The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  Amazed at how smoothly he had been set at ease, Lysaer gave back the smile he kept practised for difficult ambassadors. ‘I’m a poor hand with a needle.’

  ‘Any man would be, who’d eaten nearly nothing for a day and a half.’ Traithe pushed back to his feet. He had the build and the balance of a dancer, and the shuffling hesitation in his stride made harsh contrast as he crossed to the doorway. ‘Shall we see what Sethvir has bothered to stock in his pantry?’ He pushed the panel open, and the raven launched off and flew ahead into the torchlit stairwell.

  Lysaer set aside the unbuttered sweetroll he had long since lost interest in eating. Across the narrow, cushioned cranny that Sethvir kept for a supper nook, Traithe elbowed his own crumb-littered plate aside.

  ‘You feel bothered that Arithon should still be asleep,’ he surmised.

  Unsettled enough without having the thoughts in his head voiced outright, Lysaer flinched. His bread knife clashed against the china and startled the raven on the sorcerer’s shoulder to a flurried flap of wings. While Traithe reached up to soothe it, Lysaer looked down and away, anywhere but toward the whitened scars that criss-crossed the sorcerer’s knuckles. The nook might be cozy and the cutlery rich enough for a king’s boards, but the cruciform openings in the walls had originally been cut as arrowslits. The drafts through the openings were icy, the view beyond drab grey. Civilized, sunlit comforts heretofore taken for granted seemed unreachable as marvels in a child’s tale in this world of unending mists and bleak minds schooled to mysteries.

  ‘We’ve been here since nightfall yesterday.’ Princely manners showed a hint of acid as Lysaer challenged, ‘You don’t find it strange that a man should still be abed after twenty-four hours of rest?’ Particularly one like the Master who tended to recoil out of nerves from his blankets at every two point shift in the wind.

  Traithe showed no break in affability as he hissed at the raven which edged down his sleeve toward the table, its sidewards tipped eye greedily fixed on the butter. Careful to turn his disfigurements from the prince’s angle of view, he shoved the candle stand between the bird and temptation. Through haloes of disturbed flamelight, he regarded the s’Ilessid half-brother. ‘Had Arithon been unwell, your concern would be shared by the Fellowship.’

  The black-clad sorcerer volunteered nothing else; but his easy manner invited questions.

  Lysaer gave rein to curiosity. ‘Would you mind telling me what happened?’

  Traithe shrugged. ‘An outbreak of poisonous serpents in the kingdom of Shand took a forceful show of sorcery to eradicate.’

  The last was understatement, Lysaer determined, since the mage’s expression was suddenly inscrutable as his raven’s. Piqued to be left out when momentous matters were afoot, he said, ‘I might have liked to help.’

  ‘Your half-brother was used,’ Traithe stated baldly. ‘His power was channelled from him like wine from a vessel of sacrifice. When he recovers enough to reawaken, he’ll retain no memory of the event.’ Mindful of this prince’s staunch loyalty, the sorcerer added, ‘Arithon volunteered, at the outset.’

  The raven chose that moment to try a furtive sidle toward the butter. Traithe batted it aside without ceremony. Through its outraged croak and the breeze fanned up by its wing beats, he said, ‘Has no one ever thought to school you to understand your birth-given gift of light?’

  Touched on a life-long source of bitterness, Lysaer spoke fast to keep from hitting something. ‘No one considered it necessary.’

  The raven retreated to the top of the door jamb and alit on a gargoyle crownpiece.

  ‘Ah.’ Traithe set his chin on his fist. ‘For a prince in direct line for a crown, such judgement was probably sound. But you’ve been brought here to battle a Mistwraith. That alters the outlook somewhat.’

  But Lysaer worried at his hurt with the persistence of an embedded thorn. ‘Why did Asandir not suggest it?’

  Traithe chuckled. ‘Did you think any one of us is omnipotent? Asandir has Dakar for an apprentice. Teaching that scatterbrain anything would frustrate the patience of bedrock.’ The sorcerer pushed out of the windowseat. ‘I’ve an errand to complete in the storerooms. Perhaps you’d care to come along?’

  Lysaer brightened and stood. ‘I’d welcome the chance.’

  He trailed Traithe through the pantry, while at their backs, the raven swooped to the tabletop, folded wings like a furtive scholar, and hopped on the plates to scavenge crumbs.

  ‘Sethvir lets the butter go rancid in the larder, anyway,’ Traithe confided as he let himself into the stairwell. ‘He thinks eating a bother, but run out of tea and he’s desolate.’

  Not eased to learn that mages seemed heir to human foibles, Lysaer followed his host into the tower’s lower levels. Even without arcane perception, Althain’s starkly plain construction and rough-cut granite bespoke haste and stop-gap desperation.

  The air smelled of books, wet firewood and an indefinable tang left over from spellcraft. Somewhere high above the wind jostled a shutter against its pins. Lysaer found himself wondering whose feet had rubbed the edges from these stairs, and the hands of which crowned rulers had polished the axe-hewn oak rail. He had heard Asandir’s reverence for the old races; yet in this place, under low, vaulted roofbeams blackened by centuries of torch-smoke, there lingered only a forlorn sense of ending. Any past enshrined within Althain seemed faded to desolation and a haunting resonance of perished hope.

  The mist beyond the arrowslits concealed the view that might indicate the storey of the threshold where Traithe finally stopped. He unlatched a crude door and disappeared into total darkness. ‘Use your gift to light your way,’ he suggested to the prince who hesitated at his heels. ‘Sethvir is haphazard about candles, always. I might need a moment to find one.’

  Self-conscious as he had not been while rising from bed stark naked, Lysaer engaged his powers. Not easily, and not without trepidation, he summoned a silvery spark; but if the sorcerer thought his method crude, no comment was given on the matter.

  The chamber revealed by the witch-light was larger than its doorway suggested. Timber racks lined walls that curved into shadow, crates piled in tiers picked out by the glint of hobnail studded leather or brass hasps. The stores reeked of oil and old dust, yet when the sorcerer touched flame to the torch in the wall sconce, the pitch-soaked rags caught and unveiled a clean-swept stone floor and shelving kept clear of cobwebs. The stores had been tended unstintingly, except for labels. Those bales and boxes that were catalogued bore crumbling tags marked in antique script that time had faded illegible.

  Traithe paused in the centre of the chamber, rapt in manner as his raven. ‘I doubt much has changed since the Paravians left.’

  Intrigued beyond awkwardness, Lysaer said, ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Sethvir could have described which of the twenty odd coffers on the third shelf by the north wall, at least.’ Stirred from vexation, Traithe gave a rueful smile. ‘We’re looking for rubies, and the circlet worn by the princes of Havish in ceremonial affirmation of their rights of succession.’

  ‘You have a surviving heir?’ Lysaer inquired, starved for information on Athera’s royal lines.

  ‘Tucked away in the hut of a hermit who dyes wool, yes.’ Traithe sighed. ‘The boy’s just twelve, and about to learn there’s more to life than bartering for alum to colour fleeces.’

  Lysaer fingered an intricate pattern of vine leaves tooled into what looked like a high-born lady’s dower chest. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Here, I think.’ The sorcerer singled out two boxes and a crate stamped with a hawk sigil that might in years past have been red. ‘I would at least expect to find the regalia of the kings of Havish in a chest with the royal seal.’

  Lysaer offered his assistance and found himself handed the smaller crate. As his hands closed over ancient wood, he shivered in anticipation. His forebears had ruled a high kingdom: piqued by the thought that relics of his own heritage might be cached here with the antiqui
ties, Lysaer unlatched heavy bronze catches that slid easily despite heavy dents from rough usage. The Warden of Althain had not been lax in his care, for the hinges also turned without a creak.

  The odour of leather and parchment immediately identified the contents: document scrolls looped in musty ribbons, and books with illuminated bindings and titles inscribed in the old tongue. The covers were not jewelled or clasped with gold, but darkened and scuffed with age. Regretful the words between lay beyond his schooling, Lysaer fingered the pages in fascination.

  ‘The packages we’re looking for won’t seem very interesting,’ Traithe said, his features eclipsed by the dome of the adjacent trunk. ‘You’d best check beneath those journals before you go any further.’

  Lysaer closed a rust flocked cover. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Ancestral records that trace the line of the kings of Havish back to the founder, Bwin Evoc s’Lommein.’ Yet if the sorcerer meant to elucidate, a shuffling step and a carping voice interrupted from outside the doorway.

  ‘Did you have to set that raven loose to rampage through the butter?’ Green-faced and suffering what looked to be a punishing hangover, the Mad Prophet traipsed into the storeroom.

  Traithe barely spared him a glance. ‘I’m encouraged to see you’ve recovered enough to have an appetite.’

  ‘I woke up because I was starving.’ Dakar fumbled with the strap of his belt, which was buckled but not tucked in its keepers, and immediately resumed accusations. ‘Sethvir’s too lazy to stock much beyond plain tea.’ The Mad Prophet winced, abandoned the particulars of his clothing and cradled his brow as the echoes of his own vehemence played havoc with his sore head. ‘And olives preserved in oil sit poorly on a queasy stomach.’

  Busy unfurling an object swathed in linen, Traithe was cheerfully unsympathetic. ‘That didn’t keep you from eating them, I see.’

  Dakar clammed up rather than admit culpability. Neither did the misery of his bellyache stop him from quartering the chamber, randomly fingering the varied contents of the shelves. ‘Sethvir chose like a ragpicker, when he decided what should be salvaged.’ A bored gesture encompassed a lumpish bundle wrapped in leather tied with twine.

  ‘I wouldn’t handle that,’ Traithe warned, already too late.

  The Mad Prophet’s meddlesome fingers triggered a burst of blue-violet light. A crack shocked the air, capped by Dakar’s yell of pain. He recoiled, still howling, while the bundle he had disarranged rolled precipitately off the shelf.

  It struck the floor with a note like sheared glass and another blinding flash seared away the leather wrappings. Blinking through a veil of afterimage and an acrid puff of ash, Lysaer saw a melon-sized violet jewel bounce and roll across the flags. The facets blazed and fountained sparks at each contact with the stone.

  ‘Fiends plague it!’ Dakar licked smarting knuckles and turned a baleful glare upon Traithe. ‘That’s the Waystone of the Koriathain!’

  ‘Obviously so.’ Shadows swooped in the flamelight as the sorcerer pushed aside his opened chest, leaned down and matter-of-factly fielded the rolling crystal. The sparks died. No punitive sting met his touch.

  ‘Morriel would sell her virginity to know where that thing went!’ Mollified, Dakar added, ‘She and her pack of witches have been searching for centuries, and Sethvir’s kept her Waystone here, hidden all this time?’

  Traithe turned the huge amethyst in his hands, absorbed by the captured light that spiked through its purple-black depths. ‘Since nobody asked your crude opinion, I shall tell you once: the Prime Enchantress had only to inquire after the Waystone’s location.’ His eyes flicked up, piercingly sharp. ‘Naught but Morriel’s stubborn pride kept the jewel at Althain.’

  But nuance was wasted upon Dakar, who loosed a boyish whistle. ‘The bitches will be hot, when they learn.’

  The prospect of a scandal none but a fool would precipitate spurred Traithe to reproach. ‘We would all be better served if you would go and ask Sethvir for scrap leather that would do for replacement wrappings.’

  Too wily to cross a sorcerer who used that tone of voice, Dakar departed grumbling obscenities. Left in the company of an undesirably curious prince, Traithe made an end of the matter. ‘The Waystone was mislaid during the rebellion. As you observed, it is perilously warded. The Koriani Senior Circle was negligent to leave so powerful a talisman unguarded.’

  Traithe did not add that the loss of their great focus had also curtailed the order’s propensity for interfering in affairs beyond their understanding. Sethvir was unlikely to volunteer the Waystone’s location to the Prime Circle that craved its recovery. The Warden of Althain could be guileful as Davien the Betrayer when he chose; never mind that he appeared as honest as a clear glass of water.

  Traithe fixed Lysaer with a gaze impenetrable as ink. ‘If you’ll finish unwrapping this bundle, I think you’ll find what we came for.’ He set aside the Great Waystone and tossed across one of two items half-swaddled on the lid of the trunk.

  Lysaer caught the packet and stripped off the final layers of linen to bare a thin gold circlet, unornamented beyond a thready, age-worn line of runes. The smaller item undone by Traithe proved to be a hexagonal tortoiseshell box. Inside, nested in sheepskin, sparkled a matched collection of rubies.

  At least a dozen in number, the set was cut to a perfection beyond reach of mortal artisans. The gems required no setting to impress; their depth of colour glinted like live fire in the flare of the torch by the doorway. Lysaer gasped, dazzled by the legacy that awaited the dyer’s lad soon to be unveiled as the crown prince of Havish.

  ‘The regalia was melted down for bounty gold,’ Traithe remarked sadly. For an instant he seemed less than wizard, and more a lame, very worn old sword-captain lost in reminiscence of ill times. ‘The desecration was a great pity. But Telmandir was the first of the royal seats to be sacked and set to the torch. Only the jewels and the king’s youngest child could be saved.’

  Lysaer noted the sorcerer’s regret, but only distantly. Stark though the circlet in his hands might be it was old; its nicks and dents bespoke modest origins. Diminished to realize how very ancient were the high kingdoms of Athera, and given sense of the wide span of generations the blood lines hand-picked by the Fellowship must have ruled, Lysaer was moved to awe.

  The battered circlet of the Princes of Havish, and the rubies torn at need from a regalia whose magnificence could only be imagined implied a stability shattered wholesale; and sacrifice akin to the straits that had caused the Paravians to build Althain Tower in the bleak hills of a wilderness to safeguard an irreplaceable tradition. Lysaer felt humbled.

  His inheritance as s’Ilessid on Athera was vast in comparison to the tiny island kingdom left behind on the world of his birth.

  The pomp, the wealth, every ceremonial pageantry that had seemed part and parcel of kingship was abruptly rendered meaningless: he perceived how narrow was his experience and how limited his vision. The presumption shamed him, that he had dared to set judgement on the lives of the Camris barbarians. Their plight must be better understood to be fairly handled; a stricture that must start with rebuilding trust with his half-brother. Brought to painful self-honesty, Lysaer realized that to do right by the kingdom of Tysan, he must embrace a new concept of justice. The tinker’s workmanship in the old circlet and the uncanny loveliness of Havish’s crown jewels compelled a cold and difficult review of his mortal strengths and talent.

  Lysaer returned the artifact to Traithe, gentled by diffidence he had shown no one living. ‘I’m thankful for your offer to school my gift of light. But I see very clearly: a mage’s training is not my course to pursue. My part in confronting the Mistwraith is but the prelude to healing the rift between townborn and clansman. The greater good of Tysan must demand my total dedication.’

  Struck by the depths of sincerity that prompted this prince’s self-sacrifice, Traithe closed his hands, quenching the blood-fire of the rubies. His sorrows as sorcerer compounded with fierce forebod
ing for the future spelled out by the strands. Like the Great Waystone the Koriani enchantresses ached to recover, the cache of sapphires that were the crown jewels of Tysan must remain in Sethvir’s trust at Althain. That this gently-reared descendant of Tysan’s kings, whose shining talent was inspired rule, should one day through the Mistwraith’s machination refute the fine intentions that now moved his mind and heart seemed an impossibly cruel twist of fate.

  Harbingers

  In the cold light of dawn, a dark horse with a black-clad rider canters south, for Ghent in the kingdom of Havish; beneath the hunting bow and traplines of a forester’s trade, he bears a concealed set of rubies and a circlet, while a raven swoops on a following breeze over his silver-banded hat…

  High above land, outside even the coiling fogs of Desh-thiere, the discorporate sorcerer Kharadmon arrows east on the winds of high altitude, his intent to measure and map the power base of the governor’s council of Etarra…

  Too obdurately frugal to hurry, Luhaine drifts west into Camris, bearing tidings and grave portents for Maenalle, Steward of Tysan…

  X. DAON RAMON BARRENS

  For a confirmed hedonist and established late riser, Dakar climbed Althain Tower’s central stair in suspiciously buoyant spirits. Enjoying the early hour without a hangover, he barged into the room where the half-brothers slept with a clang of the bar, and a shove that swung the oaken door to a thunderous boom against the stops.