by Janny Wurts
“The second lane’s left in chaos,” Asandir murmured, eyes squeezed tight shut. The coiled tension in his body did not let go, as if his contact with dense matter, or even the currentless mild air caused him a sourceless pain. “The upset will have to be remedied quickly.”
Between the spin of his unruly senses, he could not ignore the snagging ache of vibration thrown into disharmony. The unbalanced backlash shocked through the earth’s lanes like a damping spill of poison. The black stone which channeled that energy beneath Althain belled in shared dissonance as the wayward, reverse polarity of the grimward strained distortions through the weakened geometry of the wardspells demarking its boundary in Korias. The world’s natural weather would suffer in resonance if the magnetic turbulence was not curbed and sealed separate.
“Never mind.” Sethvir’s murmured assurance pattered echoes off the veined agate floor and glanced in multiplied whispers from the ceiling vaults. “Other hands will correct the imbalance this time. You’re in no shape to do so yourself.”
Asandir felt his senses slip, unraveling on a hurtling plunge toward chaos. He smelled metal and rust. Still dazed by deliverance from the reek of dead bone and charred rock, the dusky fragrance of sagebrush and meadow grass which clung to Sethvir’s robes half unmoored him. The grateful, euphoric dizziness of knowing he was safe threatened his balance worst of all.
“I’m unfit to stand up,” he allowed at last. His words fell away into distance like shot arrows. “You know the problem can’t wait.”
He forced his eyes open. Around him, the tower’s white-marble walls fractured into light. His awareness remained vised in an uncontrolled flood of mage-sight, until thought and vision lost their form like run wax. The enveloping, lapping tingle of lane force strayed from the earth’s tuned chord of identity and degenerated into spats of insensate static. “A magnetic disturbance on that scale is almost certain to—”
“You cannot concern yourself,” Sethvir interrupted. “Not now.”
“I must. Who else can you send?” Unable to separate which suffering was his, and which the ripped pulse of the world’s discord, Asandir belabored the frayed rags of discipline to recoup a sure hold on his faculties.
“Be still!” The Warden’s remonstrance clove his will like jarred iron. “Let me.”
Through the jangled membrane of his skin, Asandir felt Sethvir’s sensitive fingers. Touch came and went with the lightness of moth wings, testing, then mapping the vortices of fusion where his biological body engaged with the more subtle frequencies of spirit. His colleague’s ministrations shored up flagging stamina, soothing with sympathetic infusions of fine energy; even so, Asandir felt the reverberation of each release drill through the marrow of his bones.
“Don’t call Kharadmon.” His strained eyes stayed open. The shocked, widened pupils were rimmed at the edge, the ephemeral, veiled silver of thin ice paned over turbulent water. “Especially now. The star ward must never be left unguarded for an instant.”
“No,” Sethvir agreed. He spun a thought like loomed silk. A circle of mystic seals gleamed above his cupped palms. He blew them to a cloud of indigo and silver, then let their essence purl like poured water over Asandir’s crown, where they sank into the weave of his tangled, dusty hair. “Luhaine will come.”
In a parallel response to that promised reassurance, Asandir sensed a needle of thought align with the pattern underneath him. Traced by that delicate key of vibration, the focus blazed active. Like the dislodged grain of sand which presaged a rockslide, lane forces resounded on Sethvir’s command and sent forth his summons for assistance.
“Fires and light!” Asandir winced. “The Prime Matriarch herself must sit up and take notice of that.”
Sethvir’s concern cracked into a puckish glimmer of devilment. “She’s meant to.” He spread ink-stained hands and quelled his colleague’s move to arise with a shockingly small stir of effort. “Luhaine’s been riding herd on Morriel’s councils since her plot to snatch Arithon came to light. A call sent through earth will bridge her wards fastest. Let go. Rest now. I daresay the world will continue to turn without your hand on its axis.”
Asandir groaned through a dull burn of agony. He never intended to give way. But the coiling smokes of oblivion he grappled stole through his weakened defenses. Darkness slipped in on ghost feet and trampled the glimmering last spark of his protest.
The Warden of Althain rocked back on his heels. Lapped in the warm summer fragrance of herbs, and maroon robes like old, fusty parchment, he drew a long, calming breath. The patience he borrowed from stone itself could no longer stem his sharpened state of anxiety.
“For mercy and the world, we cannot keep on like this.” Eyes shut through the moment he required to steady himself, he thanked every power in creation for Arithon s’Ffalenn’s resolve to renew his offshore search for the Paravians. Each hour that the Shadow Master spent provisioning his brigantine at Innish seeded the potential for another disaster. The Mistwraith’s curse had embedded too deeply since the great war in Vastmark. Lysaer’s grand cause now commanded too widespread an influence, and simple evasions would no longer serve. This time no less than a Fellowship Sorcerer had nearly been lost in the breach.
Again, Sethvir ran distressed fingertips over his colleague’s limp flesh.
Cinder burns had branded livid trails of blisters across Asandir’s craggy features. Couched in cavernous bone, the pinched, closed eyes seemed to battle the drawn veil of sleep.
“You pushed your limit far too dangerously close,” Sethvir admonished the Sorcerer who lay slack at his knees. Shaken by pity, he cupped his hands over cheekbone and jaw. His feather touch traced the lean, corded neck, then trailed over a chest that wore too little flesh over its vaulting of ribs. He paused, repeated his survey, then frowned and moved on, over the abdomen, and down the full length of long legs.
Then he arose and set to work.
Asandir never moved. The chamber beneath Althain seemed a capsule of stillness as Sethvir removed his soft shoes. Through the expedient decision to rechannel lane force as a restorative, the afflicted Sorcerer scarcely seemed to keep breathing.
Head tipped askance, Sethvir weighed his task through the extended spectrum of mage-sight. Refined perception unveiled the streaming cloud of the aura, and the energy knitted in layered octaves of transmission over the skin. Each bandwidth received his remorseless survey.
The damage he mapped made him ache with shared sorrow. A mage of Asandir’s strength and stature should celebrate his existence wrapped in a mantle of pure light. His raiment of spirit was the limitless power of creation, maintained into flawless balance. The axis of his being should shine as a beacon, his shimmering vitality stitched like tamed lightning through the tapestry of sinew beneath. For a Fellowship Sorcerer, self-renewal became reflex. The infinite whole sustained his existence, channeled and tuned to harmonic alignment that flowed with each breath and surged to the rhythm of each heartbeat.
Instead, Sethvir beheld a fabric rubbed threadbare as old muslin. Where the weave should have blazed with energetic life, he saw dull voids, their edges dimmed to a fuzzy, splotched gray, etched like dark tarnish on lead. Where the energy vortices tangled, he reached through his mage-sense, raising the resonance and stroking out blockage. He coaxed each stressed channel, and whispered phrases of compassionate encouragement to the inner will, which would comprehend frequency and sound. No effort was spared. Past the blinds of unconsciousness, Asandir’s senses still functioned. The mind would record, and the body respond, and rally the life force for healing.
Sethvir tuned with his breath, then used specific harmonic tones, released with ritual intent. His ordered precision called sparkling light to bridge and then settle the gapped paths of each stress-torn meridian. Nor were his hands still, all the while. He tapped through resistance, threaded current in bright bands through a body he knew like a brother’s.
Sealed in timeless concentration, his work seemed a moment displaced from
the far-distant past. Throughout their Second Age trials against drake spawn, he had accomplished the same service many times, as Asandir had done likewise for him.
Yet when three hours of meticulous labor failed to seal over the deficit which opened stray gaps in the flux, Sethvir straightened. He sighed and faced the damaging fact that Asandir needed more than rest and quiet. His prolonged manipulation of the entropic forces inside the grimward had shifted the polarities in his body. Those subtle interfaces grown too damaged to clear must be combed back into alignment by magnetics.
Sethvir arose. With remarkable strength for his wiry stature, he grasped Asandir’s slackened wrists and arrayed his muscled frame into line with the north and south axis of the pattern. The large, craftsman’s hands he placed palm upward on the intercepting arcs where the circles for sun, moon, and the twelve mariner’s stars straddled the east and west meridian. He removed the scorched leather of Asandir’s boots, stripped off the soiled hose underneath. Bare heels were arranged on the southernmost angles of the grand hexagon which connected the sixfold arcs of the earth circle.
“Forgive,” he apologized. “The bath that you long for will just have to wait.” Through a monologue of trivia, the Warden of Althain combed the smoke-stained, tangled hair with his fingers. He smoothed the stressed wrinkles from singed leather and cloth, and loosened the ties of laces and corded silk belt.
“Lie easy. You won’t be abandoned,” he whispered, hands flat on Asandir’s forehead.
Then he rose and poured all his worry into haste.
Upstairs in his stillroom, Sethvir scoured his cupboards, fingers flying. He bundled dried leaves of sage and sweetgrass and cedar. Each herb was separately tied in specific laced patterns of dyed string. Returned to the focus, he set his offerings in the sockets of the carved gryphons which crouched in stilled vigil at the compass points. He shaved birch and oak bark from two faggots filched from his woodpile and leaved them into a spill. Then he blew golden runes into the crumbled lumps of copal resin snatched from his jar in the library. When all was laid ready, he faced north. His single, rolling word of command called a spark from the earth’s vibrant consciousness.
For a long-drawn moment, plant fragrances mingled with the old stone of the chamber. Then a seed of white flame arose from the spill and winnowed smoke like living blue silk. Sethvir held the kindled bark aloft. He spoke an appeal, received a permission, then turned east and called a wild spark from the mantle of air, and bid each sconce by Name to ignite.
The stone gryphons crouched, crowned in the south’s cleansing fire.
As if tuned to resonance by ordinary flame, the pattern whispered and bloomed to a coruscation of golden light.
Barefoot, Sethvir walked the pattern’s outer circle. He blew out the wood spill and scribed phrases of runes in a knitted, running line of streamed smoke. Where the written hoop closed, he positioned himself on the key figure, invoked mastery, and stepped his mind’s vibration into attunement with the majestic chord of the third lane.
Again he invoked a release; then he asked a second permission. The pattern sang back, embracing his being through contact with his bare soles and charging the smoke runes to a glowing royal purple. Ringed in bands of unconditional, free conjury, Althain’s Warden spread his arms wide. His blessing and invocation called power from sun, moon, and stars, and raised each grand circle of the focus to capture its counterpart reflection.
One moment, he paused to give thanks. Then he appealed, and received third and final permission, which granted his use of raised power to heal.
In careful stages, he mediated the balance, tamed and down-stepped the whorled vortex of magnetic energy which belted the central axis of the pattern. In spare, precise steps he aligned the subtle currents to match the damaged imprint of Asandir’s aura. His work was meticulous. A misstep would trigger failure, or a backlash to fuse havoc down to the heart-core of the earth. The contact points of entry must be utterly precise, each line mathematically correct. No angle must jar. The ranging harmonics of each thread of power must sing exactly on key, the energy colors of each step in conjury matched to the individual.
Time passed. The patterning built, then glimmered with resonant harmony. Mage-sight revealed the comatose Sorcerer cocooned in a geometric lattice of pure light.
Sethvir squinted through the balefire glare of his handiwork. Made wise through his earth sense, he knew the planet’s energies could heal all that lived under sky, given time to allow their quiet influence.
But to a grievously shorthanded Fellowship, idleness was not an affordable option. As Sethvir completed the last step to fine-tune the outer band of energies, a waft of chill air flapped his robe against the spiked bone of his ankles.
He paused, caught his streaming beard in two tufts, and accorded the invasive breeze a glance like the tart nip of hoarfrost. “You took your sweet time arriving.”
“Well, your summons was thoughtlessly inopportune.” Luhaine huffed into a spin across the chamber. “The Koriani Prime Matriarch’s trouble enough without you upsetting her complacency.”
“She’s just about paralyzed,” Sethvir corrected, while escaped strands of hair slashed his ears, and streamed smoke from the sconces made his eyes water. “She’s been battened in silk quilts and healers since the hour she wakened without the strength to stand up.”
Luhaine disagreed. “Her temper’s a volcano waiting to blow.” Tight, spinning eddies kicked trails through the fug as the spirit whirled again and plowed on in lugubrious pique. “You knew her First Senior’s in detention at Capewell? Yes? Then I scarcely need mention the mischief that’s certain to brew the moment she’s called in to give her formal accounting. You’ll have to agree the next round of intrigue will go all the worse for no watchdog on Morriel then.”
Sethvir braced his feet against Luhaine’s errant tempest, still clutching beard, while his eyes shone the vacant, flat blue of polished turquoise. “Whatever the Koriathain are plotting must wait upon Asandir’s need.”
Luhaine ceased his petulant prowl in the cavernous vicinity of the stairwell. “Very well. A few minutes won’t hurt.”
Sethvir cocked his head, all his faculties disconcertingly aligned on the present. “When you left,” he said, concise, “Morriel was teaching a green initiate the selective process for expunging the dross of an unwanted vibration without detuning a quartz-crystal matrix.”
Luhaine was not mollified. “Which tidbit happens to bear directly on why Asandir needs assistance at all.” In a blasting, crisp sibilance of arctic air, he exploded. “You’d think, having blinded the advantage of his mage-sight, the Teir’s’Ffalenn could refrain from twisting the snake’s tail this once!”
Sethvir’s brows rose. He opened clenched hands. The cascade of freed beard spilled down his chest like wool dropped fresh from its carding. “You speak of Prince Arithon’s gracious return of Lirenda’s personal spell crystal?”
“I refer to the specific disharmonies in her quartz that he retuned with compassionate melody, yes.” Luhaine shrank to a pinpoint of cold and lit on the snout of a gargoyle. “Morriel knows we left Dakar to guard him, but a spellbinder’s wards are not an infallible protection.”
To stave off the chill, Sethvir retrieved his bushkins, and frowned at a spot worn long past salvage with a patch. “We are grown too few to manage our burdens, and since we can’t borrow our spellbinder back, you’re going to be gone more than minutes.” He eased his tired footwear over baby pink toes, chin tipped toward the prone form arrayed in the pattern. “Asandir can’t be left to heal unattended. Traithe’s south in Havish, finishing the wards on the coast for King Eldir. Who’s left but me to ride out and rebalance the damaged seal over that grimward?”
A spirit obsessed with tight focus, Luhaine paused at last and seized the gist. “Ath spare us from ruin! How long was Asandir in there?”
Sethvir declined comment. The intricate conjury drawn and sealed through live lane force offered a grim enough testament: Asan
dir’s sacrifice had detained him to the bitter limit of survival. His perilous victory had stabilized the unruly fabric of the haunt’s dream long enough to spare one more foolhardy human from the throes of a fatal predicament. Now came the cruel cost: the grimward’s tangential polarities had drained his regenerative faculties beyond the point where he could recover on his own.
“I couldn’t have done that,” Luhaine said outright. “Never mind the fact I don’t possess a body.” Blunted now to respect like scraped bedrock, he admitted, “Prince Arithon’s life is essential to see the Black Rose Prophecy completed. But to take on such risk for the sake of a misguided captain at arms was an act of softhearted insanity.”
For the penalty extended beyond individual infirmity; the Fellowship’s resources were already taxed beyond salvage. Luhaine could not shoulder the task which faced Sethvir. Stripped of mortal flesh, the fine energies of his spirit would become misaligned and erased upon contact with the raging, dire forces ringed inside the spelled bounds of a grimward.
Too fussy a perfectionist to stay passive in a crisis, the discorporate Sorcerer abandoned his perch on the gargoyle. He drifted over the pattern of the focus, and gave Sethvir’s work his critical inspection. Where he perceived nuance beyond reach of an entity encumbered by flesh, he came and went as a stiletto point of light, fretting a chain of minute adjustments to the energies already laid down. Luhaine concluded on a note of grudging admiration. “What has been gained for that one life, but a dangerous, misguided incentive? You know Sulfin Evend has sworn to become all Lysaer ever asked of a warrior priest.”
“Balance,” Sethvir snapped. His unwonted shortness revealed his own depth of misery as he padded toward the lower stairwell. Under the vaulted archway, he turned, his beard ends and hair wisped into frost cobwebs against the blank shadow beyond. “When Asandir wakens, he’s to rest. Make sure he does if you have to barricade the doors to contain him.”