The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  The moment when the sorcerers raised power came as an icy chill that flowed the length of Dakar’s spine. The strands became suffused with terrible light, as the Fellowship sought futureward and called forth the events that might occur as a result of the works of two princes from Dascen Elur.

  Desh-thiere’s fall became manifest as an explosion of new lines of power. Forests, fields and all of the natural landscape brightened to an ascendence of recovered vigour. The politics of the trade-guilds whipped into kinks of recoil, and a new axis sheared through their sundered town councils: Lysaer, Dakar perceived in wide surprise. The s’Ilessid prince would one day unite the towns, make war to claim all the wildlands for the mayors, and subdue and finally eradicate the barbarian clans. Arithon’s part appeared, not in Rathain, but as a figure of self-contained elegance that flowed from place to place, dedicated wholly to music. Yet the art he created was framed by a backdrop of unprecedented persecution.

  The sorcerers’ unadulterated dismay disrupted the flow of probability. Dakar stole the moment to regroup, then scrambled to keep up as, vehemently fast, the strands unreeled to a new sequence. The Fellowship traced out the only alternative at hand to thwart that turn toward disaster: let the Mistwraith’s hold over sky and sun abide unbroken, while the powers that offered its sole downfall, two princes’ inherited gifts of Light and Shadow, became sundered by their hand to preserve the peace.

  Shocked through change by a rippling cascade of forecasts, the pattern hardened. The motif that represented the Paravians dimmed to invisibility, then vanished away into darkness.

  The spell froze. Stunned shock passed between the sorcerers; the impact of their collective dismay threatened to stop Dakar’s breath.

  The disappearance of the old races had been sorrow enough to endure: the potential for their irrevocable extinction became as a tear in the fabric of Ath’s creation, an insupportable loss to any who had known their living presence. Although Dakar had been just a boy when the last of the creatures had vanished, childhood memories of one encounter had left him marked for life. Tears ran unchecked down his face.

  That such shining beauty should pass beyond memory into legend could not be borne. Distinct from his own experience, Dakar shared poignant memories from the sorcerers; and the one that cut deepest was that of the solstice dance under starlight in the vale of Caith-al-Caen. The blighted patch of dark amid the strands, that had personified the penultimate grace, warned of a harm beyond healing.

  ‘So much for allowing events to run their course, untouched,’ snapped a thought from Traithe across silence.

  As one, the Fellowship sorcerers rallied crushed hopes. Devastated by necessity, grimly wedded to purpose, they recast an alternative sequence they had earlier hoped to avoid. The strands flickered, interlaced, clean curves and sharp angles reformed to show a coronation at the trade city of Etarra. Charged by the Fellowship to accept Rathain’s crown, Arithon’s line bloomed into a jagged nexus of anguish, that peaked and peaked repeatedly, yet endured; and still the axis of Lysaer’s power roused the townborn to war. A great schism tore the width of the continent, with strife predominant. Yet the cipher that reflected Paravian survival glimmered on wanly, preserved.

  Sethvir’s observation cut between. ‘Desh-thiere. The Mistwraith itself lies at the root of this.’ He need not belabour his frustration that the entity inflicted upon Athera by the worlds beyond South Gate could not be directly tracked: as a thing un-Named and foreign in origin, it had no signature energy that could be set into the pattern. The strands could only reflect its effects. As the sorcerers refocused their resolve, Traithe’s face showed a drawn look of anguish.

  Again the pattern flowed into change, with discord harrowing all order. Futures in their myriad thousands described a legacy of battle and bloodshed. Dakar stared at violence until his eyes burned, and Kharadmon’s image became partially transparent with negligence. The strands flicked and interwove above the velvet, their motion unbroken but for the split-second needed by the Fellowship to assess the impact of each destiny. And still the patterns forecast war. The room grew stale with pipe smoke. Beyond the window, night gave way to hazy dawn, while the sorcerers pursued cascading trains of circumstance, unsatisfied. Their persistence unveiled no solution. The strands unravelled over and over into strife. Thwarted in their search for a peaceful expedient, the Fellowship sought answer in the far-distant future. Despite the expanded awareness of the tienelle, Dakar was left hopelessly behind.

  Midday washed the chamber in dull grey before the strands stilled, freezing to a last blazing pattern that faded away like after-image. Sethvir raised eyes reddened from smoke haze. Kharadmon’s colouring was dimmer and Luhaine had lost detail. No face present escaped the impact of the quandary spelled out in the strands. Dakar tapped ash from his pipe into the lid of the tienelle canister, and as though roused by the sound, the Warden of Althain spoke.

  ‘Never in memory have the patterns converged so strongly to a path of alternatives this narrow. We are forced to unpleasant choices.’

  The strands foretold, unequivocally, that Lysaer and Arithon would oppose, with full and bitter consequences. To strip them of their inborn powers as a deterrent in all cases yielded Desh-thiere’s continued dominance. That in itself promised changes in natural order, none of them to the good; but to deny the vanished Paravians a return to natural sunlight was to take the role of executioner. Men might engender war and suffering, but over the course of ages, even fanatical hatreds must fade. To act for immediate peace was to seal the extinction of a mystery beyond mortal means to restore.

  ‘If we only knew where they had fled, we might shelter them,’ Traithe said on a clear note of anguish.

  ‘Desh-thiere caused their disappearance from the continent,’ Luhaine pointed out. ‘If the old races allow themselves to be found at all, the Mistwraith’s fall must come first.’

  The last avenue of debate became Arithon’s royal inheritance. No longer able to follow nuance, Dakar hunched in a stupor in his chair. His head was beginning to pound and his stomach tightened with the first unpleasant symptoms of tienelle withdrawal. Through a haze of mounting discomfort, he gathered the Fellowship inclined toward freeing Arithon from obligation to Rathain’s throne. If schism between the half-brothers must occur, best the powers of sovereignty were not involved. Dakar lost the thread of concentration. Words whirled in and out of his pain-laced thoughts, unheeded. Hounded by rising nausea and dripping poisoned sweat, he knew he should rise and find drinking water. His mouth was bitter with the burnt taste of tienelle; his awareness rolled like a ship on oily billows, jumbled and buffeted by after-visions. No mage in the chamber was more surprised than he when the name of the outcast sorcerer whose works had engendered the rebellion fell through his thoughts like a stone.

  Davien.

  Dakar shoved straight as his gummy, clogged perception broke before a cold wave of prescience and prophecy claimed his tongue. Though churning sickness tugged at his gut, his words fell in solemn clarity on a sudden, arrested silence.

  ‘Davien the Betrayer shall hear no reason, nor bow to the Law of the Major Balance; neither shall the Fellowship be restored to Seven until the Black Rose grows wild in the vales of Daon Ramon.’

  ‘Black Rose!’ Sethvir shot upright, intent as a hunting falcon. ‘But none exists.’

  ‘There will be one,’ Dakar gasped, slammed by a second precognizance that blazed through him like lightning etched across darkness. ‘The briar will take root on the day that Arithon s’Ffalenn embraces kingship.’

  A dismayed round of glances crossed the table; for the strands had not deviated on one point: that if Arithon were left to free will, he would live and die as a bard. Only under duress would he accept the sovereignty of Rathain, and not even then with sincerity.

  ‘Arithon’s freedom must be sacrificed,’ Traithe said. ‘The choice is a foregone conclusion.’

  That moment, amid strained and unsettled apprehension shared between Fellowship
sorcerers, Dakar gave way to the sickness brought on by the tienelle. Doubled over with dry heaves, he all but tumbled from his chair. By the time his spasms eased, he retained no memory of the prophecy, and confronted by disappointment at every turn he managed a dogged apology before illness rendered him speechless.

  Unlikeliest of benefactors, it was Kharadmon who moved to the Mad Prophet’s side and eased his suffering. As Asandir ushered his ailing apprentice downstairs to bed, the remaining sorcerers grappled with the new prophecy like starving dogs thrown a marrowbone. The judgement and exile of Davien had been their most tragic expedient, and the disappearance of their seventh colleague, Ciladis, in his search for the Paravians had become their most mourned loss. The prophecy entangled with Dakar’s Black Rose offered the first tangible hope that the reverses that had disrupted the Third Age might one day be righted.

  Traithe, least likely advocate of individual sacrifice, had spoken rightly. Even without the fates of the two absent sorcerers thrown into jeopardy, the loss of the old races could not be risked. By the time Asandir had returned from seeing Dakar safely settled, several distasteful resolutions had become final.

  For the sake of Paravian survival the princes who held Desh-thiere’s bane between them would use their gifts to restore sunlight, regardless of the wars to follow; and Arithon would be crowned High King of Rathain at the trade city of Etarra, to open the channel of probability that gave rise to Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy.

  There remained only the task of setting safeguards, where such could be done, to limit the scope of the damage. If Lysaer went on to claim sovereignty in Tysan, he would act without Fellowship sanction. The townsmen’s loyalty he might win on his own, but that of the clans must be held in reserve, leaving Tysan’s steward, Maenalle, free to safeguard her people as she could. And if the fabric of four realms was to be torn apart by conflict, the fifth must be granted firm leadership.

  ‘The heir to Havish must be brought out of hiding,’ said Sethvir. ‘He will need to be educated, for the day he comes of age, we must see him securely on his throne.’ In one of the kingdoms, at least, town factions and barbarian clans would not be abandoned to disunity.

  Little else was exchanged in speech after that, as the sorcerers divided up the tasks at hand. Bleak as the future might become, the land would not be thrown wholesale to the bloodshed interlinked with Desh-thiere’s defeat.

  The Fellowship concluded their conference well past mid-afternoon. Kharadmon was first to depart, his wild laugh and ready smile fading through the casement as he swept south on the desert breeze. Luhaine’s image dissolved in pursuit, a score left to settle concerning his colleague’s cavalier boasts.

  Traithe shoved to his feet. His limp pronounced by exhaustion, he descended the stair to guard Dakar through tienelle withdrawal and to offer Lysaer when he woke the hospitality due to a prince.

  Left alone with Asandir, Sethvir stood by the opened casement, his eyes veiled in contemplation. The tea mugs he had belatedly arisen to recover stayed empty as he said, ‘We have an immediate problem. The crown jewels of Rathain.’

  Asandir sighed. ‘I’d not forgotten.’

  The gems included in the heritage of past high kings had been cut by the Paravian artisans of Imarn Adaer, each one a power focus tuned to respond to the descendants of their respective royal lines. But the master’s training given Arithon by Dascen Elur’s mages already enabled his finer perceptions; augmented by the crown jewels’ attributes, his gifts could potentially become unmanageable.

  The focusing properties of the stones would not be annulled by re-cutting; future generations would need them, even had the artisans of Imarn Adaer not been long dead, their knowledge gone to dust in the desecration brought by the Curse of Mearth. Sethvir and Asandir instead sought a ward to conceal the stones’ arcane nature from the s’Ffalenn prince who must hold them for the duration of his reign.

  The project took the remainder of the day.

  Dripping sweat, and tinged greenish by reflections thrown off an untidy hoard of cut emeralds, the two sorcerers locked glances as they emerged from combined trance.

  ‘Ath Creator,’ the Warden of Althain murmured in disgruntled vehemence. ‘You realize the Teir’s’Ffalenn and his confoundedly sensitive perception has brought us one damnable fix?’

  Asandir raked silver hair from his temples. ‘Today I don’t need the reminder. I only hope we set our safeguards deep enough.’

  Sethvir arose and scooped the gems into a battered coffer. ‘Take no chances. Set a geas to avert scrutiny when Arithon first sets hand to the royal regalia. If I’m any judge, he’ll notice the resonance of the wards.’

  ‘I had that hunch,’ Asandir confessed. ‘And I’m still concerned. The man has little vanity. Emeralds by themselves won’t impress him, and would you want to try and convince him that his jewellery shouldn’t be traded for something inherently more practical?’

  Sethvir laughed. ‘I should have guessed, when we decided the latent s’Ahelas talents should be trained, that Princess Dari’s descendants might cause us a fearful set of headaches. She argued the entire time I tutored her.’ The Warden of Althain planted the coffer with its irreplaceable contents amid a clutter of unshelved books, then revived the dropped thread of inquiry. ‘I’d much rather brew tea, and challenge you to chess, than persuade any s’Ffalenn prince against his natural inclinations.’

  Artifacts

  Lysaer burrowed out of a comfortable muddle of bedclothes to find himself in a chamber lamplit against the gloom of falling dusk. The air smelled of sealing wax and parchment. Relieved to be free of open-air campsites and barbarian hospitality, he took in the scholarly clutter of books and pens, the scarlet carpet and the mismatched array of fine furnishings, and decided the pallet where he lay must be inside Althain Tower. The room was not deserted.

  By the settle sat a black-clad stranger, his hands busy with awl and waxed thread, mending a broken bridle. A raven perched on his shoulder swung its wedge-shaped head at Lysaer’s movement, ruffled knife-edged feathers and fixed the prince with a gaze of bead-bright intelligence. As though given warning by a sentry, the man stopped stitching and looked up.

  Lysaer’s breath caught.

  The stranger’s eyes might be soft brown, and his clipped hair silvered with age, but the implacable stamp to his features and the profound stillness about his presence unmistakably marked him as a Fellowship sorcerer. ‘You must be famished,’ he opened kindly. ‘My name is Traithe, and in Sethvir’s stead, I welcome you to Althain Tower.’

  Lysaer forced his fingers to release their cramped grip on the blankets. ‘How long have I been here?’

  The raven cocked its head; Traithe knotted his last stitch like a farm wife and nipped off the thread with his teeth. ‘Since yesterday evening.’ At Lysaer’s raised brows, he added blandly, ‘You were very tired.’

  Discomfited by more than his saddle sores, Lysaer surveyed the form of his half-brother, sprawled on the adjacent pallet in unprecedented and oblivious sleep. Struck that Arithon’s pose seemed less than restful – more a jumble of limbs folded like knucklebones in a quilt – Lysaer turned away. This once determined to keep the edge and not feel pressured to keep pace with his half-brother’s fast perceptions and trained awareness of mages, he slipped clear of the covers and hooked his breeches and shirt from a nearby chair. He dressed with princely unselfconsciousness, inured to the lack of privacy imposed by the lifelong attentions of servants.

  The sorcerer in black was too tactful to seem curious in any case. He moved like a swordsman bothered by old injuries as he pushed aside his mending, shed his raven in an indignant flurry of wings onto the settle and rose to build up the fire. As disturbed embers flared to sudden flame, Lysaer glimpsed palms and wrists ridged with scars that would have left a lesser man crippled.

  Unable to picture the scope of a calamity that could harm a Fellowship sorcerer, the prince averted his glance and set about lacing his sleeve cuffs. His awkwardness as a
lways caused the ties to knot. Embarrassed that even so simple an act as dressing could still make him ache for the comforts lost with exile, he jerked at the snarl. Rather than succumb to expletives, he wondered if any place existed in this Ath-forsaken land where there was gaiety, laughter, and dancing in streets not guarded by sentries. He missed the gentle company of women, and his betrothed left beyond Worldsend most of all. Pride forbade the weakness of recriminations. Still, mastering self-pity took all the effort of a difficult sword form, or the thorniest problem of state ever assigned to his charge as royal heir.

  When the contrary laces were set straight, the prince had recovered his poise. He looked up to find Traithe finished tending the fire. Still as shadow, limned in that indefinable mystery that clung to spirits of power, the sorcerer regarded him intently. His features were less chiselled than marred by hard usage to wrinkles like cracks in fine crystal. Laugh-lines remained, intertwined through others cut by sorrow. As if moved by caprice, Traithe said, ‘We’re not all relentless taskmasters like Asandir, you know.’ He flipped the poker back on its hook with a playful flourish and smiled.

  Startled to reckless impulse, Lysaer said, ‘Prove that.’

  ‘I should have expected you’d ask.’ Traithe turned back, shamefaced as a dog called down for misconduct. ‘The sorcerer to answer should be Kharadmon. But he left this morning, feckless ghost that he is. As fool, I’d make a sorry replacement.’ Betrayed by a weariness that had not at first been apparent, Traithe settled back into his chair. A snap of his fingers invited the raven back to its accustomed perch on his shoulder where, out of habit, he raised a crooked knuckle and stroked its breast. ‘We could mend bridles,’ he suggested hopefully. ‘Enough worn ones are strewn about, though Ath only knows where Sethvir collects them. Unless Asandir or I happen by, the stables here shelter only mice.’