The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  Arithon offered no comment. Given his trained grasp of his gift, his quiet gave rise to trepidation. Lysaer hugged his arms across his chest. If he thought, if he hesitated, he could not in cold sanity continue. Dread sapped the dregs of his nerve. Raised to inflexible duty, he had learned at his father’s knee that a king must always act selflessly. The needs of land and people must come first. If at heart he was human, and terrified, the justice that ruled the s’Ilessid royal line now imprisoned his conscience like shackles. Lysaer raised hands that he wished were not trembling. From the core of him that was prince, and steadfast, he let go control and self-preservation and surrendered himself wholly to his gift.

  The raised light stung him in answer, as though his flesh balked at a talent that demanded too much. The eerie dark eclipsed time sense. It could be afternoon, or well past sundown; or days beyond the pall of the world’s end. The louring smoke-faces that comprised the Mistwraith veiled the tower, impenetrably dense with roused evil.

  ‘Try now,’ urged Asandir. ‘You’ll get no better chance. When your strength is gone, Desh-thiere will stay free inside Kieling. Ath help us all if that happens, for the flask and its wards of confinement cannot be locked into stability until we complete the final seal.’

  Touched to quick anger that yet another personal frailty jeopardized this dire expedient, Lysaer forced speech. ‘Brother, are you ready?’

  For reply, Arithon wrought shadow. It sprang from his hands like a net, laced, Lysaer could see, with fine-patterned rune chains and sigils. Together the Master and Luhaine entwined spellcraft to augment their assault against the mist.

  Desh-thiere churned into recoil like steam dashed against black ice. Its wraiths lashed virulently back. Even as Lysaer kindled light, the demonic aspects embodied by the fog writhed and twisted, tearing and swirling around him. Their touch stung his skin as if corrosive, and each gust felt edged with slivered glass.

  ‘Now!’ Arithon shouted.

  And Lysaer struck, his light a goad to impel the accursed fog down a gauntlet of shadow toward the flask. As glare scoured his sight, he sensed Kharadmon twining spellcraft into his effort. The fog burned, acid-rank, and the faces gnashed hideous teeth. Claws seemed to rake at his person and voices to whisper in his head. Lysaer shivered in a cold sweat.

  ‘Again!’ shouted Arithon in jagged stress.

  Lysaer punished his body to response, though shadows and fog marred his vision, and the churn of the wraiths obscured the flask. Guessing, he slashed out spears of lightning. Faces recoiled, hissing, and Arithon’s warding shadows wavered like curtains in a draught.

  Elusive as air, the Mistwraith surged to spiral clear. Lysaer blocked it, panting, his gut turned queasy from the spell-work contributed by Luhaine. He called light, and light again, white sheets that had no flaw for the sinuous wraiths to exploit. And still Desh-thiere’s entities danced free. Spell and shadow hammered what looked like nothing, but resisted like immovable granite. Through the gust-ripped air, and the acrid, burning presences that hedged the neck of the flask, Asandir called encouragement.

  ‘Keep driving! The endurance of the wraiths is not limitless. In time, they must yield to fatigue.’

  Lysaer felt emptied, a brittle husk. The demands of the attack were insatiable. No oath could prepare for a harrowing such as this, that exhausted reserves and cut past, to the uttermost unravelling of spirit. The mists battled viciously back. The lessons of survival imposed by the Red Desert became as a mere inconvenience before the suffering required to fuel his gift.

  ‘There,’ shouted Asandir. ‘It’s retreating!’

  A dull ache suffused Lysaer’s inner being. The light that left his hands seemed force bought in blood, fuelled at cruel cost to mortal flesh. Impersonal no longer, Kharadmon’s presence hammered into him, viciously taking to keep the light coming in torrents.

  But Desh-thiere was at last giving way.

  Eyes stung by salt, or maybe tears, Lysaer discerned a brightening in the air about the tower. Arithon’s barriers of shadow showed clearly now, skeined about with purple interlace that were spells lent his efforts by Asandir. Into a cone fashioned out of darkness and suspended over the mouth of the flask, Desh-thiere’s coils were chased and burned and funnelled onward by flailing tails of light.

  Lysaer had no spark left for exultation, that the Mistwraith verged on defeat. He could only heave air into lungs that felt scorched, and obey the rapacious demand of Kharadmon, who whipped him past endurance to shape light.

  The mist-wrought wisps whipped and darted in retreat past the spelled maw of shadow. Lysaer felt drained to his core. Wholly under duress, the summoned force sprang from his hands, screaming through air like rage given over to pure malice. A blinding flash sheared the murk, to lash the possessed mists inside the barriers.

  Arithon’s net of shadows wavered in recoil. The outlines blurred, softened, distended, as the trapped vapours inside thrashed to escape. The desperate strength of two mortal men and three Fellowship mages shrank to a pittance before the rage of thousands of meshed entities. Lysaer saw the ward shadows bulge, thin and threaten at a stress-point to crack.

  One leak and Desh-thiere would burst loose all over again; only now mortal limitations had reached an irreversible crux. Lysaer understood that a second assault could not be mounted. Played out, undone by weariness, the defenders found themselves beleaguered as Desh-thiere’s uncountable wraiths recoiled at bay and attacked.

  To lose grip on the barriers above the flask was to die, and leave Kieling Tower forever defiled.

  Arithon knew. Or perhaps the controlling essence of Luhaine compelled his hoarse shout to his half-brother, to fire off another blast of light. Asandir had no encouragement to offer, besieged as he was within coil upon coil of defence seals. Though Lysaer desired with all his heart to respond, he found his spirit beaten listless by the overextended forces of his gift. Only Kharadmon’s iron grip bore him upright and lent him the grace to respond.

  Lysaer raised his hands and called light. The effort sheared through him as agony, leaving trembling that would not ease. His hands flared white then dazzled. His palms stung to the rush of raw power as, ruled unequivocally by a sorcerer, he bent to his knees before the flask.

  In the moment he lifted his arms, he felt himself released to free choice. Gloved in fiery light, Lysaer fell back on a fibre he never knew he possessed. Driven by need to the sacrifice, he reached to smother the impending break in the shadow wards with the incandescent flesh of his hands.

  He touched no moment too soon. The barrier underneath unravelled and the wraiths ripped hungrily through.

  Mist met light with a virulent shriek. Unwarded, the illumination his inadequate protection, Lysaer cupped his hands to cap the breach. A raging sting blistered his palms. Then the wraiths were on him, inside him, a legion of needles in his brain.

  Light answered, a hedging dazzle of wards thrown up by Kharadmon. Trailing half a beat behind, the sorcerer’s protections failed to guard. Lysaer suffered jumbled impressions that overwhelmed the hurt to his hands. The tumult within him screeled to a whirlwind, scattering memories like debris. Through a ripped up jumble of impressions, he sensed Fellowship spellcraft flash lines of fire through past and future, hounding the Mistwraith’s assault.

  The chase re-echoed down every channel of Lysaer’s being. Impressions surged and recoiled, his own mixed with others too alien for comprehension. Past moments snapped out of recall with edged clarity: the Lady of South Isle’s lips on his, and her warm fingers twined in his hair…a night from early childhood when he had sat on the palace battlement with the chancellor’s arm around his waist, as he recited the names of winter stars.

  Then, in punishing detail, a later experience wrought of harsh sun and burning winds, and a thirst in his throat like torture.

  Dissociated wholly from the present, cut off from joined conflict with the Mistwraith, Lysaer tumbled face-down once again in the scorching sand of the Red Desert. Arithon s’Ffalenn st
ood over him, blood-streaked features contorted with unforgotten antagonism.

  ‘Get up!’ the command a lash across a mind pinned by a vice-grip of sorcery. Pain followed, lacerating the last bastion of conscious will.

  ‘Get up!’

  Then himself, a prince born royal, broken and screaming as personal dignity was trampled down and violated by the bastard half-brother who was ever and always Amroth’s enemy.

  Lysaer shuddered, racked once again by annihilating hatred for the s’Ffalenn born to mastery of shadows. Only now, in forced reliving, righteous s’Ilessid fury was shared and fanned hotter by a ravening horde of demon spirits.

  The pain this time raged redoubled as sorcery flared and sparked in an effort to hack the wraiths away.

  The psyche in torment turned to tricks. Spiralled down a tunnel like delirium, Lysaer glimpsed another place, a railed wooden gallery atop an outdoor staircase that overlooked a vast public square. The space between brick-faced halls and mansions was packed with a seething mob; and amid that multitude, one face: of a black-haired enemy who was wholly and unforgivably s’Ffalenn.

  The scene folded in on itself and vanished. Fire blistered Lysaer’s hands. He screamed for a torment more terrible still, of sorcery scourging his inner mind. The invading hordes of wraiths shrieked and gibbered inside his skull. Their cries stormed together, tangled then merged to a mindless blast of noise. Raw force answered their wail and a barrage of sparks as thick as scalding rain. The spirits broke and threshed into spinning flight like singed leaves. Lysaer felt sucked under by tides of faintness and confusion.

  Voices that were human turned distant, broken, then surged back clearly as a hand strongly steadied his elbow.

  ‘Well done!’ The tones, Asandir’s; the touch, that of a sorcerer enfleshed. Kharadmon’s enslaving presence had withdrawn.

  Lysaer leaned into the support, breathing hard, and dizzied past reach of self-control. His mind felt scoured; empty. Even his gifted sense of light seemed deadened, consumed as flaked ash in a smelter’s pit. Fragments of nightmare flitted through his grasp and faded even as he grasped to recall them. A frustrated urgency remained, disrupted as Asandir spoke again.

  ‘Lysaer? You’ve been party to a miracle. The Mist-wraith’s captivity is accomplished.’

  Belatedly aware he still breathed, that his palms stung with blisters that could heal, Lysaer at last managed speech. ‘It’s bottled?’

  For answer, Asandir drew him gently to his feet and forward two stumbling steps.

  The narrow jasper cylinder still rested upright on the battlement. Ward-light shimmered over its contours, which now showed no opening at all. The container was permanently sealed seamless, and the sky, cloaked in natural darkness, showed a terrifying tapestry of stars.

  They were hard-white, blue, and stinging violet, too bright by half to be mistaken for the heavens of Dascen Elur that Lysaer had known throughout childhood. None of the constellations matched any taught him by the chancellor.

  The meaning took a long, sweaty moment to register.

  ‘Desh-thiere,’ Lysaer croaked. ‘It’s banished.’ His handsome, weary face showed the grace of relief before he crumpled in exhaustion against Asandir.

  For a moment the sorcerer who supported him showed an expression of unalloyed sorrow.

  Then, roused to purpose, he called brisk command to the Shadow Master braced against the wall. ‘Help me get your brother down to shelter. After that, if you can manage the lower stair, call Dakar in. He’s going to be needed to doctor burns.’

  Legacy

  The evening after Asandir had ridden south with his discorporate colleagues to better secure the imprisoned Mistwraith, Lysaer sat with his back to the lee of a stone embrasure that once had been favoured as a trysting place by generations of s’Ffalenn princesses. Between hands swathed in bandages and healing unguents rested a flask of telir brandy, left as a courtesy by the sorcerer before his departure.

  The contents were already half-consumed.

  Disappointed to have slept through the first day of restored sunlight, the s’Ilessid prince applied himself to belated celebration as he pondered Athera’s savagely brilliant constellations, strewn in cloudless splendour overhead. ‘To our victory,’ he toasted and offered the flask to his half-brother, who paced, too quietly for his step to be heard through the ongoing sigh of the winds.

  Arithon paused, a dark silhouette against a million points of light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I’d drink instead to the crown that awaits you in Tysan. You’ve fully earned your right to royal privilege.’

  The expected note of bitterness was absent from his half-brother’s manner. Taken aback, that the Shadow Master’s quirky nature should relentlessly continue to confound him, Lysaer smiled as Arithon accepted the brandy, took a token swig and gently handed back the flask.

  ‘You can’t be looking forward to Etarra,’ Lysaer pressed. ‘There’s more on your mind than you let on.’ He touched the bottle to his lips. The telir brandy went down with hardly a burn in the throat; the warmth came later, a glow like a bonfire in the belly. ‘You might feel better if you drank.’

  Arithon returned a quiet chuckle. ‘I don’t feel bad. Just monstrously tired. Still.’

  ‘Still, what?’ The liquor was subtle: it undid barriers as a rake would seduce a prim virgin. When Arithon forbore to respond, Lysaer frowned in mildly euphoric irritation. ‘You’d think, after Desh-thiere’s defeat, the almighty Fellowship of Seven could reward you by finding a replacement hero to shoulder Rathain’s throne in your place.’

  Arithon turned smoothly and set his hands on the wall. For a time he, too, seemed absorbed by the stars. ‘They won’t because they can’t, I suspect.’

  ‘What?’ Lysaer elbowed up from his slouch, setting off a gurgle of sloshed spirits. ‘What do you mean by that? I hate to match sweeping leaps of logic while I’m tipsy.’

  A disturbance sounded from inside the roofless chamber that fronted the flagstone terrace. ‘Dakar,’ Arithon observed, though he had not turned to look. ‘Hot on the scent of the brandy, no doubt.’

  Sounds of a stumble and a muffled curse from the ruins affirmed his idle supposition.

  Yet Lysaer on a binge could be bullishly stubborn; in judgement impaired further by fatigue, he resisted the interruption. ‘You’re implying, friend, that our Fellowship of Seven might not have a choice as to whose head they crown at Etarra?’

  Not exasperated, but only lingeringly weary, Arithon said, ‘I think not. My best guess being that, with or without our ancestor’s knowledge, somebody meddled with our family history.’ Silent, perhaps frowning, he tipped his head sidewards in inquiry.

  ‘Consent was given,’ affirmed Dakar from the depths of the archway that led to the terrace. ‘On behalf of your line, sealed in blood by Torbrand s’Ffalenn, on the day Rathain’s charter was drawn by Ciladis of the Fellowship.’

  ‘There you are,’ Arithon said in light irony to his half-brother. He accepted the brandy that s’Ilessid diplomacy offered out of instinct to console; after a deep swallow and a sigh he relinquished the flask and ended, ‘I leave you all the joys of the night. I’m certainly too spent for witty company.’

  The Shadow Master vanished into the archway, even as the Mad Prophet emerged, wearing an unlikely combination of ragged tunics layered one over another like sediment. These were topped by Asandir’s cloak, the silver-banded hem of which dragged the flagstones around Dakar’s stocky ankles.

  Lysaer studied the Mad Prophet’s choice of wardrobe with raised eyebrows, while Dakar, vociferously defensive, slouched against the wall that Arithon had lately vacated. ‘I’m getting a cold,’ he said, in excuse for the purloined cloak.

  Since the timbre of Dakar’s voice held no sign of a stuffy head, Lysaer sensed a lecture coming on the effectiveness of telir brandy as a medicine for pending coughs. He forestalled the diatribe by offering the flask, and stuck like a terrier to his topic. ‘What did Arithon mean, and what consent did his
ancestor give at the writing of Rathain’s charter?’

  Caught in mid-swallow, Dakar choked. He recovered himself, began afresh and sucked at the flask until forced to stop and gasp for air. Then he sniffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking.’

  ‘Obviously not.’ Too bone-tired for finesse, Lysaer hooked the brandy bottle back. He regarded Dakar’s spaniel eyes and said equably, ‘I need not inquire, if that were true.’

  Dakar started to blot his dribbled chin with the cloak hem, then recalled the garment’s true owner in time to use his sleeve cuff for the purpose. ‘Damn and damn,’ he said softly.

  ‘Once for the brandy, which I won’t share unless you speak,’ Lysaer surmised. ‘The other for the trouble you’ll have earned, when Asandir discovers you’ve borrowed his best cloak without leave.’

  ‘All right.’ Dakar shrugged in resignation. ‘The royal bloodlines are irreplaceable, as Arithon already guessed.’

  ‘Due to prophecy?’ Lysaer swished the flask suggestively.

  ‘No.’ Peevish, Dakar gazed fixedly on the brandy. ‘The Fellowship chose three men and two women to found Athera’s royal lines. They were selected, each one, for a dominant trait that would resist corruption and other pressures that power brings to bear on human nature. It is a grave thing to alter or to influence unborn life. Yet that is what the sorcerers did, to ensure fair rule through generations of dynastic succession. They set a geas ward that would fix those chosen virtues in direct line of inheritance. Your ancestor gave them consent, for all the good that does you.’ Here, Dakar’s own bitterness showed, for an apprenticeship that more times than not seemed the result of manipulation.

  Always smooth, Lysaer passed over the flask. Information desired from Dakar on the nature of the Fellowship’s workings was invariably touchy to extract. ‘What does that mean for Arithon?’