by Janny Wurts
‘They checked in depth, I know,’ Sethvir said, brusque since the past night’s report from Ithamon left him frustrated. Barring self growth and maturation of character, Lysaer was, spirit and flesh, the same young man who had entered Athera through West Gate.
The Warden of Althain cocked his wrist, idly swirling his tea leaves as if the point in debate were not dire, and demanding of his closest attention. To Kharadmon, he admonished, ‘You’re analysing the nature of the universe, based on one view through a keyhole.’
‘Analogies again?’ Cold air swirled snowflakes across the chamber; when embodied, Kharadmon had tended to pace, and as spirit, his restlessness was constant. ‘Which keyhole, then? Back your theory.’
A rise of tufted eyebrows evinced Sethvir to be miffed. ‘Hunch,’ he corrected. He set the tea mug aside with contradictory care; as if soggy herbs could change nature at whim, and become brittle and subject to shatter. ‘My keyhole is present time, and Traithe’s plight should bear out my conjecture.’ His inkstained fingers cupped air. An image flickered to life as defined as a flame on a freshly lit candle. The reflected scene was not new. Time after weary time, in strands and in fire, the Fellowship sorcerers had reviewed the moment of South Gate’s closing, and the fate of the colleague who had singlehandedly stemmed the disaster…
The porphyry pillars of South Gate reared white-edged in the static flash of stressed energies. Weather-forces skewed out of balance and a storm-charged sky raked the earth with lightning. Thunder slammed and rain sheeted like a fall of silver needles through the hellish play of light. Even after five centuries the view could still inspire dread, as Desh-thiere erupted through the portal between worlds. It came on, gale-driven masses of fog like the boiled over brew from a witch’s cauldron. Toward the streaming influx at the gate, a lone figure ploughed its way forward: Traithe, fighting a cyclone of disturbed air that twisted his robes, and harried his progress to a standstill…
There the image poised, with Traithe’s face obscured behind the wind-flagged fabric of his sleeve. One hand raked out to fend off what seemed empty air, or perhaps a questing tendril of mist. Even locked against motion, the recalled moment from the past was confused by the violent extremes of the light.
‘We interpreted the turbulence as wind-shear,’ Sethvir murmured, ‘caused by the current through the gate. Now, I think differently.’
‘An attack by Desh-thiere?’ Kharadmon’s stillness was telling. ‘The vortex centres upon Traithe, true enough, but its content is no more than mist. Sentient life force is nowhere in evidence.’
‘Apparently.’ Sethvir loosed his binding, and the vision continued forward once again. The sting of its following sequence hurt no less, for being a foregone conclusion…
The revealing sleeve cracked away as Traithe raised his hands. His expression no longer reflected the calm of a sorcerer in control of his craft, but revealed a man in abject agony. Thunder reverberated, cut through by his scream as storm and mist tightened down into a whirlwind that battered him to his knees. He rallied in an extremity of effort. Power answered. Raw, white and wild as elemental lightning, it stabbed down at his call, wrapping like light-jagged wire around his wrists and arms. It flowed untrammelled into his embrace, flowering into dazzling brilliance that slapped the eyes like a nova, blinding, impenetrable and dedicated to ruin. The Mistwraith recoiled, radiant with an afterglow of live charge. Its coils rolled back and separated, to lay bare the pearlescent span of South Gate. During the moment while its invading flow was interrupted, a charred figure in spark-shot robes dragged itself up from prostration. It raised hands seared with burns and traced a seal of binding upon the air. Broken with agony, Traithe croaked out the Names that comprised the chant of ending. And like a sling cord released from great tension, spells sheared asunder; the webwork of time bonds and energies that enabled South Gate as a grand portal parted like singed silk, and dissipated.
The Mistwraith’s connection was severed, its vapours denied further invasion. Rain lashed across the soil between the dead gate. It pocked light-edged arrows in the puddles that interlaced into streamlets of runoff. Traithe remained, a cramped silhouette that could have passed for a pile of discarded rags, but for the fact that he wept with the deep, shaking sobs a child might utter in pain and terror.
Again the image paused; and like a file scraping rust from old steel, Sethvir’s commentary resumed.
‘What if the backlash that maimed Traithe was not the mishandling of grand conjury we first supposed? By intent, our colleague may have caused his own binding to be grounded through his flesh. The sacrifice makes sense, if in desperation, he sought to burn out an incursion of the enemy.’
Cryptic as always, and now on the far side of the chamber, Kharadmon said, ‘You suggest Desh-thiere’s aspects besieged his mind.’
‘Yes. Traithe opened himself to its essence, to find its Name, and gain ascendancy over it. He should not have been vulnerable, unless the beings he sounded were out of phase from our time sense, removed from our present a half-step into the future.’
Kharadmon seized the logical progression. ‘Traithe would naturally raise wards. But his countermeasure perforce would have been a fatal fraction too slow, perpetually behind the leading edge of Desh-thiere’s attack.’
‘So I surmise.’ Sethvir stared at the space where the spirit of his colleague now rested. Neither of them spoke the painful truth, that to know a true Name in all of its individual ramifications was to hold power to unmake its being. Paradox, and at times cruellest irony, that mages who survived to gain such depths of wisdom were disbarred by understanding of the universe from use of the spells of Unbinding.
Sethvir fixed again on the image he had raised from five hundred years past and resumed the dropped thread of conversation. ‘I postulate that Traithe seared away half of his awareness, truncated his own vision by blasting it out with raw power, that Desh-thiere could be stopped from enslaving him. He burned it out as a hill-warrior might hack off a limb with a septic wound, by his own hand rendering himself crippled.’
Traithe had lost memory in the process, and the greater vision that founded his faculties, and all trace of the Name of the being that had brought him to the brink of total ruin.
In a pass made savage by sorrow, Sethvir waved away his conjured image. ‘We are warned too late. Last night in Ithamon, Desh-thiere’s aspects did not challenge Asandir’s wards. Neither did they retreat; they simply passed elsewhen. Into another time. That implies their purpose was complete. My guess is our Teir’s’Ilessid shows no sign of disparate change because the moment when tonight’s damage shall manifest is still yet to come, and of a surety chosen most carefully.’
‘Arithon’s coronation in Etarra,’ Kharadmon summed up grimly. ‘It will be there. Desh-thiere’s intervention caused the strands to converge without digression.’
Ferociously grim, all without words, Sethvir and Kharadmon shared their night’s surmises: that if Desh-thiere’s aspects were advanced enough to slip the constraints of time, the Fellowship as it stood could do little more than bind temporary wards against recurrence.
‘A bit like closing the barn door after the cattle have been raided,’ Kharadmon raged, and snowflakes whirled like dustdevils from one side of the carpet to the other.
‘Restored back to Seven, we could resolve this.’ Sethvir sighed. As papers and parchments started to flap and whirl across the disarray of his writing table, he grabbed frozen ink-pots and pressed them into service as paperweights. ‘Either still yourself, or stop the natural wind by closing the casement. My belongings cannot handle both at once.’ Sorrowfully mild, the Warden of Althain added, ‘We are as ants, scurrying in vain to stay a rock slide. You know that if we are ever to see an end to this threat, the coronation at Etarra must be permitted to run its disastrous course.’
‘I was aware, and wondering why rats and Dakar’s prophecies were ever let into Ath’s creation.’ The casement swung closed with a bang and brass latches snicked int
o their settings. Left ringing across windless silence was Kharadmon’s sardonic parting statement. ‘Like the raven in advance of the war, I go to call Traithe to the bloodletting.’
Dispatch
The fenlands of southeast Tysan were a deserted and miserable wilderness to be caught in a snowfall, on the shortened days past solstice. On foot in the mire, deep in a thicket of leafless willows and marsh maples, Elaira braced an arm on her mare’s steaming shoulder. She scraped ice from a lock of hair that had escaped her hood, while flakes flecked with sleet whirled and rattled across frozen pools and the stalks of last season’s cattails. Called away by Morriel’s summons from the Koriani hostel by Hanshire, she had avoided the trade roads along the coast. The Prime Circle by this season would have resettled in winter quarters near Mainmere, where a ruined fortress deserted since the fall of the high kings of Havish overlooked the coast. The southern pass through Tornir Peaks offered the safest route, since the marshes and sink-pools that edged the high country were too sparsely settled to interest the headhunters who ranged through Korias and Taerlin seeking Caithwood’s clansmen as trophies.
However more secure the boglands might be, amenities for travellers were nonexistent. The mare had cast a shoe in sucking mud, and if she were to escape going sore on the rockier ground in the highlands, Elaira was obliged to find a smith.
‘As if any right-thinking craftsman would choose to keep shop in a swamp,’ she complained to the sedges that hooked her ankles, and her only live companion, the horse. The bay nosed her hood, her breath a warm cloud in the damp.
‘Why couldn’t you rip off your shoe in the drifter’s country?’ The enchantress squelched over a hummock. ‘Better horsemen aren’t born in Athera. Here, we’ll be lucky to find a trapper who knows how to work iron.’
The mare stamped, and the skin of frozen water overtop of oozing mud chinked like shattered glazing over the knees of the oak roots.
‘All right, we’ll go on, then.’ Elaira picked her way to the next hummock without any thought to remount. Footing was chancy in the fens, where falling snow and fog could blend with Desh-thiere’s mist and turn visibility to a wall of featureless white. A traveller could stray from the trail between one step and the next and stay lost, to die of starvation or drowning. Sometimes old bones resurfaced in the sink-holes, clean-picked by scavenger fish.
Elaira slogged through a hollow, her boots already sodden from the iced-over, peat-brown puddles that never quite managed to take her weight. The cold was so bitter it hurt. To take her mind off discomfort, she noted the plants as she passed: the fibrous, half-rotted stems of marshmallow and sword-blade stands of cattails. Her mind catalogued them all, from the renwort whose berries brewed poison, to the cailcallow and willow bark valued to ease fevers. She saw through winter’s sere mantle where watercress would flourish and which hollows, clear of snow, held hotsprings that might harbour green felscrine. Healing herbs were part and parcel of Koriani learning, and lately Elaira had devoted herself to memorizing tedious recipes for tisanes.
As if with the annals of granny-lore and crumbled texts passed down by generations of dead herbalists she might help to bury the memory of one inopportune encounter in a tavern hayloft.
So intense was her concentration, and accustomed as she had become to the startling, raucous calls of marsh pheasants and the whirr of their wingbeats as they flew from her step, that she failed to notice the children until they were nearly upon her.
A motley band of seven, they were flying across the frozen streambeds on skates, clad in the same buff and browns as any other native creature of the fens. Yelling, screaming for pure pleasure, they raced and jostled through the stands of willow and mudbrake, until the mare shied back from their exuberance.
The snort of a horse where strangers seldom passed startled them. Heads turned, half-seen through the stands of silver-barked, vine-choked maple; then a chickadee’s trill cried warning. Their play ended in a scraping slide of bone runners as they whirled into hiding behind the thickets, hushing the youngest, who was frightened and starting to cry.
‘It’s all right!’ Elaira’s call raised no echo across what now seemed empty marsh. The pools lay pewter-grey against peat-black verges and the snow like salt-rime on the hummocks; the sleet had let up to a whisper. Through streaming shreds of mist, even the sedges did not rustle. ‘I won’t harm any of you. I don’t even carry a weapon.’
‘Show us,’ shouted a boy whose voice had just finished changing. ‘Throw off your cloak.’
Elaira swore under her breath. Wet as she was, the cold would cut through to her skin. She unhooked her ring brooch and shed the heavy wool, in time to get a drenching as the ungrateful mare shook her mane.
The enchantress wore no belt beyond a sash of knotted wool. The only metals on her were three talisman buttons fashioned of copper coins, charms she still wore out of sentiment from her days as a street thief, for luck; and the hunting knife last used to strip branches for snares that most maddeningly had trapped nothing. Yesterday’s supperpot had stayed empty.
‘Turn around,’ said the boy.
Elaira held her arms outstretched, and did so, though briars caught at her clothing. ‘I could use a dry place to sleep, and fresh supplies.’ Fighting a shiver that made her teeth chatter, she added, ‘I can pay.’
Around her, the children had begun to creep from concealment. They ranged in age from ten years to late teens, the bloom on their cheeks the only bright colour about them. Their clothing was fashioned of leather, small furs stitched together, and the woven fibres of fenland flax, all undyed. If most of them were dirty, their hair was brushed or braided, and each one carried little talismans of feathers, believed to be ward against drowning. Elaira threw on her cloak, which had fully had time to grow cold. She confronted a closing ring of wide, curious eyes, and said, ‘Of course, you do have a village?’
They led her off the trail, their shyness loosening into chatter. By their accent, Elaira guessed them to be descendants of farmers displaced by the rebellion; survivors sometimes banded with exiles, outcast from the coastal settlements for some petty misdeed committed forgotten generations in the past. Refuge could be found in the fens, or the mountains, or the wilds too open or too barren to support the more numerous clanborn. Forage in such backlands was scarce and the trust of the inhabitants reserved; yet they understood the grace of hospitality more than rich families in the towns. By the time Elaira had reached the circle of huts built of mudbrick and thatch, her mare carried two boys and a girl, all solemnly trying in their excitement not to spur the beast who bore them with the bone-bladed runners of their skates.
‘Traveller!’ shouted the oldest boy, and out of the huts came the fen-folk.
Reed-thin, gnarled as swamp roots, they looked unremittingly dour. Their generosity was not. Like their young ones, they made Elaira welcome once assured she was unarmed. Within an hour, her mare was settled in a pen of woven withies, and she, blessedly bathed and dry, sat before a peat fire sipping tea brewed from plants she had heretofore torn clothes on. The children stayed clustered around her, asking questions and staking buttons on the game of knucklebones she had taught them. Too young to be fascinated by gambling, the youngest squatted on the furs at her feet, picking up the unlaced ends of her bootlaces, and trying to stuff them in his mouth.
‘Come away.’ Elaira reached down through the press to raise the baby clear of temptation. ‘I don’t think the mud will help the taste.’
The thwarted child shrieked. His noise did nothing to obscure another, louder scream, this one issuing from outside.
Elaira startled to her feet. The cry repeated, now identifiably the voice of the hut matron, gone out at dusk to haul in fresh water for the stewpot.
Elaira set the boy child aside on the stool, while the others ran like rabbits into the crannies between tied coils of basket reed. Trouble was no stranger to them, and even the little ones did not whimper. Grasping the crystal that hung at her neck, the enchantress le
aped over the boys’ abandoned knucklebones and burst out into icy winter air.
There she poised. Behind her, the hut door creaked closed on leather hinges. While the slush slowly numbed her dry toes, she struggled to fathom the source of the trouble. For off in the fens where the springs rose warm from the ground, the woman still screamed, wrenchingly, piercingly panic stricken.
The sleet had stopped; the wind smelled oddly sharp. Elaira blinked. Her eyesight was all wrong.
The shadows lay everywhere, crisp as knives and too blue. The diamond whiteness of the drifts hurt the eyes. Against them, reeds and winter-stripped thickets seemed to leap out, starkly honed as sword-edges. Maples, swamp-oaks and willows showed their details in unnatural sharpness, their top branches delineated like entangled skeins or blown ink. Elaira gulped a quickened breath. The mist had gone. Vanished. Around her, the night was fogless and bright. The spell crystal slipped forgotten from her fingers as she tipped her head, wondering, to view the sky.
There, between the black frames of bare branches, for the first time in life she saw stars: more beautiful than Morriel’s diamonds, adrift in an indigo field that looked deep and vast as forever. Elaira was swept by a primal shiver of elation that transformed to a pealing shout of joy. ‘They’ve done it! Bless the blood royal of Athera, the West Gate Prophecy is accomplished! Come out and look! Desh-thiere is beaten to retreat!’
But the door to every wattle and mud hut stayed fast shut. Elaira’s wonderment was rudely knocked short as the howling, terrorstruck fen-wife clawed past in a headlong dash to reach safety.
Elaira picked herself out of the mud in resignation. The rank smell of swamp was an offence she would not be escaping for some while yet to come. Disenchantment still could not touch her. Euphoria and the undreamed of beauty in the sky lent her boundless capacity to forgive. The soft, silvery light that limned the fens was a wonder, more miracle than magic, less substantive than breath. Elaira’s honest nature could not shirk the truth: if not for Asandir’s gift of trust, and without her privileged access to Koriani archives she would have been as ignorant of the sky behind Desh-thiere as these fenlanders who cowered in abject terror.