp; s’Ahelas farsight offered the whip. His mage’s perception recognized Arithon’s inner fibre, and its naked vulnerability stirred him to grief sharp as outrage: for he could, he would, and he must, manipulate this prince into voluntary betrayal of everything he held dear.

‘This place,’ Arithon said, interrupting Asandir’s inward turmoil, ‘it has a quality, a feeling, as if the rocks, the soil, even the wind, are something more than inanimate.’

‘Caith-al-Caen is aligned with an earth-lane,’ the sorcerer replied in what seemed measured calm; but a shiver flawed his composure. Mercy upon you, he thought to the prince at his side; for Arithon had unwittingly invited the opening the Fellowship in its desperate need required. Over the whisper of wind and through the multiple levels of his mage’s awareness, Asandir chose his words. ‘Here, in the past, the old races danced at the turn of each season to deflect the earth’s forces into latitudinal channels to enrich the surrounding land. So were all of Athera’s twelve lanes once interconnected in a lattice to nourish all life. The resonance that shaped the ward lingers still.’

Self-control prevailed: a voice could be compelled to sound conversational, though anguished self-revulsion stormed beneath; for the first strand of the snare would be spun, here and now, of the purest thing left to this world: the beauty and wild grace impressed upon Caith-al-Caen by the dance of the Riathan Paravians. ‘I can show you, if you like.’

It did not help to know that the ultimate course of the world depended upon this deception, as Arithon straightened in surprise. His eyes lit with pleasure, and a longing that was entirely spontaneous tipped up the corners of his mouth. ‘I would be honoured.’

Somehow Asandir unlocked numbed fingers. He reached down, picked up a lichened bit of stone and said, ‘Give me your hands.’ He offered his own, palm upward, the pebble cradled like the mythical seed of temptation in the left one.

Arithon laid his lyranthe aside. A gust fanned his hair and the coarse linen of his sleeves as he reached to engage his grip. Warm hands were given into the sorcerer’s cool ones. As if air itself were abrasive to his skin, Asandir accepted the touch.

He guided Arithon’s fingers to cup the fragment of stone, then moulded his own over the top. ‘You were taught to clear and centre your mind. Do that. But this time, include our bit of stone as if it were part of your flesh and leave me an open channel.’

Unaware of impending destiny, Arithon closed his eyes. Without looking, Asandir could sense the change as he underwent the necessary preparation and the clamour of inward consciousness settled to listening stillness. As a shepherd might lead his best lamb to slaughter, the sorcerer threaded his awareness into the fragment of stone, hooked the residual glimmer of Paravian magic and set it free, to pour through Arithon’s unshielded spirit and weave its undying line of melody.

The effect at first was subtle, little more than a sensation of warming from the stone, followed by a tingle of nerves akin to a rush of exuberance. Arithon underwent a moment of quivering, inward realignment, as if a chord had been struck in harmonic resonance with his being. Asandir felt the ripple of reaction course through the flesh under his grip: he removed his hands and watched, aggrieved and silent.

Arithon opened his eyes to the vision of unicorns dancing.

The statues of Riathan enshrined at Althain Tower might reflect an artist’s proportion and line. But perfection carved in cold marble could never capture motion, nor the lightness and flight of cloven hooves, nor the lift of tails and manes more fine than spun silk; not the spiralled twist of horns that shimmered with an energy visible to mages, nor the soaring, heart-searing sweetness of song that underlay the sigh of the wind. Caith-al-Caen rang with a purity of tone just beyond grasp of the mind.

Arithon dropped the bit of stone, helplessly overwhelmed. He sank to his knees before the cranny where he had sheltered. Assaulted by a rapture beyond hope, the half-glimpsed promise of limitless light, he laughed aloud and then trembled. His eyes filled with tears and over-flowed. ‘Blessed Ath,’ he managed finally, his words wrung to harshness by awe. ‘I never guessed. Yet the beauty in the sword should have warned me.’

Asandir regarded the lyrical pavane of the spirit forms, mute. Their image held power to captivate, surely; but the palliative brought only hunger, akin to the cravings of delirium. These illusions were just poor, starved shadows, an imprint like after-image left by creatures whose existence transcended mortality. The reality made pearls seem as sand. For one who had beheld the wisdom in a unicorn’s depthless eyes, for any who had once experienced the current of undefiled exultation that abided in their presence, the ghosts scribed here by trace resonance exposed only wretched emptiness. Asandir wept also, but for loss beyond words to encompass and for a future set into motion that must not now be undone.

Cut by regret and infinite pity, he bent also and gathered Arithon’s shivering shoulders into the embrace a parent might show to a child about to be orphaned. ‘You can block the visions at will by sealing off your inner sight.’

Arithon twisted against the sorcerer’s hold, his face all puzzled delight. ‘Why ever should I want to?’

Asandir released his grip as though burned. Too choked to breathe, far less speak, he whirled away and strode off. Almighty Ath, the irony wounded, endlessly, and straight to the heart. For Arithon would wish very shortly that he had never owned mage-sight, nor been attuned to the resonance of Paravian mystery.

The spirits that haunted Caith-al-Caen were as pale glimmers, their measure a dance of celebration incanted and renewed through countless turns of seasons. Here the Paravian singers had transmuted only joy. The vibrations imbued within the ruins of the traditional s’Ffalenn seat of power, Ithamon, where the Fellowship proposed to see Desh-thiere’s stranglehold over sky and sunlight broken, were not at all the same.

Amid foundations shattered by the uprising and the bones of unburied dead, the four towers raised by the Paravians still stood, their wards pristine and still radiant. The contrast between their enduring, virginal harmony and the tormented backlash of magics unleashed by the fall of the King’s Tower that coiled like a wraith through the wreckage was a thousand times more poignant than the haunting of Caith-al-Caen, and stark with the blood and tragedy of displaced lives and dreams.

Arithon might shut such clamour out, but at the cost of his bardic inspiration; and the compassion that was permanently ingrained in every scion of the s’Ffalenn line would disallow any such voluntary deafness.

Irony within irony, Asandir knew, as his feet stumbled in unabashed haste and his clothing hooked on the briars. The king for Rathain would be bought in false guilt against every dedicated principle of the Fellowship whose first task was to foster enlightenment. For the prince now entranced by the unicorn spirits lacked the hardened self-wisdom to stand down Ithamon’s past. He was too young, too strong and too much the puppet of pity to perceive that responsibilities were always self-imposed.

On fostering that lie, Athera’s need depended; and on a tender innocence paired like a curse with resilience enough not to flee.

The road across Daon Ramon Barrens was barely more than a dirt-track, half overgrown and winding between hills raked by winds that never seemed to quiet. Tired of the whisper and rattle of dead bracken, of the incessant tug and snap at his cloak hem and hair perpetually whipped into tangles, Lysaer kept good spirits, buoyed by certainty that the interval of being adrift without kingdom or purpose would end after conquest of Desh-thiere.

Never mind that, league on league, the landscape was unremittingly deserted and bare; that winter rains soaked his clothing and blankets, and Dakar’s invective worsened since the morning he woke up with iyats in his boots, and Asandir once again had to rescue him from the energy sprites’ bedevilment. No other diversions arose through weary days of travel, for their route took them far from even the most isolated initiate’s hostel: tinkers, traders and caravans did not travel the old road to Ithamon. As if the way itself, with its lichened markers and rolling, briar-grown hills was haunted, not even the ruins of farm hamlets or villages remained to remind of a prosperous past.

‘That’s because there were none,’ Asandir confided over the jingle of harness and the booming grind of the dray’s wheels over bare scarps of stone. The rain had stopped at midday and water puddled silver in the hollows. ‘Daon Ramon in the old tongue means “golden hills”. The place was the province of the Riathan Paravians and unicorns require no dwellings.’

Unwilling to let the sorcerer lapse into the forbidding silence that had gripped him since Althain Tower, Lysaer gestured toward the hillsides with their cover of bracken and thorn. ‘It seems hard to picture this place as fertile and green.’

‘It was, and beautifully so.’ Asandir urged his mount over a gully where the road had washed out and the slates lay jammed like old bones in a spongy bed of moss. His silver-grey eyes seemed to pierce the mantle of mist and peer far into distance. ‘All that you see was a grassland, rich with herbs and wildflowers. Winters were short and mild. But that changed, after the rebellion. Townsmen believed the magic of the Paravians could not abide in a land without water. They went to astonishing lengths to assuage their fears. The governor’s council of Etarra funded a force of mercenaries to dam the Severnir. A great canal was cut through the Skyshiel Mountains to divert the river at its source. The current flows east, now, and empties into Eltair Bay.’

‘That seems a mighty effort to base on a superstition,’ Lysaer commented.

Asandir rode on in troubled silence. Then he said, ‘So long as these hills remain a desert, no Paravian would return to dwell here. So you see, the townsmen’s intent was suited after all.’

The damp weather held and night fell early. By then, Asandir’s party made camp in a grotto formed by a jutting outcrop of cracked boulders. The only bit that stayed dry was the nook where the fire burned and Dakar crouched there, roasting rabbits that Arithon and Lysaer had snared before dusk. Asandir knew where to find herbs, and beside the odours of wet earth and damp horses, the air carried the savoury smell of stew.

Lysaer huddled between the slow drip of a natural spring and a falling spray of run-off, shirtless, his cloak tossed across his shoulders. With a needle and thread borrowed from the supply-pack, he was immersed in determined effort to mend a tear where a briar had torn his sleeve. Attendant on his progress was the Mad Prophet, in rare high humour at the prospect of a meal of fresh meat.

‘You’re making that thing into ruffles better suited to a tavern doxie,’ Dakar said in unasked-for criticism.

Embarrassed by his ineptness when he had been surrounded by women at their embroidery all his life, Lysaer managed a laugh. ‘If the ruffles keep out the cold, I don’t care.’

Dakar sampled the contents of his supper pot, licked the spoon, and resumed stirring. ‘Don’t jerk the stitches so tight. Everybody knows you’re irritated.’

At a loss for subtle rejoinder, Lysaer welcomed the intrusion when Arithon stirred from the shadows and insinuated himself in the fray.

‘Don’t gloat,’ the Master advised the Mad Prophet. ‘Princes don’t freely choose to keep their clothes until they rot in rags off their backs.’

Laid open to insult by his threadbare and weather-faded plaid, Dakar subsided to a glower. To his half-brother, Arithon added, ‘If you don’t mind wearing what looks like a sail-maker’s patch, there’s a better way to fix that.’

Lysaer surrendered needle and linen with a gratitude that unfailingly melted hearts. ‘These clothes would hardly impress anyone before they were torn.’ To Dakar he added quietly, ‘The s’Ffalenn bastard’s made a fool of you again. You promised a scathing show of temper after Althain Tower. Now I’m left to wonder which of you is the more devious: Arithon, for an act that would fool a saint, or you, for a lying diversion to escape getting dressed down for rudeness.’

Dakar’s ebullience died. Rather than admit to his own bafflement at Arithon’s contrary manner, he hunkered down by his cooking-pot like a disgruntled broody hen. ‘Wait,’ he muttered morosely to the fair-haired and smiling prince. ‘Just wait till we get to Ithamon.’

After five days’ journey the hills of Daon Ramon lost their rocky crowns and became clothed and gentled by heather. Valleys that until now had been channelled with dried gullies and stunted stands of scrub-oak smoothed over into vales half hidden in fog. If the view had once been beautiful, Desh-thiere rendered everything bleak; the winds that never stilled gained the bitten edge of frost. For league upon league there seemed no living thing but grey-coated deer, rabbits furred in winter-white and the lonely, dissonant calls of hawks that sailed like shadows through the mist in search of prey.

The horses grew lean and tough, nourished more by the grain carried in by wagon than on the rank brown grass. Lysaer wearied of venison but was careful to keep the fact from his half-brother, who spent as many hours hunting as playing upon his lyranthe. As always fed up with abstinence, Dakar seized upon every opening to bemoan the dearth of beer.

Asandir kept his own counsel, forbidding as northfacing rock.

The closer the party drew to the heartland of Daon Ramon, the less the sorcerer bothered to chastise his spellbinder for whining. Well warned that such silence boded trouble, Lysaer noticed the moment when the Mad Prophet abandoned complaint. More sensitive than before to nuance, he watched for any circumstance that might find the Shadow Master discomfited.

But snow fell and the days passed in anticlimax. Arithon did not oblige Dakar’s expectations and grow darkly moody. He asked companionable questions of Asandir and spent hours regarding ice-scabbed trees, stunted brush and the white-clothed shoulders of the hills as though his mage-trained sight showed him wonders.

‘The Riathan Paravians,’ Dakar whispered, upon Lysaer’s puzzled inquiry. ‘Unicorns ran in these hills and bore young in the meadows here. The mystery of their presence lingers, even now.’

Wide-eyed, sceptical, Lysaer peered through dripping bangs. An unseasonal thaw had softened the trail to muck, and slush seeped rivulets of wet down slopes like rucked old burlap. As far as the mist would allow, nothing met his gaze but bleak landscape that lacked the redeeming comfort of a single man-made structure.

Perched on the dray’s hard buckboard, Dakar slapped the reins over the paint’s steaming back and jogged her abreast of the chestnut gelding. Swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks, a derisive grin splitting his beard, he called over the rumble of rolling wheels, ‘Don’t try to look with your eyes – use your feelings.’

‘To find what?’ Lysaer shrugged to vent frustration. ‘Every morning I wake up as though eyes are on my back, watching me, and each night I step away from the campfire, I get chills that have nothing to do with the cold. This place is unpleasantly deserted, as far as I can tell.’

‘That’s the point.’ Dakar puffed up his cheeks and looked smug. ‘Asandir and Arithon might appreciate what’s missing from this Ath-forsaken wasteland, but I suspect like me you’d rather be in a crowded tavern knocking back mugs of spiced ale.’

Although Lysaer did not precisely share Dakar’s sentiment, he would have welcomed any human presence to allay the aching, hollow something that tugged at his nerves like pain. At each bend in the road, behind every storm-stunted bush, he seemed to see the lady he was to have married, her eyes liquid with tears, and her hands held out in entreaty. He remembered how her auburn hair had blown in the sea-breeze off South Isle and echoes of her lost laughter ached his heart. No noble dedication to purpose could ease his longing for home in this wilderness. His suffering stayed silent out of pride; and until the Mad Prophet had spoken, he had not guessed that his depression might arise from a source outside himself.

At noon riders and wagon paused for a cold meal beside a spring whose waters rose bubbling through a cleft in milk quartz rocks. Snow rendered the site grey on white, slashed by the arched-over stems of dead briars.

Sent down to the pebbled edge of the pool to refill water flasks, Arithon returned whitely shaken. ‘You might have warned me,’ he lashed at Asandir in tones dragged flat by upset.

The sorcerer did not answer but accepted the dripping flasks to stow back into the wagon. Then he turned eyes as chilly as the weather upon the s’Ilessid prince who watched the exchange. ‘A centaur was beset during the rebellion and pulled down here. Moss does not grow where his blood spilled. The sunchildren sang a lament to commemorate his passage and the words and the melody still ring upon the wind, to any with sensitivity enough to listen.’

Stung by what felt like rebuke, Lysaer straightened in affront, then doubled over with a gasp, robbed of his royal dignity by an elbow in the ribs from the Mad Prophet. Finished graining the horses, Dakar thrust himself headlong between sorcerer and s’Ilessid with oat chaff bristling from his hood.

‘What was that for?’ Lysaer demanded, outraged.

‘To quiet your foolish tongue, prince.’ As Asandir turned away about his business the Mad Prophet winked sidelong in conspiracy. ‘For a sorcerer this place is hurtful to walk past, let alone stop and linger.’

‘That Fellowship mage has feelings?’ Lysaer shot back, his eyes following Asandir’s hands as they laced and jerked tight the lashings that secured the oiled canvas over the supplies in the wagon bed.

Dakar picked a seed-head from his sleeve and looked thoughtful. ‘My ever-so-powerful master is doing his best at this moment to keep from weeping outright.’

‘You say.’ A billow of mist rolled past, rendering horses, men and dray as featureless as silhouette. Lysaer raised his eyebrows.

‘Well,’ the Mad Prophet amended. ‘I’ve lived with Asandir for centuries, my friend. I know this place bothers him, and I’d wager one thing further. He stopped here on purpose, to use its effect as a weapon. If you think I’m lying, look at your half-brother.’

The prince forgot pique and did so.

Still dead pale, his eyebrows snarled into a frown, Arithon had remounted his dun mare. He hunched against the wind as if he were wounded and bleeding and tears traced silver down his face.

Embarrassed as if caught eavesdropping, Lysaer spun back to face Dakar. ‘Why don’t you feel anything? Why don’t I?’

The Mad Prophet clawed back an untidy lock of hair. Cold had reddened the tip of his nose and his eyes looked unwarrantedly bloodshot; yet a dignified majesty cloaked him all the same as he said, ‘Do you want to?’

The question hit hard. Driven to see into himself with uncanny depth and clarity, struck naked before his own judgement, Lysaer perceived that the confusion that had harried him since exile held a core of ugly truth. No longer did the glamour of noble purpose veil fact: that his brave resolve to Traithe in Althain’s storeroom had been rooted in vanity and pride. He had renounced a difficult path of study and vowed instead to redress the wrongs of a kingdom for his own personal glory. As though revolted by a foul taste, Lysaer sucked in a fast breath. He could hope his self-disgust was not exposed on his face, but Dakar regarded him strangely.

‘Do you feel nothing?’ The Mad Prophet slapped the straw from his cloak with sudden, biting sharpness. ‘I’d venture not. I’d say this place moves you as deeply as the rest of us.’

Lysaer looked back, unflinching. However this spirit-cursed place afflicted others, his ingrained sense of fairness forced honesty. ‘My true heart stayed behind in Port Royal, I see, with my love, and my family, and my people. If that is a failing, it’s at least no more than human. The problems that beset this land are not mine. Yet I will do my best to help right them.’

The prince’s conviction was so far at odds with the future forecast by the strands that Dakar shied back, baffled. To cover his foreboding, he clambered back behind the dray’s buckboard and sorted his tangled loops of rein. ‘Ath in his mercy, but I could use a flagon of dark beer and a fire.’

‘That makes two of us, friend.’ Lysaer remounted his chestnut gelding, unsure whether the lingering traces of Paravian tragedy or the unendingly dreary landscape caused him to hurt as if the chill cut his flesh to the marrow.

At Asandir’s word, wagon and riders pressed onward through an afternoon that wept cold drizzle. Now the trail wound like tattered ribbon between Daon Ramon’s vales and downs, intermittently flanked by stone markers capped with lichens and moss. No trees grew, only bracken and tasselled grasses beaten down by wind and early storms. Dirtied ice lay scabbed in the hollows. Braced in his saddle against the cold, and resigned to yet another sleepless night on soaked ground, Lysaer did not realize their destination lay in sight until, rounding the crest of a hill, Arithon gasped and yanked his dun mare to a halt in the roadway.

She danced a piaffe at his roughness, her hooves clanging loudly on slate. Jostled in his saddle as his own mount bunched in reaction, Lysaer looked ahead.

Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend and seat of the high kings of Rathain.

The sight was one to stop the breath, even through the fog of Desh-thiere. No previous feature of landscape could prepare the traveller for the broad sweep of valley, slashed across by a rock-strewn scar of dry riverbed. At one time walls of rose-grey stone had arisen from the banks, but what remained lay torn to wreckage.

Landslides left less ruin.

The greensward beyond was overrun with briar, what had been orchards, gardens and tourney fields now choked by weed and bitter-root vine. A second wall had bounded the inner edge of the common. Embraced within gapped, half-gutted watchkeeps, the tumbled shells of townhouses clung to the hillside’s ever steepening pitch. Dismembered foundations marked off a tangle of narrow lanes and briar-ridden courtyards. As if a mighty army had once razed the buildings stone from stone with battering rams, the craftsmen’s cottages, market stalls and merchants’ mansions all lay jumbled in chaos. Gabled roofs had caved inward, beams rotted away in the sunless damp of Desh-thiere. A scatter of fallen slates in what may have been a market court reflected the rain like coins thrown out for a beggar.

The devastation of the lower tiers was total, a memorial to unbridled violence. Yet as if moved by some powerful unseen force, the viewer found his sight drawn upward, where, slightly north of centre, the native granite of the earth sheered up through soil and rock into a near-vertical outcrop. The triangular summit on the clifftop was encased by embrasures of seamless, blue-black granite. Inside, an unkempt eyrie of broken walls and spires marked the site of the inner citadel, the castle where generations of Paravians, and after them, the s’Ffalenn high kings, had held court.

There the eye hung captive, unable to draw away.

Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendour, of artistry spoiled by war in a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect. The incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage was a dichotomy fit to maim the soul: for their lines were harmony distilled into form, and strength beyond reach of time’s attrition.

The rain still fell relentlessly into soggy earth; the wind keened and stung like a dulled skive in a cobbler’s shop. No one noticed. Even the horses seemed strangely content to be stopped in their tracks in the roadway. The sordid, everyday miseries of winter and weather lost meaning. Into that suspended silence, Asandir began to speak.

‘Ithamon was raised by Paravians in the First Age of Athera. The outer walls were levelled twice, by Seardluin, hostile creatures native to this world that by the Second Age had been battled to extinction. The old races abandoned the city then, for its purpose as a fortress had been fulfilled. The lower tiers stayed in ruins until the dawn of the present age, when men rebuilt the double walls upon the remains. The third tier wall left standing and the four surviving keeps were part of the original city. Built by the centaurs, refined by sunchildren, they were Name-bound and warded by the unicorns.’

‘Don’t say any more!’ Arithon cut across, his bard’s voice queerly strangled. ‘I beg you, don’t!’ Bloodlessly pale, his hands clenched and shaking on the rein, he sat his mare and regarded the site where his ancestors had ruled as if he were held chained and in thrall. ‘Please,’ he finished in a whisper.

But Asandir might as well not have heard. ‘The Paravian towers have withstood three ages of strife, nineteen thousand years of history. Mortal men have called them the Sun Towers, or Compass Points, for their alignment and their dizzying height, but the ancients who laid their stones had separate names for each. The white one with the alabaster combing is Alathwyr, and its strength is Wisdom. The east, the black one, is endurance, which represents the Paravian concept of Honour. The south, of rose quartz, is Grace, and the last, of green jasper symbolic of renewal, is Kieling, Compassion. When civilization has abandoned any of these qualities, its respective tower will fail, for the power that binds their structure is the force of each virtue, renewed. “Ithamon” means Five Spires in the old tongue, and once this was so. Daelthain, the King’s Tower, for Justice, originally crowned the highest knoll in the city. That one cracked on the day his Royal Grace, Marin Eliathe, was murdered in his hall by an assassin. The last of it crumbled during the rebellion. Now just the foundation remains.’

Asandir’s speech ended, leaving the moan of the lonely wind to fill the emptiness. Lysaer discovered he must have been gripping his saddle too hard for some time.

Arithon looked tortured to his very core. Struck blind and deaf by the chord of Paravian mystery first tuned to his awareness in Caith-al-Caen, he had wheeled his mare in the roadway to confront Asandir. A betrayal too fresh to have sparked resentment tautened the planes of his face, and his voice was gravel as he said, ‘Ath’s own mercy, how am I to suffer this?’

The sorcerer sat his black stallion with the straight-backed formality of Daelion, Master of Fate. ‘I will answer when you ask out of care, Prince of Rathain.’

Arithon recoiled in a high flush of fury. ‘No need to answer at all, sorcerer. Everywhere I turn, it seems I get saddled with sand-kingdoms. Well, pity has torn out my heart far and long before this. I bear the ache already like a bad scar.’

Explosively murderous, he drove his heels into the mare. Her nerves frayed into a white-rimmed roll of eyes and she reared. Arithon gave rein, kicked her again and screamed what sounded like an obscenity ripped through by tears. His hands jabbed at the reins, and his mount clattered around in the roadway and shot blindly forward at a gallop.

Horse and rider thundered across the crumbling span that bridged the dry course of the Severnir at reckless speed and vanished into the ruin.

Dakar said something bitten under his breath and the paint mare stamped. Shaken by his half-brother’s savagery and pricked by cross-currents he lacked the background to grasp, Lysaer spun to confront the sorcerer. ‘Why did you push him?’

His mildness shaped by grief, Asandir said, ‘This city has weathered seven major tragedies and three ages of history. So much dust to you perhaps, but to those of us who have borne witness it means wisdom painfully gained, paid for by men who bled and died, and Paravians who weathered mortal failings time and again until the rifts in their world grew too wide to endure. Shall all that has been go wasted because Arithon dislikes responsibility? Athera’s civilizations struggle on the brink of imbalance with Desh-thiere’s coming defeat. A restoration of just rule must follow. The reinstated prince who subdues Etarra must descend from the old kings if he is to close the rift between townsman and clan barbarian.’ The sorcerer finished in baldfaced regret. ‘Put simply, Arithon’s recalcitrance is a luxury the times can ill afford.’

‘You’ve made an enemy of him,’ Lysaer observed coldly.

‘Merciful maker, I would that were all I had done!’ Closer to giving way to anguish than any mortal man had ever seen him, Asandir shook out his reins. He pressed his black stallion ahead against the rain and did not speak or look back the whole way through an afternoon of ascent through the ruins.

They found Arithon standing beside his horse within the broken circle that marked the old foundation of the King’s Tower. His face was hard set, and his temper brittle as iced-over current.

By now recovered from the outburst upon the riverbank, Asandir addressed him, whip-lash curt. ‘We shall camp in a tower. They are sound, comfortable and dry. Which shall it be, my prince?’

‘Kieling,’ Arithon said, determinedly blithe and uncaring. ‘Compassion.’

Caithdein

The vast stone hall at the west outpost in Camris held only a solitary figure, but the fire had been built high in expectation of a momentous event. Wax candles burned in sconces and candelabra and still, deep shadow darkened the corners. Winter had settled in. Winds moaned across the mountainside without and drafts rippled the Cildom tapestries, even the largest ones by the hearth. Slim and straight in her chair of state on the dais and clad formally in Tysan’s gold-bordered tabard over her traditional black, Maenalle s’Gannley, Steward of Tysan, fingered the gilt-tipped pen handed down through twenty generations to sign kingdom documents. The ornamental plume, though replaced at measured intervals, showed the ravages of last season’s moths; yet the nib in its cloisonne barrel remained sharp and unworn. Since the fall of the last crowned sovereign official word passed between clan chiefs by spoken courier, or not at all, for parchment could fall into the hands of townsmen if the messenger chanced to be captured.

Maenalle smoothed the feather’s tattered fibres, her sharp-planed face taut with excitement. In the absence of written record she wondered whether tonight was the first time since the desecration of the royal seat at Avenor that all of Tysan’s clanlords would be gathered beneath one roof. She smiled fiercely, savouring the news she would deliver, that a true-born heir had returned through West Gate to claim the high king’s throne.

Elder Tashan was giddy as a boy with anticipation and young Maien was unable to contain nervous jitters for fear he might be clumsy and spill the wine; this after he had waited upon his prince without mishap. No scout from the west outpost had breathed a word of the royal arrival; Maenalle held cocky pride in them for that. Her announcement would completely surprise lords who had journeyed long, inconvenient distances through hostile country at her summons.

A sudden, preternatural stillness gripped the chamber; as if the insatiable mountain gales had forgotten to gust, or fire ceased for an instant to flicker.

Possessed of a scout’s reflexes, Maenalle stiffened a heartbeat ahead of the logic that warned of something amiss. A second later, and without the fanfare of breezes carried in from far places affected by Kharadmon, the discorporate sorcerer Luhaine flicked into existence. His image was robed austerely as a scholar and posed with round face furrowed in concern as he gazed up at Maenalle in the high seat. ‘Lady, I bring tidings.’

The Steward of Tysan felt her carefree mood evaporate. She regarded her visitor, aware never more than this moment that Fellowship sorcerers did not pay visits for trivial reasons. Luhaine by preference was a recluse: his last appearance in Camris had been in her grandfather’s time. ‘Tell me quickly,’ she said, afraid of the worst and anxious most of all to recover her shattered solitude.

Luhaine returned a shake of his head. His heavy robes were not stirred by the drafts and his eyes followed hers, aggrieved. ‘I cannot. Wards must be set first, in precaution.’

Maenalle shot to her feet. ‘Wards? Here?’ Affronted that the vigilance of her scouts might be questioned, she gripped the heirloom pen with a fierceness that threatened to snap the quill. ‘Whatever for?’

A palm downward gesture from the sorcerer negated the implied insult. ‘Necessary, Caithdein of Tysan.’ His image flicked out but a strange, weighted feel to the air evinced his continued presence and industry. Maenalle snatched the interval to recover herself and sit down. Since impatience only fuelled her uneasiness, she laid the antique pen safely aside. But the wait turned out to be short. The flames in the sconces flared with sudden, hurtful brilliance and ozone sharpened the smell of oiled wood and hot wax. Then Luhaine’s image reappeared, round-shouldered and contrite, in the centre of a subliminal corona of light that extended over himself, and the shield-hung perimeter of the dais.

By then, the steward had guessed why arcane protections might be called for. ‘Koriani,’ she surmised, her annoyance a shade less acid. ‘But why fear the enchantresses? This outpost is between power lanes, and their watchers see little in these mountains.’

‘Morriel has set a circle of seniors to scrying.’ Luhaine’s image poised birdlike, as if on the edge of sudden flight. ‘Perhaps she searches once again for the lost Waystone.’ His frown deepened. ‘Worse and more likely, one of her seers caught wind of the future the Fellowship read in the strands.’

Pricked by a ripple of chills, Maenalle tugged her tabard tighter around her shoulders. ‘What have you come here to tell me, sorcerer?’

Luhaine’s deep eyes turned frosty. ‘Dire portents, lady. After the Mistwraith’s conquest will come war. Lysaer s’Ilessid will cast his lot with townsmen, to the detriment of the loyal clans.’

Maenalle’s hands recoiled into fists and fine linen crumpled unheeded as she shoved her weight forward in her chair. ‘Why?’ Her voice came out a tortured whisper. ‘Our own prince will betray us?’

Never had the sorcerer regretted his status as a disembodied spirit more than now; his mild face twisted in anguish akin to Maenalle’s own, that he could not soften the impact of his words with the warmth of a comforting touch. ‘Caithdein,’ he murmured in compassion, ‘I cannot help. The Seven cast strands. We see the evil that will set s’Ilessid prince against s’Ffalenn will be prompted by the Mistwraith. But how such schism will come to pass is beyond our powers to know.’

Thin-lipped, tight-jawed and fighting tears, Maenalle stared ahead without seeing. ‘I thought that was not possible.’

‘Yes, and paradoxically, no.’ Perpetually prepared with a lecture, Luhaine qualified. ‘Desh-thiere’s nature is opaque to us. We have no insight into it as a cause, but only can read its effects since, from origins outside of Athera, it lacks Name to embody its essence. The Riathan Paravians quite wisely would not encompass its energies for interpretation. Traithe did, at need, when he sealed South Gate against the invasion. But the greater portion of his faculties withered in the process. Whatever enormity he discovered concerning the Mistwraith that besets this world, he is left unable to say.’

Silent, saddened, Maenalle pondered this revelation. ‘Then our princes are your only recourse against Desh-thiere?’

Luhaine made as though to pace, stopped himself wasting effort for the sake of appearance and equally sparsely answered. ‘Events have forced us to choose between certain war and restoration of sunlight.’

Blanched now as sun-whitened ivory, Maenalle stirred and sat back. ‘No choice at all,’ she allowed. Dwarfed by the grand chair of state, she laced fine-boned fingers on the table edge, restored to her usual dry irony.

Luhaine bowed to honour her courage. ‘My colleagues felt you should know at once that Lysaer shall not be sanctioned for inheritance. Yet you must not lose heart. There will be royal heirs, in time, that are not twined in Desh-thiere’s moil of ills. Until then, you must be more than the shadow behind the throne tradition dictates. Whatever comes, Tysan’s heritage must continue to be preserved for those generations yet unborn.’

Very straight and fragile, Maenalle inclined her head. ‘Rest assured, and tell your colleagues. The clans of Tysan shall endure.’

‘I never doubted.’ In better times, Luhaine’s image might have smiled. ‘Only handle this confidence with great care. The Koriani witches must not hear of this break in the succession beforetime. From the moment sunlight is restored to the continent, the balance of events becomes precarious. Every action, every word, will carry weight. The interval is most vulnerable to dangerous, even horrifying digressions.’

Whatever the strands had foretold imprinted wary trepidation upon a sorcerer renowned for staid propriety.

Unable to conceive of a blight worse than war and the loss of Tysan’s prince to the cause of townsmen, Maenalle returned an assurance that rang shallow as banality to her ears. Cold to the heart she watched as Luhaine’s image dissolved away into air. For a long while afterward, she stared into the space his presence had occupied. She did not worry at first which words she would find to deliver ill-tidings to the clanlords who would assemble within the hour; instead she agonized over what she would tell her young grandson, Maien.

Since the elegant, blond prince had left the outpost, the boy had spent his every waking minute in earnest emulation of the man’s faultless manners and royal poise.

‘Damn his s’Ilessid Grace to the darkest torments of Sithaer!’ Maenalle cried at last in an anguish that echoed and re-echoed off the tapestried walls. ‘More than the child’s poor heart will be broken!’

Scryers

The chamber that had served as solar to the ladies of the old earl’s court smelled of dried lavender still, and of the birch logs that burned in the grate. Yet where the room in bygone years had been bright with light and laughter, now the shadows lay deepest in the lover’s nooks. Curtains of dense felt sealed out the drafts and also any daylight let in by ceiling-high arched windows. Draperies veiled the lion-head cornices and the paintings of nymphs and dolphins, flaking now from damp and mildew. Only the rose, gold and grey marble that patterned the floor in geometrics remained visible to remind of a gentler past before the Koriani Prime Enchantress had chosen the site for her day-quarters.

Morriel eschewed the comfort of carpets. Candles she counted a distraction from her meditation. Austere as new-forged steel, she straightened from the unuphol-stered alcove she preferred for contemplation, her head raised in expectation. A tap sounded at the door. The Prime gave a self-satisfied nod, the diamond pins netting her coiffure fire-points in the dimness as she commanded, ‘Allow the First Senior to enter.’

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.

Lirenda barely felt the jerk as the Skyron crystal was wrested from her grip. Her awareness of Kieling Tower shattered and Elaira’s persona ripped away, shocking body and mind beyond reach of coherent sensation. Lirenda never felt the cyclone of turbulence that scoured Morriel’s chamber. Cushions exploded like confetti and chests tumbled; the rose and grey marble flooring erupted into a thousand eggshell cracks that showered sharpened fragments through the hangings. Daylight sliced in through rent felt and Lirenda came back to herself. She lay unable to move, winded, befuddled and half blind from the after-image of multiple bolts of pure light.

‘Ath, most merciful Ath,’ her own voice cried across confusion, the envy in her heart unmasked. ‘They hold command of elemental mastery, both of them.’

Through drumrolls of fading thunder and a headache that blossomed like a starburst, Lirenda heard Morriel’s shrill outburst. ‘Imbecile! Fool!’

A dry palm cracked her cheek. The sting to her flesh and her dignity negated any lingering after-image of Elaira’s tender sympathies.

Limp as rags on the floor, the First Enchantress recovered her rightful sense of outrage. Her vision swam back into focus, marred by embarrassing tears. Through their blur and the wan light that seeped through slashed drapes, she beheld a chamber that looked to have suffered the brunt of an earthquake. Wreckage lay everywhere. The page-boys crouched beneath the tumbled splinters of the armoire, holding each other and shaking.

Lirenda could not have eased their terror, even had she been of a mind to.

Morriel Prime towered over her, lividly displeased, the Skyron focus clutched in her claw-like grasp. ‘Were you blind and witless not to see? The s’Ffalenn bastard’s been trained to power! However else could he and Dakar have collaborated to upset our scrying? Mischief and misery! What unconscionable recklessness prompted the Fellowship to loose this abomination upon our world?’

Lirenda propped herself upright, then pressed scratched and bleeding fingers to her pounding temples. She felt hollow as a drum and strangely reft: the banished intensity of Elaira’s susceptibilities left her drab and spiritless in spaces she had never known existed. She distanced such discomfort in a show of self-righteous propriety. ‘Elaira may have known of the Fellowship’s intent beforetime. That would account for her stubbornness throughout our probe into her escapade in Erdane.’

But Morriel’s priorities were wholly concerned with the future. ‘Recall the girl! Do it now! For pity us all, we’re going to need analysis of both these princes’ characters. If there’s any hope of setting a counterbalance to the trouble they’re bound to create, Elaira must find us an opening.’

First Enchantress Lirenda arose, bowed stiffly to the Prime, then departed to fulfil her directive. Joylessly intent, she took no pleasure in the miracle revealed by the scrying: that the princes promised by prophecy did battle against Desh-thiere from Kieling Tower.

In the remotest reaches of Athera, the Mistwraith no longer ruled the sky. Sunlight touched earth and ocean for the first time in five long centuries.

Triad

In Erdane, drowsing in her chair over knitting, the seer Enithen Tuer snaps awake with a cry, for dreams have shown her stars and moon against a backdrop of indigo darkness…

Caught treed like a monkey in an orchard where she prunes dead growth, Elaira stiffens as Lirenda’s arcane summons slices her awareness like a whip; that Morriel should demand her presence on the heels of last season’s disgrace means trouble, she knows, and she curses in language that draws grins from the boy wards who gather her cuttings up for firewood…

On a faraway isle, amid waters never charted, a unicorn stands sentinel as Desh-thiere’s mists part; and yet she does not dance for joy under the lucent sky – a horn-toss of inquiry displays her puzzlement as tree-filtered sunshine glances across a cave mouth and a weakened shimmer of ward-light fades back to quiescence without rousing the sorcerer sealed under sleep spells within…

XI. DESH-THIERE

In Daon Ramon’s heartland, atop the battlements of the tower Kieling, the ongoing battle to reduce the Mistwraith suffered an unscheduled interruption as rapport between the royal half-brothers frayed away into nothing. Lysaer broke concentration with a quizzical expression. His hands fell slack, and the last surge of energy he held poised to send a light bolt skyward dissipated as a harmless dance of sparks. He snapped a tangle of hair from his eyes and said irritably, ‘Will one of you please share the fun?’

No one answered.

Dakar remained curled on his knees, doubled helpless in a fit of laughter. Arithon seemed no more capable, close as he was to choking as he stifled an explosive whoop in the crumpled cloth of his cloak. Neither Shadow Master nor prophet recovered sobriety, even when Asandir emerged at a run from the stairwell. His brows were drawn down at an angle that should have been forbidding, had his eyes not held a glint of amused sympathy.

‘I heard,’ he addressed without preamble. ‘Sethvir informed me from Althain that you two have upset the Koriani Prime and her First Senior. Tell me what prank you pulled, and quickly, since we may now anticipate a round of angry repercussions.’

Although Arithon was quickest to rally, Dakar answered, through tears and outbursts of chuckles that he manfully strangled back to wheezes. ‘Damned witches tried meddling.’ He mopped streaming eyes, slapped his knees, and started again. ‘Morriel sought another scrying on the princes, through Lirenda and the Skyron focus. It was too obvious –’ Here speech failed and the Mad Prophet relapsed into a paralysing spasm of hiccups.

The sorcerer shifted hopefully to Arithon. ‘So you hooked into the Koriani scrying, and allowed their matrix to absorb the energies you had gathered against Deshthiere?’

Wiser to his limits than Dakar, the Master of Shadow simply nodded.

‘Ath!’ Lysaer interrupted, mortified by his half-brother’s baldfaced confession. ‘You redirected our gifts at the enchantresses? You reckless fool! Somebody could have been killed!’

Arithon raised hands in denial, still grinning. ‘Not likely. The ladies had wards up. Nobody got hurt. Only curtains were shredded, and a lot of old stonework went flying to bits where their shields couldn’t dampen the counterforce.’

‘Dakar!’ cracked the sorcerer across the schoolboyish mood of jubilation. ‘Tell me now! However did the Koriani Prime gain foothold to scry across Kieling’s wards?’

The Mad Prophet shot straight as if smacked. ‘I haven’t a clue. Ask your prince.’

Arithon’s exuberance vanished, his mien abruptly blank and implacable as a wall. The strained relations between himself and Asandir returned suddenly and in force, and knowing any query the Fellowship might pose would get rebuffed, the sorcerer abandoned further questions.

His mage-sight offered means to find clear answers. Not even the murk of Desh-thiere could dim the abrupt unshielding of his will as he scrutinized the Master’s taut stance. The effect was as merciless to the victim as a field surgery performed with cut glass. Out of stubborn, irate pride, Arithon neither flinched nor hid his face. This despite the shame that even to an uninvolved witness, the feelings bared to view were revealingly personal. Watching avidly, Dakar sweated outright; Lysaer found himself discomforted to the point where honour compelled him to avert his eyes rather than witness a violation of his half-brother’s privacy.

But neither sorcerer nor Master of Shadow had notice to spare for any onlookers, locked as they were in the absolute intimacy of their conflict.

‘Compassion,’ the sorcerer mused at length, his tone as apparently casual as a man counting facts on his fingers. ‘The Riathan Paravians set their wards in perfect surety. They never mistake false evidence, for theirs is the perception of Ath Creator. Kieling Tower may admit no force except unconditional love -’ Asandir broke off, his face abruptly drained colourless. ‘The lady enchantress in the hayloft at the Ravens,’ he surmised, a spike to his tone that caused Lysaer to shiver where he stood.

Now Arithon did speak, his antagonism barely held in check. ‘The Prime used her. Elaira herself was absent, and had neither knowledge nor consent. Now say to me, and mean it, that her thieving pair of seniors didn’t deserve the come-uppance they got.’

Confused by a name he could not place, Lysaer watched Asandir weigh the comment, then allow its ferocity to pass. The look he trained upon Arithon held entreaty commingled with pity. ‘You must never, ever in your life allow Elaira to indulge in her feelings where you are concerned. Her care is real enough, and generous; but to acknowledge her in any way would lead her to ruin. The Koriani creed she is bound to obey is unnaturally opposed to human nature.’

‘And yours is not?’ Arithon spun on his heel and braced his hands on Kieling’s embrasure. The mist that streamed past strung droplets in his hair, but the rigidity of his shoulders had nothing to do with its chill. ‘If I’m to be made a crowned puppet to drag this wasteland out of darkness, I’d hardly entangle a lady along with me.’

‘See you don’t,’ Asandir snapped back. ‘Where Elaira is concerned, I shall hold you to your word of honour, Prince of Rathain.’

Arithon drew a slow breath, then spun back with the brightest of smiles. ‘You’ll hold me to nothing against my will, sorcerer. Elaira is secure from my attentions, most certainly, since I’d die before I’d give your Fellowship even one chance of getting an heir.’

At this, Asandir released a bright laugh. ‘Five centuries is a very long abstinence, my prince. And if you want me to think that you hold the enchantress in light regard, you’ll need better subterfuge than lying.’

‘Touché,’ Dakar murmured from the sidelines. His quip was ignored.

For an instant Arithon looked murderous. Then his green eyes went wide, and he spoke with a candour meant only for the sorcerer. ‘What caused you to abandon the resolve you made to me after Maenalle’s banquet in Camris?’

The promise of the free will that he was persistently being hounded to abandon stayed unspoken through the gust that raked the battlements.

Already pale, Asandir turned death-white. For the first time Dakar could recall, the sorcerer looked as if he wanted to retreat. He answered instead, though he suffered for it. ‘You shared for yourself the echo of the mystery that gentles the vales at Caith-al-Caen. Could you bear to see what originated that resonance fade forever from this world? If prescience revealed such a thing might happen, could you stand aside and take no action in prevention?’

‘Oh, Ath! Not that!’ Arithon gripped the parapet as if warded stonework might steady a universe that rocked under his feet. ‘Do you say that my kingship over Rathain is connected to recovery of the Paravians?’

‘More and worse.’ Dakar could not resist his chance for vindication. ‘Refuse your crown and you seal their final disappearance.’

Asandir stayed silent; but the sorrow in his gaze denied nothing.

‘Truth or lies!’ Arithon exclaimed, suddenly savage. ‘The needs of this land are killing me, do you understand?’

The desperation to his stance caused Dakar regret for his outburst. Lysaer wished passionately to be anywhere else in Athera, but pity locked his limbs against movement.

Asandir stared down and appeared to ponder his boots, which were wet and caught with brown bits of gorse from his walk upon the hills of Daon Ramon. ‘Even so, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’ His gentleness held an implacability that damned as he added, ‘I had to choose. Now so must you.’

‘Merciful maker, you call murder a choice?’ Arithon’s anguish rejected sympathy, enough that none dared to stay him as he spun away toward the stairwell.

Dakar shuffled his feet through the poisoned, abrasive stillness that remained. ‘I’m surprised you held him to that,’ he challenged, brash enough to fly in the face of the sorcerer’s brittle mood.

But it was Lysaer this time who provoked. ‘Less than the truth would not bind him, is that it?’

Asandir stirred as if from contemplation of a topic that held ugliness personified. ‘Truth is like a gem with many facets – reflection and illusion from every outward angle.’ His damp hair blew in the wind, and his hands hung helpless as he finished, ‘The one unsplintered view can only be found from within.’

Against all natural inclination the sorcerer chose not to correct Lysaer’s misapprehension. Truth by itself would not condemn the Paravians to extinction, as Arithon had so harshly presumed; but their exile might indeed become permanent, for by the uncompromising Law of the Major Balance, the old races were not any man’s concern unless he embraced them for his own. Truth, Asandir reflected sadly, was the one principle in existence that could release the musician from blood-ties to kingly heritage; but the barbs of the trap first closed in Caith-al-Caen had set full well and deeply.

No comfort could be gained, that Arithon was physically absent throughout the struggle as his personal desires warred and lost to the burden of guilt-induced duty. Asandir sensed to the second when the Shadow Master’s aspect became set. Brooding stillness claimed the sorcerer as his mage-sight stung him with awareness: for he saw the thread of probability that held all of a gifted man’s contentment fray away into nothing. The moment passed, and the chance died, that Arithon could become the bard the strands had forepromised at Althain, a musician cherished across the continent for his generosity and warmth of perception. The legacy of a beloved master singer, whose equal had not been seen since Elshian, for need had been cancelled out. In his place walked a prince whose competence would come to be feared, and whose gifts would be whetted by adversity to a cruelly focused edge.

Arithon would not now refuse the crown that waited at Etarra.

Consolation was nonexistent; through embittered years to come, the Fellowship must hope the man whose dream they had spoiled might become reconciled to the fate he had been coerced to undertake. Paravian survival might be bought with restoration of sunlight and war; but that the old races could be returned in joy to the continent, and the Fellowship be restored back to Seven was by no means certain. The particulars of Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy remained in question still.

Asandir shivered in an icy blast of wind. He tugged his cloak closer to his shoulders and discovered himself alone on the battlements of Kieling. Lysaer and Dakar had abandoned him to solitude, and to the depthless mist that sheathed a glowering twilight sky. The Paravian towers seemed to brood through the gloom, lightlessly and empty and dark.

Elsewhere in Ithamon’s ruins, Arithon perched on the curve of a fallen corbel, his lyranthe rested silent on his knee. He had chosen his vantage site at random. The littered courtyard before him in prosperous years had served the merchants who supplied broadcloth to the tailors. Those slates not scabbed over with grit and moss showed wheel scars from the drays that had carried imported velvets and brocades from weavers in Cildom and Narms. But Arithon gave that past no thought where he sat, his hands clasped limp on his soundboard, and his eyes pinched closed in frustration.

His every nerve end was raw.

Music, which had always been his first solace, this day came to him soured. He could not play. Each time he set fingers to strings, the perception that inspired his art left him defenceless against the insatiable whirl of spirit life imbued within ruined Ithamon. Ancestors winnowed past his innermind, calling his name and imploring. Those whose ends had come untimely in the upheaval of the rebellion troubled him less than others born of an earlier era, when Paravians had inhabited the surrounding hills, and diversion of the Severnir’s waters had not rendered all the land barren. Spirits whose passage through time had left no regrets to sigh in descant between the winter winds; these had touched rock and soil and the weathered remains of fine carving with resounding vibrations of content. Their fragile, lost chord of celebration hurt an uncrowned prince the most, for in the absence of heritage and inhabitants, their song cried out for restoration of the city that lay splintered in ruin.

Hounded to sadness by misfortune that he alone was empowered to redress, Arithon sighed. He should have chosen a sword to accompany his mood in this place, not the instrument he cradled in a silence that painfully accused. Stubbornness held him rooted. He would deaden his ear and strike notes that were feelingless, even false, before he opened himself to sorrows that had utterly reft his peace.

A fool he was, to have disdained Asandir’s warning in Caith-al-Caen!

Mage-taught wisdom reproached him: any gift of power was two-edged. The awareness of Paravian beauty he had accepted in blithe carelessness now chafed him like a thousand raw sores. But to do without, to close off that channel of inner vision, was to render himself pitiful, to blind himself to hope, and what he now recognized for the shining, enduring truth that set the spirit outside time and mortal decay.

Sooner would he bind himself to the misery promised by the crown of Rathain. Ties of kingship, after all, were only temporary. Death would free him, at the end.

Dusk blurred the pewter edges of broken stone. Light bled out of the mist, leaving murk as dense as musty felt. Arithon hunched against the chill, his arms crossed over Elshian’s superlative lyranthe, unaware. If he heard the step that approached, he dismissed it along with the spirit forms that plucked incessantly at the conscience he held closed and barred against them; and others, more sinister, that reached as if to tear his living flesh.

‘Blessed Ath, here’s twice I mistook you for a statue!’ Lysaer called through the muffling layers of the scarf he had wound at his neck. The temperature had dropped since afternoon, and the air smelled of snow. ‘You must be freezing.’

Arithon opened his eyes and saw that full night had fallen. He changed grip on his lyranthe, discovered his fingers were numb and flipped down his cuffs to shelter his knuckles from the tireless bite of the wind. A musician’s instincts to preserve the hands from the elements died hard.

‘Move over, will you?’ Lysaer demanded of the half-brother who appeared to have forgotten him. ‘I’d like to sit down.’

Arithon inclined his head in belated greeting. He shifted aside, his tunic snagging on edges of chipped fretwork. As he braced his shoulder against the broken door post at his back, a gust sang through the lyranthe’s exposed strings.

Unsettled by the mournful ring of harmonics and by the close-bound air of desolation, Lysaer crowded in and attempted without success to settle comfortably. ‘You pick the most miserable sites for your brooding. Is it perversity, or a masochistic effort to drive away unwanted company?’

Arithon faintly smiled. ‘Probably both.’ He did not ask what brought his half-brother out into a dismal winter night when Dakar had slaughtered the ewe bought away from a migrant herder. A savoury mutton stew was sure to be bubbling over the fire in Kieling’s lower ward room, where, uncommon to stone buildings anywhere else, draughts did not chill a man’s blood.

Unsurprised to be offered no opening, Lysaer picked at the lichens rooted deep in old carving and said, ‘I wanted to ask. Did you notice this place is haunted?’

Arithon loosed a bark of sharp laughter. ‘Did I notice?’

Lysaer stayed his impulse to draw away. He might not share his half-brother’s inclinations, to set music before the needs of kingdom and people, but he had sworn to try to understand. Since Asandir had done little by way of kindness to compensate for unwanted burdens, Arithon’s pique was forgivable, if not entirely just.

His eyes on the grain of the marble revealed under his fretful touch, Lysaer tried a fresh approach. ‘I don’t have a mage’s sensitivity. Where you and Asandir see mysteries, I find only broken stone that fills me with an unmanly urge to weep.’ He gestured toward the interlace his hands had cleared of debris. ‘Except for the remains of their artistry, the Paravians to me are just a name, and the wistful feeling that’s left of a dream after waking.’

A sidelong glance showed Arithon’s manner still inclined toward abstraction.

Reluctantly aware he must reveal himself to establish rapport, Lysaer pressed on. ‘I think of home, and am not comforted. Somehow I sense that Amroth would disappoint me if I were to find my way back. As if this place held a truth that taunts and eludes me.’

Arithon turned his head. He was listening with no trace of his earlier, corrosive sarcasm.

Yet the captured quiet of the Master’s attention became no more reassuring; a mage’s mystery backed his calm, indefinably poised, and though it might not overtly threaten, it observed in ruthless detail. Lysaer put aside his fear of seeming foolish and forced himself to continue. ‘The haunting I speak of is not at all the same. I notice it when we are outside the protection of the tower. It seems to grow stronger, more suffocating, the longer we battle the Mistwraith. I wanted to know if you felt anything similar. Do you think the sensation could be connected? With Desh-thiere, that is, not Ithamon.’

Now Arithon shivered once, violently, as though his prolonged exposure to the cold all at once caught up with him. His reply came dry in the darkness. ‘Why not ask Asandir?’

Lysaer held to patience. ‘I did.’

Arithon only closed his eyes.

The s’Ilessid prince had no choice but to sustain the conversation by himself. ‘Our sorcerer contacted Sethvir immediately. The Fellowship sensed nothing amiss, and Dakar was too busy butchering sheep to have an opinion.’

Somewhere downslope in the ruins, a fox barked. A field mouse rustled through dry grass seeking seeds, and the mist coiled close, despite the wind. Arithon unfolded from his huddle, set his lyranthe carefully by his ankle and rubbed at his temples, disturbed.

Lysaer knew relief, that after Sethvir and Asandir had drawn blanks, the Master did not dismiss his concern as groundless fancy.

In fact, Arithon’s disquiet was all personal. To open his mage’s perception and sound for whatever uneasy presence had troubled Lysaer was to invite laceration from within. The very timing was a curse. The fullness of Ithamon’s spirit legacy was too painful to be sorted, so soon after Asandir’s revelation concerning the old races’ survival. Paravian wards did indeed dampen the sting from Ithamon’s hauntings; yet since Kieling’s protections were framed of compassion, and Arithon took hurt from his exposure, he had never thought to look deeper. Not once had he paused to question whether something else inherently harmful might have sourced the grace of the wards’ surcease. Now that Lysaer had spoken, he berated himself for carelessness. Repeatedly the Rauven mages had stressed that assumptions were the weakness of the learned.

‘Asandir and Sethvir found nothing, you say.’ The statement mused upon fact, and did not ask for answer.

Unsettled by the moist cling of Desh-thiere, Lysaer stopped worrying at the old carving. ‘You feel it, too,’ he accused.

Arithon shook his head, emphatic. ‘Just now, I feel nothing. By choice, you understand. If I were to open myself, allow even a chink through my defences, I’d be helpless and probably crying.’ He sighed, slapped his hands into his lap, and tilted his crown back into the stone that braced up his spine. ‘Did you by chance bring a handkerchief?’

‘My valet always carried mine for me,’ Lysaer apologized. He shrugged in wry humour. ‘Will my shoulder do for a substitute?’

The offer was friendly and genuine; also painful as a slap to a man who wished no ties at this moment to anyone outside himself. Pressured to reflexive antagonism, Arithon curbed his angst. A threat that might stem from Desh-thiere was too dangerous a development to be sidelined for personal hurt; never mind that his half-brother lacked perception to understand that he did not care at any cost to drop his inner barriers to use mage-sight in this place.

When nothing moved beyond Arithon’s clothing in the ceaseless sweep of the wind, Lysaer said, ‘You need not act on my word alone.’

Arithon cut off protestations. ‘On the contrary. Given your nature, only a fool would ignore your worry. This begs to be seen to at once.’

Now Lysaer shot upright in dismay. ‘Here? This minute?’ It was night, and stingingly cold, never mind that the ruins themselves were unnerving in the extreme.

Clammy and chill, the mist had closed down like a shroud. Objects a half stride away were invisible and the air smelled of damp decay.

The s’Ilessid prince tried humour to shake off a rising uneasiness. ‘I always supposed you were crazy. Should I be amazed that you want to freeze your balls to marbles in a ghost hunt?’

Arithon’s hand shot out and clamped his half-brother’s wrist. ‘Don’t speak.’ He reached down and recovered his lyranthe with a haste that caused Lysaer alarm.

Amid the dark ruins, the wind had suddenly dropped. Their perch on the corbel abruptly and for no sane reason seemed precarious. Lysaer resisted a near to overpowering urge to grab for the weapon he had stupidly left behind in the tower. He stifled his need to ask what was wrong, while his half-brother poised, stone still and apparently listening.

The mist held their surroundings pent in gloom. Hearing recorded only an eerie quiet that, under scrutiny, became suspect. No owls called. The mouse in the grass had frozen or fled in fear, and the very air seemed to have gone scentless, the frosty edge of snow and pending storm dissipated into cold that had no character.

Arithon’s grip tightened on his half-brother. Just on the point of speaking, the tension that held him seemed to snap. He shot without words to his feet, dragging his half-brother after him. As if something he alone could perceive gave pursuit from the depths of the ruins, he pitched into a run. Lysaer was jerked headlong into flight across the courtyard and onward into a cross alley. Broken walls slapped back echoes of their footfalls and shadows closed over them like ink. A fallen oak barred their exit; Arithon bashed through like a hunted animal, unmindful of the scrape of bare branches as he turned his shoulder to spare his lyranthe. Unsure why they should be fleeing, and perversely suspicious that he might have been spooked by a prank, Lysaer asked to slow down before their dash through the ruins wound up ripping good clothes. But his breath came too fast for speech, and the hold on his wrist hauled him onward.

A moment later, he lost inclination to argue.

Though the breeze had utterly died, on their backtrail, the limbs of the downed tree rustled: someone or something was following.

‘If I made a mistake, I just compounded a second one,’ Arithon said, making Lysaer start. ‘I should have removed our conversation to one of the warded towers.’

‘What mistake?’ Apprehension drove Lysaer to interpret past mage-trained obtuseness. ‘Our talk was noticed? Do you guess that some aspect of Desh-thiere is alive?’

‘More than that.’ Arithon tugged him to the left, past the pit of a caved in cellar. ‘This mist we’ve been given to subdue could be an intelligent entity, and hostile.’

Alarmed, Lysaer said, ‘Asandir didn’t know?’

They turned down a thoroughfare slippery with mossed over stone, and laced with weeds and briar. Bits of what may have been pottery skittered and chinked underfoot. Perturbed, absorbed and strangely, invisibly harried as they hacked through hummocks of ivy and tripped uphill toward Kieling Tower, Arithon gasped back, ‘Likely not.’ Given time, he might have qualified, but a clear and sudden jab of energy against defences he had never let down urged him to cry out a warning. ‘Call light from your gift, now!’

For retreat was no longer an option.

Whatever invisible entity had attracted Lysaer’s notice had flanked them and circled their position. Arithon slammed to a halt, jerking his half-brother to him. He spun in a half-turn, his shoulder set to Lysaer’s as he fought to dredge up wards laced of shadow and what magery he had learned from Rauven.

On faith, Lysaer matched his efforts. Brilliance speared outward, dissolving darkness in a magnesium glare of white heat. Crackled into turbulence by conflicting fields of shadow, close-bound coils of mist recoiled with a shriek of steam. Over the hiss, the prince said, ‘What’s happening? Are we under attack?’

‘I fear so.’ Encumbered by his instrument, Arithon sidestepped, jostling Lysaer through a portal and into a weed-choked yard.

‘Do you know, from what?’ Outside the thin blue ring that glimmered in manifestation of his half-brother’s hastily wrought ward, Lysaer could see little beyond mist and cracked stone and darkness. He brightened his gift. Light picked out the ragged brick of a forge chimney, and a quenching trough blackened with moss. Lysaer banged his hip as he scraped past. He tripped and recovered his footing in time not to stumble over the sharpening wheel that lay canted before a rust-flaked stockpile of scrap.

Arithon came back with a curse. ‘We face nothing friendly. Beyond that, I won’t probe. It’s spirit-formed, and unravelling my defences as fast as I can maintain them. I’m not about to drop barriers to see what seeks to get in.’ He ripped off his cloak, tearing clasps, and wrapped up his precious lyranthe. Regret marked his face in the flash and dazzle of wardlight as he stooped and abandoned his instrument on the flagstone. ‘I’d hate to fall and see her break.’

Distressed that his half-brother should abandon his most priceless possession, Lysaer asked, ‘Where are you taking us?’

‘Here. The armourer’s.’ Arithon veered toward a pitted anvil, visible in silhouette against the corona thrown off by his protections. ‘If Desh-thiere’s aspects are an earthforce, iron may help turn them back.’

But the explanation fell on deaf ears. Lysaer was lost to response. The scintillant hedge of light he had raised to drive back the mist snapped out at the next step. Darkness returned, impenetrable, and without a sound raised in warning the s’Ilessid prince crumpled at the knees.

Iron did nothing to divert the advance of whatever bleak force moved against them.

Aware too late that his primary wards were ineffective, Arithon grabbed his half-brother’s clothing to break his fall. Through a fast fading glimmer of failed spell-craft, he perceived a ghostly circle of faces. They closed in, leering with bloodthirsty ferocity. Sweat-drenched with fear, Arithon caught a fleeting impression: their image was wrought of seething mist and their strength was that of a multitude.

These were no part of Ithamon’s troubled spirits, but something separate and wholly evil.

Unbalanced by Lysaer’s sagging weight and frightened to outcry by the suffocating sense of closing danger, Arithon let go his mage-formed barrier and lashed out in a fury of shadow.

Night became blackness distilled.

The ever-narrowing band of hostile entities winnowed into a dusting of new snow, the mist that clothed their form pared away. Their essence of ferocity stayed untouched. A probe lanced Arithon’s mind. He screamed, repulsed, his knuckles spasmed tight in his half-brother’s cloak. Lysaer was dead weight, unconscious, injured, or worse. Just how the attacking Mistwraith had pierced through arcane protections to strike could not be figured. In moments, Arithon saw his own reserves would crumple. He would be helpless as his half-brother.

Horrified and desperate that not even shadow brought protection, the Master found himself cornered without remedy against an aspect whose resources dwarfed his awareness.

In denial of acknowledged human frailty, he strove to fashion another barrier-ward. Counter-forces ate at his efforts like a school of feeding sharks. His guard-spells were chopped up piecemeal, his concentration too slow to recoup. Only freak luck had spared him, the protective inner block he had initially raised to distance the haunting of Ithamon’s ruins. That shield of itself was under siege, then giving way before an onslaught as relentless as the tides.

Arithon gritted his teeth. He grasped after fraying concentration, panting in the throes of an effort that taxed him like physical pain. Still, the entity streamed past. It cut against his awareness with the pressure of a dull knife driven by the weight of all the world. As he tried and failed again to grapple the disembodied beings that pressed him, he at last knew the scope of the enemy.

The Mistwraith was more than just aware. It was intelligent and bent on retaliation against the princes who were its sure bane. But how it had hidden its multiply faceted nature, even from the Fellowship of Seven, Arithon lacked resource to determine. Battered to the bitter edge of consciousness by an assault his skills could never stem, he staggered.

Light flashed.

Harsh, searing glare rinsed away the dark. Running footsteps sounded over the wind-rush of foundering senses, and a shout echoed through Ithamon’s ruins.

Beaten to his knees in wet moss, Arithon ripped out a reply. His cry brought help. A ward circle slashed into existence with a fountainhead of purple-white sparks. Hands caught his shoulders in support and Asandir’s voice said, ‘Let go. Dakar has hold of Lysaer.’

Awash in dizziness, shocked off balance by the proximity of forces beyond imagining, Arithon loosed his grip. ‘Desh-thiere,’ he gasped out. ‘It’s self-aware. More dangerous than any of us guessed.’

‘Let me turn my shields against it,’ said the sorcerer. No longer leashed, his power radiated from him until the air in his presence blazed light, a flash and dazzle of force too piercing for fleshly endurance. Vibrations of palpable current caused inert rock to ring with shared resonance until the earth itself sang in answer. Arithon braced against shock from the contact as Asandir towed him to his feet.

But the sorcerer’s touch stayed surprisingly human and warm until the moment sensation itself became cancelled by the annihilating surge of the wardfields. Asandir’s protections unfurled around beleaguered flesh like a deluge of rays from a beacon. Arithon felt the invading pressure against his innermind relent with a soundless howl of rage.

Disparity remained, a sting in the mind that raised puzzlement.

For Desh-thiere was not repulsed. It did not conjoin in conflict with Asandir’s bared might, but with disorienting and baffling speed, seemed to fade beyond the pale of dimensional awareness.

The repercussions of this anomaly blurred as Arithon collapsed against the sorcerer’s shoulder.

There came no respite even then.

Harsh fingers seized his arm, spun him remorselessly around. He was aware of steel-grey eyes and Asandir’s implacable will boring into his consciousness with the directness of an awl piercing cloth. He had no reflex left to flinch. ‘I’m all right,’ he managed to convey, through the roaring cyclone of ward-force.

‘We’ll see,’ Asandir replied. To Dakar he added, ‘Drag Lysaer, or carry him. But we must get back to Kieling as quickly as we may.’

‘Lysaer?’ Arithon asked weakly. He felt sick. The ground seemed to twist and buckle under his feet.

Asandir’s response came back clipped. ‘Alive. Can you walk?’

The Master took a step and stumbled. Hands caught him up before he fell, cruel in their hurry to keep him moving. He managed to find his balance before the sorcerer lost patience and lifted him, but he remembered little of the journey back through Ithamon’s twisted lanes to the safety of the upper citadel.

Arithon’s next impression was sight of the interlaced carving inside the double arches of Kieling Tower’s lower entry. The runes seemed reversed and upsidedown, an angle of view that disoriented him until he realized: Asandir had needed to carry him after all. He had a raging headache. The searing brilliance of mage-light that had sourced the sorcerer’s protections had gone, rendered unnecessary by the ringing, subliminal vibration that marked the bounds of Paravian wards. A quietude as abiding as the heart-rock of the earth enfolded around the party in Asandir’s protection.

The calm brought surcease, but no ease of mind.

The near to cataclysmic forces the sorcerer had raised against attack remained stamped indelibly into memory.

Awe remained.

It was one thing to sense past shielded resonance to the potential of a Fellowship mage; quite another, to experience such potency unveiled in the close-pressed immediacy of action. Flame from the wall sconces showed Asandir’s face, etched into the planes of his bones by passage of the powers channelled through him. That a spirit of such vast resource should still be walking, clothed in humanity and flesh, defied comprehension. And yet the mage was himself. His expression reflected no grand depths, but only self-recrimination as he turned his head and saw Arithon had recovered awareness.

‘My prince, I’m sorry.’ This admission played no part in the conflict that, only hours before, had sealed a prince to an unwanted destiny.

Disarmed, even shamed by the affection in Asandir’s concern, Arithon evaded the personal. ‘How did you know Lysaer and I needed rescue?’

Driven off by banality, the poignancy of the moment fled. Asandir said, ‘I was given warning. The wards in your sword, Alithiel, came active and all but set fire to your clothes chest.’ The sorcerer helped Arithon to a chair by the hearth, tossed him a blanket, then moved briskly to assist Dakar with Lysaer, who was unconscious still, and pale as a carving in wax.

Kieling Tower’s wardroom no longer held the bleakness of an edifice standing whole amid a ruin. Its worn plank floor was made cheerful by a spread of Narms carpet, hauled from Althain Tower in the dray. Asandir’s books lay piled near a wrought brass candlestand on an ebony inlaid table. Four chairs, without cushions, had been salvaged from a dusty upper chamber. In the pot over the flames, stew still bubbled as though all in the world were yet ordinary. Burrowed in blankets and handed a mug of bitter tea, Arithon lay settled and still, content to let the resonance of the Paravian defences permeate his awareness. He drew in the smell of cedar from the delicate, patterned panels that adorned the wardroom walls. To mage-trained eyes, the interlaced carvings of vines and animals sang with vibrant inner resonance. Whatever Paravian artisans had done the reliefs had instilled true vision in the work. To behold them was to share an echoed reflection of the great mystery that endowed the land with life. Slowly, the chill that had invaded the inner tissues of Arithon’s body flowed away into warmth. He released a last violent shudder. As if called by that movement from across the room, Asandir arose, leaving Dakar to watch the s’Ilessid prince, who was sleeping, perhaps under spell.

A second later, the sorcerer knelt at Arithon’s side in concern. ‘You look steadier. Can you tell me what happened?’

Haggard as though he had stepped intact out of nightmare, Arithon considered the muddled impressions that remained. ‘You saved our lives and didn’t see?’

The sorcerer rested slack hands on his knees and stared aside into the fire. The play of bronze-gold light deepened the creases around his mouth and other finer lines that arrowed from the corners of his eyes. ‘I know you were assaulted by a manifestation of Desh-thiere. I’m not clear why, or how. Even Sethvir was fooled into belief the creature wasn’t sentient.’ If the admission humbled him, it did not show; his gaze remained lucent as sun-flecked crystal beneath the jut of his frown.

Arithon closed his eyes, hands that had not stopped shaking clamped hard on his tea mug. ‘You were looking for an entity that had just one aspect?’ he suggested, for the moment no prince, but a mage sharing thoughts with a colleague.

Across a chamber whose unearthly symmetry was made squalid by the smell of mutton grease, Dakar stowed his bulk by the settle, surprised. ‘But there’s no living spirit in existence that a Fellowship mage cannot track!’

Arithon fractionally shook his head. Desh-thiere had proved the exception: a thing wrought of who knew what malice, in the sealed-off worlds beyond South Gate.

Asandir maintained a charged stillness. As if perplexed by a twist in a puzzle, he only appeared detached as he said, ‘Whatever the Name of the Mistwraith, it maimed Traithe’s continuity of function. Are you telling me the creature has spirit, and that it encompasses more than one being?’

‘Try thousands,’ Arithon whispered. He opened his eyes. ‘Too many to number separately, and all of them bound captive in hatred. Our efforts with light and shadow here have been systematically reducing the mist and the area that confines them, nothing else.’

‘Ath’s eternal mercy,’ was all the sorcerer said. Yet as a shifting log in the fireplace fanned a spurt of flame, shadows shrank to show alarm on a face seldom given to uncertainties.

‘But that can’t be possible,’ Dakar interjected. ‘If it were, how could Desh-thiere’s vapours cross Kieling’s wards at will?’

‘Easily,’ Arithon murmured, unnerved also, but applying himself to the problem through habit and years of self-discipline. ‘The mist is no more than a boundary wrought of dampness. The entities I encountered move within it, self-contained. Paravian defences bar them entrance, but not the fog that imprisons their essence.’

Asandir did not contradict the Master’s supposition. At some point his awareness had faded from the room, diffused outward into a net that expanded over the ruins.

Arithon was seer enough to catch impressions in resonance. Under his grandfather’s tutelage at Rauven, he had studied the close-woven relationships that conjoined all worldly things. As he had traced the paths of his teacher’s meditations into the nature of such interconnectedness, so he followed Asandir’s scrying now. Yet where the Rauven mages had known how to feel out the paths of the air, to read in advance the wind-spun flight of dry leaves; how to sense warmth amid mist-chilled trees and recognize a bird asleep with head tucked under wing; how to link with the weighty turn of the earth, the limning of frost crystals on grasses raked dry by the season, the perception of a Fellowship sorcerer saw deeper.

Fully aware of Arithon’s attentiveness, Asandir hid nothing. And like the unfolding of a painted fan, or a span of fine-spun tapestry shown whole to a blind man through miracle, Arithon saw familiar natural forms wreathed about with the silver-point etchings of their energy paths. The sheer depth of vision overwhelmed him.

Asandir did not see stone, but the crystalline lattices that matrixed its substance, and beyond that to the delicate, ribbon-like glimmers that were the underpinnings of all being, that stabilized vibration into matter. More, as a man might know his most treasured possessions, the sorcerer recognized everything he scried, not according to type, but in Name, that unique understanding of every object’s individuality. He held the signature of each plant, from the seed that had thrown up its first sprout, to the days of sunlight and storms that marked its growth, to the twigs and every turned leaf ever shed by the grown tree. One oak he would know from every other oak, living or decayed or unsown, on the basis of just one glance. Stresses, disease or the robustness of perfect health were delineated plainly to his eye. He knew frost crystals, not as frozen water, but as single and separate patterns in all of their myriad billions. Their Names were as visible to him as signatures. He knew the pebbles of the dry water course, each and every one by touch, and the tangles of bundled energies that signified each grain of sand. The detail, the sheer magnitude of caring such depth of perspective demanded, dwarfed the watching spirit.

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.’

Kharadmon seized the logical progression. ‘Traithe would naturally raise wards. But his countermeasure perforce would have been a fatal fraction too slow, perpetually behind the leading edge of Desh-thiere’s attack.’

‘So I surmise.’ Sethvir stared at the space where the spirit of his colleague now rested. Neither of them spoke the painful truth, that to know a true Name in all of its individual ramifications was to hold power to unmake its being. Paradox, and at times cruellest irony, that mages who survived to gain such depths of wisdom were disbarred by understanding of the universe from use of the spells of Unbinding.

Sethvir fixed again on the image he had raised from five hundred years past and resumed the dropped thread of conversation. ‘I postulate that Traithe seared away half of his awareness, truncated his own vision by blasting it out with raw power, that Desh-thiere could be stopped from enslaving him. He burned it out as a hill-warrior might hack off a limb with a septic wound, by his own hand rendering himself crippled.’

Traithe had lost memory in the process, and the greater vision that founded his faculties, and all trace of the Name of the being that had brought him to the brink of total ruin.

In a pass made savage by sorrow, Sethvir waved away his conjured image. ‘We are warned too late. Last night in Ithamon, Desh-thiere’s aspects did not challenge Asandir’s wards. Neither did they retreat; they simply passed elsewhen. Into another time. That implies their purpose was complete. My guess is our Teir’s’Ilessid shows no sign of disparate change because the moment when tonight’s damage shall manifest is still yet to come, and of a surety chosen most carefully.’

‘Arithon’s coronation in Etarra,’ Kharadmon summed up grimly. ‘It will be there. Desh-thiere’s intervention caused the strands to converge without digression.’

Ferociously grim, all without words, Sethvir and Kharadmon shared their night’s surmises: that if Desh-thiere’s aspects were advanced enough to slip the constraints of time, the Fellowship as it stood could do little more than bind temporary wards against recurrence.

‘A bit like closing the barn door after the cattle have been raided,’ Kharadmon raged, and snowflakes whirled like dustdevils from one side of the carpet to the other.

‘Restored back to Seven, we could resolve this.’ Sethvir sighed. As papers and parchments started to flap and whirl across the disarray of his writing table, he grabbed frozen ink-pots and pressed them into service as paperweights. ‘Either still yourself, or stop the natural wind by closing the casement. My belongings cannot handle both at once.’ Sorrowfully mild, the Warden of Althain added, ‘We are as ants, scurrying in vain to stay a rock slide. You know that if we are ever to see an end to this threat, the coronation at Etarra must be permitted to run its disastrous course.’

‘I was aware, and wondering why rats and Dakar’s prophecies were ever let into Ath’s creation.’ The casement swung closed with a bang and brass latches snicked into their settings. Left ringing across windless silence was Kharadmon’s sardonic parting statement. ‘Like the raven in advance of the war, I go to call Traithe to the bloodletting.’

Dispatch

The fenlands of southeast Tysan were a deserted and miserable wilderness to be caught in a snowfall, on the shortened days past solstice. On foot in the mire, deep in a thicket of leafless willows and marsh maples, Elaira braced an arm on her mare’s steaming shoulder. She scraped ice from a lock of hair that had escaped her hood, while flakes flecked with sleet whirled and rattled across frozen pools and the stalks of last season’s cattails. Called away by Morriel’s summons from the Koriani hostel by Hanshire, she had avoided the trade roads along the coast. The Prime Circle by this season would have resettled in winter quarters near Mainmere, where a ruined fortress deserted since the fall of the high kings of Havish overlooked the coast. The southern pass through Tornir Peaks offered the safest route, since the marshes and sink-pools that edged the high country were too sparsely settled to interest the headhunters who ranged through Korias and Taerlin seeking Caithwood’s clansmen as trophies.

However more secure the boglands might be, amenities for travellers were nonexistent. The mare had cast a shoe in sucking mud, and if she were to escape going sore on the rockier ground in the highlands, Elaira was obliged to find a smith.

‘As if any right-thinking craftsman would choose to keep shop in a swamp,’ she complained to the sedges that hooked her ankles, and her only live companion, the horse. The bay nosed her hood, her breath a warm cloud in the damp.

‘Why couldn’t you rip off your shoe in the drifter’s country?’ The enchantress squelched over a hummock. ‘Better horsemen aren’t born in Athera. Here, we’ll be lucky to find a trapper who knows how to work iron.’

The mare stamped, and the skin of frozen water overtop of oozing mud chinked like shattered glazing over the knees of the oak roots.

‘All right, we’ll go on, then.’ Elaira picked her way to the next hummock without any thought to remount. Footing was chancy in the fens, where falling snow and fog could blend with Desh-thiere’s mist and turn visibility to a wall of featureless white. A traveller could stray from the trail between one step and the next and stay lost, to die of starvation or drowning. Sometimes old bones resurfaced in the sink-holes, clean-picked by scavenger fish.

Elaira slogged through a hollow, her boots already sodden from the iced-over, peat-brown puddles that never quite managed to take her weight. The cold was so bitter it hurt. To take her mind off discomfort, she noted the plants as she passed: the fibrous, half-rotted stems of marshmallow and sword-blade stands of cattails. Her mind catalogued them all, from the renwort whose berries brewed poison, to the cailcallow and willow bark valued to ease fevers. She saw through winter’s sere mantle where watercress would flourish and which hollows, clear of snow, held hotsprings that might harbour green felscrine. Healing herbs were part and parcel of Koriani learning, and lately Elaira had devoted herself to memorizing tedious recipes for tisanes.

As if with the annals of granny-lore and crumbled texts passed down by generations of dead herbalists she might help to bury the memory of one inopportune encounter in a tavern hayloft.

So intense was her concentration, and accustomed as she had become to the startling, raucous calls of marsh pheasants and the whirr of their wingbeats as they flew from her step, that she failed to notice the children until they were nearly upon her.

A motley band of seven, they were flying across the frozen streambeds on skates, clad in the same buff and browns as any other native creature of the fens. Yelling, screaming for pure pleasure, they raced and jostled through the stands of willow and mudbrake, until the mare shied back from their exuberance.

The snort of a horse where strangers seldom passed startled them. Heads turned, half-seen through the stands of silver-barked, vine-choked maple; then a chickadee’s trill cried warning. Their play ended in a scraping slide of bone runners as they whirled into hiding behind the thickets, hushing the youngest, who was frightened and starting to cry.

‘It’s all right!’ Elaira’s call raised no echo across what now seemed empty marsh. The pools lay pewter-grey against peat-black verges and the snow like salt-rime on the hummocks; the sleet had let up to a whisper. Through streaming shreds of mist, even the sedges did not rustle. ‘I won’t harm any of you. I don’t even carry a weapon.’

‘Show us,’ shouted a boy whose voice had just finished changing. ‘Throw off your cloak.’

Elaira swore under her breath. Wet as she was, the cold would cut through to her skin. She unhooked her ring brooch and shed the heavy wool, in time to get a drenching as the ungrateful mare shook her mane.

The enchantress wore no belt beyond a sash of knotted wool. The only metals on her were three talisman buttons fashioned of copper coins, charms she still wore out of sentiment from her days as a street thief, for luck; and the hunting knife last used to strip branches for snares that most maddeningly had trapped nothing. Yesterday’s supperpot had stayed empty.

‘Turn around,’ said the boy.

Elaira held her arms outstretched, and did so, though briars caught at her clothing. ‘I could use a dry place to sleep, and fresh supplies.’ Fighting a shiver that made her teeth chatter, she added, ‘I can pay.’

Around her, the children had begun to creep from concealment. They ranged in age from ten years to late teens, the bloom on their cheeks the only bright colour about them. Their clothing was fashioned of leather, small furs stitched together, and the woven fibres of fenland flax, all undyed. If most of them were dirty, their hair was brushed or braided, and each one carried little talismans of feathers, believed to be ward against drowning. Elaira threw on her cloak, which had fully had time to grow cold. She confronted a closing ring of wide, curious eyes, and said, ‘Of course, you do have a village?’

They led her off the trail, their shyness loosening into chatter. By their accent, Elaira guessed them to be descendants of farmers displaced by the rebellion; survivors sometimes banded with exiles, outcast from the coastal settlements for some petty misdeed committed forgotten generations in the past. Refuge could be found in the fens, or the mountains, or the wilds too open or too barren to support the more numerous clanborn. Forage in such backlands was scarce and the trust of the inhabitants reserved; yet they understood the grace of hospitality more than rich families in the towns. By the time Elaira had reached the circle of huts built of mudbrick and thatch, her mare carried two boys and a girl, all solemnly trying in their excitement not to spur the beast who bore them with the bone-bladed runners of their skates.

‘Traveller!’ shouted the oldest boy, and out of the huts came the fen-folk.

Reed-thin, gnarled as swamp roots, they looked unremittingly dour. Their generosity was not. Like their young ones, they made Elaira welcome once assured she was unarmed. Within an hour, her mare was settled in a pen of woven withies, and she, blessedly bathed and dry, sat before a peat fire sipping tea brewed from plants she had heretofore torn clothes on. The children stayed clustered around her, asking questions and staking buttons on the game of knucklebones she had taught them. Too young to be fascinated by gambling, the youngest squatted on the furs at her feet, picking up the unlaced ends of her bootlaces, and trying to stuff them in his mouth.

‘Come away.’ Elaira reached down through the press to raise the baby clear of temptation. ‘I don’t think the mud will help the taste.’

The thwarted child shrieked. His noise did nothing to obscure another, louder scream, this one issuing from outside.

Elaira startled to her feet. The cry repeated, now identifiably the voice of the hut matron, gone out at dusk to haul in fresh water for the stewpot.

Elaira set the boy child aside on the stool, while the others ran like rabbits into the crannies between tied coils of basket reed. Trouble was no stranger to them, and even the little ones did not whimper. Grasping the crystal that hung at her neck, the enchantress leaped over the boys’ abandoned knucklebones and burst out into icy winter air.

There she poised. Behind her, the hut door creaked closed on leather hinges. While the slush slowly numbed her dry toes, she struggled to fathom the source of the trouble. For off in the fens where the springs rose warm from the ground, the woman still screamed, wrenchingly, piercingly panic stricken.

The sleet had stopped; the wind smelled oddly sharp. Elaira blinked. Her eyesight was all wrong.

The shadows lay everywhere, crisp as knives and too blue. The diamond whiteness of the drifts hurt the eyes. Against them, reeds and winter-stripped thickets seemed to leap out, starkly honed as sword-edges. Maples, swamp-oaks and willows showed their details in unnatural sharpness, their top branches delineated like entangled skeins or blown ink. Elaira gulped a quickened breath. The mist had gone. Vanished. Around her, the night was fogless and bright. The spell crystal slipped forgotten from her fingers as she tipped her head, wondering, to view the sky.

There, between the black frames of bare branches, for the first time in life she saw stars: more beautiful than Morriel’s diamonds, adrift in an indigo field that looked deep and vast as forever. Elaira was swept by a primal shiver of elation that transformed to a pealing shout of joy. ‘They’ve done it! Bless the blood royal of Athera, the West Gate Prophecy is accomplished! Come out and look! Desh-thiere is beaten to retreat!’

But the door to every wattle and mud hut stayed fast shut. Elaira’s wonderment was rudely knocked short as the howling, terrorstruck fen-wife clawed past in a headlong dash to reach safety.

Elaira picked herself out of the mud in resignation. The rank smell of swamp was an offence she would not be escaping for some while yet to come. Disenchantment still could not touch her. Euphoria and the undreamed of beauty in the sky lent her boundless capacity to forgive. The soft, silvery light that limned the fens was a wonder, more miracle than magic, less substantive than breath. Elaira’s honest nature could not shirk the truth: if not for Asandir’s gift of trust, and without her privileged access to Koriani archives she would have been as ignorant of the sky behind Desh-thiere as these fenlanders who cowered in abject terror.

For the rest of the evening she tried to make amends. She rescued stew-pots from burning to char over abandoned fires; she wore herself hoarse cajoling the fen-folk out from under blankets or barricades of upended furniture thrown hastily against doorways and root cellars. She used her crystal, set seals of peace and of calm until her fingers ached from making sigils in the air with the precision an enchanter’s art required. Her success at such efforts was debatable. The settlement’s headman found solace in a pottery jar of crude spirits, while one elderly grandmother continued to shriek and weep obscenities from under a mountain of bedclothes. Grateful to be spared from the wider-spread bedlam that must have afflicted the towns, Elaira finally yielded to weariness and answered her own need for quiet.

She threw on her cloak. Outside, in solitude, she stared at the miracle of unveiled stars in an amazement that renewed with each passing moment.

The deep-bound silence of the fenlands that always before had oppressed her, now invited exploration of new mystery. Trees looked different, dappled in subliminal shadow and the fine-spun subtleties of starlight. Ice looked more silver than grey, and hollows soft in their shadows as rich men’s velvets. The amazing acuity of outdoor vision she absorbed in sheer delight. Other avenues of thought she forbade through brute force of will.

Discipline like iron let her look upon beauty and never once contemplate a desolate site in Daon Ramon, where a black-haired prince laboured with his half-brother to bring such a miracle to pass. Morriel’s warning was serious, and had in sober fear been taken to heart. For wholedays, Elaira had succeeded in allowing no chink for regret. She prided herself on unshaken performance through this supreme test, of bared skies and her first sight of stars.

She trembled, excited to imagine how untrammelled sunlight was going to look. Envy did not sting her as she realized that those sister initiates assigned the quieter duty of lane watch most likely already knew. Elaira wrapped her hands in her leathers. Contented despite cold and loneliness and the desolation of the marsh by midnight, she awaited the advent of dawn.

During that hardwon moment of balance, the message from the First Senior reached her. It smote her through the pulse of the second lane energies, and its directive shattered all peace:

‘To Elaira, revised orders from the Prime Enchantress: upon the Mistwraith’s defeat at Ithamon, the Fellowship of Seven has plans to arrange the high king’s coronation at Etarra. You are commanded to journey there, to bring back for Koriani scrutiny your most intimate insights into the royal princes’ characters.’

Guard, Ward and Bard

The gusts that sweep the broken outer walls of Ithamon join force with a second current, not natural, that twists the dead grasses and kicks up dry leaves in drifts; looking to the eye like a wind devil, the discorporate sorcerer Luhaine lays wards against Desh-thiere that cut across time as well as worldly dimension…

When sunlight breaks finally over Havistock, the sorcerer Traithe takes his leave of the craftsman who stands as fosterparent to the growing heir to Havish: ‘Prince Eldir will assume his inheritance after Rathain’s succession has been settled in Etarra. But let us be clear that until then, his studies continue. He is not to be excused from the dyevats…’

North, in the town of Ward, under skies still greyed by Desh-thiere’s mists, an elderly bard contains bitter disappointment as he rips down the message posted in bright hope the day before: ‘Auditions for an apprenticeship to beheld, beginning the following noon. Apply to Halliron at the tap in the Straw Cock Tavern…’

XII. CONQUEST

The change in season brought buffeting winds to Daon Ramon Barrens, even as every spring had before the loss of sunlight to the mist. In past years, turbulent gusts mingled the fragrances of wildflowers and sweetgrass that mantled the backs of the greening hills. Unicorns had rejoiced with the quickening earth. But that had been before man’s meddling had diverted the Severnir’s waters from their natural course, Asandir reminisced as he stood vigil under the lichened span of Ithamon’s wrecked southern gate. The valleys outside were robbed of their carpet of flowers. Saddened by the taint of mould and rot that Desh-thiere’s hold had lent to the seasonal breezes, the sorcerer trained his mage’s perception upon the land until physical form became overlaid by the vision of his innermind. Before him all things stood revealed in primal patterns of light.

Beyond the imbalance marked upon the landscape by centuries of warped weather, he sensed something else; a more subtle wrongness, built of pent expectation and a near to subliminal tingle, as if between air and the solidity of the earth, violence lay coiled in ambush. Asandir delved deeper. The anomaly faded before his probe, eluded him so thoroughly that for a moment he stood disoriented, unsure if he had chased some spectre of his own uncertain thoughts.

He released his focus, frustrated. His feet were clammy in dew that natural sunlight would long since have burnished dry. Asandir sucked in a deep breath. His fears loomed real enough, perhaps, to corrupt even true seeing. And yet he remained unconvinced that the sick things half-sensed between the shimmer of life-force were phantoms inferred by apprehension.

This day began the chain of events that must culminate in a s’Ffalenn king’s coronation at Etarra. During the next hours, and spanning the course of several weeks to follow, Desh-thiere’s meddling would skew the world’s fate beyond reach of augury or strands to reflect any certain outcome. With luck and persistence, these hills could be restored to their former fairness. Yet although the moment had come to complete the Mistwraith’s defeat, Asandir remained grim. Contrary to nature, his cloak hung in straight folds off his shoulders: winds that should have whipped in off the downs to strafe the ruined wall walks were this moment quelled by a barrier ward fashioned by his discorporate colleagues. When complete, the spell worked by Luhaine and Kharadmon would be a masterwork that twisted even time to subservience.

A catspaw of air through the archway sent a dry leaf scratching. Aware the disturbance marked an arrival, Asandir drew breath and addressed, ‘Ithamon is secure?’

Kharadmon replied from the mist-murky shadows, a sulky note to his tone. ‘Luhaine’s not satisfied.’ A pause ensued. ‘There’s clear sunlight not a dozen yards above the mists at the outer walls.’

Asandir flicked back damp cuffs to chafe blood back into cool hands. ‘So Lysaer said. He sensed as much through his gift. That excited him to the point where he took himself off to practise sword forms. Dakar is still finishing the breakfast the others were too tense to eat.’

Amid stillness, and a chill that gripped more than cracked stonework, Kharadmon’s amusement whetted to anticipation. ‘You want your apprentice rousted from his comforts?’

‘Not by your methods, ghost.’ In a lighter moment, Asandir might have chuckled. ‘I’ve no patience today for soothing prophets with bruised dignity, particularly one griped by a bellyache brought on through overindulgence.’

‘And Arithon?’ The discorporate sorcerer’s sarcasm blurred in reverberation through the gateway.

Asandir broke his pose of quietude and strode up the vine-tangled avenue that led to the inner citadel. Ahead of his step, leaves rustled in a burst of agitation as an iyat skulked out of his path. ‘Right now, the Shadow Master’s tuning his lyranthe with an intensity better suited to a man whetting steel for bloody vengeance. You’re welcome to provoke that one by yourself.’

Kharadmon barked a laugh and kept pace, an unseen flow of cold air. ‘A formidable weapon, Elshian’s lyranthe.’

‘In Arithon’s hands, not just yet,’ Asandir snapped. Then he sighed. ‘You’ve caught me as testy as Luhaine, this morning.’ But the wards by themselves were enough to have done so, without Kharadmon’s provocation. Since the effectiveness of any arcane defence stemmed from Name, no spell could perfectly thwart what lay outside of the grasp of true seeing; to balk an essence wrought of mist and multifaceted sentience posed a nearly impossible task, like trying to fence darkness with sticks. Despite the combined efforts of four sorcerers, Asandir could not shake a sense of helplessness. The strands had augured for failure. The strongest of conjured defences might well prove inadequate to contain Desh-thiere’s many entities. Its mist might be confined and Athera’s weather restored only if nothing went wrong; only if the princes who centred the hope of two vital prophecies could be protected through the wraiths’ final binding.

Not so preoccupied as he seemed as he picked steps over fragmented friezework, Asandir pursued the topic sidelined earlier by his colleague. ‘Luhaine’s not satisfied, you say.’

Cold air became a snap of frigid wind near in vehemence to an oath as Kharadmon said, ‘Last I saw, Luhaine was upending rocks in the rivercourse and rousting up salamanders in droves.’

‘Would that were all,’ cracked a rejoinder from the entity Kharadmon’s blithe tones just maligned. Arrived in time to defend himself, Luhaine said indignantly to Asandir, ‘We can’t make a ward to plug every Ath-forsaken bolt-hole in the earth!’

‘Meaning?’ Asandir frowned toward the matrix of energies that mage-sight picked out as the essence of the spirit he addressed.

If Luhaine intended answer, Kharadmon stole the initiative. ‘Even spread over three acres, Desh-thiere’s concentration of malice is the most powerful threat we’ve ever handled. To pare it down further will add to its unpredictability. What happens when the princes cut it to a scrap, a shadow, small enough to scatter and hide?’

Asandir spoke the unpleasant thought outright. ‘Nameless, it cannot be traced.’ His mouth thinned. ‘Find another choice, I’d embrace it.’

Kharadmon returned no glib comment. Luhaine lost his inclination to expound upon the nuance of every risk. Today, and until the upheaval augured for the time of Arithon’s coronation, perils could not be avoided. All things, including lives, must be considered expendable, except one: the continuance of the great mystery imbued in earthly form, the survival of the Paravian races. The silence of Asandir’s discorporate colleagues stretched the more ominous, in the absence of the seasonal winds.

The battlement atop Kieling Tower stayed wrapped in the same dire stillness when Asandir took stance alongside his discorporate colleagues. Voices echoed from a stairwell near his feet: Lysaer’s, raised in some jocular quip, and Dakar’s reply, hotly truculent.

‘First, they don’t have telir brandy in Etarra. Mention spirits distilled from fruits that the mist has turned sour for centuries, and the governor’s minister of justice will howl, then see you staked through the arse. They’re hysterically scared of hearing legends.’ Dakar paused to puff. The stair was very long and steep. Still bitter, he added, ‘Sorcerers are regarded even worse. Admit you ever saw one, and they’ll roast you whole without a hearing. I’m bored of this wasteland as you are, but damned if I’m eager to rush on to that stew of corruption and prejudice!’

‘Well then,’ said Lysaer, stubbornly and spiritedly agreeable, ‘when Desh-thiere is vanquished, and we get there anyway, I’ll buy the beer till you’re passed out in your cups.’

‘You can try.’ Dakar’s tousled head emerged into the mist, twisted aside for rejoinder down the stairwell. ‘First, when it comes to knocking back drink, I’ll have you under the table, prince. Next, Etarrans don’t brew beer worth pissing. They like gin, from which half the populace gets headaches. You’ll find their governor’s council badtempered.’

Lysaer trailed Dakar onto the battlement, saw his half-brother already poised between merlons with his knees tucked under folded arms. He called greeting. ‘Let’s hurry and set the last of this fog under a cork.’

Arithon nodded absently, then addressed what seemed like vacant air. ‘We’re not going to finish this here, are we?’

Blocked by Lysaer’s shoulder, Dakar craned his neck to follow this exchange until something unseen in between prompted a string of fervent curses.

Caught in the crossfire, and unconvinced that epithets which mingled blasphemies with the properties of fresh cow dung should be rightfully applied to his person, Lysaer said, ‘I seem to be missing some point.’ His good nature remained stiffly in place as he rounded to face his tormentor. ‘Could you stay the abuse until after you’ve explained?’

Dakar rolled his eyes; while behind Lysaer’s back the ghost-silent images of Luhaine and Kharadmon manifested upon the battlement. Each in their way looked inconvenienced: Luhaine’s rotund figure and schoolmasterish frown at perpetual odds with Kharadmon’s cadaverous slenderness.

Still puzzled, Lysaer turned around again, to find himself confronted by strange sorcerers. Only royal poise curbed his startled recoil. Creditably courteous in rebound, he said, ‘We’ve not been introduced, I believe.’

Kharadmon raised tapered fingers and flipped back his hood. Streaked piebald locks tumbled over his caped cloak as he swept through a courtier’s bow. ‘My prince, we are colleagues of the Fellowship, members in spirit since the day that flesh suffered mishap.’ And he arose, confronting Lysaer with cat-pale eyes that studied in sardonic provocation.

Luhaine tucked his thumbs into a belt stout enough to halter a yearling bull. As flesh, he had always been careful to regale his portliness with restraint; as spirit, he forwent adornment as a frivolous waste of conjury. Against an appearance unrelentingly prim, his words seemed weighed like insult as he said, ‘The buffoon who speaks is Kharadmon, your Grace of Tysan.’

‘Buffoon?’ Kharadmon curled his lip. ‘Luhaine! Can your wit be that tired, to find you floundering for epithets?’

‘After two ages suffering your lame taste, such failing would carry no shame.’ His eyes joylessly reticent, Luhaine measured the blond prince whose dignity made light of unpleasantness. Given Lysaer’s staunchness of character, it seemed unnatural that the strands should unremittingly forecast war. Aggrieved that such beautifully trained poise might come to be channelled toward deceit, Luhaine turned sharp. ‘You think we should get on with defeating Desh-thiere?’ He flicked a thick finger in reproach. ‘I say it’s a fool who would rush to meet danger.’

Taken aback, Lysaer flushed. Asandir set a hand on his shoulder and spared him from further embarrassment. ‘Kharadmon and Luhaine have worked nightlong to establish protections.’ He shot a pained look at both spirits. ‘Excuse their rudeness, please. Their labours have left them disagreeable.’

Motionless up until now, Arithon abruptly stood. He did not speak and Lysaer, unsmiling, found grit to ignore Kharadmon’s challenging regard. ‘Since the last attack by Desh-thiere’s aspects, I thought your Fellowship determined its hostilities couldn’t be warded?’

Asandir said in honest discomfort, ‘We can’t be sure.’

Lysaer glanced at his half-brother. But Arithon stayed quiet as Luhaine shed his disapproval to explain.

‘Permit me. What spirits the Mistwraith embodies cannot pass the tower safe-wards. Should your efforts with shadow and light drive its vapours to final extinction inside Paravian protections, the self-aware essence would become sundered from the bounds of the fog that enshrouds it. In brief, its wraiths would be winnowed separate, even as kernel from chaff.’ Warmed to his topic, Luhaine raised spread palms. ‘After that, our Fellowship cannot be sure whether natural death would banish such spirits. Should the entities have ways to evade Ath’s law and continue existence as free wraiths, they might go on to possess our world’s creatures with dire and damaging results.’

‘The methuri that plague Mirthlvain Swamp were created by a similar calamity,’ Asandir pointed out. ‘That might lend you perspective.’

‘Indeed yes.’ Now set for a scholarly diatribe, Luhaine opened his mouth, then caught a glare from Kharadmon. Nettled, he said, ‘I must sum up.’

Kharadmon hitched up an eyebrow. ‘Do go on.’ He tipped his palm in invitation as a courtier might, to defer to a lady in a doorway.

Luhaine stiffly turned his back and resumed with his speech to the half-brothers. ‘To counter the risk of loosing free wraiths, you must drive Desh-thiere to captivity outside of arcane protections. The wards set over Ithamon must serve as your bastion, and also as defence for the land in case of mishap.’

‘Brief, did you say?’ accosted Kharadmon. Despite an image that stayed fixed in serenity as a painting, his impatience was plain as he said, ‘We waste time.’

Unperturbed, Asandir gave the half-brothers his quiet reassurance. ‘The perils are not insurmountable. On faith, we have Dakar’s prophecy, and the strands’ further augury that the Mistwraith can be conquered. Yet there won’t be satisfaction if we stall over details until sundown.’ He tipped his head at Lysaer. ‘Prince?’

Relieved to be excused from the friction between a ghost pair of sorcerers who deeply unsettled him anyway, Lysaer called power through his gift. Light sheeted from his raised fist, a crackling, broad-banded flash that shocked through the murk overhead. Desh-thiere hissed in recoil. A backwash of steam fanned Kieling Tower, torn short as Arithon’s shadow-wrought counterthrust sliced across the breach. Dark flicked the air and the temperature plunged. Snow flurried over the battlement, struck gold by filtered sunlight as the mist layer seared nearly through. The heavens moiled like dirtied water as Desh-thiere surged to choke the gap. Barriers of wrought shadow razed it short, and ice dusted the hollow before the crenels where the image forms of Luhaine and Kharadmon had vanished away, unremarked.

The half-brothers broke off the first stage assault, breathing hard; and as always, the moment they snatched in recovery cost them.

The mist massed in upon itself. Purple-grey and sinister as thunderheads, Desh-thiere battened the winds in dank darkness and settled over the patch of true sky. Lysaer’s fair nature turned grim. Always the fog became thicker and more troublesome to manage after the initial attack. Charged to resentful revenge, grown adept at shaping his craft as a weapon, Lysaer hammered killing power into the gloom that oppressed the landscape.

The grease-thick miasma above the tower flared white, then burned to incandescence as the charge struck. Shadow ripped out in reply, and snow crystals scoured by the gusts slashed across the exposed stone parapet. The mists bulked, denser, poisonously thick as poured oil. Lysaer’s tunic dampened with sweat, and Arithon’s hair whipped to tangles against dripping temples.

The half-brothers fought, while morning gave way to afternoon. Slowly, grudgingly, the Mistwraith’s bounds were harried inward. Sunlight speared down and silvered Ithamon’s knoll with its interlocked stubble of foundations. Notched battlements and broken walls drowned the next minute under yet another countersurge of fog. Light and then shadow punched back. Again a ragged hole appeared. Sky appeared over Kieling Tower, besieged at once by rolling curtains of murk. Arithon cried out as the wraith-driven mists burst his barriers. Stonework shook to a thunderous report as Lysaer extended to heroic lengths to shock back the break in the attack line.

His light slashed into gloom that churned, congested as a blood-gorged bruise. Shadow answered him strongly. Snowfall snatched up into whirlwinds as stress-heated air snapped and shrieked through pocketed blizzards of ice.

And then a sudden and peculiar twist of change: interwoven through the violent play of energies, something tugged subtly out of balance. Across the concussive boom of backlash and a gale like a rising scream, Arithon shouted to Asandir, ‘We’re in trouble!’

Less trained to nuance, Lysaer saw no cause to pinpoint. A third charge gathered in his hands, his sight congested by a darkness dense enough to suffocate, he groped to define his uneasiness. Aware of voices, but cut off from the others by the mist, he closed his fists.

And knew terror, for his gifted powers failed to dissipate.

Lysaer reached to recover control but another will struggled against him: as if the mists had changed nature, without warning turned from a stubborn, resistant barrier that needed ever to be driven, into something repellently uncanny: a creature voracious and alive, that now fed off the very energies summoned to achieve its defeat. Lysaer felt the graze of unseen presences across his flesh. Things seemed to twist at his clothing and hair, while a heaviness dragged his thoughts.

Then a surge of overweening elation displaced all trace of alarm. They had triumphed! Desh-thiere now collapsed in a sucking rush toward annihilation.

A shout from Asandir ripped through that giddy unreality. Lysaer’s mad urge to crack the sky with his powers became dashed as someone’s hands snatched his wrists apart. Spell force slapped over his unshed light like soaked woollens thrown down to douse a wildfire.

No victory had been immanent on Kieling. Lysaer gasped in recovery. Murk wrapped him, dank as marshvapours, and his body dripped sour sweat. ‘What happened?’

‘Desh-thiere!’ cried Asandir above winds that keened like death angels whetting their armoury of scytheblades. ‘It’s hurled itself into the breach for a purpose!’

Magelight flashed and the air cleared, or seemed to. Only a circle closed off by some boundary of sorcery answered to Asandir’s will. Beyond Kieling’s walls pressed darkness, damp and impenetrable as shroud felt. Lysaer blinked streaming eyes. Brushed by settling snow, he noticed the winds no longer buffeted his body. Instead he felt crowded by noxious warmth the characterless temperature of shed blood. Pressured by nameless foreboding, Lysaer braced to continue, then flinched as Asandir cruelly tore his wrists apart again.

Affronted by the physical handling, Lysaer tensed to strike off restraint. Asandir met his glare, wordless, until reason displaced princely pride. Shaken to discover how near vanity had come to eclipse his good sense, Lysaer squared his shoulders to apologize.

Asandir forestalled him. ‘I’m not offended and you were never rude. This Mistwraith has aspects that can turn the mind, and now you are warned. Stay guarded.’

Upset and humiliated, Lysaer strove to pick sense out of chaos. ‘The mist flung itself on us like a suicide.’

From across the battlement, Arithon said in a voice scraped and hoarse, ‘That last assault sheared out more vapour than we ever burned away through a half-day. I presume the damage is done?’

‘We’ll see. Luhaine!’ His hold still tight on Lysaer’s wrists, Asandir cracked out, ‘How diminished is the radius of the fog?’

The discorporate mage forwent his tendency to patronize. ‘Only Kieling Tower remains enveloped, which leads me to suppose we have problems. If Desh-thiere’s entities were subject to natural death, why should they rush their destruction?’

Kharadmon agreed. ‘It’s too dangerous, now, to finish outside the tower. Whether our wards are found wanting or not, to cut the mist down on open ground is to beg a bid for escape. These ruins offer a thousand crannies. If the wraiths escape their bindings, they’ll surely scatter and hide.’

‘That’s Desh-thiere’s intention, no doubt,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Or wouldn’t it just lure us to take an outside stand, then make the two princes its target?’

‘It could be attempting to do both.’ Asandir looked like a man faced with torture as his hands slackened, then at last released Lysaer. ‘We have a second choice of action.’

‘No!’ cried Dakar in protest, half-forgotten where he huddled on the sidelines. He strode to the centre of the battlement. Nose running, eyes bloodshot, his hands bunched in fists before his chest, he bristled like a fat banty rooster. ‘You wouldn’t dare sully the wards of compassion on this tower! Merciful Ath, how could you think to disarrange the irreplaceable work of ages, and draw evil inside these protections?’

Asandir visibly hardened. ‘I would do so, of sheer necessity.’ His look blazed back at his apprentice. ‘These wards are all that can dependably fence the Mistwraith. I will open them, and let Desh-thiere be driven inside, and see this land safe under sunlight. For the survival of the Riathan Paravians who sanctified this haven, you’ll lend your strength to that cause.’

Shocked, shaking, visibly afraid to hold his ground, nonetheless; Dakar stayed stubbornly rooted.

‘Desh-thiere has three times shown us guile,’ said Luhaine, his image indistinct through the turmoil of darkness and mist. ‘We could be the ones driven, and purposefully, to try just such a desperate action.’

‘The risk must be taken.’ Lysaer came forward. ‘Of us all, I’m the least fit to weigh risks. Yet I cannot set my life above the need to confine this monster. Kieling’s protections will not fail the land. Though we all were to die here, sunlight for Athera would be secured.’ His hair like drowned gold in the gloom, he deferred to Asandir. ‘I prefer to trust you can protect us from the wraiths, as you did on the night my half-brother and I were attacked.’

That mishap had occurred well before Desh-thiere’s teeming entities had been crowded inside shrunken boundaries; yet Asandir kept dread to himself as he switched his most merciless regard back to the Teir’s’Ilessid. ‘So be it, Lysaer. But let your heart not falter. When I call, you will act, and do so without question, to the utter dregs of your strength. Your gift of light will partner Arithon’s shadows, and burn mist until all of Desh-thiere’s entities are driven inside of ward boundaries.’

The words and their depth of commitment struck Lysaer with strange force and finality, as if magic would be bound to his consent. Though warned he must forfeit any later change of will, he scraped up a ragged smile. ‘What resources I have are freely yours.’

Wary though he remained, Asandir showed sincere respect. ‘Ath’s blessing on you, s’Ilessid prince. You do seem to understand the stakes.’

Ever the pessimist, Luhaine said, ‘Let Dakar leave the tower now, then. Should the worst befall, someone must stay outside to guard until Sethvir can set seals on this tower to permanently block chance of reentry.’

‘I’ll get my nose sunburnt and blistered for nothing, waiting for you to come out!’ Yet in his eagerness to quit the site of conflict, Dakar tripped over his feet in the stairwell. His peeved oaths faded with his hurried steps, first muffled by the close-pressed mists, and finally drowned by the moan of the eddying winds.

Desh-thiere swathed Kieling’s battlements in unremitting gloom as the sorcerers made preparations. Kharadmon appointed himself the task of safeguarding Lysaer. Luhaine’s image dissolved also, but wearing an acerbic expression that cautioned Arithon to restraint. Whether moved by precocious knowledge or by edgy s’Ffalenn temperament, any attempt to broach Fellowship guardianship would be handled with flat intolerance.

Lysaer wiped sweating palms. Before he could imagine what arcane defences might demand of him, a circle of blue-white force cracked around him. His eyes were flash-blinded and his senses tipped spinning into vertigo. The wards set over his person by Kharadmon not only laced the surrounding air; they invaded and flared through his most private self with a persistence that raised primal rebellion. Lysaer felt every hair on his body stab erect. For a horrible, drawn out moment, his mind and flesh lay outside self-command, frozen in subjugation to another will. The unpleasant feeling soon faded. Mage-light no longer etched his body to incandescence. Lysaer stretched in reaction. He flexed his hands, then his toes, relieved to find them not locked in paralysis. Then he tried a breath, and felt, like a spike hammered through the grain of growing wood, the ward’s immutable presence.

He retained bodily control, but only as Kharadmon’s protections allowed.

Moved to consternation by the scope of the strictures imposed by his open consent, Lysaer had no chance to wonder how Arithon reconciled such a pact. Above the moan of the wind, and through the ear-stinging pitch of ward resonance, Asandir delivered fast instructions.

‘Once I’ve merged awareness with Kieling Tower’s protections, I won’t be able to respond. Should trouble arise, the discorporate sorcerers who are linked with you will sense your needs and give help as the situation requires.’ Asandir paused.

His eyes, light, brilliant, piercing, studied the half-brothers who, for the cause of restored sunlight and Paravian survival were about to place body, mind and spirit into jeopardy.

Pressed by unspoken anxieties, Asandir added, ‘I’ll seek to key an opening in the wards and signal you when that’s accomplished. Engage the Mistwraith then. With all of your strength and will drive it inside the tower’s protections. Once the last bit of fog is drawn in, I’ll reseal the wards. After that, Luhaine and Kharadmon will strive with you to fend off Desh-thiere’s hostile entities. If Paravian spellcraft can be plumbed for inspiration, and if forces of compassion that were created to be unconditional can be made to yield to necessity, I’ll try to fashion a containment of wardspells. With luck, we can imprison Desh-thiere and keep this tower unsullied.’ He hesitated, then finished off, ‘Hold to this through the worst: the auguries cast at Althain Tower did not forecast any deaths here.’

But dying was hardly the worst fate to suffer, Lysaer reflected: possession was more to be dreaded. Kharadmon’s apprehension thrummed as a deep, subliminal tingle through his flesh. This host of mist-bound wraiths that their party of five must incarcerate yet owned the malice that had disabled Traithe.

‘I wish you all sure hands and good hunting.’ A figure of shadow against the charcoal roil of the fog, Asandir bent and slipped off his boots and hose. Barefoot in the cold, he scuffed through the crust of sleet and arranged his stance on freezing stone. Then he raised his hands. Rigidly still, his eyes a chill vista of emptiness, he held motionless for an interval that stretched Lysaer’s nerves to the snapping point. To stave off morbid misgiving, the prince cupped his hands and fiercely concentrated to muster back will to use his gift.

A concussion of air smacked his face and a high-pitched ping like pressure cracks cold-shocked through a glacier ripped the sky. The tower seemed rinsed in white light. Lost in a dazzle that blinded, Asandir cried out in what could have been ecstasy or the absolute extremity of mortal pain. Then darkness opened in the brilliance, virulently black and stonework that had stood firm through two ages shuddered under waves of vibration.

‘Now!’ screamed Asandir. The joined jasper of tower and battlement seemed to jar into brittleness with his cry.

Lysaer released light in a concatenation of sparks. Heated wind seared his cheeks. Black fell, velvet-dense, then a buffet of frigid air that he attributed to backwash from Arithon’s counterthrust of shadow. Next a subliminal purple glow bathed Lysaer’s skin, driving before it a sting like a thousand venomed needles. He struggled to breathe, to think, while Kharadmon slapped a goad through his mind to gather his strayed wits and fight.

Lysaer struck at the encroaching mists in bursts of force like bright knives. He battled, though entities leered from the fog, gnashing fanged jaws and milling through darkness to reach and then claw him down. Savaged by the killing fields of energy demanded from his gift, Lysaer flung up latticed walls of lightning. Flash-fire burned the wraiths back until his eyes were left stunned and sightless.

‘Now! Again!’ exhorted Kharadmon.

The battlements seemed wildly to tilt. Wrung out and disoriented, Lysaer could not tell if the stonework dissolved from beneath him, or whether natural law still held firm. Past the ongoing blaze of the wards, he sensed Luhaine and teamed with him, Arithon, still slamming the Mistwraith with shadow spun frigid as the void before Ath’s creation.

Lysaer choked on a breath that was half snow. Frost bit his lungs and kicked off an explosion of coughing. The air felt all strange, too thick and stiff to pass his nostrils. Gust-eddied ice raked his face. He ached with a sensation like suffocation, while Kharadmon pressed him to resume.

Driven to expend himself through his gift until he became as a living torch, Lysaer cried out. Charge after charge of pure light raked from him, until his flesh felt mauled and reamed through, a bare conduit to channel his gift. The light torn out of his centre slashed from him, a brilliance of chiselled force that the one mote of consciousness undrowned by the torrent recognized for the work of a stranger.

No more than a puppet impelled by a sorcerer’s whim, Lysaer felt stripped and crushed. The darkness and vertigo that assailed him were no longer solely the effects of spell-wards and Mistwraith. His body was starved for breath to the point where he barely stayed conscious.

And still the light ripped from him, in crackling, searing white torrents.

His disorientation tripped off panic. While instinct screamed that he was being immolated, consumed by a scintillant spellcraft pressured outside of sane control, he clung in desperation to his willing consent to the Fellowship, and the honour that bound his given oath: to battle the Mistwraith for as long as he held to life.

Yet his endurance was only mortal.

Undercut by sharp anguish, that royal blood, and pride, and heart-felt integrity of purpose were not enough by themselves to sustain him, Lysaer lost grip on dignity and wept.

And then there was no thought at all, only grey-blackness more neutral than mist, more terrible than the dark door of death.

A harrowing interval passed. Sound reached Lysaer in a burst like tearing fabric. Then came voices, shouting above a roar like a millrace in his ears.

Vague pain resolved into bruises on shoulder, knee and cheek. Evidently he had collapsed on his side, for he lay face down in thin snow. Too shaken yet to move, Lysaer shivered. Through air that pressed down like sulphurous smoke, voices whined and gibbered, moaning, mewling, and countless as Sithaer’s damned. It hurt to breathe; tissues of his throat and lungs stung as if rasped by ground ice. Then hands were gripping him, tugging him urgently to rise.

‘Get up,’ cracked Asandir.

Wasted and haggard, the sorcerer was gratingly hoarse, as if he, too, had been screaming. Or else the powers he had engaged to reconfigure Kieling’s protections had required focus through multiple incantations.

The winds had ominously stilled again.

Lysaer gained his knees. ‘The wards,’ he gasped. ‘Did you open them?’ As dizziness slowly released him, he glanced about. ‘My half-brother. Is he all right?’

‘Over there.’ Asandir pointed.

Arithon rested a short distance off, his back propped straight against the battlement. Had expenditure of shadow also drained him to a husk, Lysaer could not tell. Heavy mist blurred clear sight.

‘Well done,’ the sorcerer added, his tone a touch less rough. ‘We have the wraiths’ collective presence contained inside Kieling and the ward energies safely resealed. If the virtue that founds this tower’s strength is not to be abandoned to desecration, we’ll have to confine the creatures further.’

On his feet now, and shaky as if wasted by a fever, Lysaer tried a light stab at humour. ‘I’m spent enough already that I wouldn’t have the spark to charm a maid. The Mistwraith I hope needs less tact.’ At a sidewise glance from the sorcerer, his foolery dissolved. ‘You’ll have my best effort, in any case.’

But even before Asandir looked away, the prince recalled: Kharadmon’s presence was quiescent within him, but not withdrawn. The Fellowship would have more than his best effort, though final cost became his life.

Mortified by doubts that the strain yet to come might break him, Lysaer snatched back the initiative. ‘What next?’

Asandir flung him a harried smile. ‘Let no one ever question that the strengths of s’Ilessid are not yours. The most difficult trial lies ahead.’ And he gestured toward a narrow stone flask that rested amid a dip in the stonework that floored Kieling’s upper battlement.

Lysaer shoved back awareness that his courage had been frayed to undignified, whimpering shreds. Neither the container nor the declivity where it rested had existed previously. Its cylinder seemed wrought from the same grained jasper that framed Kieling’s fortifications.

‘Yes, the vessel to imprison Desh-thiere was cut from the rock of this tower,’ said Asandir in unprompted explanation. ‘Its wards were patterned from Paravian bindings, and there lies the heart of our challenge. The Mistwraith is self-aware enough to recognize its peril. We can expect a bitter fight to send it into final captivity.’

Arithon offered no comment. Given his trained grasp of his gift, his quiet gave rise to trepidation. Lysaer hugged his arms across his chest. If he thought, if he hesitated, he could not in cold sanity continue. Dread sapped the dregs of his nerve. Raised to inflexible duty, he had learned at his father’s knee that a king must always act selflessly. The needs of land and people must come first. If at heart he was human, and terrified, the justice that ruled the s’Ilessid royal line now imprisoned his conscience like shackles. Lysaer raised hands that he wished were not trembling. From the core of him that was prince, and steadfast, he let go control and self-preservation and surrendered himself wholly to his gift.

The raised light stung him in answer, as though his flesh balked at a talent that demanded too much. The eerie dark eclipsed time sense. It could be afternoon, or well past sundown; or days beyond the pall of the world’s end. The louring smoke-faces that comprised the Mistwraith veiled the tower, impenetrably dense with roused evil.

‘Try now,’ urged Asandir. ‘You’ll get no better chance. When your strength is gone, Desh-thiere will stay free inside Kieling. Ath help us all if that happens, for the flask and its wards of confinement cannot be locked into stability until we complete the final seal.’

Touched to quick anger that yet another personal frailty jeopardized this dire expedient, Lysaer forced speech. ‘Brother, are you ready?’

For reply, Arithon wrought shadow. It sprang from his hands like a net, laced, Lysaer could see, with fine-patterned rune chains and sigils. Together the Master and Luhaine entwined spellcraft to augment their assault against the mist.

Desh-thiere churned into recoil like steam dashed against black ice. Its wraiths lashed virulently back. Even as Lysaer kindled light, the demonic aspects embodied by the fog writhed and twisted, tearing and swirling around him. Their touch stung his skin as if corrosive, and each gust felt edged with slivered glass.

‘Now!’ Arithon shouted.

And Lysaer struck, his light a goad to impel the accursed fog down a gauntlet of shadow toward the flask. As glare scoured his sight, he sensed Kharadmon twining spellcraft into his effort. The fog burned, acid-rank, and the faces gnashed hideous teeth. Claws seemed to rake at his person and voices to whisper in his head. Lysaer shivered in a cold sweat.

‘Again!’ shouted Arithon in jagged stress.

Lysaer punished his body to response, though shadows and fog marred his vision, and the churn of the wraiths obscured the flask. Guessing, he slashed out spears of lightning. Faces recoiled, hissing, and Arithon’s warding shadows wavered like curtains in a draught.

Elusive as air, the Mistwraith surged to spiral clear. Lysaer blocked it, panting, his gut turned queasy from the spell-work contributed by Luhaine. He called light, and light again, white sheets that had no flaw for the sinuous wraiths to exploit. And still Desh-thiere’s entities danced free. Spell and shadow hammered what looked like nothing, but resisted like immovable granite. Through the gust-ripped air, and the acrid, burning presences that hedged the neck of the flask, Asandir called encouragement.

‘Keep driving! The endurance of the wraiths is not limitless. In time, they must yield to fatigue.’

Lysaer felt emptied, a brittle husk. The demands of the attack were insatiable. No oath could prepare for a harrowing such as this, that exhausted reserves and cut past, to the uttermost unravelling of spirit. The mists battled viciously back. The lessons of survival imposed by the Red Desert became as a mere inconvenience before the suffering required to fuel his gift.

‘There,’ shouted Asandir. ‘It’s retreating!’

A dull ache suffused Lysaer’s inner being. The light that left his hands seemed force bought in blood, fuelled at cruel cost to mortal flesh. Impersonal no longer, Kharadmon’s presence hammered into him, viciously taking to keep the light coming in torrents.

But Desh-thiere was at last giving way.

Eyes stung by salt, or maybe tears, Lysaer discerned a brightening in the air about the tower. Arithon’s barriers of shadow showed clearly now, skeined about with purple interlace that were spells lent his efforts by Asandir. Into a cone fashioned out of darkness and suspended over the mouth of the flask, Desh-thiere’s coils were chased and burned and funnelled onward by flailing tails of light.

Lysaer had no spark left for exultation, that the Mistwraith verged on defeat. He could only heave air into lungs that felt scorched, and obey the rapacious demand of Kharadmon, who whipped him past endurance to shape light.

The mist-wrought wisps whipped and darted in retreat past the spelled maw of shadow. Lysaer felt drained to his core. Wholly under duress, the summoned force sprang from his hands, screaming through air like rage given over to pure malice. A blinding flash sheared the murk, to lash the possessed mists inside the barriers.

Arithon’s net of shadows wavered in recoil. The outlines blurred, softened, distended, as the trapped vapours inside thrashed to escape. The desperate strength of two mortal men and three Fellowship mages shrank to a pittance before the rage of thousands of meshed entities. Lysaer saw the ward shadows bulge, thin and threaten at a stress-point to crack.

One leak and Desh-thiere would burst loose all over again; only now mortal limitations had reached an irreversible crux. Lysaer understood that a second assault could not be mounted. Played out, undone by weariness, the defenders found themselves beleaguered as Desh-thiere’s uncountable wraiths recoiled at bay and attacked.

To lose grip on the barriers above the flask was to die, and leave Kieling Tower forever defiled.

Arithon knew. Or perhaps the controlling essence of Luhaine compelled his hoarse shout to his half-brother, to fire off another blast of light. Asandir had no encouragement to offer, besieged as he was within coil upon coil of defence seals. Though Lysaer desired with all his heart to respond, he found his spirit beaten listless by the overextended forces of his gift. Only Kharadmon’s iron grip bore him upright and lent him the grace to respond.

Lysaer raised his hands and called light. The effort sheared through him as agony, leaving trembling that would not ease. His hands flared white then dazzled. His palms stung to the rush of raw power as, ruled unequivocally by a sorcerer, he bent to his knees before the flask.

In the moment he lifted his arms, he felt himself released to free choice. Gloved in fiery light, Lysaer fell back on a fibre he never knew he possessed. Driven by need to the sacrifice, he reached to smother the impending break in the shadow wards with the incandescent flesh of his hands.

He touched no moment too soon. The barrier underneath unravelled and the wraiths ripped hungrily through.

Mist met light with a virulent shriek. Unwarded, the illumination his inadequate protection, Lysaer cupped his hands to cap the breach. A raging sting blistered his palms. Then the wraiths were on him, inside him, a legion of needles in his brain.

Light answered, a hedging dazzle of wards thrown up by Kharadmon. Trailing half a beat behind, the sorcerer’s protections failed to guard. Lysaer suffered jumbled impressions that overwhelmed the hurt to his hands. The tumult within him screeled to a whirlwind, scattering memories like debris. Through a ripped up jumble of impressions, he sensed Fellowship spellcraft flash lines of fire through past and future, hounding the Mistwraith’s assault.

The chase re-echoed down every channel of Lysaer’s being. Impressions surged and recoiled, his own mixed with others too alien for comprehension. Past moments snapped out of recall with edged clarity: the Lady of South Isle’s lips on his, and her warm fingers twined in his hair…a night from early childhood when he had sat on the palace battlement with the chancellor’s arm around his waist, as he recited the names of winter stars.

Then, in punishing detail, a later experience wrought of harsh sun and burning winds, and a thirst in his throat like torture.

Dissociated wholly from the present, cut off from joined conflict with the Mistwraith, Lysaer tumbled face-down once again in the scorching sand of the Red Desert. Arithon s’Ffalenn stood over him, blood-streaked features contorted with unforgotten antagonism.

‘Get up!’ the command a lash across a mind pinned by a vice-grip of sorcery. Pain followed, lacerating the last bastion of conscious will.

‘Get up!’

Then himself, a prince born royal, broken and screaming as personal dignity was trampled down and violated by the bastard half-brother who was ever and always Amroth’s enemy.

Lysaer shuddered, racked once again by annihilating hatred for the s’Ffalenn born to mastery of shadows. Only now, in forced reliving, righteous s’Ilessid fury was shared and fanned hotter by a ravening horde of demon spirits.

The pain this time raged redoubled as sorcery flared and sparked in an effort to hack the wraiths away.

The psyche in torment turned to tricks. Spiralled down a tunnel like delirium, Lysaer glimpsed another place, a railed wooden gallery atop an outdoor staircase that overlooked a vast public square. The space between brick-faced halls and mansions was packed with a seething mob; and amid that multitude, one face: of a black-haired enemy who was wholly and unforgivably s’Ffalenn.

The scene folded in on itself and vanished. Fire blistered Lysaer’s hands. He screamed for a torment more terrible still, of sorcery scourging his inner mind. The invading hordes of wraiths shrieked and gibbered inside his skull. Their cries stormed together, tangled then merged to a mindless blast of noise. Raw force answered their wail and a barrage of sparks as thick as scalding rain. The spirits broke and threshed into spinning flight like singed leaves. Lysaer felt sucked under by tides of faintness and confusion.

Voices that were human turned distant, broken, then surged back clearly as a hand strongly steadied his elbow.

‘Well done!’ The tones, Asandir’s; the touch, that of a sorcerer enfleshed. Kharadmon’s enslaving presence had withdrawn.

Lysaer leaned into the support, breathing hard, and dizzied past reach of self-control. His mind felt scoured; empty. Even his gifted sense of light seemed deadened, consumed as flaked ash in a smelter’s pit. Fragments of nightmare flitted through his grasp and faded even as he grasped to recall them. A frustrated urgency remained, disrupted as Asandir spoke again.

‘Lysaer? You’ve been party to a miracle. The Mist-wraith’s captivity is accomplished.’

Belatedly aware he still breathed, that his palms stung with blisters that could heal, Lysaer at last managed speech. ‘It’s bottled?’

For answer, Asandir drew him gently to his feet and forward two stumbling steps.

The narrow jasper cylinder still rested upright on the battlement. Ward-light shimmered over its contours, which now showed no opening at all. The container was permanently sealed seamless, and the sky, cloaked in natural darkness, showed a terrifying tapestry of stars.

They were hard-white, blue, and stinging violet, too bright by half to be mistaken for the heavens of Dascen Elur that Lysaer had known throughout childhood. None of the constellations matched any taught him by the chancellor.

The meaning took a long, sweaty moment to register.

‘Desh-thiere,’ Lysaer croaked. ‘It’s banished.’ His handsome, weary face showed the grace of relief before he crumpled in exhaustion against Asandir.

For a moment the sorcerer who supported him showed an expression of unalloyed sorrow.

Then, roused to purpose, he called brisk command to the Shadow Master braced against the wall. ‘Help me get your brother down to shelter. After that, if you can manage the lower stair, call Dakar in. He’s going to be needed to doctor burns.’

Legacy

The evening after Asandir had ridden south with his discorporate colleagues to better secure the imprisoned Mistwraith, Lysaer sat with his back to the lee of a stone embrasure that once had been favoured as a trysting place by generations of s’Ffalenn princesses. Between hands swathed in bandages and healing unguents rested a flask of telir brandy, left as a courtesy by the sorcerer before his departure.

The contents were already half-consumed.

Disappointed to have slept through the first day of restored sunlight, the s’Ilessid prince applied himself to belated celebration as he pondered Athera’s savagely brilliant constellations, strewn in cloudless splendour overhead. ‘To our victory,’ he toasted and offered the flask to his half-brother, who paced, too quietly for his step to be heard through the ongoing sigh of the winds.

Arithon paused, a dark silhouette against a million points of light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I’d drink instead to the crown that awaits you in Tysan. You’ve fully earned your right to royal privilege.’

The expected note of bitterness was absent from his half-brother’s manner. Taken aback, that the Shadow Master’s quirky nature should relentlessly continue to confound him, Lysaer smiled as Arithon accepted the brandy, took a token swig and gently handed back the flask.

‘You can’t be looking forward to Etarra,’ Lysaer pressed. ‘There’s more on your mind than you let on.’ He touched the bottle to his lips. The telir brandy went down with hardly a burn in the throat; the warmth came later, a glow like a bonfire in the belly. ‘You might feel better if you drank.’

Arithon returned a quiet chuckle. ‘I don’t feel bad. Just monstrously tired. Still.’

‘Still, what?’ The liquor was subtle: it undid barriers as a rake would seduce a prim virgin. When Arithon forbore to respond, Lysaer frowned in mildly euphoric irritation. ‘You’d think, after Desh-thiere’s defeat, the almighty Fellowship of Seven could reward you by finding a replacement hero to shoulder Rathain’s throne in your place.’

Arithon turned smoothly and set his hands on the wall. For a time he, too, seemed absorbed by the stars. ‘They won’t because they can’t, I suspect.’

‘What?’ Lysaer elbowed up from his slouch, setting off a gurgle of sloshed spirits. ‘What do you mean by that? I hate to match sweeping leaps of logic while I’m tipsy.’

A disturbance sounded from inside the roofless chamber that fronted the flagstone terrace. ‘Dakar,’ Arithon observed, though he had not turned to look. ‘Hot on the scent of the brandy, no doubt.’

Sounds of a stumble and a muffled curse from the ruins affirmed his idle supposition.

Yet Lysaer on a binge could be bullishly stubborn; in judgement impaired further by fatigue, he resisted the interruption. ‘You’re implying, friend, that our Fellowship of Seven might not have a choice as to whose head they crown at Etarra?’

Not exasperated, but only lingeringly weary, Arithon said, ‘I think not. My best guess being that, with or without our ancestor’s knowledge, somebody meddled with our family history.’ Silent, perhaps frowning, he tipped his head sidewards in inquiry.

‘Consent was given,’ affirmed Dakar from the depths of the archway that led to the terrace. ‘On behalf of your line, sealed in blood by Torbrand s’Ffalenn, on the day Rathain’s charter was drawn by Ciladis of the Fellowship.’

‘There you are,’ Arithon said in light irony to his half-brother. He accepted the brandy that s’Ilessid diplomacy offered out of instinct to console; after a deep swallow and a sigh he relinquished the flask and ended, ‘I leave you all the joys of the night. I’m certainly too spent for witty company.’

The Shadow Master vanished into the archway, even as the Mad Prophet emerged, wearing an unlikely combination of ragged tunics layered one over another like sediment. These were topped by Asandir’s cloak, the silver-banded hem of which dragged the flagstones around Dakar’s stocky ankles.

Lysaer studied the Mad Prophet’s choice of wardrobe with raised eyebrows, while Dakar, vociferously defensive, slouched against the wall that Arithon had lately vacated. ‘I’m getting a cold,’ he said, in excuse for the purloined cloak.

Since the timbre of Dakar’s voice held no sign of a stuffy head, Lysaer sensed a lecture coming on the effectiveness of telir brandy as a medicine for pending coughs. He forestalled the diatribe by offering the flask, and stuck like a terrier to his topic. ‘What did Arithon mean, and what consent did his ancestor give at the writing of Rathain’s charter?’

Caught in mid-swallow, Dakar choked. He recovered himself, began afresh and sucked at the flask until forced to stop and gasp for air. Then he sniffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘Obviously not.’ Too bone-tired for finesse, Lysaer hooked the brandy bottle back. He regarded Dakar’s spaniel eyes and said equably, ‘I need not inquire, if that were true.’

Dakar started to blot his dribbled chin with the cloak hem, then recalled the garment’s true owner in time to use his sleeve cuff for the purpose. ‘Damn and damn,’ he said softly.

‘Once for the brandy, which I won’t share unless you speak,’ Lysaer surmised. ‘The other for the trouble you’ll have earned, when Asandir discovers you’ve borrowed his best cloak without leave.’

‘All right.’ Dakar shrugged in resignation. ‘The royal bloodlines are irreplaceable, as Arithon already guessed.’

‘Due to prophecy?’ Lysaer swished the flask suggestively.

‘No.’ Peevish, Dakar gazed fixedly on the brandy. ‘The Fellowship chose three men and two women to found Athera’s royal lines. They were selected, each one, for a dominant trait that would resist corruption and other pressures that power brings to bear on human nature. It is a grave thing to alter or to influence unborn life. Yet that is what the sorcerers did, to ensure fair rule through generations of dynastic succession. They set a geas ward that would fix those chosen virtues in direct line of inheritance. Your ancestor gave them consent, for all the good that does you.’ Here, Dakar’s own bitterness showed, for an apprenticeship that more times than not seemed the result of manipulation.

Always smooth, Lysaer passed over the flask. Information desired from Dakar on the nature of the Fellowship’s workings was invariably touchy to extract. ‘What does that mean for Arithon?’

Brandy vanished down the Mad Prophet’s gullet in prodigious swallows, and this time Asandir’s best cloak did not escape usage as a napkin. ‘Ah well,’ sighed Dakar. ‘It means that our arrogant Master of Shadow can never escape his nature.’