by Janny Wurts
Asandir drew a racking breath and stirred, while Traithe stepped aside and dropped into a chair as though his knees had failed him.
For an interval spanning several minutes, nobody cared to try speech.
Verrain finally pushed upright and made his unsteady way to the hearth to unshield the fire and brew tea. The toxins in the tienelle had left him dehydrated and queasy; spurious starts of vision still snatched through his senses like flares. Tired to his bones, his hypersensitized awareness cringing even from the rub of the grey tom just returned to bask by the settle, the spellbinder struggled for the self-command to weather the withdrawal and transmute the herb's fatal poisons.
Behind him discussion continued, Fellowship voices mazed in grim echoes as comparisons were drawn from their study of the methuri, and the Mistwraith's curse on the princes. Verrain rubbed stinging eyes, unable to quell his ripping shudders as true-sight relived the hideous aberrations the strands had etched into memory. The hissing splatter of boiled over water yanked back his straying thoughts. Cold and sick unto lassitude, he bent to mind the cauldron. He could never regard the monstrosities of Mirthlvain in quite the same fashion again; dangerous as they were, and vicious, still, they deserved his full measure of pity.
The chance that two sons of Athera's royal lines might suffer a similar disfigurement offered horror beyond sane belief.
Braced by hot tea and determination, Verrain reclaimed his chair. He realized with renewed disquiet that the Fellowship prepared another scrying. Though this next divination was simple and harmless, an image drawn from straight recall, Asandir looked hollow-eyed. His craggy profile jutted into hot light as his largeknuckled hands attended the task of striking fresh flame to a candlewick. The wrist Traithe raised to put aside his raven trembled in apprehension.
Even Sethvir seemed on edge. Mantled in tawdry burgundy velvet, his collar caught with hair like snagged fish line, he raised eyes touched to fevered brilliance and regarded each of his colleagues. 'We're caught in a critical moment.' To Asandir, whose part was to draw the scrying, he said obliquely, 'Will the reliving in depth be too much?'
'Ath have mercy, it will become so, if uncertainty leads me to procrastinate.' Asandir's distress was noticed by the cats, who streaked from dim corners to crowd his lap, lace through his ankles, and vie for the chance to offer comfort. His strong hands moved, returning their attentions in rueful, saddened irony. 'Little brothers, I'm truly grateful. But our night's work isn't through yet.'
The sorcerer's words reached triangular pairs of ears and imparted uncanny understanding. As clear in their disdain of spell currents as a chance-met douse in cold water, the cats dashed off in a twitching flinch of back fur, a shaking of paws and scything jerks of offended tails.
Verrain might have chuckled at their haughtiness had the moment been less distressed. Whatever troublesome development was afoot, the sorcerers gave no explanation. Asandir set aside the rusted striker and poised in concerned stillness. While his fierce eyes closed, that alone had witnessed the moment when Desh-thiere's curse claimed its victims, the oddity recurred: this same exhaustive search had been accomplished years since, in the hour the disaster had befallen.
The spellbinder's puzzlement became crushed aside by a rising wave of bright force. Power coalesced, great enough to melt rock or ignite metal like a twig of dry tinder. Over the dusky weave of Traithe's cloak, carved out by will and clean conjury, Asandir's augury reformed the sphere of the candle's fire, to recreate an event six years past when Etarra's teeming thousands had turned out to celebrate the crowning of Rathain's sanctioned prince. . .
Spring sun flooded over the royal banners, streamered in Rathain's colours of silver and green. On a gallery overhanging the city's wide square, above the surge of a multitude, one man's gold hair and fine jewellery flared in caught light as he raised his arms in sudden violence. His words scribed no sound in the window of Asandir's re-conjuring; the instant Desh-thiere's fragmented wraith enacted its possession over Lysaer s'Ilessid, he raised his gift in a lightning-bolt attack against an enemy singled out ...
Despite knowledge that the Mistwraith's vengeance had exploited Lysaer; that its meddling distortion of the justice a benevolent past conjury had grafted into the s'Ilessid royal line had lent it the leverage to wreak ill, nothing could prepare for the naked, wasting passion launched against the Master of Shadow. Racked by a spasm of visceral revulsion, Verrain watched, riveted, as the moment continued to unfold.
The light-bolt sheared on, a fateful, white arc of fire that tore a scream from roiled air. The black-haired victim who was its sure target thrashed to escape, while two terrified, burly merchants held him pinioned at wrists and knees. The sword he might have turned to cut his way free as well had not been in his hand. He ignored his captors' efforts to wrest the blade away. To Arithon s'Ffalenn, all else lost meaning before the attack set against him by his half-brother.
Pinned like a moth to a card by a needle of sick fascination, Verrain saw the crystalline flicker that sheeted through the burn of Lysaer's assault: an unexpected, warning blaze of Paravian spellcraft released by Arithon's heirloom sword. Then the weapon was wrenched away, to fall in mute motion to the pavement.
As Rathain's disarmed prince raised his hand to shape shadow, Sethvir interrupted like the slap of a whip striking flesh, 'Stop it there.'
In control that disallowed pity, Asandir locked the scrying. Like a reflection cold frozen in a mirror; or a jewel spiked through a ravelled plane of darkness, he held a fragment excised out of time.
The result felt as rendingly ghastly as a dying man's drawn out scream. Again, Verrain wondered why the Fellowship sorcerers should distress themselves to launch this irrelevant review.
Arithon s'Ffalenn had tipped his face skyward. Eyes widened to a tourmaline blaze of anguish, he tracked a raven that arrowed in flight above the mob etched motionless in the square. The hand cocked back in the first blooming burst of cast shadow showed his fingers flexed in concentration. The directive to guide the spell's homing was set for Traithe's bird, dispatched at need to find Sethvir. A heartbeat shy of disaster, the prince's concern lay unmasked, not for himself, but for a wasp's nest of ramifications: that if the Fellowship sorcerers went unwarned of this crisis, far more than his own life and destiny were going to fall forfeit in consequence...
'The farsight of s'Ahelas!' Verrain looked up, shocked by the evidence before him. 'No one told me Rathain's prince had inherited the marked gift of his mother's line along with s'Ffalenn compassion.'
'To his sorrow and that of his half-brother also,' Sethvir affirmed in quiet grief. 'Both carry the attributes of two royal families.'
Across the table, embattled by raw recriminations, Traithe sucked a fast breath and shut his eyes. 'Ath's blessed mercy, I should never have lent him my raven.'
'The bird's guidance changed nothing,' Asandir disagreed in jarring firmness. Distanced from emotion by the fearful discipline he needed to stabilize the scrying, he added, 'You'll see as much once the vibration is refined to show a clear imprint of the aura.'
Unhappiness dwelled like a sore point, that such redefinition was required only to match the shortfalls of Verrain and Traithe; or else for some larger, interconnected reason that remained too elusive to place.
Then Sethvir cut in with an adamance to end Verrain's laboured speculation. 'Dare we overlook a single facet? The Mistwraith and its malice are unprecedented. We might need every angle at hand to unkey the riddle of the curse.'
Asandir bowed his head and realigned the augury. Still mazed under influence of the tienelle, Verrain flinched as the image shimmered into a delicate, prismatic fire of patterns. These displayed the character and emotions of Rathain's prince through the unshielded vibrations of his life-force. The outrage of the merchants showed also, a rinsed flare of ruby that fringed the peripheral edges.
But their coarse-textured hatred became discarded like noise before the tight-meshed imprint that was Arithon.
Verrain shuddered, confounded by a warring urge to weep and hold his breath.
The aura of the s'Ffalenn prince sang through the vision in spare and forceful irony, even as Lysaer's must have done through the hour of crisis when Sethvir and Asandir between them had disentangled him from the possession of the wraith that had sealed Desh-thiere's vengeance.
Distaste like sand in his gut, Verrain pushed past grief to see more: through passage to Athera by way of the Red Desert, this prince had acquired the matrix imparted by the Five Centuries Fountain, a structure of riddles and spells built and abandoned by Davien the Betrayer in the years before he raised the insurrection to overtum kingdom rule.
'Fatemaster's mercy.' Verrain expelled a sharp exhalation. 'Both half-brothers came here by way of the Worldsend Gate. Are they equally marked by the Betrayer's enforced longevity? If so, this geas of Desh-thiere's could upset the whole continent through the course of five hundred years!'
Sethvir's hand dropped, warm and steady on the spellbinder's shoulder. 'Save thought for more than despair. Davien's gift of added lifespan might equally lend us grace to achieve the princes' salvation.' But in comfortless fact, his platitude held no certainty.
That moment, driven to straight urgency by some unseen cue, Althain's Warden cried, 'Now! Jump ahead to the moment of the curse.'
The image in the candle-flame unlocked to kaleidoscopic change; and Verrain felt as a man sent to dam back a cataclysm with only a wish and bare hands.
Lysaer's bolt struck.
A scintillant flash bisected the sphere of the vision. Seared from palm to right elbow, Arithon recoiled from worse than scorched flesh. Jabbed and enveloped through the crux of half-formed defences, he opened his mouth to scream as he tasted the measure of his downfall.
And peril incarnate closed over him. Lysaer's killing band of light shimmered and exploded, to unveil the Mistwraith's covert conjury: the bane-ward of the curse, transferred inside an attack no schooled mind had ever thought to suspect.
'Slow the sequence,' Sethvir commanded in a sharpetched whisper.
Verrain jammed his fists against his temples as the brilliance shed away to unveil the stripped armature of the geas, a serried mesh ugly as flung blood, but never random. The spellbinder who shared its ruthless symmetry could wish his own tears could scald and blind him.
'Dharkaron witness,' he managed on a rasped catch of breath. 'The creature baited its binding with Arithon's personal imprint.'
'Lock and key.' Sethvir's affirmation came oddly muffled by distance. 'The bystanders were safe, had we known it.'
Traithe had no comment to offer; and Verrain could only ponder a third time why this scrying should be rewrought in such depth. One glance was enough to establish plain fact: Desh-thiere's curse and the signature pattern which comprised the extinct methuri held only chance similarity. As the Fellowship certainly realized, no further help for their princes could be garnered from Mirthlvain mire's dark history.
The present scrying edged forward. In a hideous play of stopped motion, the spell coils netted their victim. Barbed tendrils flung out like grapples and snagged, to shed pervasive currents throughout the s'Ffalenn prince's being.
His torment, physical and mental, shivered, shocked, and rebounded in a voiceless play of light. Through pain enough to cripple thought, Arithon fought back: in starbursts of mage-fire; in sigils and counterwards knotted and thrashed in harried ink-twists of shadow.
Yet Desh-thiere's malice had been configured to outflank and countermand every turn of his desperate strength.
Verrain saw the clean bars of will wrapped and smothered, the brilliance of purpose starkly crushed. Through the heartbeat while Arithon's self-awareness lay slapped back and stunned, the curse spun insidious transformation.
'Odd, don't you think, that the creature made its incursion a static one,' the spellbinder ventured. 'How much simpler to go the next step and force a degenerative erosion of the spirit.'
Sethvir's mouth thinned amid a bracketing bristle of beard. His uneasiness stayed unvoiced, that he feared such restraint held a purpose. The Mistwraith had set the princes against each other; it had not overtly destroyed them.
That its works could have done so was plain as the vision unreeled.
Verrain combed through the locked snarl of energies, overwhelmed by the evidence that this geas held no opening for reprieve. Leaving the s'Ffalenn personality symmetrical and intact, the bane-spell had meddled in cruel selectivity. Like a spider staked out in a web, it insinuated itself where hurt would be greatest: across will, emotion, and integrity. It waited, a dread vortex that consumed in cumulative subtlety, even as it pressed the incessant urge to battle its chosen nemesis: to kill Lysaer, and no other, a compulsion harnessed in step with life and spirit and consciousness.
The last coil sliced into place. Scarlet trailers bound close as wire, to vanish without trace in the quicksilver haze of the aura. Conclusion shaped only despair: the curse which shackled the half-brothers was a mirrorimage construct that choked envenomed tendrils around every nuance of the victim's being. To cut or disturb the least jointure would trip a flashfire backlash of dissolution.
Flesh would die and spirit be instantly annihilated. The enslavement at face value might seem less damaging, but its depths were more insidious than any distortion inflicted by methuri possession. Limp as old rags from a helplessness the Fellowship must have gauged in advance, Verrain masked his face in his palms. Five centuries was not enough, he thought sadly, to solve a quandary of such reaching proportion.
'Well the curse won't pass to the next generation,' Sethvir offered to ease the spellbinder's despondency. 'Should either prince engender offspring, their heirs will be born unsullied.'
'Small comfort,' Traithe allowed, as he gathered his cloak from the tabletop. His resignation showed divided thoughts; whether to bless the mage training that gave Arithon limited means to resist the bane-spell's directive, or to curse the added peril his schooled talent could present as the conflict renewed, at stakes inevitably more dire.
Made aware by the bound of a cat into his lap that the candle now burned clean of conjury, Verrain welcomed the animal's small warmth against the chills of withdrawal and grief.
Dawn shed a leaden glimmer through the casement. Dulled as wind-beaten linen in its light, Asandir stretched, his move to arise cut short by Sethvir, who exchanged a weighted glance, then bent to recover his satchel.
'You're headed north,' the Warden of Althain said, settled erect with his hands full. 'I'd be obliged if you could deliver this to Arithon when his apprenticeship with the Masterbard ends.'
Asandir's eyes snapped up, keen-edged as steel raised to guardpoint. 'Not so soon!' he exclaimed. Then in brittle capitulation, he reached across the table and relieved Sethvir of the satchel. Once his grip closed over the ties, he knew the list of its contents. 'Nautical charts and Anithael's navigational instruments? Why?'
'Arithon asked for them,' Sethvir replied in painful, unsmiling directness. 'He hoped to hasten Halliron's passage to Shand. But the sea may have to answer a more urgent need, and the letter Lady Maenalle sent as well.'
The grievous implication hung through suspended quiet, that the six years of peace Arithon had bought since the massacre at Strakewood forest, that he had wrested from his fate by denying his half-brother any viable target to strike at, might be threatened well before any means lay at hand to challenge the Mistwraith's fell binding.
Unless and until Kharadmon came back successful from his quest, the hands of the Fellowship remained tied.
Traithe jammed on his hat to mask trepidation. Afflicted by more personal ties to the princes, Asandir pushed back his chair and strode out with a speed that shed draughts and snuffed the spent flicker of the candle. Verrain could only clench his knuckles in cat fur, his throat closed against questions too fearful to ask, and his eyes flooded from what he hoped was flung smoke from the wick that glowed briefly and blinked out.
Disclosure
The irksome price of rushing passage across the continent by means of tapping a power lane was the wrenching disorientation that lingered after arrival. Restored to his tower in Atainia with trouble enough on his mind to threaten a thunderous headache, the Warden of Althain paced. Each step squelched across the scarlet carpet in his bedchamber, soaked since a squall had dumped rain through the casement left ajar in his absence. His thick, furry buskins wicked up the wet and added a smell like damp dog to the mustiness already in the room.
'You know,' a disembodied voice admonished in reedy bass, 'there are quite a lot of books in this tower that are going to flock and mould if you don't amend your poor housekeeping.'
Sethvir stopped short amid puddles and sundry furnishings burdened like a fair stall with clutter. 'Luhaine? You wouldn't leave the Koriani witches unguarded for the simple pleasure of berating me.'
The query raised a slow spin of air in one corner, which rocked a sagged wicker hamper crammed to bursting with cast-off socks. Several woolly toes lolled over the brim, unravelled beyond help of darning; but Sethvir's drifty attentiveness reflected no shame for his negligence.
A moment passed in suspension.
Then, typically sulky, the elusive voice proffered reply. 'After last night's exertions, what need to guard? Just now, the Koriani Senior Circle lie tucked up in quilts, comatose as buds in a hard frost.'
Undaunted by Luhaine's penchant for evasions in flowery language, Sethvir sighed. 'Don't say our ruse went for nothing. Asandir's temper is touchy as if he'd swallowed pins, and though we needed our master spellbinder's help for scrying dead methurien, Verrain need not have been aggrieved by what else transpired last night.'