The Curse of the Mistwraith (47 page)

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.