by Janny Wurts
In the cruel, biting cold, he dismounted. Around him, the night was a maelstrom of sleet that rattled like glass through bare branches. Sight-blind in the storm, by mage-sense alone he knew he stood inside the cleared circle of the Isaer focus. His booted feet slid on the icy black agate. The Paravian runes that marked each ring of power lay buried in leaves, storm glazed to a crust like old varnish. Braced against his horse's shoulder to stay upright, Asandir reached the focal point at the center by touch. There he stopped, breathing hard, his face like pinched clay as he murmured a cantrip of appeal to the earth.
Soil and stone received his request. Asandir bent his head, patient in gratitude, while the ringing vibration of the lane force played through him and rinsed the fierce ache of travel from nerve and muscle and bone.
In time, he stirred, stroked sure hands over the stallion's shivering flesh. Healing moved with his touch. The creature's laboring flanks eased and settled, and the fevered heat left its sinews. Asandir blew on his hands and loosened the girth, then removed bit and bridle. He looped the tack securely through the leather of a run-up stirrup iron.
The contact he expected from Sethvir came then, soundless and subtle as a shaft of new moonlight. 'Asandir? There's still hope. Fionn Areth's held prisoner in Jaelot's dungeon, pending trial and due process. The enchantress Elaira is with him.'
Exposed to the flaying chill of the gale, Asandir shut his eyes. 'Thank Ath for that blessing. The woman at least will fight to the last to thwart the mayor's injustice.'
When a flood of sent warmth from Sethvir replaced words, Asandir flexed tired shoulders and straightened under the wet weight of his mantle. 'There's bad news as well. What aren't you telling me?'
A sigh from Sethvir, so slight the sound played like the breath of a ghost through the mind. 'Lysaer's left Erdane early. One of Raiett's agents sighted Arithon's double in Daenfal, and sent word into Tysan by fast post.'
Alone with the impact of that ugly news, Asandir flicked packed ice from his collar. 'You feel that's worrisome?' Without using his aggressive command of deep sorceries, he himself could not have crossed Orlan Pass once the blizzards set in for the winter.
Leagues distant, Sethvir tracked the query without effort. 'Lysaer didn't try the way through the mountains. He went north by land on fast horses with only ten officers in attendance. Another messenger took the road across the flats to Miralt Head. He carried royal orders to dispatch a galley in swift passage along the north coast. The vessel will make rendezvous with the Prince of the Light in four nights and bear his party across the cove narrows to Atainia.'
Asandir frowned, while the wind flicked loose hair against his numbed cheek. "That's still three hundred leagues distant from Jaelot.' Given unseasonal fine weather and luck, the prince's train could not reach Rathain's shores earlier than the next fortnight; whereas, plying lane forces and the power focus sited in the feast hall of the mayor's palace, Asandir expected to reach that far city within the hour of midnight. 'You can't think I'll need more than a day to spirit a captive boy from a dungeon.'
Again, that shattering, fractional pause. Asandir's mouth thinned to a taut line. He waited, bone still with the certainty he had not yet been told the worst. 'Where's Arithon?' he asked suddenly, his question bladed steel through the frigid, pelting darkness. 'He can't have returned to the continent for this.'
'He'll put ashore at Sanpashir by morning, likewise a long way from jaelot,' Sethvir shot back in rife exasperation. A thoughtful exchange showed how Morriel Prime had manipulated Dakar to a dream of prescient clairvoyance. 'As you see, there's no threat. As long as the mayor's prisoner can be rescued inside of the next twelve hours.'
The stud chose that moment to shake out its mane. Doused by loose ice and a spray of chill water, Asandir wiped streaming eyes. Acerbic now with concern and impatience, he fired point-blank at the source of his colleague's evasion. 'What ill under sky could defer me?'
'Morriel Prime and a circle of enchantresses.' When cornered, Sethvir could deliver bad news like a hammerblow into bedrock. 'She's sitting in the Skyshiels, poised over a quartz vein with her Waystone and twelve trained seniors.'
'Dharkaron's bleak vengeance!' Asandir burst out, blistered to rare exasperation. 'If she raises such powers to thwart me, she must know she risks tearing a rift of disharmony clear through the aura of the planet.'
'She's frail and she's desperate,' Sethvir allowed. 'Are you certain you wish to attempt this?'
A motionless imprint in the rank, sleeting darkness, Asandir gave back an unbending, dire silence. No need to set words to uncomfortable facts. With Arithon drawn back to the coast at Sanpashir, no doubt remained that Fionn Areth's imprisonment had been planned as the bait for a trap.
'Take extreme care in your transfer from Isaer into Jaelot,' Sethvir returned, and no more.
Chills changed to a grue that chased down Asandir's spine like a prickling spill of loose needles. 'Be very certain I will.'
In the peaks of the Skyshiels far to the east, winter stars shone like strung ice chips above summit ridges of stone. Thin cloud rode the heights, feathered to ribbons where the teeth of the scarps combed the frigid track of the winds. The gold finials capping the corner posts of Morriel Prime's palanquin speared upright like an adept's staves set as sentinel to the four directions. Despite the bitter cold of high altitude, the frame stood stripped of its layered velvet hangings. The order's twelve most disciplined seniors sat arrayed in a surrounding circle.
Attended by two high-ranking seers, Morriel Prime watched the turn of the stars as the hour to the west approached midnight.
In her papery quaver, she stated, 'Not long to wait now.'
Folded cross-legged, the seeress to her left replied from the dreamy depths of schooled trance. 'Lane-watcher at Deal sends you word that the flux of the third lane is shifted. The signature chord is a Fellowship working. As you guessed, Asandir draws on magnetic forces to arrange for a northbound transfer.'
'He has circled his horse,' the right-hand seeress chimed in, hands cupped to the sphere of clear quartz she employed to capture clairvoyant vision. 'I see the veil as the power's engaged. He's sent his black stud on to Althain Tower to receive Sethvir's care in his absence.'
A rustle of silk in the glass-edged cold, then a tinge of lavender breathed through the pitch scent of spruce; Morriel thrust a hand from her quilts and stroked the faceted sphere cradled upon the silver tripod before her. The three legs extended through an opened trapdoor in the palanquin's floor, the spikes of each foot grounded into the stone of the mountain by gold wire, and chains of ciphers and forced spells. Their imprint had scarred the face of the stone, rune and seal branded inside a slagged ring of obsidian.
Alive to the summoning touch of the Prime, the Great Waystone threw off a flared spark of violet in response to her signal of readiness. 'As I thought,' Morriel said. 'The fool will not balk in the face of adversity. He'll use the change in the magnetic tides at midnight to effect his own transfer across latitude. He will dare to meddle in Jaelot, despite Sethvir's warning that we stand prepared to obstruct him.'
She snapped bone-thin fingers. 'At Isaer, the hour of opportunity draws nigh. Enchantresses, assume trance and make ready.'
Bared to the elemental dark of the night, the poised circle of seniors stirred beneath their wool cloaks. They joined hands like linked wax in the pallid half-light of the moon's late-rising quarter. Strong discipline blinded. Not one of their number sensed Morriel's masked smile of elated anticipation. In oathbound subservience, each woman surrendered her power and awareness into the Waystone's glittering dark heart.
* * *
Alone amid silvery needles of sleet, Asandir mopped sweating temples. The risks he would shoulder within the next seconds were grave enough to cause even a mage of his stature second thoughts. Not the sure grounding of earth beneath his feet, nor the steady well of possibility scribed in the dance of elemental air could lend him the boon of reassurance. The steps he must tread cr
ossed a field of rank thorn, barbed and coiled with unseen peril.
He blew out a plume of white breath in trepidation, aware as he stood that the hour had arrived to act or stand down in defeat. High above the disruptions of sleet and tempest, the winter stars turned untroubled in their slow-spinning arc. Sun crossed the meridian a hemisphere away, engaging the lane flux at midnight. Feet spanning the central focus at Isaer, Asandir linked his hands at his breast. He pulled another breath of ice-ridden air and held, while the life energies inside his quickened flesh coursed into harmonic equilibrium. Eyes closed, he stilled thought, listening with mage-sight. He engaged the pent strictures of discipline until his active awareness encompassed the outermost edge of his aura. The closed rime of stasis appeared as a flame in his mind, to seal a ward of protection around body and spirit through the chaotic forces of transit.
Next he called on the infinite, streaming chord of prime power to transmute the vibration of matter. His physical being shimmered and dissolved, raised upward into a patterned resonance of pure energy. That polarized state held peril incarnate. Danger stalked in malevolent forms, shadows born of thought and hatred given spin by the mass consciousness of humanity. Here also lurked temptations to tear unmoored spirit from flesh. Poised at the crux of duality, where the veil demarked the soaring edge of high mystery, awareness could become swept away on the spiraling dance of forces strung in laddered waves between polarities. Here, in the shimmering rainbow of energies, all possibilities existed: the full gamut beckoned the unfettered mind, from the dance of lost unicorns to the white fires of dragons, which in Athera's distant past had remolded the face of creation.
For a spirit whose service extended through Ages, with no end yet in sight, the call tugged weary nerves like sweet ecstasy. Ever the desire lured like a siren, to unfold in joy into light and abjure forever the trials and pains borne in the burdensome guise of dense flesh.
Asandir resisted, obdurate; the binding laid down with the gift of his wisdom could not be so lightly cast off. Steadfastly grim as a scarp of seamed granite, he held, while the midnight change in the lane field swept its cascading current, north to south. Fixed iron in pursuit of his dedicated purpose, the Sorcerer mastered that essence. He launched through its charge, at one with the spiraling tide of the earth flux that clothed the night face of Athera. One fractional second, that surge of suspension threaded the arc of creation. Asandir retuned the harmonic vibrations of his essence in one deft leap of trained vision. Upstepped to merge with the planet's magnetic field, he passed in a contained band of static from third lane to fourth, and thence, to the fifth lane, which devolved through the vortex at the great power focus at Ithamon.
There, the Sorcerer paused a split second. A ghost frame of intent became all that preserved the imprinted signature of his body. Spirit and awareness remained immersed in the tingling, raw band of the lane flux. Prepared for trouble as he crossed into the sixth lane, he would venture no farther without safeguards.
The ruin where past s'Ffalenn high kings had ruled hung still and deserted under starlight. Hoarfrost limned a sheen like dulled quicksilver off broken facings of rock, except where the four standing towers still rose, pristine and whole against sky. The Paravian-wrought wards which knit their disparate stone into one seamless defense fanned like a cry of pure light through the weave of solid creation. Aware of that strength as an undying harmony touched through the ephemeral fabric of his being, Asandir cast an anchor of binding deep into earth at the site. Should aught go amiss, he could link with that cipher and access those powers still active in the heart of Ithamon's shattered citadel.
One final time, he retuned his vibration, this stage to match the great power circle inset in the feast hall of Jaelot's palace of state. Even as his essence shifted alignment to close the last leg of his journey, he sensed a disharmony impelled through the lane's magnetic flux.
Asandir pinpointed the source instantaneously.
He had handled the Koriani Great Waystone in the past. One encounter was enough to instill lasting memory of its matrix, the wise energies of amethyst warped by long usage into a trammeled, mad tangle of trapped malice. Though the Koriani Order preserved those ancient imprints as an irreplaceable repository of knowledge, to Fellowship sensibilities the gemstone's enthralled pain framed a cry of cruel offense. Yet the Law of the Major Balance forbade his intervention. Since all the talisman crystals in Koriani service had been brought to Athera from offworld, the compact claimed no jurisdiction.
Poised in vexation, Asandir measured the lane's imbalance. Although earth herself had embraced Sethvir's offered permission to reject any seal of forced mastery imposed through the amethyst's tainted focus, no wakened power of discrimination could deflect an influx of distortion struck through an unshielded quartz vein. Morriel's Waystone had been denied all empowerment to inflict direct conjury upon the land; but as an act of self-will, the old Prime could engage the gemstone and wield her own malice in assault against nature. She and her circle of trained seniors raised a cone of raw force to haze Athera's aura and malign its field of magnetics.
The disruption threatened Asandir's safe passage into the great focus at Jaelot; no surprise. While Koriani magics wrung the lane to random chaos, the Fellowship Sorcerer was stonewalled, unable to rematerialize at the portal inside the mayor's palace.
Exhaustively versed in the harmonic skein of the earth's diversified energies, Asandir picked out the dissonant strand in a second's reflexive survey. The inherited trust of the centaur guardians fell under Fellowship auspices; against willful destruction to Athera herself, the Major Balance demanded no grace of permissions. Free rein was his to unshield dire will and hurl the Waystone's channeled current of interference to harmless dissipation in the salt waves of Eltair Bay.
Few beings might stand in defiance against a Fellowship Sorcerer. On the breath of a whim, whole mountains might walk, or seas flatten to glass sheets of ice. Asandir could rule wind and tide as he chose, or divert the earth's molten core to burst through her crust in white magma. Like the force of blind cataclysm refined to a feather touch, he extended a whisper of power and flicked. The ranging mesh of static sustained through the Waystone spun into recoil, its polarity reforged into an arrow of combed force.
The instant of contact touched off an explosion.
That split second too late, Asandir realized the sixth lane's distortion had been a smoke screen. He could not evade. The torrent of force the Koriani loosed against him snapped closed like the jaws of a trap.
He knew blinding pain, a burning, corrosive attack of disharmony as the conjury lashed his defenses. His long centuries of experience became as driven reflex, to distance the fright and emotion. Torment could be ruled as mere sensory information, cut away from its link to mortality. Asandir was a master mage versed in all keys to the spectrum of existence. From the negative pole of dense-form matter to the exalted realms of pure spirit, his command was absolute, if governed by wisdom into a steel-clad restraint. Against him, the buffet of Koriani conjury should have been as fog and thread before bonfire.
Except that his natural form was in lane flux, translated above the threshold of matter. He dared not close with heavy energies while immersed in a transformed state of higher frequency. The smallest, most subtle attempt to engage adverse forces would open the floodgates to disaster. In unbodied form, the altered vibration of his physical being and the unbinding spells of attack would combine in one shattering burst of annihilation.
Asandir met the reeling onslaught on the knife-edged awareness that his peril was unforgiving of mistakes. Hurled with the focused impetus of the Waystone, strung runes leached his being like flung acid. Sigils of unbinding deranged his perimeter of defenses and threatened his state of pure energy. Each counter-move he engaged unleashed more force against him. Spells tied in chains seemed to magnify and splinter into thousands of needling echoes. Nor was the momentum behind them intelligent. The quartz vein in the Skyshiels thrummed like a sounding bo
ard, magnifying Morriel's attack to exponential proportions.
Against outright dissolution, Asandir knit veils of intent like bright mirrors to spin distorting energies back on themselves.
While static and vertigo sapped his stability, he traced circles to carve small pockets in time. Given a fractional second, as he pinned those vortices stable, he must effect intervention and freeze the catalyzing cascade of events.
Through that heartbeat of bought time, he engaged his full resources. Senses refined far beyond mortal limits let him parcel the impact of each energy sent in assault against him. From his years spent with sly, temperamental old drakes, he identified the forms of dissolution that cast ordered wisdom into void. Other seals recombined in dark resonance to imbalance and bind. Here, he isolated the sigils to seed terror, and there, a spinning entropy which destroyed human will. Other seals played on the fires of addiction, invoked twisted passions and abject despair. Others engendered a spiraling distortion which led to inexorable decay. To spells of leaching ruin, Morriel had linked gyroscopic spirals of diversion. Cantrips to stall thought, and narcotic procrastination; seals of blight to rot flesh into putrefied liquid. Through these, she had knotted tangling mazes to steal reason and shackle the mind into nightmare.
Speed of reflex held the Sorcerer's only salvation, and also his greatest peril should he slip, or miss even one turning through the morass.
Beleaguered as he was, Asandir admired the Prime's ingenuity. The spells cast against him ranged the gamut of spite, a thousand small shards pitched to wound on the chance he could be overwhelmed and outflanked. Almost, he fell prey to the snares in the mesh, cloaked in false trappings to imprison him. Destroy, or maim, or take captive; Morriel had laid ambush for whatever end she could snatch out of reeling confusion.