The Curse of the Mistwraith (43 page)

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.’