by Janny Wurts
A white and tortoiseshell tom poured itself from Asandir's lap as he arose. 'Sethvir! Come sit. How long has it been since you remembered to eat?' Tall, windburned, worn lean from travel, he made room for Althain's Warden, in the process displacing a sleepy kitten.
The black-clad sorcerer opposite hunched over a plate of smoked fish and scones, his mouth too full for speech. But the raven perched on his shoulder swivelled beady jet eyes and croaked.
'Hello to you too, little brother.' Sethvir dumped his satchel on the floor and sat, his diffuse gaze no longer bemused, but trained in sharp inquiry upon the quieter of his two colleagues.
Traithe stayed riveted on his food. His wide-brimmed black hat with its tarnished silver band hung from the knurl on his chair arm. The Gaped sable mantle he still wore failed to mask the tender movements left over from crippling injuries; in the hour of the Mistwraith's first invasion, Traithe had made tragic sacrifice to unbind the spells on the South Gate portal and cut off the creatures' point of entry.
When his raven clipped him a peck on the ear, he looked up, his brown eyes dark with affront. 'Yes,' he snapped as though to an unwanted inquiry. 'My scars ache today. But since meeting was called for at Mirthlvain, I presume we save our strengths for something more pressing than small healing.'
Above a twist of frosty hair the raven had tousled, Asandir and Sethvir locked glances. Had Traithe still possessed his full faculties, no one need say that Mirthlvain's ills were quiescent.
'Actually,' the Warden of Althain admitted, 'this is the closest active focus to Alestron, where one of us needs to pay a visit. A copy of Magyre's papers has apparently survived and fallen into the hands of the duke's scholars.'
'Black powder again?' asked Verrain, arrived with a stalker's silence to settle on Traithe's other side. He had shed his frieze cloak. Lank blond hair tied by velvet ribbons feathered through the ruffles of a dandy's collar several centuries out of fashion.
Sethvir sighed. 'The very same old tired story.' He looked askance at Asandir, who had forgotten to pass on the scones. 'It's scarcely on your way, but you'll need to visit the city before going north to Rockfell to check on the Mistwraith's confinement.'
Then, mindful the cruellest of Traithe's distress would not stem from old injuries, Sethvir tucked his hands in his sleeve cuffs. Carefully, aloud, he said, 'No, I have yet to hear word.'
His inference was to Kharadmon, their discorporate colleague dispatched across the gulf to resurvey the paired worlds left severed by the closure of South Gate. There, for a purpose beyond comprehension, the abomination wrought of mists and trapped human spirits first became amalgamated into the Mistwraith that endangered Athera.
Worries abounded. The icy, lifeless void between stars was inhospitable, even to the bodiless spirit; worse, the alienated worlds presumably harboured the wraith's greater portion, still at large and potently malevolent. The calamity that resulted from the creature's confinement here had unveiled frightening truths: for the mist's bound spirits were intelligent, able to wrest the key to grand conjury from another mind trained to mastery. They had even proved capable of movement and planning across the threshold of time.
Best of any, the Fellowship sorcerers understood the ugly details. The curse they undertook to unravel to reconcile two princes was daunting in scope, and ranged about with perils that lay outside of all augury.
Kharadmon's journey had been launched at unmentionable risk. If he suffered mishap and failed to return, far more than the hope of the royal heirs' reconciliation would be lost. The Fellowship itself might never be restored to its original circle of seven sorcerers.
Amid bitter silence, and stalked by the interest of three cats, the raven spread glossy primaries and dived in to peck at the scones. Traithe beat it back to a flurry of wings, snatched the butter crock away, then hissed until the bird retreated to fluff indignant feathers on his chair back. Since mention of one discorporate colleague brought the other to mind, he said, 'Luhaine has no plans to join us?'
'Sadly not.' Sethvir rescued a scone the bird had mauled and dipped up a creamy scoop of butter. 'The Koriani witches have renewed their efforts to find Arithon.' He bit down and chewed with absent relish. 'For equinox, they've planned a grand scrying. A circle of twenty-one seniors, to be matrixed through the Skyron crystal. Luhaine's needed to try and scatter their energies everywhere else but toward Jaelot, a touchy task. We'd rather his influence wasn't noticed.'
'Jaelot?' Verrain's expostulation re-echoed off the vaults of the ceiling. 'That cesspit of snobbery and bad taste? Why Jaelot?'
Asandir sighed, the broad line of his shoulders looking tired. 'The affair involves an exploit of Dakar's that's too idiotic to mention. But to redeem the Mad Prophet's foolishness, Halliron is confined there till solstice. His apprentice naturally won't leave him.' The sorcerer hooked his chin on steepled fingers, not needing to add that a stay of such length left Arithon's identity as Medlir vulnerable, and not just to auguries done on the balance point of equinox. Since the secret of the Shadow Master's alias was the fragile linchpin that frustrated the directive of Desh-thiere's curse, Luhaine was bound to be misleading enchantresses for some while yet to come.
'Well,' murmured Traithe in dry conclusion. 'This isn't so much a convocation as a gossip list of our weaknesses.'
'From which we can certainly spare a moment for minor healing,' Sethvir interjected with a glance of prankish triumph toward his colleague. 'For the task that lies ahead of us tonight, we can't do without your sense of humour.'
A flick of amusement rekindled the laugh lines at the corners of Traithe's spaniel eyes. 'What's amiss that's any worse than the monsters mewed up in these mires?'
Turned blankly vague, Sethvir fiddled pastry crumbs out of the folds of his cuffs. 'The Koriani Council's pursuit of Arithon s'Ffalenn. But let that bide for a little.'
His wistful glance toward the cauldron moved Verrain to arise and fetch mugs, and steep a pot of bracing tea.
* * *
When eventide dimmed the Mirthlvain marshes, the peepings and shrills, the skreels and the croaks of its nocturnal denizens racketed across the shallows of Methlas Lake. The mists had not yet arisen, to lure out the will o' the wisps and the seeping flares of the marshlights. Unquiet waters lay black as a facet of obsidian, stippled by the light-prints of stars, and one anomaly: a thread of reflection sculled on the shore's dying currents, cast out into darkness by a firelit casement high up in Meth isle fortress.
There, around the stone table in a hall dimmed to cavernous shadow, three Fellowship sorcerers hunched in conference. They concluded their survey of farreaching responsibilities, for they alone had been left as guardians of Athera's ancient mysteries since the old races' inexplicable disappearance. Wards of protection that confined creatures dangerous in malice had been checked over world gates and preserves. As always, defences had weakened; four months of difficult travels lay ahead for Traithe and Asandir. The demands on them both were relentless, with their discorporate colleagues committed elsewhere. Of two other sorcerers outside tonight's active circle, none spoke: the shade of Davien the Betrayer remained banished in seclusion since the hour of the high kings' fall; Ciladis the Lost, still gone beyond reach, on his failed quest to find the Paravians.
The sole augury that forecast the Seven's reunity, the last hope to accomplish the old races' return: all remained jeopardized by the Mistwraith's curse, and two princes shackled into enmity. Brought at last to that point, and the reason for gathering at Meth Isle, Sethvir peered into his empty mug. The tea leaves scummed in the dregs deceptively appeared to absorb him, while his eyes mapped the sonorous currents of the earth, and the fine, singing tracks of distant stars. 'It is time.'
Gaunt and silent, Asandir arose. He collected the used crockery, Verrain's chipped pot with its sprung wicker handle, and the moth-eaten quills filched from the library. With hands that moved much more freely, Traithe rolled up a marked map. He slipped the parchment into its case and across the c
leared table, spread the black cloth of his cloak.
Sethvir stooped by his chair to rummage something from his satchel. While the cats piled next to Verrain's ankles scampered off, and the one in his lap stretched and left, the Guardian of Mirthlvain out of habit used mage-sense to tag the cause of their unrest. But this time no aberrated creature from the swamps had strayed inside to be hunted. Verrain's query touched the edge of a cold ward, a boundary field laid down to contain a flux of refined vibration. He realized, alarmed, that the Fellowship meant to cast strands. The augury they could wring out of still air and power would be exactingly accurate, and undertaken only at grave need. More disturbing still, the Warden of Althain straightened up and offered him a tin canister and stone pipe.
Verrain need not unseal the container. The pungency that seeped from the dried herb inside charged his senses with dreadful remembrance of its poisons. Shaken, he said quickly, 'I shouldn't need tienelle to follow the progression of a strand pattern.'
Sethvir did not back down, but cradled the master spellbinder's hands within his own tepid palms. 'Tonight, we're not sounding the future.' Fallen into shadow as Asandir made a spell to darken the glow of the fire, the Warden looked oddly wizened; momentarily no sorcerer at all, but an old man rubbed spiritless and thin by a lifetime's uncountable sorrows. 'You weren't told earlier. But the Mistwraith's curse that sets Lysaer and Arithon into conflict is far worse than a geas of fixation. The knowledge which might shed light on their condition lies two ages back in the past.'
A creeping shudder harrowed Verrain's nerves. 'You wish to tune the strands to examine the methuri that created the abominations here at Mirthlvain?'
'Desh-thiere's binding over the princes is not far removed from the corruptions effected by the hatewraiths.' Asandir folded his lean length and sat with his usual economy of movement. 'Both arose from the meddling of spirit entities. Both were imprinted into living flesh, with bonds of compulsion that can't be undone without losing the victim in death.'
As Sethvir's touch slipped away, Verrain flicked open the little tin, his dimples erased by trepidation as he cleaned and packed the stubby pipe. The biting smell of the tienelle enveloped him, fierce enough to make him cough. Just how a strand casting could be ranged across time, he desperately wished not to learn.
Sethvir unkindly answered his thought all the same.
'Time's riddle is only opaque to those senses attuned through the flesh.'
Verrain's horrified start shot the canister lid in a clanging arc to the floor. 'Ath forfend! Can't we ask Luhaine to handle this?'
But already Asandir had slipped beyond hearing. His tall, dark-robed form lay slumped across the table, his cheek cradled on folded arms. His flesh was a vessel emptied of spirit, with Traithe already set in anguished silence by his shoulder to stand ward and guard.
The plain fact could not be forgotten, that just such a perilous scrying had stripped Kharadmon to discorporate status. Verrain snapped a flame off a finger tip that trembled and ignited the herb in his pipe. As drug-laden smoke twined in ghostly step to the dance of some aimless air current, he called on six centuries of discipline to wrest his uncertainty aside. Then he drew on the stem and gasped as the tienelle's drug whirled through his senses like wildfire.
Vertigo upended him in a savage, exhilarant rush. There followed a glass-sharp awareness that scoured his dross of flesh, until the stillness of the room compressed his ears like cotton and his eyesight gained hurtful clarity. The lofty, crystalline expansion of awareness overturned him like a plunge from great height. He clung to his chair in desperation to stay anchored, while around him the floor lost its semblance of solidity. Changed perception showed him the layers of dizzy energies that bound its cool stone into matter.
Verrain fought to master the reeling hyperbole that savaged him. As Sethvir's expectancy jabbed through his trance, he recalled his place and purpose: for the knowledge to redeem Athera's cursed princes, Asandir now twisted the flow of time. The thread of his existence hung poised in suspension on the threshold between life and death.
The spellfield the sorcerer laid out above the black cloth on the tabletop had limits; its influence encompassed little more than the span of one cubic yard. But the resonance where its edges grazed up against the present raised a whine past the limit of hearing, and a fleshstripping ache that made human bone marrow shiver and jump like kicked mercury. Hazed by indescribable discomfort, his blond hair strung limp with sweat, Verrain cobbled a grip on his frayed consciousness and spun out three filaments of light.
Sethvir raised power and spoke. An answering resonance of mage-force tingled outward as his words parted drug-heightened senses like razors, touched the strands hanging poised against darkness, and set over them a signature that gave Name.
Ruled in parallel with the life-currents that endowed Ath's creation, the filaments quickened, interleaved into patterns the trained mind could unriddle at a glance. Verrain called forth another strand, and another, while through some unseen linkage with the time-pocket carved out by Asandir, Sethvir spoke Names upon them that recreated constructs of this stone, and that mudpool, then seeded them with plants, insects, salamanders and trees in their individual, teeming thousands. Here lay like pen strokes the growth and death of moss. There, in skeined interlace, the play of breezes through reed beds, ringed with black water scribed by stitched curves that marked the life-dance of fishes. In glowing, intricate splendour against a dark like layered velvet, a mile square portion of Mirthlvain's mire became replicated in a linear analogue of patterns.
Transfixed by awe, and a harmony that wrung him breathless, Verrain wept as he realized: the bogland he viewed was still governed by nature. The creatures there had yet to be enslaved, corrupted and cross-bred to birth the monstrous perversions induced by the hate-wraiths' possession.
Softly out of shadow, Sethvir said, 'Commence.'
Verrain felt the hair stir at his nape as channelled power sparked through the strands.
A pent sense of danger prevailed, like the quaver of a note too long sustained, or the chill of sharp steel masked in cloth. Now, any misplayed distinction between the quick force of life and the raw burn of elemental energy might sunder the time-ward's fragile balance and rip Asandirs spirit from flesh. Verrain trembled in his battle to keep the herb's explosive prescience tied in to geometric augury as Sethvir alone called forth the final strand, then shaped it to the Name of the methuri.
The matrix mapped an origin Verrain had studied only in ancient text: here, in spikes and jagged angles, he experienced the leaked bit of storm charge that had displaced half-formed beings from the thought-shaped, nether-realm of drake-dreams. In twists and snagged knotwork, he saw anomalies that to this world were half demon, half monster, change vibration and emerge to rampage and slay. The original methurien were creatures deranged by pain, animate consciousness torn into breathing life from an existence of shadowy apparition. Their bodily deaths on Paravian weapons had served only to release their twisted essence as free wraiths.
His centuries of handling the cross-bred abominations left behind as their legacy could not prepare Mirthlvain's Guardian for the concentrated, driving hatred the methuri had embodied. Needled breathless by passions bent and whetted for destruction, Verrain felt his consciousness twist to escape. The drugs in the tienelle gave no quarter, but held his awareness channelled open through the shivering flinch of full contact.
'Steady. Hold steady,' Sethvir cautioned.
Verrain's fingernails split under the force of his grip on the table as the first wraith ensnared a live victim. The moment of its possession was terrible to witness: clean-edged lines that delineated a mouse unique unto itself in Ath's creation flickered and spiked into a chaotic jumble that, even two ages later, seemed to shock the night air with scream upon scream of torment. Verrain stung as though every nerve in his body had been sieved out and scorched in hot acid.
Locked into step with the strands' unfolding sequence, he watched the si
gnature pattern of the mouse blur, coil, then fix in a flare of cold fire into something wholly wrong, in mind and matter remoulded to a parasitic hybrid that was irrationally, unthinkably other. What moved and breathed in the heart of the strands' reflection was a thing outside the Major Balance, the warp and weft of its birthright wrenched contrary to natural law.
Revolted to spasms of dry nausea, the spellbinder clamped hands to his lips until the blood felt squeezed from his fingers. He compelled himself to abide as Sethvir broadened his study: and snakes, insects, otters and frogs all suffered possession in turn. The moment of change in each case was sliced free of time and dissected; line for line, contortion for mauled contortion, the maligned detail of the hate-wraiths' workings wrung out in white pain from their victims. Life-force itself became impressed and intemally warped until only the husk of the body remained, to spawn its altered, aberrant offspring. The warped things birthed from such breedings in turn became subservient to the whim of the host.
Drenched in a cold sweat, Verrain tracked Sethvir's analysis of the past as methuri abominations insinuated a rift in earthly order, to knot a linkage through the breathing essence of spirit and the energy coils that underpinned fleshly matter. The conclusion in the strands was most clear. Not only would separation trigger the dissolution of bodily substance, but the wraith in possession could unkey the quickened flesh and impose wilful change with impunity.
Aghast, Verrain whispered, 'You think Desh-thiere's curse upon the princes may work in a similar way?' Sethvir looked up, the strand-wrought, desecrated patterns imprinted in frosty reflection upon his emotionless eyes. 'That's what we're here to determine.' He succumbed to a shudder, as if his detachment gave way and the horrors reeled off in cold augury overcame him in one slamming wave. Then he blotted damp palms on his sleeve cuffs and spoke a single clipped syllable. The knit mesh of forces that energized the strands bled off in a crackle of sparks.
