The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  A resolution in favour of complaints he understood would be a frank relief.

  ‘I’ll find you,’ he swore to the shadows, Arithon’s name behind the vow. His tingling discomfort now replaced by fanatical resolve, he moved on.

  Stray dogs that skulked across his path whined and shrank from his scent. When a braver bitch snarled and hounded his track, he dispatched a flick of light and stung her to yelping flight.

  That cruelty to any animal would have been beyond him just minutes before never once crossed Lysaer’s mind. He picked his way over cracked paving and discarded bits of broken pottery and emerged from the alley into the brighter main thoroughfare.

  People crowded the avenue, converging toward the square to attend the royal coronation. A sun-wrinkled farmwife stared at Lysaer’s emergence, chewing toothless gums as she leaned on a strapping, dark skinned grandson. Children darted past on both sides, tossing painted sticks in a throwing game that held careless regard for the neat clothing bestowed by their steadfast merchant parents. These, Arithon’s intended victims, Lysaer greeted courteously. He smiled at a cake vendor, and paused to help her boy push her cart across the gutter.

  The servant in attendance at Morfett’s front doorway knew Lysaer by sight. Politely admitted inside, he asked and was granted leave to see himself to the guest suite on his own.

  No sorcerer guarded the back stairwell: Luhaine’s wards were all faded. The room where Arithon quartered held only a still warmth of sunlight through latched, amber-tinged casements. Lysaer paused, breathing hard on the threshold. He surveyed the chamber more closely.

  The callous character of its occupant stood revealed to casual inspection: in a king’s cloak left crumpled into the cushions of a divan, and the gift of a carbuncle scabbard spurned and abandoned on the floor.

  Lysaer scowled, that the sacred trust of royal heritage should suffer such careless usage. Only the lyranthe lovingly couched on the windowseat gave testament to the heart of the man.

  Urged by a pang so indistinct he could not fathom its origin, Lysaer crossed the echoing floor. By the time he reached the alcove, his feelings had fanned into rage. He shouted to the room’s empty corners, ‘Are Rathain’s people of less account than minstrelsy?’

  Silence mocked him back. The silver strings sparkled sharp highlights, mute, but all the same promising dalliance.

  Rathain’s prince would be reft from distractions; Etarra’s needs would be served. Lysaer reached out and struck the instrument a flying blow with his forearm.

  Parchment-thin wood, spell-spun silver, all of Elshian’s irreplaceable craftwork sailed in an arc above the floor tiles. The belling dissonance of impact lost voice as the lyranthe’s sound-chamber smashed and each scattered splinter whispered separately to rest in a swathe of trammelled sunlight.

  ‘You cannot hide, pirate’s bastard,’ Lysaer vowed. Heat and chills racked his flesh as he spun, crunching over fragments, and burst back through the breached doorway.

  The streets outside were packed by a crushing mob. Every tradesman and commoner turned out with their families now crowded toward the square before the council hall. Even a few white-hooded initiates pledged to Ath’s service had left their hospices in the wilds to attend. Lysaer let the flow of traffic carry him. He felt no remorse for his destruction of Arithon’s lyranthe; besieged by his drive to right injustice, he gave full rein to the ingrained gallantries of his upbringing. Lysaer touched shoulders and patted the cheeks of children, offered kind words to the plain-clad people in the streets. They stood aside for him, gave him way where the press was thickest and smiled at his lordly grace.

  Rathain’s prince must be like him, they said; tall and fair-spoken and pledged to end the corruption in Etarra’s trade guilds and council.

  Lysaer did not disabuse the people of their hope. The whispered turbulence of his thinking bent wholly inward as the untroubled faith of Etarra’s commonfolk caused him to measure his own failing. He too had allowed himself to be misled by the prince of Rathain; he, Amroth’s former heir, who had lost blood kin to s’Ffalenn wiles, should at least have stayed forewarned.

  A touch upon his arm caused Lysaer to start. He glanced in polite forbearance at the matron with the basket of wrinkled apples who gave him a diffident smile. ‘Did you lose track of your folk, sir?’

  ‘Madam, no.’ Lysaer smiled. ‘I’m alone.’

  Abashed by his extreme good looks, the woman gave a little shrug. ‘Well, even by yourself, sir, you’d get a better view from the galleries.’ She raised a chapped hand from her knot-worked shawl and pointed.

  Lysaer squinted against sunlight so pure it seemed to scour the air with its clarity. From his vantage at the edge of the square, the balconies of the guild ministers’ mansions arose in tiers above street level. Their wood and wrought-iron railings striped shadow over a singing knot of cordwainers who boisterously shared a skin of spirits. As their least tone-deaf ringleader paused to take his swig, their ditty drifted cheerfully off-key. ‘I have no invitation,’ Lysaer said above the noise. ‘And anyway, by now the best places are all spoken for.’

  ‘Well, that may be.’ Made bold by his friendliness, the matron gave him swift appraisal. ‘But I’ve a cousin who has lodging at the front of the square. At my asking a bit of space could be found.’

  Lysaer did not ask if the cousin perhaps had a marriageable daughter and fond hopes to attract a wealthy suitor. Neither did he accept on false grounds as he clasped the woman’s wrist and kissed her palm. ‘You’re most kind.’

  The dreams and the lives of just such honest folk were the first things Arithon’s machinations would tear asunder.

  Lysaer gently captured the matron’s basket. ‘Let me. Any burden must hamper you terribly in this press.’

  ‘Not so much.’ But her fingers surrendered the wicker handle. Won to trust by his sincerity, the matron took his arm. ‘Come on. Hurry or we’ll miss the procession.’

  Minutes later, squeezed between the granddaughters of a furniture maker and three strapping cousins who wore guild badges as vintners, Lysaer took the place he was offered.

  From a third-storey gallery accessed by an outdoor stairway, he gazed over the square’s gathered thousands which eddied below like currents pressed counter by fickle winds. The jewelled and feathered finery of the rich mixed uneasily with poorer fare, common labourers and beggars still clad in their jetsam of motley. Angry, outraged, curious or joyful, the factions mingled uneasily. Etarra had turned out for Arithon’s coronation in a welcome well leavened by enmity.

  The atmosphere on the gallery where Lysaer came to roost was festive. The lads had been staked a cask by their master, and wine was freely passed around. The sharpness of red grapes mingled with the sweeter scent shed by apples doled out to the children.

  Courteous but aloof, Lysaer smiled and offered compliments when the inevitable pretty daughter was presented. After that, though the girl in her neat paint and layered silk dresses shot him admiring glances filled with hope, he spared her little attention as he engaged in a predatory survey of the crowd.

  Her little sister was more forthright.

  She toddled forward and plucked at his rich sleeve. With her dimpled chin dribbled with apple juice, she demanded, ‘Who are you looking for?’

  Behind her, older cousins were whispering, ‘It’s him. The very one who’s companion to the prince. Nobody else in Etarra wears indigo velvet like that.’

  The child with her fruit sticky hands was pulled back to allow the exalted guest space.

  Lysaer gave the family who hosted him scant notice as his gaze caught and fixed on an anomaly: above the sunwashed square with its heaving, raucous throng, a raven flapped, deep as shadow against the cloudless brilliance of the sky.

  Heat and cold flashed through Lysaer, and a tremor coursed his flesh. Then the bird, sure harbinger of Traithe and the doings of the Fellowship, the next heartbeat ceased utterly to matter.

  Beneath the raven’s flight path, a lone man s
hoved through the press.

  Lysaer noted details in preternatural clarity. The fugitive had shirt cuffs worked in ribbons of green, silver and black and edged with bands of leopard fur. A plain cloak thrown on to conceal a heraldic tabard had been torn, and threadwork glistened through the holes. The royal blazon might not show, but in his haste Arithon s’Ffalenn had neglected the circlet of inheritance that even now crossed his brow.

  The face beneath was taut with a desperation that touched Lysaer to stark anger. ‘He’s running away!’ he murmured incredulously. ‘Breaking his commitment to the realm.’

  ‘Who’s running away?’ cried the vintner’s drayman, full of red wine and brash fight.

  Heat and cold and chills merged into scalding resentment. ‘Your prince,’ Lysaer snapped back. ‘The truth must be told. Your promised Teir’s’Ffalenn is a criminal and a pirate’s bastard, raised and corrupted by sorcerers.’

  The youngest children were staring, their half-gnawed apples in their hands. To Lysaer, the innocence in their faces reflected a whole city’s deluded defencelessness.

  Something inside of him snapped.

  ‘Get the little ones inside, they’re not safe here!’ His command was instinctive, and charged with a regal prerogative that none on the balcony dared gainsay. A grandfather helped the house matron bundle her young through a side door.

  The confused wails of the children, the scrape of a door bolt, the sudden cringing deference shown by family members still left on the gallery made no impression upon Lysaer. From his unobstructed place at the rail, he drew himself up to full height. Delineated by a nimbus of sunlight, his hair gleamed bright gold and his presence seemed charged with righteous wrath as any angel sent from Athlieria to scour the land of bleak evil.

  Lysaer raised his hand and singled out the slight, dishevelled fugitive that elbowed and shoved to escape the square, then lifted his voice in a thunderous shout.

  ‘People of Etarra, behold the prince you would crown king and hear truth! Your lands have been restored to fair sunlight, yet one lives who can wield darkness more dire than any mist! Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn is full Master of Shadow, a sorcerer who would succour barbarians and waste your fine city to ashes!’

  The roar of the multitude overwhelmed any further accusation; but the velvet-clad figure on the balcony drew notice. People thronging the great square stopped and tipped their faces up to stare. Lysaer’s pointing finger and the circling flight of Traithe’s raven drew notice to the other figure in that strange, partnered tableau.

  Arrested in mid-flight by the grasp of two stolid merchants, Arithon cast a fraught glance at the bird.

  To Lysaer, watching, the gesture affirmed s’Ffalenn guilt. A prince who was innocent of machinations would never count a dumb beast above his subjects or his own threatened fate. Jolted to savage antagonism; unaware he was the manipulated instrument of Desh-thiere’s fugitive wraith, Lysaer raised rigid hands to call his gift…

  Buffeted by the crowd that streamed through a side-street, an illusion cast over his person that lent him the semblance of somebody’s benevolent grandfather, Asandir ceaselessly scanned the grand square. Then an odd flare of light drew his eye to the rail of a nondescript balcony. ‘There!’ he whispered, his word too quiet to be overheard. His thoughts framed the image he saw: of Lysaer, poised in an unmistakable effort to summon light.

  Although nowhere near the tumultuous scene by the council hall, Sethvir picked up the communication. He could do nothing, embroiled as he was in his own difficulties. His head cocked, one hand braced against the doors of the south gate wardroom, the Warden of Althain sent back acknowledgement. Under his palm stout planking shuddered and bounced, assaulted from without by a ramming squad under Diegan’s acting captain. Ordered to disrupt the coronation, Gnudsog had pulled every sentry from the gatehouse with intent to breach the sealed armoury. Busied with stayspells and bindings to withhold more weapons from the chaos in the streets, Sethvir had no chance to express relief.

  Quartering the city mobs for Lysaer had been worse than seeking a needle in a haystack. Where steel and straw could at least be winnowed separate by Name, the wraith that Desh-thiere had insinuated into the matrix of Lysaer’s spirit posed a quandary. Without means to command its true essence, no stop-gap spell of transfer could rescue the possessed victim from his stance of attack upon the balcony.

  Sorrow and grief the strands foretold, were the Fellowship to stand restored to Seven; but with a second, unanticipated forecast entangled on top of the first, the validity of Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy stood threatened. Caught in the critical crux, the Fellowship raged with tied hands. They dared use no power to divert, but could only inadequately observe the blow as inevitably, it must fall.

  ‘We can’t even shift Arithon to safety,’ chimed in a sending from Luhaine, who tracked the s’Ffalenn prince’s progress on the outside chance that the coronation might yet be salvaged. ‘Two interfering merchants have grabbed hold of him.’

  From his stance on the street side, Asandir loosed one of Dakar’s randiest oaths; an offended mother glared in his direction and scooped her toddler beyond earshot.

  On the balcony above the crowd, Lysaer’s hands bunched to fists. A crack split the air and light flared raw brilliance across the sky.

  ‘No!’ Arithon’s horrified cry tangled with Lysaer’s scream of triumph. The Shadow Master under attack tore his forearm out of a man’s grip, twisted and thrust up his sword.

  Silver-white light flared in a starburst that dazzled and blinded: Alithiel’s Paravian-wrought protections sheared out a chord of pure heart-break, sure proof the defending cause was just. Asandir saw, and despaired.

  The light-bolt that speared from the balcony was wholly the work of Desh-thiere’s vengeance and the wraith that now fully possessed Lysaer.

  Arcane energies collided in wrenching dissonance high over Arithon’s head. He thrashed, but despite a madman’s contortions failed to evade the vigilantes who tackled him across shoulders and knees. His sword arm was seized and torn downward.

  That he might have turned his blade and cut to kill never seemed to occur to him; as if the only peril that held meaning lay in Lysaer’s unprovoked assault.

  Asandir’s hand was forced, the full might of his protections engaged to shield helpless bystanders from harm. He cursed fate, agonized that Dakar’s new vision had upset the strands’ forecast and precipitated crisis too soon. No coronation could take place now. On every side of the square, people were screaming, flash-blinded and whipped to stampede in raw terror that their city was being savaged by sorcery.

  As light-bolt and sword-flash sheeted through the maze of his own conjury, Asandir mourned that Alithiel’s bright magic would offer Arithon no shred of defence. The spells of Riathan Paravians were never wrought to take life, but only to dazzle an opponent, and divert or deflect unjust attack.

  Lysaer’s was full command of light; his sight would be unimpaired by a ward that flashed just to blind.

  The revenge engendered by Desh-thiere’s possession arced on toward its targeted victim.

  Isolate from the ward-light that shielded the chance-caught bystanders, Arithon yanked a wrist clear of encumbrance. He no longer held his sword. Only shadow cracked from his spread fingers: for defence of Traithe’s raven, Asandir saw in split-second, grief-sharp perception.

  Uncaring who noticed, the sorcerer wept as Desh-thiere’s offensive hammered down.

  The bolt struck Arithon’s raised palm and snaked in a half-twist down his forearm. Scalded flesh recoiled in agony. Worse horror bloomed upon impact, as conjury well beyond Lysaer’s means burst from his killing band of light.

  Arithon screamed.

  Red lightnings jagged over his body. The merchants who struggled to bear him down were tossed away like ragdolls, leaving the Shadow Master a figure alone, strung through and threshed by patterns like tangled wire.

  Asandir gasped in sick shock. The inconceivable had happened: Desh-thiere’s wraith
had delivered a banespell against the half-brother beyond reach of possession. Transferred by Lysaer’s bolt of light, the evil mesh of its geas entangled in Arithon’s aura.

  Thunder pealed. For a heartbeat the packed square was rinsed scarlet, a tableau borrowed from nightmare. As Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its foothold, Arithon’s expression shifted from resistance and pain to a hatred that abjured all redemption. In purest, bloody-hearted passion, he howled and wrought shadow in answer to Lysaer’s betrayal.

  The air stung under a savage bite of frost and darkness slammed over Etarra.

  Night swallowed all without distinction, from Traithe’s raven that yet flew unharmed on its faithful straight course for Sethvir, to four vigilante merchants exposed to the backwash of murdering force shed from the Shadow Master’s person. Cut down in sudden death, they lay twitching and seared amid smouldering brocades. Citizens scattered in fear from a carnage past the grasp of sane experience.

  Blackness dropped also like a curtain over the most ill-starred victim of them all, the s’Ilessid prince enslaved and ruined by the usage of Desh-thiere’s loose wraith. Emptied by the powers that had driven him, Lysaer folded at the knees and collapsed against the gallery rail.

  A last peal of thunder rattled the mansions that edged the square and boomed off the scarps of the Mathorns.

  ‘Now,’ Sethvir sent in sorrow. ‘The cusp that rules the prophecy has passed. We can try to heal the smashed pieces.’

  Backlash

  The armoury that adjoined the south gate wardroom became the Fellowship’s site to regroup after Desh-thiere’s machinations struck the half-brothers. Sethvir by then had secured the stout doors to both chambers. Ongoing assault from the outer bailey by Gnudsog’s squad of besiegers became reduced to muffled thunder by thick oak. Should the sheared-off lamp-posts pressed into service as rams at length splinter down the braced panels, enchantments would remain that none but the mage-trained might cross.