by Janny Wurts
Arithon shivered, crossed from the syrup of noon sunlight into dense shade under a stand of pines. Gooseflesh pebbled his arms, perhaps from misted damp: somewhere ahead, a tumbling waterfall wafted the scent of dank stone. Or not, he mused, chilled by felted gloom that smothered clear daylight. The evergreens nestled against a sheer cliff, the vertical face entangled in vines, and streaked virid where seeped springs dripped from the clefts. Arithon shoved through the needled branches, drawn by the glimmer of uncanny rays, spun like cobweb through the gloaming ahead.
The silver light flared from a marker stone, hoary with lichen and fallen twigs. Arithon braced for the resonant surge unleashed by Paravian workmanship. But no such upset unmoored him. The emanation that met his approach sang to a different register. Thrust under the encroaching greenery, Arithon cleared the detritus and found the star glyph of the Fellowship Sorcerers.
He stared upwards, astonished. Above, inked in shadow, a sloped seam notched the cliff wall. Ferns scalloped the aperture, laddered in creepers, likely the site of Ciladis’s sketch, before overgrowth blocked the view.
Thrill raked Rathain’s prince, spiked by trepidation. The muffled air wore the weight of the ages beneath the drooped boughs, hanging breezeless. Against the dulled roar of the falls, a near-desolate hush suppressed even the small, furtive rustles of wildlife.
Respect called for due care. Though if the setting harboured a tomb, the unkempt stone lacked the dignity of a monument. Unlike the cottage, lovingly preserved, this site had been abandoned to nature. Mystery or memorial, the marker bore no other inscription. Hope died, that a ready key had been left to decipher its codified purpose.
Arithon crouched. He laid his trembling palm flat on the earth. Without safer means, ill-prepared for the perilous assay, he murmured a request, begged forgiveness, then opened his already overwrought senses.
He had only the embedded imprints in the flux by which to chart Ciladis’s active intent.
The dreaded plunge into the range of raised frequency did not shred Arithon’s precarious balance. Instead, he settled into replete peace, soft as cotton. A soporific spiral of calm eddied the dynamic current of the natural flow, apparently to preserve a static field in sealed isolation. Mage-trained perception could not pierce the veil. Arithon drew a slow breath and took pause.
To collapse the stay outright would expose the unknown construct to the reactive swirl of the lane tide. No means existed to gauge the consequence. His sole measure to grapple that fathomless peril was to spiritwalk: forfeit his grounded attachment to flesh, then surrender his consciousness to the spell and trace its coil backwards to centre. That rash prospect flushed Arithon to cold sweat. An unshielded immersion, in his fractured state, risked shearing the tenuous foothold that anchored his being. Supposing he threaded the gamut intact, the resonance of the engaged working might overwhelm him.
Already, the resinous air spun his senses. Arithon gripped a branch for stability, the bite of rough bark insufficient to ground him. Indecision saved nothing. On-coming nightfall would hasten his plunge into seductive entrancement. Whether he perished quickly through meddling folly or dwindled slowly into terminal dissolution, defeat finished him either way.
Arithon gritted his teeth and battled his swimming dizziness. Before the irrevocable choice to commit, he cautiously sampled the flux currents again to determine the stay’s point of origin. The spare elegance of Fellowship handiwork was elusive by nature. Yet here, the exception sprang stark to the eye and took Arithon by surprise. The inaugural configuration aligned with his birth gift! Shadow, woven from the element functioned as a direct trigger, with the stasis of the mighty construct sustained by the covering shade of the evergreens.
Even a glancing exposure to sunlight would touch off a volatile unbinding.
“Daelion Fatemaster wept!” whispered Arithon.
For the entrained configuration was strikingly similar to the Sunloop, a specialized artifact created to herald the Mistwraith’s defeat. Logic’s breath-taking leap suggested the greater array in place here should have captured the first shaft of untrammelled dawn, and unravelled in spontaneous release.
A banishment meant to occur long before, had a stand of pines not taken chance root and thwarted the cue for dispersal. Which meant Ciladis had never sequestered himself by wilful abdication. Instead, hopeful oversight had misjudged the pervasive endurance of Desh-thiere’s blight.
Arithon knelt on the mat of shed needles. Two hundred and eighty eight years too late, he dispelled the pinned wisp of shadow that stabilized the Sorcerer’s last work.
The flash-point collapse of the ward was past visible, a clap of reverberation beneath mortal hearing. Yet the tremor that shivered the earth shook the trees and flared in recoil through the local flux. Arithon shuddered at the brink of unconsciousness, fighting to stabilize his beleaguered senses. Whatever his impulsive act had unleashed, the slip-stream of displacement shocked home. A diverted pocket in time and space reintegrated with the present.
When the queasy blur of the interface settled, Arithon stood. He reoriented himself amid the blue gloaming filtered through the dense pines. At first, nothing seemed changed. Then a scatter of loosened rock from above bounced and clattered through the meshed vines. His startled glance upward beheld a lone figure, emerged from the gloom of the cleft.
“Ciladis?” he murmured in hoarse amazement.
A bright flicker of movement: the silvered head turned, roused from a bemused survey of the encroaching trees. The ebon face that peered downwards was clean-shaved, and gaunt as pinched clay. A crooked nose and fleece eyebrows jutted over flat cheek-bones. Deep-set eyes the colour of ale resharpened to fixated interest.
Arithon staggered, stripped naked under that searching regard. Unstrung, he beheld himself mirrored: from the ingrained grime in his rolled cuffs, to black, tangled hair and stubbled chin, to the festered scab on his forehead. Yet his unkempt state did not scald him to self-conscious humiliation. Rather, he felt cherished by the tender kindness of total acceptance. His instinctive recoil softened to trust as, eased beyond turmoil, uplifted in spirit, Arithon was embraced by a pure compassion that pierced the core of his being. The paralysis of stressed uncertainty lifted and melted him to his knees. Defenceless awareness lost breath and wits, dazzled by the grace of a rapport lit by the blaze of the infinite. His tears welled, unabashed, while the might of the myriad world seemed to spin on its axis around him.
The adept shielded himself before Arithon crumpled. Shuttered, his power folded inward and left an earthy old man, clothed in a dusky grey mantle snagged with a jackdaw’s cache of small twigs. The saffron eyes creased in gentle inquiry.
“These trees,” the Fellowship Sorcerer mused, his mellow baritone husked in the grain as aged whiskey. “They are over five hundred years old. How long has the Mistwraith been vanquished?”
“Not defeated completely,” remarked Arithon, discomfited by his borrowed clothes, which surely belonged to the speaker. “The fog-bound wraiths were fought to confinement, then sealed within Rockfell Peak.” Mage perception would verify the fraught truth behind his shocking answer. “By Third Age reckoning, the year in question was 5638.”
Ciladis’s smile banished dismay. “For that long, Dakar’s West Gate Prophecy has achieved closure!” The exclamation digressed to a further deduction of intimate accuracy. “Then you would be Dari s’Ahelas’s mage-trained descendant, and by twice-royal lineage, acknowledged by Asandir’s mark as Crown Prince of Rathain. Your Grace, I’m indebted to you for deliverance from the pitfall of my own enchantment.”
Spring 5925
Release
The squall line that rampaged in after sundown tapered off to light rainfall that pattered like mercury off the soaked pine boughs. The sheltered seam in the cliff-face stayed dry. Aromatic smoke twined off a neat bed of birch coals, wafted in the dank gusts through the run-off, splashed from the moss ledge above. Arithon sat cross-legged on the rammed-earth floor, an unfastened clo
ak draped over his shoulders. He did not flinch at sounds or cringe when the lightning flashed. But the mug of restorative tea cradled in unsteady fingers betrayed his facade of unruffled discipline.
Across the embers, as if naught lay amiss, the Sorcerer most beloved of the Seven knelt beside the forked sticks of an improvised spit. Flame-light carved lean features that seemed suited more to a veteran warrior, while hands that once penned the finest tracts on healing proved equally facile with noose snares and a skinning knife. Respect marked each movement. Tenderly, though his catch was no longer alive, Ciladis skinned and jointed the hare taken for supper. Where time and moths left frayed holes in his shirt, the Sorcerer himself seemed unimpaired by the centuries spent in stasis.
Sidewise glance warm as amber, his concern expressed by cheerful domesticity, Ciladis laid the cleaned meat on the scraped hide and answered Arithon’s turbulent thought. “Our Fellowship does not succumb to the rapture arisen from Paravian exposure. Not because we are privileged, mind, but because of the binding bestowed upon us by the dragons.” The pearl-handled knife better suited for pen nibs was quite sharp enough to point a green stick. With their frugal meal spitted to roast, Ciladis rinsed his smeared fingers and qualified. “The drakes’ initiation expanded our range of perception in ways that transcend mortality. A drastic trial by fire, and an irrevocable change beyond your imagining. A gentler stay is effective through resonance.”
Arithon stirred, his applied will a palpable force as he battled exhaustion. “The stone in this place has been spun down to a slower vibration. Your touch, I presume?”
“Indeed.” Ciladis stood. His rag-picker’s shadow swooped in the fire-light as he approached the cliff rim, still talking. “Proximity reduces the flux charge and eases excessive strain on the senses.” He flung the befouled water into the rain, then hooked his hide bucket under the drizzle to refill. “I fashioned the working to buffer a long-term sleep without dreams. The residual echo won’t fade straightaway, a benefit to your relief. I’d urge you to rest if you care to listen.” Which subtlety side-stepped an outright command to stop fighting the soporific.
Rathain’s prince disregarded the mild remonstrance. Though the strong tisane weighted his eyelids, relentless interest still fired his febrile attention. “The warding you raised here does not explain the uncanny recognition exchanged between us upon our first encounter.”
“Ah! That.” Ciladis smiled. “You never explored the particulars of your ancestry in the archive at Althain Tower?” His direct gaze flared yellow as a wyvern’s eye as he crouched and poked up the coals. “Each of the royal lineages was selected by one of us Seven. Davien bowed out, acrimoniously opposed. Luhaine deliberated for weeks, undecided between several candidates. Asandir’s arbitration favoured the perception inherent in Iamine s’Gannley, who declined, which elevated Halduin s’Ilessid. Traithe named Rondeil s’Ellestrion, and Kharadmon appointed Cindra s’Ahelas. Sethvir played his selection close to the vest, then put forward Bwin Evoc s’Lornmein for Havish.”
The ancestor left unstated flicked Arithon to wary surprise. “Then you stood behind Torbrand s’Ffalenn? The surly grain of the family temperament seems ill-matched.”
“Do you think so?” Ciladis’s mahogany face crinkled with merriment. “Each of us responded to a quality inherent in our own characters. Torbrand’s provocative disposition stemmed from an empathy vulnerable enough to require protection.”
“You don’t share that defence,” Rathain’s Prince fired back, sharp enough to imply accusation.
Ciladis tipped his head in acknowledgement. Then he settled, unruffled, back braced to the wall, with the dead branch employed as a poker bridged across his tucked-up knees. “The bleeding distress can be tempered through solitude.” His mild glance dispelled any sting. “Does the subject jab too close to the bone?”
Arithon shivered, shook off drowsiness, and rejected sympathy. “Torbrand surely measured the pertinent facts before he gave his consent.”
“Whereas his hapless heirs were born victimized, infelicitously ignorant. Very well.” Primed for the descendant’s nettlesome intelligence, Ciladis faced the barb unoffended. “Each candidate’s raw affinity granted our sponsorship a needful point of foundation. We branded those partnered virtues into your heritable blood-lines. The imprinted traits were brought to actualized potency through the sympathy of conjoined resonance.”
Arithon sucked a breath through his teeth, the fingers on his mug tensed to blanched knuckles.
“You encountered, in me, the mirrored endowment bequeathed through your ancestry.” The sizzle of fat dripped onto the embers sheared through a brittle silence. Ciladis watched Arithon shelter his face with one hand. Further words offered nothing but tawdry noise; the least human touch would humiliate. The constancy of the Sorcerer’s care was a fathomless flame, gifted freely enough to dismantle the barriers of personal privacy.
“You never forsook your colleagues,” ventured Arithon, steadied when at length he accepted his portion of the toasted meat. “You encountered the truth behind Desh-thiere’s bound wraiths, which drove you to seek the Paravian refuge. I’ve admired the scholarship in your journals. Without stint, you applied your healer’s knowledge to spare the old races from lethal despair.”
Ciladis stretched out his legs, ankles crossed, his quiet relentless until his inquisitive guest started eating. Then he said, “Mortality fosters irrational hope, and brief life-span inspires an extraordinary tenacity. Mankind by nature was better suited to endure the Mistwraith’s incursion. One of the Seven had to shoulder the task of raising the localized flux currents before the Paravians lost their vitality. Afterward, the sealed wards shielding this sanctuary could not come down, which committed me for the duration.”
Green eyes met and locked with the Sorcerer’s, over a half-consumed meal. “The old races value their secrets,” agreed Arithon.
A ferocious understatement from a man who had quartered the seas throughout decades of search, with repeated landfalls to replenish his water casks at the guarded islet’s north anchorage. An initiate talent’s acuity had never detected the displacement ward, wrought dense enough to blindside even the broad-scale vision of Althain’s Warden.
Which was no play on mild irony at all, but a frontal assault at the core of a subject Ciladis preferred not to broach.
The bucket set under the run-off overflowed. Fortuitous accident, or tactical evasion, the Sorcerer arose. His distorted shadow swept the far wall as he fetched the full vessel and replenished his pot, then tossed in foraged herbs to heat an infusion. His unhurried activity rebuilt the low fire. Then he sat, a dark silhouette with an ancient dignity tucked up like a peasant in rumpled cloth. Without speaking, he finished his meat. Yet his reticent calm bespoke a shrewd vigilance: he waited, while the spelled rock did its work, hastened by the fragrant steam released from his boiling infusion. He did not miss the moment when Arithon’s eyelids slid closed. His timely move rescued the tilt of the mug, sliding from slackened fingers.
Then Ciladis caught Rathain’s prince as he toppled, and as tenderly as he had skinned a killed hare, eased him down beside the spent fire. Then he spread his borrowed mantle over shoulders grown sorrowfully thin.
Through an interval while the rain sluiced outside, he measured the form in repose at his feet, emptied of the raw fire of will in oblivious sleep. Dirt-rimmed broken finger-nails, far removed from the mastery that plied exquisite art on the lyranthe string. The drawn features seemed too frail to have survived Davien’s maze; too pithless to have surmounted the spiritual mauling that brought down the vile practice of the Grey Kralovir.
Ciladis read far more into the man than the shared stamp of compassion. His insight traced back to the first breath at birth and weighed up the aggregate sum of experience. He perceived the vow that had salvaged a child, and grasped the immensity of the risk, when dire need once in the past had called for the salvage of the damaged wardings at Rockfell. Livid as a brand, he interpreted the c
onsequence imposed by Davien’s seal of longevity, which, times over, rewrote the natural course of mortality during the captive years spent settling Marak’s unleashed horde of free wraiths.
At rest, recorded in skin pale as candle wax, and in the deep tremors that clenched muscle to bone, the Sorcerer mapped the cost of the endurance that yet sustained spirit and flesh.
Weariness had extracted its toll. Within days, perhaps less, Arithon’s initiate strengths would collapse. Mankind was not endowed to survive the charged resonance inside the Paravian refuge. Regret did not dwell on the impacts of Arithon’s adamant resistance. The relentless intimacy which stripped the heart and bared the most intimate secrets was the attribute of all Fellowship Sorcerers.
Ciladis’s pity stemmed instead from the trials thrust upon the resiliency of sterling character. “Rue the day Asandir sealed your blood bond for cold surety,” he murmured with vibrant remorse. “The Seven have meddled with you above every design envisioned by Torbrand as line-bearer.” For the tragic betrayal by friends at Athir and the appalling cascade of consequences sprung from Dakar’s mistake, even farsighted wisdom lost words. “I will have your answers,” the Sorcerer vowed. “You have not lived, or suffered, or sacrificed only to waste in an exile that leads to your death.”
Determined to speak in the crown prince’s behalf, Ciladis shrugged on his holed cloak with its tarnished damascene thread. He drew up the hood lined in pale saffron silk. Then he soundlessly left the sheltered crevice and strode away through the pounding rain.
Darkness swallowed the Sorcerer’s path through the pines, and wind buffeted his crossing of the puddled meadow beyond. Where Arithon’s course approached from the southwest, Ciladis went north and eastward, where the flux charge far exceeded mortal capacity. The open land in due course became wooded, with secluded glades carpeted in moss and grasses. Here, the living trees wore the glory bestowed by Paravian habitation. Mighty trunks soared aloft, crowns leafed with a majesty that whispered and roared in the gusts that chased off the storm. Serenity cloaked the remote hollows. The Sorcerer stepped softly where the melodic drip of slackened rainfall gleamed like fallen crystal and diamond, and the silver braid of small streamlets trickled over round stones. The greenwood retained its fair aspect here. All forests elsewhere had faded since the Paravians abandoned the mainland. Even where Mankind’s trespass was forbidden, deep inside the free wilds where the mysteries still flourished, the magnificence of Athera’s life web had diminished under the long shadow cast by Desh-thiere.