The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Elaira insisted, recalling the whiplash resilience the living man had possessed. ‘Ath be my witness, the conclusion you’ve drawn from this is wrong.’

  ‘Time will tell.’ Morriel motioned dismissal. ‘You are excused to rest. The widow will have a bed waiting, and a basin to wash. Remember to drink enough water, lest you take harm from the tienelle poisons.’

  The traditional response all but caught in Elaira’s throat. ‘Your will.’ She dragged herself to her feet, managed a graceless curtsey, and before the cramping that marked the aftermath of tienelle usage tore her composure to shreds, contrived to walk out of the warehouse.

  Outside, wrapped in darkness with the dank winds cooling her sweaty face and her back to the mildewed sill of a craft shanty, the tears came.

  Elaira could not cast off the ripping, unhappy remorse, that in keeping loyalty to her order, she had effected a betrayal much deeper. Her every intent had just misfired, to expose a man’s private self, that his hidden pregnabilities should win him the protection of Koriani sympathy. Yet understanding had turned awry in her hands. Elaira ached with recognition that she had only succeeded in granting a weapon to an enemy.

  Daybreak

  In a widow’s attic bedchamber, First Senior Lirenda wakens once again, restlessly entangled in her bedclothes; and the dream that spoils her sleep is the same, of a man’s green eyes imbued with a compassion deep enough to leave her weeping and desolate in the icy chill before dawn…

  As fog curls silver through the marshes flanking Tal Quorin, Deshir’s clansmen break fast on dry journey-biscuit and take up their shovels and axes; and although they speak little on the fact their crown prince has been absent since his oathtaking ceremony the previous afternoon, Steiven’s son Jieret overhears enough to become intrigued over Arithon’s whereabouts…

  In the chimney-warmed garret of a north-kingdom hostel, a caravan-master nurses a flagon of spirits; between gulps and recriminations, he cannot fathom what possessed him to give over the horse-thief’s jewelled pin to that dreamy-eyed greybeard in maroon who had met him in the alley and simply asked for the gift, as if acorn-sized emeralds were proper to claim as charity from an absolute stranger…

  XVI. AUGURY

  In a place of his own choosing, well removed from the activities of the clans, Arithon disengaged mage-trained senses from the webs of subliminal energy that delineated the surrounding forest. Gently the awareness bled from him, of living leaves and dappling sunlight; of roots rejuvenated by the Mistwraith’s defeat groping warmed soil in new growth; and of birds that flicked in bursts through the branches as they gathered small twigs for their nesting. His touch upon the land’s pulse had been thorough but light; even the secretive night-lynx had not been disturbed where she slept denned up with her young. Arithon opened his eyes at last to the fluting calls of thrushes and the light-shafted haze of midmorning.

  Absent since his oathtaking the previous afternoon, Rathain’s new crown-prince laced his fingers and stretched kinks from his shoulders and back. Worry he would have masked before others sat all too plain on his face.

  Deep trance had absorbed him for twelve unbroken hours, a necessary interval to ensure that this small, streamside glen would stay isolated enough for the arduous scrying that lay ahead of him. Game deer within his proximity browsed untroubled by hunters, the paths they tracked never trodden by clan children sent out to forage for herbs and firewood.

  Muscles released from the demand of perfect stillness cramped as Arithon arose. The gimp in his movement dismayed him, forced a reckoning for a self-discipline sadly slackened since his apprenticeship at Rauven. No small bit wrung by trepidation, he knelt. Alone beside one of the Tal Quorin basin’s many streamlets, that bent in dark courses through towering oaks and tangled thickets of witch hazel, he dipped his hands and drank.

  Icy water hit his empty stomach and shot a quiver through him. While he rested on his heels for an interval to allow his body to settle, a half-smile tugged at his mouth. His unexplained night in the open had hopefully confirmed the feckless character he had fostered among Deshir’s clansmen. Let them think he went off to mope. Unless he shied clear of Lady Dania’s sharp perception and Halliron Masterbard’s meddlesome curiosity, he could never have fasted to purge his system without becoming embroiled in a Sithaer-bent mess of unwanted inquiries. No frivolous excuse could mask the unbending requirements of spellcraft. Let the clans suspect he was mage-trained and every deception he had played to win his freedom would be irremediably spoiled. Concealed in place and purpose, Arithon engaged his mastery and methodically centred his will.

  If the clans of the north were determined to stand to war against Etarra’s army, his oath to Rathain bound him to make sure that no man’s life be needlessly endangered. Given means to tap prescient scrying through Rauven’s teaching and the tienelle filched from Sethvir, Arithon took out the stolen canister. Fearfully aware of risk to himself, he unwrapped the stone pipe inside and packed the bowl with silvery, notched leaves that sheared the forest air with their pungence.

  Narcotically expanded senses might sound whether Caolle’s battle strategies would deflect Lysaer’s assault, but the perils could not be ignored. Until the drug’s influence faded, the scryer’s awareness would be hypersensitized, every nerve left unshielded before the risk of chance-met interference. This was not Rauven or Althain Tower, ringed around with defences and intricate wardspells to protect the unshuttered mind. And Arithon had cast away the second safeguard instilled by his grandfather’s tutelage: that trance under influence of tienelle never be attempted while alone. If he lost his iron self-command, if his concentration became shaken by the maze of drug-induced visions, no one stood by to realign his frayed concentration.

  Arithon smoothed a last leaflet into the pipe and rammed it firm. More than his personal hope of happiness held him adamant. Events might have cornered him against an inborn compassion he could not shed, but the deeper danger still stalked him. He could not evade the certainty that his oath to Deshir was a fragile thing before the curse Desh-thiere’s wraith had left embedded and coiled through his being. The endangerment to Rathain’s feal vassals must be shouldered, while every minute the temptation to take and twist clan trust into a weapon to bring down Lysaer ate like a darkness at his heart. Only a mage’s sensitivity allowed Arithon to separate that poisoned urge from active will; and the passage of days wore him down with the draining, constant effort such distinction took to maintain. Until he won free of royal obligation, and could dissociate himself from any claim to sovereignty, the double-edged burden would continue to chafe at his control.

  No cause must jeopardize the image of weakness so painstakingly fostered among the clans. Though Halliron had breached that pretence, the Masterbard was one that Rathain’s new crown-prince least wished to admit into confidence. The wild need to seize upon false escape, to accept companionship and release through musical indulgence, could too easily lure him into misstep.

  Finished preparing the pipe, Arithon arose. He braced his back against a massive old oak and took a full breath, clean-scented with growing greenery and the sharper pungence of evergreens. He invited the peace of the forest to calm him. Absorbed by the lisp of current over mosscapped rocks, and calls of chipmunks in a fallen log, he stilled his clamour of self-doubt and drew on his mastery to create a spark.

  The herb in the pipe-bowl ignited. Silver-blue smoke trailed and twined like ghost-spells on the breeze. Touched to a frisson of apprehension by the sting of acrid fumes, Arithon collected his will. He set the pipe stem to his lips and drew poisoned smoke deep into his lungs.

  Vertigo upended his physical senses. Well-prepared, he pressed against the tree and let live wood reaffirm his balance. The kick as the drug fired his nerves was harder by far to absorb and master. He gasped in near pain at the explosive unreeling of his innermind as sights, smells, and sensations launched him through a spiralling hyperbole.

  He was immediately grateful
he had seen through the precaution of fasting. The plants Sethvir had dried at Althain were fiercely potent and pure.

  The trickle of the stream by Arithon’s feet became an avalanche of sound in his ears; the squall of a jay, a torment that flicked his hearing like a whip. Battered to the verge of bewilderment, he clenched his right hand, let the dig of his nails in half-healed burns anchor his scattered concentration. The instant he had firm control, he cast his mind ahead into the many-branching avenues of possible happenstance.

  Reeling holocaust met him. Fire and smoke swallowed all, while the higher-pitched vibration of dying trees screamed across his lacerated senses. Arithon cried out in forced empathy. Through a wilderness of chaotic sensation he groped, and finally separated the cause: Lysaer’s army, waiting until the tinder-dry days of midsummer, then firing Strakewood, that the windcaught blaze drive the clans out of cover to be rounded up and slaughtered. Vistas followed, of razed timber and dead men, blackened with ash and feeding flies. Clan children marched in ragged coffles, then died one by one in a public display that packed Etarra’s square with vicious, screaming onlookers. Arithon’s stomach wrenched at the smell of the executioner’s excitement, charged and whelmed to a sickness of ecstasy by rivers of new-spilled blood.

  The Master of Shadow bit back horror and physical distress, and in forced effort as difficult as anything he had undertaken throughout training, transmuted revulsion to the icy detachment necessary to reimpose control. The hideous sequence arrested, only to slip his grasp again as sensitized perceptions careened off on a tangent.

  He saw a hillside strewn with corpses; banners fallen and snarled by the trampling passage of horses; and beyond these a clearing that held townsmen who were also Rathain’s subjects, hideously disembowelled and hung by their ankles from game hooks.

  ‘No!’ Arithon ground the heels of his hands in his eyesockets, then ripped in a shuddering, clean breath of air. Whirled by a firestorm of prescience, he grappled to recover mental balance, to reach past the reeling crush of nightmare for the single thread dictated by Caolle’s prudently laid strategy.

  Control escaped him.

  Harrowed by atrocities that deluged his mind in shockwaves, Arithon bent double in dry heaves. Gagged by the taste of bile, he sucked in another fast breath. Sweat poured off him in runnels. His sensitized flesh recorded the slide and fall of each salty drop. Another breath, this one deeper; his mind cleared fractionally. He managed to pry his consciousness away from the herb-induced barrage of far sight. He had been right to fear! One wrong choice, one misplaced scout or mistimed attack, and all he had envisioned might result.

  Arithon tightened his hold on concentration, then locked onto the sequence he desired. His hand trembled as he shallowly drew on the pipe. Prepared this time for raw carnage, he traced through the spinning nexus of possibilities that deluged his innermind, to follow the single one that mattered.

  Caolle planned to lure Etarra’s thousands up the Tal Quorin’s creekbed. Upstream, where the river shoaled and fanned out into reedbeds and swamp, the tight phalanxes of townsmen would be compelled to split their ranks. The terrain as they progressed would divide them further, until two rising, parallel ridges parted the garrison three ways. As battle became joined with the clan scouts, Arithon reviewed the unfolding engagement with deliberate slowness, while tienelle-inflamed awareness touched off in outbranching visions the thousands of alternate outcomes each action in due course might take. Natural and man-made barriers would successfully disadvantage two of Etarra’s split divisions. Archers placed in earth-bank embrasures Caolle hoped would disable the third.

  Arithon paused to resteady himself. The bowmen would not be enough, he saw, as prescience swooped and spun to frame a grim chain of disasters. Etarra’s guardsmen slaughtered clan scouts like meat behind over-run embankments until the screams of dying men gave way to the croak of sated crows, all because the left flank of Etarra’s army would be commanded by a man whose lifetime obsession had been the study of barbarian tactics.

  The butcher had grizzled grey hair and hands that were narrow and expressive. The face with its pocking of scars and out-thrust jaw was that of Pesquil, Mayor of Etarra’s League of Headhunters. His were the orders that sent city officers upslope like terriers to secure the ridge-tops. Etarra’s west division of pikemen would split two ways, then weaken the cohesion of barbarian resistance by storming both ends of the ridge. Then the light horse cohort dispatched single file through a ravine to the east would circle back and eventually bottle the valley from the north. They would crush the barbarian right flank and rejoin Gnudsog’s troops in time to effect rescue of the main columns bogged in the Tal Quorin marshes.

  Faint and sick, Arithon watched the Deshans left alive at that juncture become herded into slaughter to a man.

  Attempts to forestall their fate by assassinating Pesquil saw three scouts dead under torture. Whether fated by luck or by Daelion, the man would remain in command on the morning that battle commenced.

  Sad recognition followed, that even the gravest misuse of shadow mastery and sorcery could not clinch a fourth effort. Pesquil’s Etarran paranoia made him carry a talisman, an artifact passed down since the rebellion that would ward against mischance by magic.

  Arithon wept then, for sure knowledge: that his hope and his preferred future were forfeit. Left to their own resource, the clans were destined for ruin. Whether he left them outright, or played through his charade of weak prince and carried his sword at Steiven’s shoulder made no difference. Did he fight as a man, and not a sorcerer, his own corpse would be part of the carnage.

  He yanked himself clear to escape a second reliving of the aftermath and the children’s executions in Etarra.

  Shivering, wrung by a storm of guilt and grief, Arithon rallied wits enough to realize his pipe-bowl held only ashes. Though his body ached for reprieve, he could not let go yet.

  The sweat on his lips mingled with a dampness salty enough to be tears, as he forced unsteady hands to move and function. He pried the lid back off the canister, repacked the pipe, then sucked in a redoubled dose of the herb to use trance to sound an alternative.

  Back to the initial deployment, he reran the sequence of Caolle’s battle plan. Only this time, before Pesquil’s cat-cunning strategies could unravel clan defences, Arithon added pertinent contributions of his own. Inspired to terrible invention by the breadth of tienelle awareness, he gave his whole mind, bent the talents his grandfather had nurtured to full-scale killing. Wrought of magecraft, and shadow mastery, and devious cunning, he tested strategies that brooked no conscience. He toyed with the visions, slanted and skewed them to tens and thousands of variations. He weighed and recombined results; counted the dead and the wounded with a will locked hard against any acknowledgement of suffering. To feel, to think at all, was to lose the mind to sorrow. Dogged, driven half mad by his oathtaken weight of responsibility, he inhaled more tienelle and threshed through each chain of happenstance in exhaustive review for blind errors.

  By the end, spent to a weariness that soaked in dull pain to his bones, he had garnered a handful of tactics that might yield the lowest toll of lives. His work would hold only if no unforeseen circumstance arose to upset his tested effect patterns; if against odds he had managed to circumvent all possible avenues of probability.

  He was not Sethvir, to be tracking a scope of event as wide as the chance interaction that could happen between eleven hundred human lives. He could only try his best and leave his frailties to hope.

  The tienelle was finished off in any case.

  Arithon blew his lungs clear of the last, spent smoke. He sank on his heels and let the empty canister drop between his feet. At the edge of mauled senses, he sensed the quick, running tremors of withdrawal that must be damped and subdued before they built and racked through his body. He held motionless. Unlike the drug that had nearly ruined him in Amroth, tienelle’s toxins were not addictive. Once he had regained inner stillness, he could use mastery to
annul the poisons. The torment would pass without craving. Arithon bent the lingering influence of the drug’s sensual enhancement toward steadying himself until his awareness could stabilize and let time reassume natural proportions.

  The liquid call of a lark trilled through the glen. Eyes closed, Arithon savoured the sorrowful melody. He had done well, he knew. Amid odds so bleakly tipped toward defeat, he had ploughed an alternate path. Bitterness squeezed his heart for what felt like a tragic failure. To the farthest-flung limit of his abilities, a scant third of Steiven’s clansmen could be kept alive. How could a prince, mage or otherwise, brook the scale of such sacrifice? Etarra would suffer greater losses; but the cost would be cruel for a stalemate, particularly when mishap could yet play a hand, and snatch back the chance of even that.

  No trick of magecraft could fully anticipate bad luck. All guarantees were forfeit, since the day Etarra’s garrison marched upon the north.

  Arithon rapped the ashes from the pipe bowl. The slightest attempt at motion now shot lancing pains through his skull. Warned to pay heed to common sense, he took swift stock of his condition.