Disparity remained, a sting in the mind that raised puzzlement.
For Desh-thiere was not repulsed. It did not conjoin in conflict with Asandir’s bared might, but with disorienting and baffling speed, seemed to fade beyond the pale of dimensional awareness.
The repercussions of this anomaly blurred as Arithon collapsed against the sorcerer’s shoulder.
There came no respite even then.
Harsh fingers seized his arm, spun him remorselessly around. He was aware of steel-grey eyes and Asandir’s implacable will boring into his consciousness with the directness of an awl piercing cloth. He had no reflex left to flinch. ‘I’m all right,’ he managed to convey, through the roaring cyclone of ward-force.
‘We’ll see,’ Asandir replied. To Dakar he added, ‘Drag Lysaer, or carry him. But we must get back to Kieling as quickly as we may.’
‘Lysaer?’ Arithon asked weakly. He felt sick. The ground seemed to twist and buckle under his feet.
Asandir’s response came back clipped. ‘Alive. Can you walk?’
The Master took a step and stumbled. Hands caught him up before he fell, cruel in their hurry to keep him moving. He managed to find his balance before the sorcerer lost patience and lifted him, but he remembered little of the journey back through Ithamon’s twisted lanes to the safety of the upper citadel.
Arithon’s next impression was sight of the interlaced carving inside the double arches of Kieling Tower’s lower entry. The runes seemed reversed and upsidedown, an angle of view that disoriented him until he realized: Asandir had needed to carry him after all. He had a raging headache. The searing brilliance of mage-light that had sourced the sorcerer’s protections had gone, rendered unnecessary by the ringing, subliminal vibration that marked the bounds of Paravian wards. A quietude as abiding as the heart-rock of the earth enfolded around the party in Asandir’s protection.
The calm brought surcease, but no ease of mind.
The near to cataclysmic forces the sorcerer had raised against attack remained stamped indelibly into memory.
Awe remained.
It was one thing to sense past shielded resonance to the potential of a Fellowship mage; quite another, to experience such potency unveiled in the close-pressed immediacy of action. Flame from the wall sconces showed Asandir’s face, etched into the planes of his bones by passage of the powers channelled through him. That a spirit of such vast resource should still be walking, clothed in humanity and flesh, defied comprehension. And yet the mage was himself. His expression reflected no grand depths, but only self-recrimination as he turned his head and saw Arithon had recovered awareness.
‘My prince, I’m sorry.’ This admission played no part in the conflict that, only hours before, had sealed a prince to an unwanted destiny.
Disarmed, even shamed by the affection in Asandir’s concern, Arithon evaded the personal. ‘How did you know Lysaer and I needed rescue?’
Driven off by banality, the poignancy of the moment fled. Asandir said, ‘I was given warning. The wards in your sword, Alithiel, came active and all but set fire to your clothes chest.’ The sorcerer helped Arithon to a chair by the hearth, tossed him a blanket, then moved briskly to assist Dakar with Lysaer, who was unconscious still, and pale as a carving in wax.
Kieling Tower’s wardroom no longer held the bleakness of an edifice standing whole amid a ruin. Its worn plank floor was made cheerful by a spread of Narms carpet, hauled from Althain Tower in the dray. Asandir’s books lay piled near a wrought brass candlestand on an ebony inlaid table. Four chairs, without cushions, had been salvaged from a dusty upper chamber. In the pot over the flames, stew still bubbled as though all in the world were yet ordinary. Burrowed in blankets and handed a mug of bitter tea, Arithon lay settled and still, content to let the resonance of the Paravian defences permeate his awareness. He drew in the smell of cedar from the delicate, patterned panels that adorned the wardroom walls. To mage-trained eyes, the interlaced carvings of vines and animals sang with vibrant inner resonance. Whatever Paravian artisans had done the reliefs had instilled true vision in the work. To behold them was to share an echoed reflection of the great mystery that endowed the land with life. Slowly, the chill that had invaded the inner tissues of Arithon’s body flowed away into warmth. He released a last violent shudder. As if called by that movement from across the room, Asandir arose, leaving Dakar to watch the s’Ilessid prince, who was sleeping, perhaps under spell.
A second later, the sorcerer knelt at Arithon’s side in concern. ‘You look steadier. Can you tell me what happened?’
Haggard as though he had stepped intact out of nightmare, Arithon considered the muddled impressions that remained. ‘You saved our lives and didn’t see?’
The sorcerer rested slack hands on his knees and stared aside into the fire. The play of bronze-gold light deepened the creases around his mouth and other finer lines that arrowed from the corners of his eyes. ‘I know you were assaulted by a manifestation of Desh-thiere. I’m not clear why, or how. Even Sethvir was fooled into belief the creature wasn’t sentient.’ If the admission humbled him, it did not show; his gaze remained lucent as sun-flecked crystal beneath the jut of his frown.
Arithon closed his eyes, hands that had not stopped shaking clamped hard on his tea mug. ‘You were looking for an entity that had just one aspect?’ he suggested, for the moment no prince, but a mage sharing thoughts with a colleague.
Across a chamber whose unearthly symmetry was made squalid by the smell of mutton grease, Dakar stowed his bulk by the settle, surprised. ‘But there’s no living spirit in existence that a Fellowship mage cannot track!’
Arithon fractionally shook his head. Desh-thiere had proved the exception: a thing wrought of who knew what malice, in the sealed-off worlds beyond South Gate.
Asandir maintained a charged stillness. As if perplexed by a twist in a puzzle, he only appeared detached as he said, ‘Whatever the Name of the Mistwraith, it maimed Traithe’s continuity of function. Are you telling me the creature has spirit, and that it encompasses more than one being?’
‘Try thousands,’ Arithon whispered. He opened his eyes. ‘Too many to number separately, and all of them bound captive in hatred. Our efforts with light and shadow here have been systematically reducing the mist and the area that confines them, nothing else.’
‘Ath’s eternal mercy,’ was all the sorcerer said. Yet as a shifting log in the fireplace fanned a spurt of flame, shadows shrank to show alarm on a face seldom given to uncertainties.
‘But that can’t be possible,’ Dakar interjected. ‘If it were, how could Desh-thiere’s vapours cross Kieling’s wards at will?’
‘Easily,’ Arithon murmured, unnerved also, but applying himself to the problem through habit and years of self-discipline. ‘The mist is no more than a boundary wrought of dampness. The entities I encountered move within it, self-contained. Paravian defences bar them entrance, but not the fog that imprisons their essence.’
Asandir did not contradict the Master’s supposition. At some point his awareness had faded from the room, diffused outward into a net that expanded over the ruins.
Arithon was seer enough to catch impressions in resonance. Under his grandfather’s tutelage at Rauven, he had studied the close-woven relationships that conjoined all worldly things. As he had traced the paths of his teacher’s meditations into the nature of such interconnectedness, so he followed Asandir’s scrying now. Yet where the Rauven mages had known how to feel out the paths of the air, to read in advance the wind-spun flight of dry leaves; how to sense warmth amid mist-chilled trees and recognize a bird asleep with head tucked under wing; how to link with the weighty turn of the earth, the limning of frost crystals on grasses raked dry by the season, the perception of a Fellowship sorcerer saw deeper.
Fully aware of Arithon’s attentiveness, Asandir hid nothing. And like the unfolding of a painted fan, or a span of fine-spun tapestry shown whole to a blind man through miracle, Arithon saw familiar natural forms wr
eathed about with the silver-point etchings of their energy paths. The sheer depth of vision overwhelmed him.
Asandir did not see stone, but the crystalline lattices that matrixed its substance, and beyond that to the delicate, ribbon-like glimmers that were the underpinnings of all being, that stabilized vibration into matter. More, as a man might know his most treasured possessions, the sorcerer recognized everything he scried, not according to type, but in Name, that unique understanding of every object’s individuality. He held the signature of each plant, from the seed that had thrown up its first sprout, to the days of sunlight and storms that marked its growth, to the twigs and every turned leaf ever shed by the grown tree. One oak he would know from every other oak, living or decayed or unsown, on the basis of just one glance. Stresses, disease or the robustness of perfect health were delineated plainly to his eye. He knew frost crystals, not as frozen water, but as single and separate patterns in all of their myriad billions. Their Names were as visible to him as signatures. He knew the pebbles of the dry water course, each and every one by touch, and the tangles of bundled energies that signified each grain of sand. The detail, the sheer magnitude of caring such depth of perspective demanded, dwarfed the watching spirit.
Arithon found himself weeping. Not only for himself, and the deadness of his senses, but for the beauty of common weeds, and the unendurable complexity of the shed husk of a beetle’s wing. He saw again, through finer eyes, the resonance of Paravian presence, and saw also that the coarseness in a clod of horse dung was held into balance by the same singing bands of pure energy. In Asandir’s pass across the ruins of Ithamon, Arithon realized just how shallow was his own knowledge, and how inadequate. In punishing clarity, he understood the scope of just what he had abandoned when he had left Rauven, and yielded himself to another will, another fate, another calling; now, most bitterly, the loss would repeat and compound, as he assumed a second unwanted crown.
Then Asandir closed down his field of concentration. Released from that terrible mirror of truth that embodied a Fellowship mage’s awareness, Arithon came back to himself and recalled the dangers that had prompted the search.
For all its awesome depth, the scrying disappointed. Tumbled stonework had harboured nothing untoward, only the mindless tenacity of lichens living dormant under the mantle of winter night. The sorcerer had unreeled his probe past the city’s edge, across untold miles of Daon Ramon’s heartland, but no sign had he encountered anywhere of those aspects of Desh-thiere that had launched attack with such startling virulence.
No movement could be found but the flight of night-hunting owls; no death beyond the grass roots grazed by hares; no sound but the play of wind through dry brush. The Mistwraith’s fog was just that – mist coiled cold in the hollows, lifelessly damp and inert.
Asandir snapped off the last of his vision in a curtness born of frustration. ‘I cannot find it.’ His voice held a scraped edge of pain, not for humiliation that his resource seemed short for the task, but for failure and heartsore apology, that the Fellowship’s oversight had imperilled two princes whose safety was his charge to secure.
‘But how can that be?’ Dakar cried, his hands too cramped to pick up the spoon to stir the stewpot.
And Arithon wondered the same. The arts of grand conjury were wrought from the force that quickened the universe. Asandir’s vision had but confirmed Rauven’s teaching: that all things were formed of energy, arrangements of bundled light that were subject to natural law. The awareness of this truth, defined to absolute perfection, granted the mage-trained their influence. To know a thing, to encompass its full measure in respect was to hold its secrets in mastery. Life-force was the basis of all power; as a confluence of collective entities, Desh-thiere’s consciousness should have been vividly plain. That its nature could in any way stay hidden seemed outside of sane comprehension.
To anyone trained to the subtleties of power, it felt as if an evil of unknown proportions had sown chaos across the fabric of natural order.
His plaintiveness a mask for desperation, Dakar said, ‘What in Athera could escape the vigilance of the Seven?’
‘Nothing of Athera.’ Arithon shifted gaze to the sorcerer, his earlier antagonism set in abeyance. ‘I was blind to the Mistwraith’s aspects also, until the moment they chose to attack.’
Asandir stirred. ‘Neither strands nor seer can read Desh-thiere, only its effects. That this trait may also apply to the moment we know as the present is dangerous enough, but pursuit of the reason must wait. My first concern stems from need to build sound defences, that our efforts don’t call down some worse threat.’
Dakar watched, afraid to move, as Fellowship mage and s’Ffalenn prince shared a deep understanding. Jolted to fey sight by the combined effects of exhaustion and fear and disillusion, for a split second, Dakar perceived the scintillant brilliance of Asandir’s being in mirror-image, alike except in dimension to the pattern that was Arithon.
Then the trickster play of firelight and the fusty smell of drying wool over-rode the spellbinder’s fickle talent. The tableau shrank back to the unremarkable: a careworn, weatherbeaten old man in a rumpled mantle bent over a younger one left limp and tired.
To the Master so narrowly delivered from the malice of the Mistwraith he had pledged to subdue, Asandir said, ‘Sleep. Let the problem bide in my hands until morning.’
A gentle edge of spellcraft laced the words. Calm to a depth that transcended pity, Asandir waited for the prince he had betrayed to sort his feelings. Although the offering of serene rest might have been rebuffed by a thought, Arithon capitulated with a gratitude that gave the sorcerer startled pause. Despite the new depths of yearning unveiled through tonight’s shared scrying, no grudge remained in this prince who had been shackled in guilt to a fate he had not wanted. The very s’Ffalenn compassion that sealed the trap in the end prevailed to bring absolution. The wounding begun in Caith-al-Caen, that no effort at indifference might heal, would be carried into kingship in selfless silence.
Humbled by a forgiveness he had never expected to receive, Asandir stood stunned and still. Then he smiled as if touched by light, reached out with hands that could wring raw force from bedrock, and in a visible effort not to fumble, rearranged the blankets around the Master of Shadow. He tucked the musician’s fingers with their contradictory scars and callouses into the warmth of dry wool and set a binding of peace upon his handiwork.
When at length he straightened to address his apprentice, his face had assumed the bleakness of glacier-scarred granite. ‘We have a full night ahead. Lysaer had none of his half-brother’s protections, and we must not presume him unharmed. Luhaine has been called to our aid. Kharadmon is already back at Althain, since Sethvir believes our princes’ encounter could key insight into how Traithe came to be crippled. If we cannot unmask the nature of the enemy, we must determine what lets it slip at will through any but Paravian safe-wards. Otherwise, there can be no restored sun, for we’ll have no means to contain the part of Desh-thiere that is spirit.’
From his refuge on a bench by the settle, Dakar caught the poker from its peg. Clumsy in movement, his stocky calves dangling above the floor, he leaned to stir up the fire. The fact he had neglected to mind the supper-pot this once in his life did not irk him. ‘If the thing is alive,’ he surmised in reference to the Mistwraith, ‘we cannot follow through and kill it, can we?’
‘If it is alive,’ Asandir corrected, impatient as if drawn on wire. ‘If the life-forces we witnessed were not born of illusion, if it is a being or beings embodied into mist, think, Dakar. We let our princes “kill” it, reduce its confining vessel of fog, what then will be left?’
Hunched as a terrified child, the poker dangling from deadened hands, Dakar whispered, ‘Pure spirit. Ath’s mercy, we’d actually be setting the thing free.’
‘So I fear, my prophet,’ Asandir allowed. ‘If, like our disembodied colleagues of the Fellowship, the creature as unfettered spirit could shift its vibration and continue
to manifest in this world, so I most desperately fear.’ He followed with swift instructions that called for another trip out into the inclement night to set more wards of guard over the inner citadel.
Dakar glared at the stewpot, and the hot supper that must, of necessity, be eaten in savourless haste. With his chin cupped in his hands, and the ratty muffler he felt too chilled to shed trailing in twists about his ankles, he looked morose as a vagabond evicted from an alehouse. ‘Now why couldn’t I have chosen to be a tinker?’ he demanded of the leaping fire. ‘Fixing holed pots would be better fun than banishment of invisible ghosts at night in a wind-plagued ruin.’
‘I agree,’ snapped Asandir. ‘Now get moving.’ Crisper than a whipcrack, the sorcerer stepped to where Lysaer lay under tidy heaps of blankets. ‘If we don’t make certain this prince took no hurt from Desh-thiere, the leaky pots in this land aren’t going to matter very much.’
Backsearch
The blizzard whirled in off the Bittern Desert, and eddied snow through the casement fanned a diamond dusting of ice across the carpet in Althain Tower’s copy chamber. Sethvir’s ink-pots had frozen with their quills stuck fast where they stood; yet the sorcerer appeared not to care. Clad in rumpled robes, his hair raked into tufts like some itinerant roadside fortune-teller’s where he had savaged it with his knuckles, he glared at the dregs in his tea mug, cooled now to a mush of bitter leaves. As though the turnings of the world could indeed be read in the floating debris, he addressed a chamber that appeared to hold only books. ‘The damage, if that broad a term can apply to an attack of such focused proportion, has already been done.’
Kharadmon’s voice replied out of empty air, near a hearth heaped with ash that had not been raked since Asandir’s departure. ‘But then the disturbance left by the Mistwraith’s meddling should be obvious. To wit, a contradiction: Luhaine and Asandir found nothing amiss with Prince Lysaer.’