The Curse of the Mistwraith (46 page)

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.