The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  The grease-thick miasma above the tower flared white, then burned to incandescence as the charge struck. Shadow ripped out in reply, and snow crystals scoured by the gusts slashed across the exposed stone parapet. The mists bulked, denser, poisonously thick as poured oil. Lysaer’s tunic dampened with sweat, and Arithon’s hair whipped to tangles against dripping temples.

  The half-brothers fought, while morning gave way to afternoon. Slowly, grudgingly, the Mistwraith’s bounds were harried inward. Sunlight speared down and silvered Ithamon’s knoll with its interlocked stubble of foundations. Notched battlements and broken walls drowned the next minute under yet another countersurge of fog. Light and then shadow punched back. Again a ragged hole appeared. Sky appeared over Kieling Tower, besieged at once by rolling curtains of murk. Arithon cried out as the wraith-driven mists burst his barriers. Stonework shook to a thunderous report as Lysaer extended to heroic lengths to shock back the break in the attack line.

  His light slashed into gloom that churned, congested as a blood-gorged bruise. Shadow answered him strongly. Snowfall snatched up into whirlwinds as stress-heated air snapped and shrieked through pocketed blizzards of ice.

  And then a sudden and peculiar twist of change: interwoven through the violent play of energies, something tugged subtly out of balance. Across the concussive boom of backlash and a gale like a rising scream, Arithon shouted to Asandir, ‘We’re in trouble!’

  Less trained to nuance, Lysaer saw no cause to pinpoint. A third charge gathered in his hands, his sight congested by a darkness dense enough to suffocate, he groped to define his uneasiness. Aware of voices, but cut off from the others by the mist, he closed his fists.

  And knew terror, for his gifted powers failed to dissipate.

  Lysaer reached to recover control but another will struggled against him: as if the mists had changed nature, without warning turned from a stubborn, resistant barrier that needed ever to be driven, into something repellently uncanny: a creature voracious and alive, that now fed off the very energies summoned to achieve its defeat. Lysaer felt the graze of unseen presences across his flesh. Things seemed to twist at his clothing and hair, while a heaviness dragged his thoughts.

  Then a surge of overweening elation displaced all trace of alarm. They had triumphed! Desh-thiere now collapsed in a sucking rush toward annihilation.

  A shout from Asandir ripped through that giddy unreality. Lysaer’s mad urge to crack the sky with his powers became dashed as someone’s hands snatched his wrists apart. Spell force slapped over his unshed light like soaked woollens thrown down to douse a wildfire.

  No victory had been immanent on Kieling. Lysaer gasped in recovery. Murk wrapped him, dank as marshvapours, and his body dripped sour sweat. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Desh-thiere!’ cried Asandir above winds that keened like death angels whetting their armoury of scytheblades. ‘It’s hurled itself into the breach for a purpose!’

  Magelight flashed and the air cleared, or seemed to. Only a circle closed off by some boundary of sorcery answered to Asandir’s will. Beyond Kieling’s walls pressed darkness, damp and impenetrable as shroud felt. Lysaer blinked streaming eyes. Brushed by settling snow, he noticed the winds no longer buffeted his body. Instead he felt crowded by noxious warmth the characterless temperature of shed blood. Pressured by nameless foreboding, Lysaer braced to continue, then flinched as Asandir cruelly tore his wrists apart again.

  Affronted by the physical handling, Lysaer tensed to strike off restraint. Asandir met his glare, wordless, until reason displaced princely pride. Shaken to discover how near vanity had come to eclipse his good sense, Lysaer squared his shoulders to apologize.

  Asandir forestalled him. ‘I’m not offended and you were never rude. This Mistwraith has aspects that can turn the mind, and now you are warned. Stay guarded.’

  Upset and humiliated, Lysaer strove to pick sense out of chaos. ‘The mist flung itself on us like a suicide.’

  From across the battlement, Arithon said in a voice scraped and hoarse, ‘That last assault sheared out more vapour than we ever burned away through a half-day. I presume the damage is done?’

  ‘We’ll see. Luhaine!’ His hold still tight on Lysaer’s wrists, Asandir cracked out, ‘How diminished is the radius of the fog?’

  The discorporate mage forwent his tendency to patronize. ‘Only Kieling Tower remains enveloped, which leads me to suppose we have problems. If Desh-thiere’s entities were subject to natural death, why should they rush their destruction?’

  Kharadmon agreed. ‘It’s too dangerous, now, to finish outside the tower. Whether our wards are found wanting or not, to cut the mist down on open ground is to beg a bid for escape. These ruins offer a thousand crannies. If the wraiths escape their bindings, they’ll surely scatter and hide.’

  ‘That’s Desh-thiere’s intention, no doubt,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Or wouldn’t it just lure us to take an outside stand, then make the two princes its target?’

  ‘It could be attempting to do both.’ Asandir looked like a man faced with torture as his hands slackened, then at last released Lysaer. ‘We have a second choice of action.’

  ‘No!’ cried Dakar in protest, half-forgotten where he huddled on the sidelines. He strode to the centre of the battlement. Nose running, eyes bloodshot, his hands bunched in fists before his chest, he bristled like a fat banty rooster. ‘You wouldn’t dare sully the wards of compassion on this tower! Merciful Ath, how could you think to disarrange the irreplaceable work of ages, and draw evil inside these protections?’

  Asandir visibly hardened. ‘I would do so, of sheer necessity.’ His look blazed back at his apprentice. ‘These wards are all that can dependably fence the Mistwraith. I will open them, and let Desh-thiere be driven inside, and see this land safe under sunlight. For the survival of the Riathan Paravians who sanctified this haven, you’ll lend your strength to that cause.’

  Shocked, shaking, visibly afraid to hold his ground, nonetheless; Dakar stayed stubbornly rooted.

  ‘Desh-thiere has three times shown us guile,’ said Luhaine, his image indistinct through the turmoil of darkness and mist. ‘We could be the ones driven, and purposefully, to try just such a desperate action.’

  ‘The risk must be taken.’ Lysaer came forward. ‘Of us all, I’m the least fit to weigh risks. Yet I cannot set my life above the need to confine this monster. Kieling’s protections will not fail the land. Though we all were to die here, sunlight for Athera would be secured.’ His hair like drowned gold in the gloom, he deferred to Asandir. ‘I prefer to trust you can protect us from the wraiths, as you did on the night my half-brother and I were attacked.’

  That mishap had occurred well before Desh-thiere’s teeming entities had been crowded inside shrunken boundaries; yet Asandir kept dread to himself as he switched his most merciless regard back to the Teir’s’Ilessid. ‘So be it, Lysaer. But let your heart not falter. When I call, you will act, and do so without question, to the utter dregs of your strength. Your gift of light will partner Arithon’s shadows, and burn mist until all of Desh-thiere’s entities are driven inside of ward boundaries.’

  The words and their depth of commitment struck Lysaer with strange force and finality, as if magic would be bound to his consent. Though warned he must forfeit any later change of will, he scraped up a ragged smile. ‘What resources I have are freely yours.’

  Wary though he remained, Asandir showed sincere respect. ‘Ath’s blessing on you, s’Ilessid prince. You do seem to understand the stakes.’

  Ever the pessimist, Luhaine said, ‘Let Dakar leave the tower now, then. Should the worst befall, someone must stay outside to guard until Sethvir can set seals on this tower to permanently block chance of reentry.’

  ‘I’ll get my nose sunburnt and blistered for nothing, waiting for you to come out!’ Yet in his eagerness to quit the site of conflict, Dakar tripped over his feet in the stairwell. His peeved oaths faded with his hurried steps, first muffled by the close-pressed mists, a
nd finally drowned by the moan of the eddying winds.

  Desh-thiere swathed Kieling’s battlements in unremitting gloom as the sorcerers made preparations. Kharadmon appointed himself the task of safeguarding Lysaer. Luhaine’s image dissolved also, but wearing an acerbic expression that cautioned Arithon to restraint. Whether moved by precocious knowledge or by edgy s’Ffalenn temperament, any attempt to broach Fellowship guardianship would be handled with flat intolerance.

  Lysaer wiped sweating palms. Before he could imagine what arcane defences might demand of him, a circle of blue-white force cracked around him. His eyes were flash-blinded and his senses tipped spinning into vertigo. The wards set over his person by Kharadmon not only laced the surrounding air; they invaded and flared through his most private self with a persistence that raised primal rebellion. Lysaer felt every hair on his body stab erect. For a horrible, drawn out moment, his mind and flesh lay outside self-command, frozen in subjugation to another will. The unpleasant feeling soon faded. Mage-light no longer etched his body to incandescence. Lysaer stretched in reaction. He flexed his hands, then his toes, relieved to find them not locked in paralysis. Then he tried a breath, and felt, like a spike hammered through the grain of growing wood, the ward’s immutable presence.

  He retained bodily control, but only as Kharadmon’s protections allowed.

  Moved to consternation by the scope of the strictures imposed by his open consent, Lysaer had no chance to wonder how Arithon reconciled such a pact. Above the moan of the wind, and through the ear-stinging pitch of ward resonance, Asandir delivered fast instructions.

  ‘Once I’ve merged awareness with Kieling Tower’s protections, I won’t be able to respond. Should trouble arise, the discorporate sorcerers who are linked with you will sense your needs and give help as the situation requires.’ Asandir paused.

  His eyes, light, brilliant, piercing, studied the half-brothers who, for the cause of restored sunlight and Paravian survival were about to place body, mind and spirit into jeopardy.

  Pressed by unspoken anxieties, Asandir added, ‘I’ll seek to key an opening in the wards and signal you when that’s accomplished. Engage the Mistwraith then. With all of your strength and will drive it inside the tower’s protections. Once the last bit of fog is drawn in, I’ll reseal the wards. After that, Luhaine and Kharadmon will strive with you to fend off Desh-thiere’s hostile entities. If Paravian spellcraft can be plumbed for inspiration, and if forces of compassion that were created to be unconditional can be made to yield to necessity, I’ll try to fashion a containment of wardspells. With luck, we can imprison Desh-thiere and keep this tower unsullied.’ He hesitated, then finished off, ‘Hold to this through the worst: the auguries cast at Althain Tower did not forecast any deaths here.’

  But dying was hardly the worst fate to suffer, Lysaer reflected: possession was more to be dreaded. Kharadmon’s apprehension thrummed as a deep, subliminal tingle through his flesh. This host of mist-bound wraiths that their party of five must incarcerate yet owned the malice that had disabled Traithe.

  ‘I wish you all sure hands and good hunting.’ A figure of shadow against the charcoal roil of the fog, Asandir bent and slipped off his boots and hose. Barefoot in the cold, he scuffed through the crust of sleet and arranged his stance on freezing stone. Then he raised his hands. Rigidly still, his eyes a chill vista of emptiness, he held motionless for an interval that stretched Lysaer’s nerves to the snapping point. To stave off morbid misgiving, the prince cupped his hands and fiercely concentrated to muster back will to use his gift.

  A concussion of air smacked his face and a high-pitched ping like pressure cracks cold-shocked through a glacier ripped the sky. The tower seemed rinsed in white light. Lost in a dazzle that blinded, Asandir cried out in what could have been ecstasy or the absolute extremity of mortal pain. Then darkness opened in the brilliance, virulently black and stonework that had stood firm through two ages shuddered under waves of vibration.

  ‘Now!’ screamed Asandir. The joined jasper of tower and battlement seemed to jar into brittleness with his cry.

  Lysaer released light in a concatenation of sparks. Heated wind seared his cheeks. Black fell, velvet-dense, then a buffet of frigid air that he attributed to backwash from Arithon’s counterthrust of shadow. Next a subliminal purple glow bathed Lysaer’s skin, driving before it a sting like a thousand venomed needles. He struggled to breathe, to think, while Kharadmon slapped a goad through his mind to gather his strayed wits and fight.

  Lysaer struck at the encroaching mists in bursts of force like bright knives. He battled, though entities leered from the fog, gnashing fanged jaws and milling through darkness to reach and then claw him down. Savaged by the killing fields of energy demanded from his gift, Lysaer flung up latticed walls of lightning. Flash-fire burned the wraiths back until his eyes were left stunned and sightless.

  ‘Now! Again!’ exhorted Kharadmon.

  The battlements seemed wildly to tilt. Wrung out and disoriented, Lysaer could not tell if the stonework dissolved from beneath him, or whether natural law still held firm. Past the ongoing blaze of the wards, he sensed Luhaine and teamed with him, Arithon, still slamming the Mistwraith with shadow spun frigid as the void before Ath’s creation.

  Lysaer choked on a breath that was half snow. Frost bit his lungs and kicked off an explosion of coughing. The air felt all strange, too thick and stiff to pass his nostrils. Gust-eddied ice raked his face. He ached with a sensation like suffocation, while Kharadmon pressed him to resume.

  Driven to expend himself through his gift until he became as a living torch, Lysaer cried out. Charge after charge of pure light raked from him, until his flesh felt mauled and reamed through, a bare conduit to channel his gift. The light torn out of his centre slashed from him, a brilliance of chiselled force that the one mote of consciousness undrowned by the torrent recognized for the work of a stranger.

  No more than a puppet impelled by a sorcerer’s whim, Lysaer felt stripped and crushed. The darkness and vertigo that assailed him were no longer solely the effects of spell-wards and Mistwraith. His body was starved for breath to the point where he barely stayed conscious.

  And still the light ripped from him, in crackling, searing white torrents.

  His disorientation tripped off panic. While instinct screamed that he was being immolated, consumed by a scintillant spellcraft pressured outside of sane control, he clung in desperation to his willing consent to the Fellowship, and the honour that bound his given oath: to battle the Mistwraith for as long as he held to life.

  Yet his endurance was only mortal.

  Undercut by sharp anguish, that royal blood, and pride, and heart-felt integrity of purpose were not enough by themselves to sustain him, Lysaer lost grip on dignity and wept.

  And then there was no thought at all, only grey-blackness more neutral than mist, more terrible than the dark door of death.

  A harrowing interval passed. Sound reached Lysaer in a burst like tearing fabric. Then came voices, shouting above a roar like a millrace in his ears.

  Vague pain resolved into bruises on shoulder, knee and cheek. Evidently he had collapsed on his side, for he lay face down in thin snow. Too shaken yet to move, Lysaer shivered. Through air that pressed down like sulphurous smoke, voices whined and gibbered, moaning, mewling, and countless as Sithaer’s damned. It hurt to breathe; tissues of his throat and lungs stung as if rasped by ground ice. Then hands were gripping him, tugging him urgently to rise.

  ‘Get up,’ cracked Asandir.

  Wasted and haggard, the sorcerer was gratingly hoarse, as if he, too, had been screaming. Or else the powers he had engaged to reconfigure Kieling’s protections had required focus through multiple incantations.

  The winds had ominously stilled again.

  Lysaer gained his knees. ‘The wards,’ he gasped. ‘Did you open them?’ As dizziness slowly released him, he glanced about. ‘My half-brother. Is he all right?’

  ‘Over there.’ Asandir pointed
.

  Arithon rested a short distance off, his back propped straight against the battlement. Had expenditure of shadow also drained him to a husk, Lysaer could not tell. Heavy mist blurred clear sight.

  ‘Well done,’ the sorcerer added, his tone a touch less rough. ‘We have the wraiths’ collective presence contained inside Kieling and the ward energies safely resealed. If the virtue that founds this tower’s strength is not to be abandoned to desecration, we’ll have to confine the creatures further.’

  On his feet now, and shaky as if wasted by a fever, Lysaer tried a light stab at humour. ‘I’m spent enough already that I wouldn’t have the spark to charm a maid. The Mistwraith I hope needs less tact.’ At a sidewise glance from the sorcerer, his foolery dissolved. ‘You’ll have my best effort, in any case.’

  But even before Asandir looked away, the prince recalled: Kharadmon’s presence was quiescent within him, but not withdrawn. The Fellowship would have more than his best effort, though final cost became his life.

  Mortified by doubts that the strain yet to come might break him, Lysaer snatched back the initiative. ‘What next?’

  Asandir flung him a harried smile. ‘Let no one ever question that the strengths of s’Ilessid are not yours. The most difficult trial lies ahead.’ And he gestured toward a narrow stone flask that rested amid a dip in the stonework that floored Kieling’s upper battlement.

  Lysaer shoved back awareness that his courage had been frayed to undignified, whimpering shreds. Neither the container nor the declivity where it rested had existed previously. Its cylinder seemed wrought from the same grained jasper that framed Kieling’s fortifications.

  ‘Yes, the vessel to imprison Desh-thiere was cut from the rock of this tower,’ said Asandir in unprompted explanation. ‘Its wards were patterned from Paravian bindings, and there lies the heart of our challenge. The Mistwraith is self-aware enough to recognize its peril. We can expect a bitter fight to send it into final captivity.’