The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  ‘That must have upset Commander Diegan’s sensibilities,’ Sethvir ventured, his head disappeared behind the pages of yet another yellowed ledger.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Lysaer forgot his distaste for orange tassels and tipped his head back into the chair cushions. ‘The Lord Commander of the Guard rousted out his head captain, Gnudsog, is it? The squat fellow with the muscles and the scars. He silenced the uproar with a battle mace by breaking the messenger’s jaw. The bonesetters are still busy. To mend appearances Etarra’s council will convene tomorrow morning behind barred doors, to formalize reformed laws to ban the monarchy. The guild ministers already bicker like fishwives. Hungover as they’re likely to become, they’ll lock horns over the language until noon.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Sethvir forsook the accounts to jab fingers through a coxcomb of stray hair. ‘Are you saying you got them all in their cups?’

  Dakar answered from the bed with his eyes still closed. ‘They were irked enough to dance on the tables, anyway. All Lysaer did was keep them filling their tankards.’

  ‘Who paid for the gin?’ asked Asandir.

  ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ Lysaer said, infectiously lapsed into merriness. ‘The tavern was owned by the vintner’s guild, and drinks were declared on the house.’

  Lord Governor Morfett set the massive gold seal of the city into puddled scarlet wax. Then, while the guild ministers added their own signatures and ribbons, he shoved his knuckles into a fringe of damp hair and cradled his splitting head. A servant had to touch his sleeve twice before he realized: the pounding came from the doorway, echoing the throb inside his skull.

  ‘Let them in,’ he said through his palms. ‘The damned sorcerers can raise a commotion all they like. Our edict is signed into law, and their prince will be in irons by afternoon.’

  A hagridden secretary scurried to unbar the door. He was all but knocked down as the panels burst inward, and a flood of agitated barristers barged through.

  The newcomers started shouting all at once.

  From the governor’s chair on the dais, Morfett screamed for order. By the time he made himself heard, his head was splitting. The councilmen around him were sweating or vainly covering their ears to ease their hangovers. Not a few looked ready to be sick.

  When the men could be made to speak in more orderly fashion, their complaints added up to disaster.

  The sorcerers and their prince had spent an industrious morning, beginning with a review of Etarra’s condemned. By the tenets of Rathain’s royal charter, it transpired that two thirds of the city’s prisoners were wrongfully tried and sentenced.

  ‘Pardons and reprieves from execution!’ Morfett howled.

  ‘Worse,’ a clerk interrupted. ‘The prince has also vouched treasury funds for reimbursement of unfair fines.’

  ‘His mother-accursed royal Grace can’t do that!’ Morfett jumped to his feet. ‘A Teir’s’Ffalenn has no right to set his seal to any documents unless and until there’s a coronation. The decrees are false! No such ceremony has been ratified!’

  ‘No,’ corrected Etarra’s seneschal sadly. He looked and sounded like a kicked hound. ‘But he could, and did, post documents that name the prisoners to be acquitted on the day he’s invested as high king.’

  ‘Along with which laws will be repealed, which taxes, eliminated and how many public servants shall be relieved from their posts without pay!’ This inveigling was worse than the feud ongoing between the ironmongers and the furniture-joiners, who captured and tortured each other’s apprentices to blackmail concessions for trade secrets. Morfett slammed his fists on the high table, spattering ink and official wax over mother of pearl inlay. ‘Is this what you’ve come here to tell me?’

  Amid cringing rows of officials, not one met their Lord Governor’s furious outburst.

  ‘Dharkaron take you for a pack of piddling puppies!’ Morfett stuck out his hand toward his commander of the guard. ‘Give me our new writ! Then go at once and tell Gnudsog to muster a squad of enforcers. I’ll see that s’Ffalenn bastard in chains and flogged for fomenting insurrection. Fiends and Ath’s fury, no meddling Fellowship sorcerer’s going to raise a hand to stop me!’

  ‘No sorcerer will, but your people might,’ a voice volunteered from the entry. Sethvir stepped inside, bemused as a philosopher given new audience for his theories. ‘Have you been listening?’ He pushed the outer door panels open.

  A wave of sound reverberated into the council hall. The mob in the streets beyond the antechamber were not outraged, but cheering, and against any law of nature, Sethvir’s mild tone carried clearly over the din. ‘Rumours spread that your ministers met to outlaw the royal charter. To keep an irate mob of farmers from storming your doors and tearing your councilmen limb from limb, the First City Alderman suggested the contrary; that the documents being drawn were in fact an abdication of the guilds from ruling power and an affirmation of s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty. Craftsmen and labourers took to the streets in celebration. The North Gate belltowers play carillons and the shanty-district whores are throwing posies. If you end this session without a writ for a royal coronation, your people of Etarra are going to riot.’

  ‘Let them!’ Diegan’s rebuttal rang like a whipcrack over the noise. ‘I’d rather find myself lynched than bend my knee to any high king.’

  He made as if to push past, but the dignitaries beside him caught his wrists. There were others of the council not so staunch. Should the mobs turn lawless in the streets, the city guard could not stay them. Looting would be followed by bloodshed and the damage to trade would be incalculable. Pressured to give in by a mournful flock of peers, the Lord Governor of the city waved for Diegan to subside. Then he sat down abruptly with his knuckles jammed against his teeth. Today the sorcerers’ timing had them beaten. But the Fellowship could hardly shepherd the stew of Etarra’s politics indefinitely. Best to accept this defeat and save resources to upset s’Ffalenn rule another day. On the floor, trodden under the milling feet of the pedigreed elect of Etarra, the morning’s brave warrant to arrest the prince came to an ignominious end.

  Diegan tugged free of the dignitaries, unpacified. ‘It won’t be that easy,’ he lashed at Sethvir. ‘The rabble might love the idea of a high king today. But when unrest drives them to turn, no blandishments your prince can offer will appease them.’

  ‘Blandishments?’ Sethvir looked thrilled as a madcap apothecary prepared to make gold from plain clay. ‘I rather thought his Grace would give them back their chartered freedom.’

  Diegan’s lip curled in a snarl. Blithe as the Warden of Althain could appear, as much as he seemed a doddering elder of a stripe to knot strings around his wrists to nudge a senile memory, he was no such vague old fool.

  He had Etarra’s council at bay and he knew it.

  But his position was dangerously precarious. Moment to moment, any of a thousand missed details could erupt into bloody uprising as upheaval gave rise to panic. The citizens outside the council hall were far from tranquil, nowhere near under control. Only the poor and the disaffected roamed the streets. Sensible citizens of stature had barricaded their families inside their houses in dread. The Fellowship’s straits were not invisible. They could not be everywhere. Even as the governor’s council drafted their formal abdication, Diegan continued to collect reports.

  Guilds were seizing the disruption as cover to wage less covert rivalries; five men of good families lay dead from unmarked knives. Asandir was busy protecting the moneylender who funded the treasury’s bottomless capacity to dispense bribes from a stone-throwing mob, who protested paying taxes for usury. Traithe, at the south ward armoury, barred Gnudsog’s deputies from the spare weapons stores while, impervious to attempts by all three fraternities of assassins, Arithon was being fitted for dress-boots by Etarra’s most fashionable cobbler.

  The discorporate mages Kharadmon and Luhaine assuredly were behind the royal luck.

  Before the wax on the writs that confirmed s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty
grew cool, and despite the frustrated opposition of a governor’s council hazed like smoke-driven wasps, his Grace emerged in princely splendour to read the Royal Charter of Rathain in the square before the guild-halls. This time, the ceremony was engineered with enough glitter to make even Etarran excess seem drab.

  Afterward, the populace could speak of nothing else.

  The only man in the city less pleased than the Lord Governor and Etarra’s commander of the guard was Arithon s’Ffalenn himself. Set on display before the throng, he had managed his part as a musician might play to a rowdy taproom. Viewed as saviour by the poor, unrelentingly hated by the trade-guilds, he weathered the feast that followed less masterfully. Mantled in the green, black and silver of the s’Ffalenn royal blazon, he mingled awkwardly with a merchant aristocracy of faddish extremes. The fine food and wines did not distract them from their newest pleasure, which primarily consisted of prince-baiting. Intrigue poisoned the simplest word of courtesy, and while some wives and ladies battled for the chance to ingratiate, they had sharp, cunning minds that searched also for weaknesses to exploit.

  This was a city where children were urged to select their playfellows according their parents’ rank and importance, and who were often as not sent out visiting with instructions to overhear all they could of the affairs of their schoolmates’ fathers.

  Arithon handled the pressure with the jumpy nerves of a cat caught unsheltered in a rain shower.

  Amid an obstacle-course of laden tables, heavy with gold appointments and pearl-stitched bunting, he needed his swordsman’s footwork to escape becoming entangled. At his elbow, steady in support, was Lysaer who deflected social ripostes with a wit that invited friendly laughter. Less skilled at diplomacy, Arithon buried distaste behind blandness. He escaped being targeted by insults by never for a minute staying still. He did not trust these people, in his presence or out of it. He most carefully followed conversations that took place behind his back. Hounded as quarry set after by beaters, he saw openings. Even Diegan’s hostility revealed ways to breach the arrogance, the mistrust, even the depths of antagonism that fenced him round. But the political complacencies such changes would demand of him played false to his musician’s ear.

  Karthan, at least, had not been riddled with such viperish greed in brocades; though piracy was no honest trade, its thievery had been straightforwardly presented.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ murmured a female voice in his ear.

  Rathain’s prince turned to acknowledge the source: Diegan’s tawny-haired sister who could drive a man silly with her looks, but who was poised in her carriage as a snake.

  Arithon inclined his circlet-crowned head. Physically graceful in discomfort, he offered his hand. Too much rich food. Your city’s cooks have outdone themselves. Shall we dance?’

  She took his fingers and her fine, arched brows sketched a frown that was swiftly erased. She had not expected his callouses. The tightening around her eyes made plain that the discovery would be passed to her brother: that despite the appearance of delicate build, this prince’s palms were no stranger to the sword. ‘I find conversation more interesting.’

  ‘How disappointing for both of us. Too much talk has been driving me mad.’ Arithon returned a regret as impenetrable as chipped quartz. ‘For clever conversation with a lady, I must defer to Lysaer’s charm.’ Gently, firmly, he deposited her on the arm of the blond companion, who disengaged from discussion with two ministers with a panache any statesman must envy. ‘Lord Commander Diegan’s sister, Talith,’ Arithon introduced, and his grin came and went at his half-brother’s blank instant of appreciation.

  The lady in her black-bordered, tawny brocades was enough to disrupt conscious thought.

  ‘My lady, Lysaer s’Ilessid.’

  ‘Commander Diegan mentioned you,’ said Talith in chilly politeness. She turned her head quickly, but Arithon was gone, melted into the crowd as neatly as a fugitive iyat. Her annoyance this time creased her forehead. He had defeated her before she had quite understood that her methods were under attack. Her stung pride would show, if she put aside dignity and chased him. No prince should have been able to vanish that swiftly, burdened as he was in state clothing. The gossips might be right to name him sorcerer.

  ‘Allow me,’ Lysaer interrupted her thought. ‘Poor substitute though I may be, in truth, his Grace can be terrible company.’

  Talith turned back, to find her pique met by a surprisingly earnest concern. Lysaer’s elegant good looks did nothing to ease her thwarted fury. ‘He said he wanted to dance. I should have accepted.’

  Lysaer set her down on a chair and as if by magic a servant appeared to pour wine. ‘Arithon anticipated your refusal.’ Smiling in the face of her crossness he added, ‘Given his perverse nature, and his penchant for solitude, that’s precisely the outcome he desired. He’s much easier to collar when alone. Will you take red wine or white?’

  ‘White, please.’ Talith accepted the offered goblet and raised it. ‘To his absence, then.’ She drank, surprised to discover herself mollified. Lysaer’s sympathy held nothing of fawning. He appreciated her misjudgement and refrained from questioning her motives, suave behaviour that was piquantly Etarran. Gauging the interested sparkle in his eyes, she smiled back. One missed opportunity could as easily be exchanged for another. From Lysaer, she could glean as much, or perhaps more to help the city’s cause, than from the irksome s’Ffalenn prince himself.

  Not until very much later, when her brother the commander of the guard visited her chamber to ask what she had garnered, did she realize how thoroughly she had been beguiled.

  Throughout the evening spent with Lysaer she had done most of the talking.

  ‘His charm is tough to resist,’ her brother grumbled. He loosened the amethyst buttons of his collar with fingers much softer than the prince’s, and smoothly unmarred by scars. ‘Damned fair-haired conniver is a diplomat down to his shoes. Too bad he wasn’t born townsman. We could’ve used one with his touch to restore our relations with the farmers.’

  At council the following morning the acknowledged Prince of Rathain was conspicuous by his absence. Worn by the tact needed to smooth down mutinous factions of councilmen, and strung up from picking apart intrigues that clung and interwove between the guilds like dirtied layers of old cobwebs, Lysaer decided he needed air. Of late he had been troubled by a succession of fierce headaches. Threatened by another recurrence, he begged leave of the proceedings when Sethvir called recess at noon.

  Lysaer seemed the only one bothered enough to pursue his half-brother’s irresponsibility.

  A hurried check on the guest chambers at Lord Governor Morfett’s mansion revealed Arithon nowhere in evidence. The bed with its orange tassels had not been slept in; the servants were quick to offer gossip. Laid out in atrociously warring colours over the divan by the escritoire were the gold-worked shirt and green tabard that should have attired the prince.

  Alone with his annoyance in the vestibule, Lysaer cursed softly, then started as somebody answered out of the empty air.

  ‘If you want your half-brother, he’s not here.’

  ‘Kharadmon, I suppose,’ Lysaer snapped: the morning’s dicey diplomacy had exhausted his tolerance for ghosts in dim corners who surprised him. ‘Why not be helpful by telling me where else he isn’t.’

  Equably, the discorporate sorcerer said, ‘I’ll take you, unless you’d rather charge about swearing at empty rooms.’

  ‘It’s unfair,’ Lysaer conceded, ‘but I’m not in the mood to apologize. Help find my pirate bastard of a half-brother, and that might improve my manners.’

  Kharadmon obliged by providing an address that turned out to be located in the most dismal section of the poor quarter.

  ‘You don’t seem concerned about assassins,’ Lysaer noted, his crossness now equally due to worry.

  ‘Should I?’ Kharadmon chuckled. ‘You may have a point, at that. It’s Luhaine’s turn for royal guard-duty.’ Etarra’s back-district alleys
looped across themselves like a botched mesh of crochetwork. The paving was slimy and frost-heaved. Lysaer ruined his best pair of boots splashing through sewage and spotted his doublet on the dubious fluids that dripped from a brothel’s rotted balconies. He lost his way twice. The street of the horse knackers where he arrived at last reeked unbearably of rancid tallow and of the waste from unwholesome carcasses.

  He wanted to kick the next beggar who solicited him for coins; he had already given all he had and against his promise to Kharadmon his temper had done nothing but deterioriate.

  Blackly annoyed for having volunteered responsibility for this errand, he stalked around the next corner.

  Laughter lilted off the lichen-stained fronts of the warehouses, as incongruous in that dank, filthy alley as the chime of carillon bells.

  The sound stopped Lysaer short. The joy he recognized for Arithon’s, as joltingly out of character for the man as this unlikely, dreary setting.

  Pique replaced by curiosity, Lysaer edged forward. Past the bend, under the gloom of close-set walls, he saw a band of raggedy waifs, his errant half-brother among them. The prince of Rathain had spurned fine clothes for what looked like a ragpicker’s dress. The elegant presence of yesterday had been shed as if by a spell, leaving him noisome as his company, whose unwashed, cynical faces were enraptured by something that transpired on the ground.

  Lysaer stepped cautiously around a maggot-crawling dump of gristle and tendons. His step disturbed older bones. Flies buzzed up in a cloud and his eyes watered at the stink. He covered his nose with his sleeve, just as a brigantine fashioned of shadows scudded out from between one child’s bare legs. Of unknown sex under its rags and tangled hair, the creature screamed in delight, while the ship caught an imaginary gust in her sails and heeled, lee-rail down, through a gutter of reeking brown run-off.