The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  The racket rivalled the impact of a siege-engine.

  Accustomed to solicitude, courtly deference and a chamber valet selected for quiet habits, Lysaer squinted through a hurtful flare of torch-flame. He buried his face in his pillow, nettled enough to curse when rude hands grasped his shoulder and shook him.

  The assault on his person ended with a raw hoot of laughter. Lysaer faced around. He endured the ache until his eyes adjusted to the sudden fullness of light and made out the form of his tormentor. Bent double and gripping his belly as if he hurt, Dakar wore a shirt that needed washing, a leather tunic ripped ragged at the hem and a plaid sash so sunfaded the only recognizable colour was grey. The glare of princely displeasure left his paroxysms unfazed.

  Lysaer propped himself on one elbow. Made aware as he flicked back tangled hair that the view beyond the shutter was night black, he said, ‘I don’t see any humour in being wakened before dawn by a maniac.’

  Dakar sat on the adjacent cot. The frame gave a squeal of leather and wood at the load, and the mattress canted. Its slumbering occupant slid like a dropped puppet in the direction gravity dictated. Blocked from tumbling to the floor by the planted bulk of Dakar, Arithon showed no sign of awakening.

  ‘Well?’ Lysaer fixed glacial eyes upon the Mad Prophet. ‘Are you going to share your joke?’

  ‘Joke?’ Dakar hiccuped and looked aggrieved. ‘I made none. But I’ll bet you never used that many filthy words in one breath before.’

  ‘Meaning I forgot my manners.’ Recovered enough to find tolerance, Lysaer gave back a wicked grin. ‘My reputation’s hardly spoiled. You don’t look to me like a lady I need to impress.’ Before Dakar could throw back rejoinder, he added, ‘Try that last move on the Master and see what sort of words he uses.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dakar twisted, reached out and pinched Arithon’s cheek, but failed to raise any response. Arithon never twitched an eyelid. Prosaically, the Mad Prophet said, ‘Won’t be waking up this morning, not at all. Too used up still, and better so. Asandir wants him napping.’

  Warned by a hint of recalcitrance that purpose underlay Dakar’s remark, Lysaer got up and reached for his breeches and shirt. ‘We’re leaving Althain today?’

  ‘Tonight. The sun’s not up yet.’ All cow-eyed innocence, Dakar heaved off the cot. He regarded his knuckles, still nicked with scabs since his encounter with the door panel stuck shut by Kharadmon. ‘We go within the hour. But against any natural inclination, we won’t be making passage across Instrell Bay by boat. The sorcerers have decided we’re in a rush.’

  Lysaer measured his shirt laces against each other to even them up for tying. ‘Why?’

  Transparently reluctant to answer, Dakar crooked a finger in an end of his tangled beard and shrugged. ‘Daelion Fatemaster himself couldn’t fathom ways of the Fellowship.’ Impelled to neglected duty, he abandoned his affectations and launched off toward a nearby chest and scooped up Arithon’s clothing. Onto the heap, he tossed boots, hose, cloak, and belatedly, the sword Alithiel, which still lay naked against the table. ‘Didn’t this come with a scabbard?’

  Lysaer unhooked the Master’s baldric, which hung in plain sight from a chair back, and handed it over without comment.

  Still grumbling, Dakar shed his armload of garments onto Arithon’s chest. He then sheathed the blade, dumped that on top, and announced, ‘Right now I’ve got other problems, like lugging your bastard brother down five courses of stairs.’

  ‘Half-brother,’ Lysaer corrected. Regarding the Mad Prophet’s ministrations askance, he retrieved his weapons and cloak from the armoire. ‘I’m not so befuddled I don’t recall we’re only four flights above ground level.’

  Nonplussed, Dakar said, ‘I can count properly when I’m sober. We aren’t leaving by the gate. Sethvir’s got a third lane focus pattern in his dungeon, and Asandir’s of a mind to hurry.’

  By now acquainted with Athera’s geography through Sethvir’s collection of charts, Lysaer paused in the act of fastening his baldric: the distance inferred was well over two hundred leagues, with a span of open water in between. ‘We’re travelling on to Daon Ramon Barrens by sorcery?’

  Dakar smiled, mooncalf features all innocence. ‘You’re going to witness wonders. That is, unless you get disoriented and lose your breakfast on the way. Personally, I find lane transfers across latitude nearly as dismal as sailing. But then my stomach tries to get seasick in a bathtub.’ A last, hasty inspection showed nothing indispensable had been forgotten from his collection of Arithon’s things; the Mad Prophet in prosaic efficiency rolled both Shadow Master and belongings up in the blankets he slept on.

  As Lysaer took station at the foot of the cot to help lift the inert body, Dakar confided, ‘Our boy here’s going to be mad as blazes when he finally does wake up.’ A pause ensued as prophet and prince hefted their load and shuffled out of step around Sethvir’s clutter toward the doorway. Dakar elbowed the panel aside, backed through and cheerfully began the descent. ‘Angry as a rock-bashed snake.’

  ‘Maybe that has something to do with Asandir’s sudden haste?’ Lysaer suggested, hoping to pry loose explanation.

  ‘All of that.’ Dakar grinned, perversely uninformative. ‘Your half-brother’s going to be furious.’

  Lysaer shifted grip on the blankets, which were an impractical way to handle a comatose body down a stairwell. Past the first landing, the draft swirled unpleasantly across his shoulders; and somewhere a loosened shutter grated sullenly in the wind. The steepness of the risers stalled conversation until something Dakar saw as he rounded the bend doused his overweening smugness.

  Caught on the uphill end of a precarious and unwieldy load, Lysaer discovered in embarrassment that Sethvir stood on the landing, the voluminous cuffs of his sleeves for once shaken clean of dust.

  Sight of the Teir’s’Ffalenn trussed in his bedclothes caused the Warden of Althain to blink like an owl exposed to sunlight. ‘I asked you to bring him down,’ he murmured in vague reproof. ‘Did you have to bundle him up like stolen goods in a carpet?’

  ‘Next time, you carry him,’ the Mad Prophet retorted between wheezes.

  Sethvir hurried ahead down the corridor, maroon robes flapping around feet tucked hoseless into ridiculously oversized fur bushkins. His reply trailed back with all the daft overtones of a hermit caught talking to himself. ‘Teirain’s’Ffalenn are well able to right their own injustices, this one better than most. He’s Torbrand’s descendant, after all, every inch of him touchy. You’re welcome to his revenge by yourself, fool Prophet.’

  To this Dakar spoke phrases that cast biological doubt upon Arithon’s already illegitimate ancestry. Sethvir gave back a blank glance and passed ahead into darkness. Their course meandered, stopped, backtracked and circled between ranks of Paravian statuary faintly visible as sparkles of gold-weave and gemstones caught glancing torchlight from the stairwell. Lysaer lost count of how many times he stubbed toes or whacked his elbows and shins; the muscles of his arms and shoulders ached unmercifully. That his discomforts might have been staged as a lesson did not dawn, until the sorcerer paused and without any fumbling, hooked an inset steel ring in the floor. A counterweighted trapdoor sprang open and raw light flooded upward to show features as blithe as a pixie’s. Lysaer recalled with a snap of annoyance that mages saw perfectly in the dark.

  Sethvir’s blue-green eyes held a twinkle. ‘Go ahead. Asandir has the horses waiting below.’

  ‘Horses!’ Lysaer eyed the narrow stairwell that spiralled downward toward a glow too steady to be lamplight. His skin crept, even as the nuance of his gift confirmed the play of unnatural energies. ‘How did he ever get them down here?’

  Dismissing the question as irrelevant, Sethvir beckoned prince and prophet and the unconscious bundle carried between them on ahead. ‘Where you’re going, you’ll be glad not to walk.’ He closed the trap door after himself with barely a whisper of a creak.

  The air radiated a tang like a blacksmith’s forge intermixed with the c
harge of inbound storms. Lysaer checked, while behind him, Dakar snarled in annoyance that princely fainthearted hesitation was going to wind up tripping him.

  Lysaer sucked a quick breath and pressed ahead into burgeoning light. Assured by now that the Fellowship’s grand magics would not harm him, his reluctance stemmed as much from indignity. Accustomed to responsibility as a king’s heir, he found the sorcerer’s secretive authority deeply irritating. Had he been apprised of their plans one step beyond the immediate, or been granted some insight to their motivations, he might have felt less unnerved. Traithe alone had addressed this need; but the black-garbed mage had ridden off to tutor the heir to Havish, and some event since arrival at Althain had turned Asandir bleak as chipped granite.

  The stair ended. Circular and doorless as a vault, the deepest chamber of Althain Tower was incised into seamless white marble. A floor of polished onyx held eight leering gargoyle sconces arrayed on pedestals at the compass points. No torches burned in their sockets; the light emanated from a webwork of lines scribed across a wide, bowl-shaped depression. The patterning shaped three concentric circles, edged in Paravian runes and centred by an intricate, looping interlace that hurt the eyes to follow. Asandir waited in the middle on a starburst formed by the intersection of five axes, his shadow merged in the silhouette of a massive, high-wheeled mason’s dray. Dakar’s paint mare was harnessed between the shafts and the other mounts tied to the tailboards stamped and blew in nervous snorts. The rap and clang of shod hooves raised no echoes in that windowless, enclosed space, and for all that hellish glare the air retained no warmth. The draft that wafted off the pattern was charged with unnatural, arctic cold.

  Touched to spine-tingling uneasiness and soaked in icy sweat, Lysaer shivered. He started at a touch on his shoulder and spun around to meet the myopic, inquiring eyes of Sethvir.

  ‘You’re looking at a power focus, charged and enabled with the natural forces that flow in lines across the earth,’ said the Warden of Althain in measured reassurance. ‘The energies gathered here will allow Asandir to effect a direct transfer to the ruins west of Daon Ramon Barrens.’

  Lysaer shut his eyes against patterns that glared and sparked like fireworks against enigmatic black stone. Through an odd and unpleasant ringing in his ears, he heard Dakar’s petulant interruption. ‘Why not go straight to the focus at Ithamon?’

  Sethvir replied, unperturbed. ‘For Arithon’s sake, you’ll travel overland from the focus at Caith-al-Caen.’

  ‘The Vale of Shadows!’ As if the translation thrust home a violation of something sacred, Dakar cried, ‘Why protect him?’ He rounded in disgust on Sethvir. ‘Arithon showed you how lightly he regards your commitment to Rathain. After his insolence at the summons, do you think he gives a damn for your solicitude?’

  ‘Suppose with all his heart that he wished he did not?’ Sethvir interjected. To Lysaer, who listened in confusion from the lip of the bottom stair, the sorcerer added, ‘The floor is solid, and certainly safe to step on.’

  The oblique shift in subject silenced Dakar. Since Arithon’s dead weight had long since tired his arms and shoulders, Lysaer proceeded forward. For all his apprehension, the pattern’s burning lines caused no sensation beyond a queer tingle as he stepped over and around them. Dakar of necessity straggled after, muttering mutinous curses that attributed Ath’s angels to acts of scatological impossibility.

  Still by the stair, Sethvir said nothing.

  Asandir was less restrained, when the pair with their burden slung between them crossed the last circle of the focus. Eyes bright and ruthless as sword steel flicked over blankets, belongings and the head that dangled backward, black hair trailing within inches of the rune-scribed floor. ‘Lay the Teir’s’Ffalenn behind the buckboard and see him comfortably arranged. No reason this side of the Wheel can excuse the extra care you should have taken to fix a litter.’

  ‘I’d sooner coddle a viper,’ the Mad Prophet unwisely retorted. ‘Why rush to stir up disaster?’

  ‘Arithon gave his trust into your hands without terms the other night,’ Asandir snapped back. ‘Is that how you thank him?’ Low-voiced, he added something else that made Dakar cringe like a kicked dog.

  Then the sorcerer’s glance snapped to Lysaer, driving home a rebuke not solely directed elsewhere. Stung for his lapse into pettiness, Lysaer hefted Arithon into the dray. He attended his half-brother’s needs with a servant’s humility, while around him the vault became preternaturally quiet. The horses stopped sidling and stood glassy-eyed, their ears and tails hanging limp. The pattern in the floor began to sing in a tone just outside of hearing and the air gained a charge that lifted the hairs on their backs.

  ‘Get into the wagon and hold on,’ Asandir commanded.

  Dakar leaped the buckboard and scrambled to snatch up the reins. Lysaer scrambled over the high sides behind the wheel, while the sorcerer strode forward, grasped the paint’s bridle, and positioned his feet precisely upon the nexus of the focus.

  Sethvir called out in farewell and the vault burst asunder in an explosion of unbearable blue light.

  Darkness ripped down hard after, relentless as the void between the Veil. If Lysaer cried out, his ears recorded no sound. His senses overturned, as if he, the rough wood he sat on, even the horses tied by their bridle reins overturned in a gut-twisting series of somersaults. Too late he recalled Dakar’s flippant comment: but having no breakfast in him to lose, only bile burned the back of his throat.

  Thrilled and frightened by the pull of forces beyond understanding, Lysaer clung to fast-fraying shreds of self-control.

  Then a jolt slammed the boards beneath his body. Wind compressed from his lungs and his stomach plummeted back into his middle in a wrench fit to tear a gut. The unsprung dray hit earth with a crash that jarred the supplies in the back, Arithon’s limp form and everyone else’s teeth with undivided viciousness. Pebbles spanged out from under the iron-rimmed wheels, and with an appalling creak and a clatter of hooves from panicked horses, the vehicle lurched and rolled as natural order intended.

  Winter wind slashed through Lysaer’s hair. He recovered a ratcheting breath, discovered his eyes squeezed shut and his hands locked rigidly to the side-boards. When he mastered the wits to risk a look, disbelief shocked him like icewater. Tower, vault and pattern were wholly swept away. Through a dissolving haze of blue sparks and an after-stink of ozone, he beheld a changed landscape and mist silvered with new day. Under a brooding grey sky, gusts raked through feathered brown grass, stripped trees and black, striated rock that gouged through soil and dead briar. Lysaer felt dizzied, sick and disoriented. He was still battling to reconcile his shaken nerves, when the impossible solidity of the land, the rutted dirt lane the dray thundered down and the flying clods gouged up by the horses, who raced ahead in stark fear – everything pretematurally made real by the loosening coils of grand magic – tilted hard sideways and overturned.

  ‘You’re going to faint,’ Asandir said with incisive clarity from a point somewhere inside the wagon.

  Vertigo swallowed Lysaer’s sight. He sensed no pain as his gold-thatched head banged into a sack of iron cooking-pots, but heard only the clang of impact melded with words made blurred through a distance of fading awareness. ‘Ath’s mercy on you, prophet, for I’ll show none if the s’Ilessid heir falls out.’

  The Paravians called the place Caith-al-Caen, Vale of Shadows, by the dawn of the Second Age. Common usage corrupted the name of the ruin there to Castlecain, though from a vantage halfway up a mist-cloaked hillside the reason seemed obscured. The site never held any fortress. All that remained of the clay and thatch croft where Cianor Sunlord had been born were hummocks where orchards had stood. Yet as Asandir wound his way over ground that once had held gardens of scented, flowering trees, his eyes saw beyond bleak mist and sere landscape. If he looked with his mage’s vision, the shadows, the memories, that abiding resonance of mystery that lingered wherever the old races had cherished the earth skeined like star
-lit thread through the cross-laced, dead canes of briar.

  Ballads held that a place beloved by unicorns never quite lost the aura of their presence. At Caith-al-Caen, the adage held true; while Asandir strode through weeds napped like velvet with dew, his peripheral vision and the limits just beyond hearing entangled him in echoes of the past. Here, when the splendours of the Second Age were yet young, the Riathan had gathered each solstice to renew the earthpowers and to rejoice in the turn of the seasons. The ecstasy in their music had marked the very soil, and now wind itself mourned the loss. Even after a thousand years, the land remained blessed with a grace that haunted. An energy coursed through the soil that glorified life; even under Desh-thiere’s curse, the hills each spring put forth a knee-high carpet of flowers and rowan still thrust through the bracken.

  Now, under winter’s frosts, only the spirits lingered, ethereal as shadings in silverpoint, their dance songless and silent. The sorcerer walked, careful not to look too closely to either side. The memories of too many friends watched his back with pity and reproach. Sorrow had scribed too many creases around his eyes, and hope had eased too few.

  ‘Dael-Farenn, kingmaker!’ lisped the wind as it curled through his hair. ‘What have you done with your hope, your dreams, your joy? The dance is not ended, not yet. For the song will renew with the sunlight.’ Could Asandir close his ears he would have; but the hearing of a mage went beyond reliance on the flesh. The voices and the spirits dogged his innermind, each step; he would answer their pleas, but at a cost that anguished to contemplate.

  He crested the rise. Beyond spread the hollow where the Ilitharis Paravians had first Named the winter stars. The place retained a serenity that would abide through ages still to come, however much strife marred the world. Informed of the Master’s presence by a bright-edged spill of lyranthe notes, Asandir stopped dead. His hands and his throat tightened. As though touched by his sharp trepidation, the voices on the wind palled to murmurs and the spirits swirled away, brilliance dimmed; while through a perception that threatened to unman him, Asandir heard Arithon play Maenalle’s gift with a touch unfettered by bitterness.