by Janny Wurts
Inside, ill-lit by a single torch, oil and leather and the staleness of old sweat sullied the air with the leftover grimness of past wars. Dust from dryrotted fletchings filmed the floors, smeared by tracks left from Sethvir’s pacing and other marks scoured by the arbalists and pitch barrels he had dragged to clear space between the close-stacked stores.
After, his robe like old blood in the dimness, Sethvir stilled. As if, overcome by reverie, he had forgotten to move between steps. In contrary fact, his appearance masked a concentration so keen, nothing alive could escape him. Beyond distraction from the ram’s thudding impacts, he unreeled his awareness beyond keep walls to measure the pulse of all Etarra.
Like individual currents in a cataract, he sensed the mobs that rampaged through streets battened black under shadow; restive city guardsmen who formed bands and drew steel to skewer any sorcerer they could search out and harry to final reckoning. Sethvir knew families mewed up in locked houses; he touched the spilled blood of the innocent, heard the cries of the raped, knew the rage and despair of the looted. Need left scant space for grief. He could set only small seals of peace.
The effects were infinitesimal: amid dusty cobwebs in a wine-cellar, an infant hidden by its parents ceased its hysterical crying. Three huddled siblings quieted in relief, their terror of the dark given surcease; while in the air high above Traithe’s raven was rescued from blind circling and guided through black sky to safe roost. Yet of thousands of woes the Warden of Althain encountered, he eased but a very few. His greater reserves of necessity stayed poised, as, stone-patient, he scanned the welter of Etarra’s disgruntled humanity, inset with the odd pool of calm that was Traithe’s spell of ward upon the governing officials, asleep and barred inside their council hall.
Sethvir might have found humour in their predicament, had the signal he awaited not chosen that moment to manifest.
‘Reach,’ the Warden of Althain responded.
On a balcony in the darkened main square, Asandir acknowledged, then stepped into a net of forces held ready to receive him. His foot left the platform of a gallery redolent with spilled wineskins and bruised apples, passed through a nexus of spatial distortion and came down in dust and steel filings on the floor of the south keep armoury.
Sethvir stepped clear as the shadows cast by the weaponracks rearranged to embrace his colleague’s tall form. In his arms, Asandir cradled Lysaer s’Ilessid, unconscious. One jewelled, silk-clad wrist dangled down, and hair fanned gold strands across the shoulder of the sorcerer’s dark robe.
Clear-cut as a cameo, the prince’s profile reflected the inborn nobility of his lineage; no shadow showed of the evil that had blighted life and honour. Unwitting pawn of ill circumstance, Lysaer had yet to waken and feel the change that disbarred him from royal inheritance.
Sethvir avoided Asandir’s eyes, which were steel-bleak. The hands, too fierce in their grip, that crinkled fine lace and blue tinsel; his stance, forced and graceless from the sorrows unspoken between them: that after today’s unconscionable sacrifice, the s’Ffalenn coronation had not happened.
The result did not bear mention, that the precarious Black Rose Prophecy, which keyed Davien the Betrayer’s repentance and the return of Ciladis the Lost, should be left unresolved and in jeopardy.
Desh-thiere had been allowed its ugly vengeance, yet the reunification of their Fellowship they had traded Athera’s peace to guarantee had escaped its conditional link to the future. The drum-boom of the siege-ram allowed no space for regret, that every atrocity that swept Etarra’s streets might have been set loose in vain.
‘Lay him there.’ The Warden of Althain indicated the weathered canvas litter he had braced off chill flooring with upended casks of catapult shot. Asandir shed his burden and knelt to rearrange blue velvets before they became napped with grime and oil.
‘You cannot blame yourself,’ Sethvir said quickly. He did not add empty platitudes, that Arithon might one day rise beyond the day’s betrayals and change heart to embrace his inheritance; that Rathain’s mismanagements and hatreds, now vastly worsened, could somehow be healed without scars.
Left bleak and empty-handed, Asandir slipped his dark cloak and covered the fair-haired prince still left in their charge. Soft as a fall of shadow, heavy wool veiled the glitter of rich threadwork that proved Lysaer still breathed. ‘We were remiss not to look for possession,’ Asandir said finally.
‘Across time?’ Sethvir closed his eyes, savaged by awareness that continued to span the warp through weft weave of reactions that marked a city’s plunge into turmoil. The strain did not just leave him vague; today, he looked whitely haggard. ‘Had we Name for the one wraith responsible, we might have unriddled its intent. But prevent? The conflict etched by the strands has not altered. And Arithon is in retreat, not dead.’
Which was close as he could bear to come to pleading faith in a major miracle.
In answer to unvoiced forebodings, the torch-flame streamed in its bracket, then extinguished as Luhaine’s presence unfurled with untoward violence in the armoury. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he announced in reference to Arithon. The ongoing thud of the rams clipped his words as he added, ‘I managed to track him across the square but his life-pattern’s drifted severely. I mislike the evidence, that Desh-thiere’s wraith wrought black sorcery whose taint has afflicted both half-brothers.’
‘It’s accomplished more than possession, we’ve confirmed.’ Sethvir’s admission came tired as he joined Asandir beside the litter and cradled both hands under Lysaer’s head.
‘But not what,’ Luhaine fired back.
‘Let Cal work and he’ll tell you.’ That Asandir used Sethvir’s ancient and all but forgotten mortal Name laid bare the depth of his distress.
Luhaine disregarded the lapse. ‘No one of us can afford to stand idle while you check!’ He departed in a whip-snap of wind more Kharadmon’s style than his own.
Fibres of dry-rotted fletching spiralled away on the draft, faintly visible to mage-sight against a chiaroscuro of dark.
‘It’s bad,’ Asandir concluded softly. ‘How bad?’
‘Ah, the unsuspected craftiness of the creature.’ Sethvir’s voice seemed blurred to distraction as his awareness realigned with his flesh. ‘Desh-thiere’s plot has been deviously thorough.’ He sighed and smoothed the ruched laces of Lysaer’s formal collar. ‘It understood that its bane was comprised of paired strength. What better protection than to sunder our princes through hatred and set their gifted talents against each other?’
‘It cursed them to enmity, so.’ That implied long-range planning, a chilling fact. Asandir shared Sethvir’s unsettled wariness, that the wraiths left under ward at Skelseng’s Gate were far from secure as they stood.
But that complication must wait.
‘What else?’ Asandir prompted gently.
Abject in misery, Sethvir released his findings.
Not surprisingly, the Mistwraith’s malice had begun that night when the half-brothers had been cornered outside of Paravian protections at Ithamon. Cognizant of them as its enemy, Desh-thiere had imprinted their personalities then. The Fellowship’s night-long search to uncover damages in the aftermath had been wasted effort: the wraiths had done no meddling, not then.
In shock and raw pain Asandir voiced the appalling conclusion. ‘Desh-thiere had already encompassed the scope of Arithon’s training in that first split-second of contact!’
Fenced by battered racks of weapons, the Warden of Althain propped his forehead on laced knuckles. ‘Worse.’ His words fell deadened against his sleeves. ‘The wraiths withheld from action, brooding upon what they had learned.’ And then when language failed him, he set his ugly findings into thought. Deep damage had not occurred until Lysaer’s barehanded, heroic exposure, in the throes of the last struggle to confine the entities at Ithamon. New knowledge reshaped the decision to shield Arithon’s learning to a tragedy of broader proportions.
‘Our protections were wrongly aligned,’ Asandir whisper
ed, anguished. ‘We sought harm too soon and protected craft teachings too late.’ Woe to Lysaer, his integrity left ruthlessly forfeit to an enemy that took him defenceless. The irony wounded, that Arithon’s schooled protections might have deflected the attack; or at least sensed the presence of an invading wraith before it could move to possess. ‘Dharkaron damn us for fools, we threw the wrong prince into jeopardy.’
Too late, in hindsight, to reverse a choice miscalled through crisis and desperation. Sethvir closed dry, chapped fingers over his colleague’s wrist. ‘Without Desh-thiere’s true Name we were blinded. And still are.’ Gently, despondently, he clarified: that a stolen memory from Lysaer’s trials in the Red Desert had offered foothold for Desh-thiere’s revenge; when, for the sake of survival, Arithon had once resorted to magecraft to break the recalcitrance of a half-brother whose hatred eclipsed hope of reason.
‘The Mistwraith seized upon discord, then borrowed deeper knowledge from the bindings Kharadmon attached to Lysaer’s consent on Kieling Tower,’ Sethvir said. ‘The spell-curse just cast interlinks with the half-brothers’ life-force. To dissolve or countermand its hold would separate spirit from flesh.’
‘Death,’ Asandir mused bitterly. His remorse did not lighten, for past mistakes. While the Mistwraith’s entities encompassed such grasp of the mysteries, the Fellowship and two princes from Dascen Elur had achieved no small feat to bind and confine all but one. There remained the unresolved menace of Lysaer’s possession and an entity that must of necessity be exorcised now.
‘Are you ready?’ Sethvir asked. Though the eyes of his colleague mirrored trepidation, the two sorcerers took position across the makeshift pallet and placed hands upon the prince’s brow and chest. Around them, the gleam of a thousand weapons lay quenched in darkness, kept keen for blooding mortal flesh. Yet against a phantom entity, steel offered only brute ending; the sharp, final agony of the mercy stroke that exchanged live suffering for the grave.
Cruel comfort. Asandir snatched a shaky breath. ‘You know, if we fail, we’ll have to kill him.’
Sethvir chose not to answer. At some point the shivering boom of the ram had stopped. Deep quiet spread over the armoury until a sorcerer’s profound concentration could pick out the sigh of each settling dust-mote. Aimless air stroked the blades in their racks and rang from them tone that sang of death. Distanced from such distractions, Sethvir stilled into trance. His awareness merged into Lysaer’s to ferret out the elusive energies which comprised the enemy wraith.
No simple exorcism, this delicate unravelling of spirits, since the entity they sought to extricate stayed unNamed.
To Asandir fell the task of safeguard. Submersed in Sethvir’s labours, he paced a hunt through the complex, interlocking auras that comprised Lysaer’s spirit. Like inventory, each strand and loop and whorl of light became mapped; those that belonged to s’Ilessid were set under ward by Asandir. Any that felt alien, Sethvir marked aside. The nuances of identity were perilous, slight; in some cases outside logic or intuition. A wrong choice would cause a fragment of the victim to splinter off, an amputation of the soul more permanent than the most devastating bodily mutilation. Yet without Name to compel the invasive spirit out of its entrenched possession, the Fellowship had no other recourse. The risk of error widened with the taint of the spell-curse that bound the half-brothers into enmity. Firsthand, Asandir was forced to share the anguish of Sethvir’s prior assessment. For the hatred instilled into Lysaer for his half-brother was so thoroughly intermeshed with his life-force that it defeated outside help to unravel. The geas to take down Arithon both was and was not a part of the s’Ilessid prince’s essence. To miscall just one twist of its bindings would be to condemn Lysaer to death.
Sweating, frustrated, intermeshed in life-threads complex enough to fray reason to the bittermost edge of bewilderment, Asandir grasped why Sethvir had met his last statement with silence.
More likely their attempted exorcism would go awry and kill the victim, than any aspect of an unnamed wraith be left at large to require an execution.
Time lost meaning. The paired sorcerers submerged in the immensity of their task made countless agonized choices. Near the end, in ragged exhaustion, they examined their respective progress.
The patterns that comprised the known wraith were layered too thinly to be credible.
‘That can’t be all of it,’ Sethvir sent in ringing despair. ‘Where in Ath’s name can it be hiding?’
They began afresh, untangled Lysaer’s memories strand for strand. Some rang false; far too few. The wraith’s entirety yet escaped them. Sick with trepidation, Asandir said, ‘We had better re-examine what was artificial at the outset.’
Sethvir’s grief came back barbed with white anger. That Desh-thiere’s aspect might attach its possession to the given gift of the s’Ilessid royal line was unthinkable. And yet, there it was: the rest of its meddling essence enmeshed so subtly with Fellowship sorcery that their own review had missed it out.
‘Dharkaron, Angel of Vengeance!’ Sethvir all but wept. ‘No wonder the ill creature had him! It gained entry through the one avenue of conscience he was spell-charged never to question!’ The fault and the weakness were never Lysaer’s but the Fellowship’s own, for sorrowful lack of foresight.
That moment a key rattled in the outside lock to the wardroom. Gnudsog’s bass shout cut off on somebody’s testy command, this followed by a mortal yelp of pain.
Dakar said, his diction slurred and quarrelsome, ‘Well, I warned you there’d be wards. Let me.’
Sethvir sighed. ‘Company. We had better finish this quickly.’
The rush sat poorly with Asandir. But if the panic driven bloodshed in Etarra’s streets was to be curbed, Lysaer’s talents would be needed to dissolve Arithon’s barrier of shadows. Crisis allowed no time to triple-check steps that at best were uncertain business anyway. Asandir steadied the defences set to shelter Lysaer’s spirit. Then, braced as if for a cataclysm, he said, ‘Go.’
Sethvir unleashed counter-bindings like a trap over the parasitic wraith. Light crackled over Lysaer’s body. A convoluted mesh traced like fire upon the air, reflected in swordsteel and polearms. Asandir felt a burn of force tear against his wards as the wraith interlaced through its victim’s being thrashed to maintain its hold. The pull increased, terrible as the tug of a rip-tide or the wrench of barbed grapples from seasoned oak. Asandir resisted. To lose grasp on even one strand of the pattern was to cede a bit of Lysaer with the wraith.
Sethvir’s draw spells sharpened. Stress-points flared cold blue, and the lines over Lysaer’s body blurred and spiked where they dragged one against another like entangled wires pried to separation.
The wraith clung, obdurate.
Sorcery peaked to compensate. On the litter, Lysaer spasmed taut. The pain of the forced unbinding cut even through unconsciousness and a harrowing wail tore from him.
The cry as well had been Asandir’s, for the prince’s torment became shared. No resource could be spared for small healing, absorbed as the sorcerer was in holding spirit united with flesh. Even as powers twisted and flashed at his directive, he could not shed the feeling that this exorcism was going too hard. As if the wraith had sunk fangs into some part of Lysaer, it seemed intent upon ripping him asunder rather than relinquish its possession.
And then on the heels of that uncertainty, the wraith came unravelled from Lysaer’s being so abruptly that recoil hit like a slap. Spellcraft sheared last connections and pinned the creature down in mid-air. For good or ill the deed was done. The trapped wraith froze, burning in malice like a marsh candle; the freed man lay dazed senseless on the litter. The sorcerers braced at his side regarded each other, beaten and drained from their labours. Between them passed understanding: that cost had been set upon this unbinding. The s’Ilessid gift of true justice, bent to ill usage by the wraith, had suffered untold further damage.
Asandir ventured hoarsely, ‘The curse that sets Lysaer against Arithon had sullied the s’Il
essid gift in any case.’
Hunched with his chin on clasped knuckles, Sethvir sighed. They dared correct nothing now. Not without risk of disturbing Desh-thiere’s binding and chancing the s’Ilessid prince’s life. ‘There’s always the next generation,’ he said sadly. ‘The wraith, at least, is defeated.’
The barest hitch to Sethvir’s statement snapped Asandir to keen scrutiny. The Warden of Althain avoided contact, his mind held shuttered and dark. His eyes stayed stubbornly averted. Asandir said, ‘There’s more. You’ve got Name for the ill-starred being, haven’t you?’
Now Sethvir did look up, bleak as ice on spring blossoms in the sickly glimmer shed by the wraith. ‘Once, the creature was human.’
Stunned by cascading implications, scraped raw by a forced reassessment of the countless doomed spirits imprisoned under wards at Skelseng’s Gate, Asandir lost speech. Dread burdened him, as each wraith’s disfigured humanity set his Fellowship too bleak a quandary. A sorcerer’s judgement was not Ath’s authority, to trap unconsenting spirits in a limbo of indefinite imprisonment. Neither could the riddle of Desh-thiere’s nature be unwound to free those damned thousands, until the Fellowship stood at full strength, their number restored back to Seven.
All and more swung in pivot upon one chancy cipher: the life of the last s’Ffalenn prince.
As Sethvir and Asandir shared this final, most vivid disclosure compounded of miscalculated risks and urgency, immediate troubles returned to roost.
The bar on the armoury door clanged up. A stay-spell flared dead and steel hinges wailed open as, bemoaning a headache in a carping counterpoint, Dakar pitched sideways into the breach. The shoulder that hit against the lintel was all that kept him upright.
‘It’s dark!’ Diegan’s complaint shivered the still air with echoes. ‘Dharkaron take your drunken whimsy, I heard no screams. Nobody’s in here.’