The Curse of the Mistwraith (52 page)

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.