The Curse of the Mistwraith

  Hard-pressed himself, the adjacent clansman turned his shoulder to cover Arithon’s extended body through the moment of recovery. ‘Elwedd’s wasted a wager, I see. How’d the Masterbard know you were gifted at bladework?’

  ‘Escape this, and we’ll ask him,’ Arithon said.

  Though joyless, the scout’s grin gave endorsement that his liege was capable enough to be entrusted with full share of Jieret’s defence.

  Which fine point would shortly mean nothing, with the headhunters too thick to beat off and more of them coming by the second. Arithon saw this. Braced against the tree, forced to close-quarters, his style was cramped. Crushed moss and roots hampered footwork, and fallen enemies were adding to the hazard. The archers up the tree were less encumbered, but one of them already dangled head-down and dead in the branches. The headhunter crossbowman was still busy. Arithon could not see past the heave of the fighting to approximate his location. Another bolt whacked through green leaves and torn shreds of foliage spiralled down.

  Inevitably more crossbowmen must arrive; and Caolle’s men could hardly drive a foray through to rescue Steiven’s heir since they could not know he was pinned down. Arithon beat aside a blade that thrust at him and fought a slipping stance in wet leaves. A friendly arrow from above dispatched the brute in the conical helm who shoved in to grapple, and Arithon escaped with a bruise and a graze. Behind him, Jieret had out his dagger, determined to enter the fray.

  ‘Not now,’ said Arithon. ‘Jieret, this isn’t your fight.’

  Three swords came at him. He ducked one, felt the flat of a second jar his cut shoulder and met the third in a screaming bind. Locked steel to steel with an enemy, and exposed on his left side to fate, he saw his choices reduced to the one that, in Karthan, had undone him.

  He must use magecraft to kill, or allow Jieret and Steiven’s grief-crazed clansmen to die as victims of Desh-thiere’s curse.

  Arithon turned the wrist above Alithiel’s guard, felt his steel catch his opponent’s crossguard.

  The headhunter anticipated the wrench that would leave him disarmed. A burly man, and well trained, he gave with the pressure, then grunted in surprise as Arithon’s right-footed kick added force to his counter-move and staggered him sideways. He crashed across other headhunters who thrust through an opening no longer opportune. Slashed and half-skewered through the side he went down, two men’s steel mired in his fall, and a third man bashed off balance into the tight-pressed advance of his fellows.

  While the knot in the fighting swirled momentarily backward, Arithon dropped his blade, leaped and caught a treebranch, then swung hard. His boot lashed another attacker and upended him over the foeman who engaged Madreigh. ‘Guard Jieret,’ ordered Arithon. ‘What needs to be done, I can’t accomplish from here.’

  ‘You’ve got spells for a miracle?’ grunted the clan scout, his blade busy. He sidestepped into his prince’s vacated position, feinted low, and cut. Blood pattered down, filming the leaves, the tree-trunk and Jieret, buffeted and jostled by his defenders as he watched his liege lord hoist himself after the archers who were now, all three, dead of crossbow bolts.

  Another quarrel snicked bark by Arithon’s head. He ignored it, gave a quick smile downward to Jieret which held more worry than reassurance. A sailor’s move and a slither saw him up and then prone on a treebranch.

  Below him, Madreigh fought half-blind from a gash that trickled blood off his brow and right eye. Arithon drew his belt knife, threw and took down an opportunist who bent for a low stab at Jieret.

  Madreigh finished the action by stomping the fallen man’s face. He said, blade-harried, ‘If you know something that’ll save us, just do it!’

  Already two more clansmen lay dying, with another one wounded about to follow. Torn that such bravery should go wasted, Arithon stilled his nerves and focused his mind to cold purpose. The crossbowman perforce must come first.

  He cast about the wood, but could not pinpoint the man’s cover. That was the bitterest setback, since his purpose must be accomplished without broadscale use of shadows, or any wide sweep of illusion that might terrify an army into rout. Unless he maintained his anonymity among the clans, everything that mattered would go for naught.

  Amid a battle that assaulted concentration, Arithon distanced his senses, walled off awareness of everything outside a discrete sphere of air that immediately surrounded his person. The ward snare he shaped was risky and difficult, an amalgamation of illicit magelore and inspiration he would on no account have attempted to save himself; nor had he, to spare his own father.

  But to Deshir’s clansmen, he was oathbound. Steiven’s people would never have faced annihilation if not for his tie to Rathain.

  The forces he tapped were forbidden by any right-thinking mage. The tiniest miscalculation, just one slipped step and the vortex he fashioned could rend himself, the tree and the last of Jieret’s defenders. Arithon pitched the far fringes of his knowledge against dependency that, with his person offered as target, the town bowman would shoot to kill. The attention must be poised like strung wire: he must not feel his cut shoulder, must not rouse at the choke of dying men, nor even spare thought to question whether his clansmen might already lie slain. Ringed in perilous energies, Arithon touched the air, became the air, as one with its currents and small breezes that skeined through uncounted spaded leaves.

  Air did not feel death: it registered screams only as rhythms, intricately concentric as ring-ripples spread through a pool. There was peace and the terrible beauty of Ath’s order, until a rip of turbulence bored through, swift and barbed for death as only man-made ingenuity could contrive.

  Arithon closed the net of a ward just finished, but not yet tested for weaknesses. Too fast for care, too late for regrets, too utterly final to abort, the headhunter’s quarrel whistled in.

  A small thing, the dart, comprised of a handspan of wood and steel, wound string, glue and dyed feathers; but a shaft notched and barbed, that sped with a force to pierce mail. Each particle of its substance had Name; each grain of its mass, an energy signature for which Arithon had subverted Ath’s order and patterned a banespell.

  By nature, any snare of unbinding held a lawless compulsion to annihilate. Counter to the Major Balance and in parallel with chaos, frail strictures bent to harness the ungovernable were wont to spin dangerously awry.

  In raw fact, Arithon’s effort was only plausible through a tangle of tricks and paradox, a loophole in the world’s knit that hinged on a theoretical blend of fine points: that the object to be over mastered was itself made for death, and that its uninterrupted natural action must set forfeit the conjurer’s life.

  Everything, everything depended upon the headhunter crossbowman having scored a lethal hit.

  And if the man was such a marksman and his aim did not drift, and the baneward successfully intercepted his bolt before the instant it broached living flesh, the result offered perilous instability. The safeguards contrived to limit the unbinding’s ill effects were by no means infallibly sure.

  Doubts were all Arithon had, and stark fear, when the quarrel hissed into his defences.

  To unmake any particle of Ath’s Creation came at hideous cost. Arithon shuddered, then blocked a scream with his knuckles as the mote he had captured exploded in a battering burst. Tied to his conjury, his body convulsed in a spasm that seemed to crush out his marrow as law and matter unravelled in a whistling rush of wild energies. Arithon felt the nexus of his uncreation graze his protections, burning for entry to twist, tear and unravel his whole flesh as well as any other thing that lay within range of its reach. Inflamed as though he noosed magma, he flung out the shielding second stage of his counterspell.

  He deflected his ugly package of wrecked order through air, back along the disturbed eddies traced by the quarrel’s first flight path, then trailed with a stop-ward set to the resonance of wrought steel.

  A hiss arced through space above the skirmishers that partnered no physical projectile. Arit
hon opened his eyes, running sweat and winded as if he had been whipstruck. With every nerve screaming he waited.

  Until, behind a thin screen of alder, the crossbow exploded in the hands of its wielder.

  Splinters and wound wire and metal burst like shrapnel and flayed the headhunter’s face. He dropped, choking, holes torn through his chest and his abdomen, and blood spattered like thrown ink across the bleached trees. The only bit of his weapon not fragmented was the trigger latch, the first steel to contact the spell and engage its limited safeward.

  That stricture at least had worked and cancelled the unholy destruction. Arithon shivered in relief. Let there be no more archers among the enemy, he hoped, gasping as he clung to the treebranch. If there were, then Deshir’s clans were finished. He lacked stomach to repeat those defences. Torn by nerve-sick reaction, he regretted the victim, whose death was not needed, but who could not in the pinch of the moment be distanced from the means that destroyed his weapon.

  Below the beech tree fighting still raged. Casualties mounted ferociously. Only five clansmen remained standing. Madreigh battled on one knee, his right arm useless and his blade in his left hand, parrying. Jieret had taken up Alithiel in braced readiness for the moment when his last adult defenders should be cut down.

  Again, Arithon stamped back the temptation to grasp at the easiest expedient. Whoever he might spare by using shadow he could later kill without compunction in the grip of Desh-thiere’s curse. No risk was worth the chance he might draw Lysaer. Hedged by untenable choices, Arithon recouped a concentration that felt as if sloshed through a sieve. Need drove him again to abjure safe limits and to further violations of integrity that were going to cost bitterly later.

  He must not think of that. Now, all that mattered was the preservation of Jieret’s life and after him, any other clansman who could be saved.

  Clammy with chills, hollowed by weakness that sapped like the aftermath of fever, Arithon rested his cheek on the tree limb. He closed his eyes, inhaled the peppery scent of damp bark, and let that fuse with his being. He quieted. His clasped hands settled and sensitized to the languorous flow of sap. His thoughts became the whisper of leaves, the sunlit flight of pollinating bees, the unfurling of green shoots that thickened with each season’s turn, into stately crown and mighty wood branches. His consciousness spiralled down to encompass the thick black depths of earth, the firm anchored network of tap roots.

  Through the irreproachable pith of the living tree, Arithon twined his spell. Like the buds, the leaves, the branches, all groping outward for new growth, he spun the fine tendrils of his wards away from the trunk, that any defender who used its bulk to shield his back would be spared. But any attacker facing inward would find his eyes drawn and subtly captured, while his thoughts slowed to syrup, then to the languid drip of sap.

  A human mind ensnared in the consciousness of a tree will sleep, immersed in slow dreams that measure time in stately rhythms, of clean sun and silvered snow and seasons that slide one into another like the rain-kissed drift of autumn leaves.

  Which meant, Arithon knew, that any Deshan still standing would slaughter his victims in the half-second their reflexes dragged and the hand on driving blade faltered. Unlike the Etarrans entrapped by the shadow maze in the adjacent valley, these townsmen were given no reprieve. Mastery of their fate was reft from them, with no offered moment of free will in which they could choose to turn aside.

  Against a powerful temptation to shelter with them in sunwashed oblivion, Arithon disentwined his consciousness from the tree’s green awareness. He opened his eyes too soon. The part of him still paired to heart-sap and earth peace ripped away into noise and the blood-reek of animal carnage. Below him, the beech roots were mulched over with dead men, their wide open eyes still dreaming, imprinted with sky caught reflections of bark and boughs and leaves.

  Arithon retched, then forced a tight grip on raw nerves. He clasped the branch in sweated hands and through guilt and revulsion, took charge of the fruits of his conjury.

  Madreigh was down and wounded, Jieret at his shoulder with Alithiel bloodied in his hand. Two clansmen, both injured, were still on their feet, while outside the canopy of the beech tree, enemies crumpled to their knees, lost to mind and awareness. Beyond these, more headhunters checked in fear of the bane that had invisibly struck down their fellows. Outrage would soon overcome their apprehension and drive them to vigorous retaliation.

  ‘Don’t face inward, don’t look at the tree,’ Arithon instructed the surviving clansmen. He then asked numb limbs to move, and proved shaking hands could still grip. Somehow he swung to the ground. Hands tried to steady him as he swayed. He pushed them impatiently away. ‘Don’t trust what you’re going to see. The reinforcements will all be mine.’ He caught his sticky blade from Jieret’s grasp. ‘Just run, and don’t for any reason turn back.’ To the boy’s alarmed look, he added quickly, ‘I’ll be with you. Go.’

  He punctuated his instruction with a light slap on Jieret’s shoulder. Then, leaning on Alithiel to keep balance, he knelt, bent his head and spun illusion.

  Even depleted as he was, his inborn gift would always answer. Now he was alone and the risks were to himself, he dared risk shadow in limited countermeasure. Darkness flowed freely to his use as water might beat from a cataract. And as he had done another night in Steiven’s supply tent, he bent conjury into the shape and form of warriors.

  They emerged from brush and thicket with weapons gleaming, and bows nocked with broadheads in their hands. If their faces lacked character, if their step was inhumanly silent, discrepancy was covered by the scream and clash of fighting that echoed from the grottos by Tal Quorin. Since the appearance of reinforcing clansmen befitted a strategy to cover the flight of three fugitives, any headhunters not turned by the sleep-snare were scarcely minded to pause in analytical study. Caught inside arrow range when Arithon’s shadow-men knelt and pulled recurves, most wisely, Pesquil’s men who still had wits and footing broke and dived under cover.

  Their panicked haste might have amused, had the arrows when they arced not been made up of fancy and desperation.

  Arithon stirred, looked up, and tried to muster resource to rise and continue after Jieret. He managed neither. His miscalculation was not surprising, after the strictures he had broken. Before the foot and the knee that failed his will lay Madreigh, a tear in his chest that welled scarlet over his buckskins at each gasp.

  ‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He sat. Stupid with weakness, he met the eyes of the man, which stayed lucid through a suffering that should have eclipsed recognition.

  ‘My liege.’ Madreigh drew a scraping breath. ‘Go on. After the boy. You’re oathbound.’

  A scathing truth; one Arithon understood he had to answer for. Except he was drained to his dregs from misused expenditure of magecraft. Since he could not immediately master himself, he did as he wished and snatched up Madreigh’s wrist. In a whisper that seemed the utterance of a ghost he said, ‘I also took oath for Rathain and look, you die for it.’

  Beyond speech, Madreigh looked at him.

  Arithon spread the clansman’s limp fingers and pressed them, already chilled, against the bole of the beech tree. He closed his own hands over the top. Then with a gesture that lanced blackness and sparks through his mind, he wrenched back the fast-fading glimmer of his spellcraft and let it flow like a mercy-stroke over the clansman’s consciousness.

  Sleep took Madreigh’s tortured frame. His face under its grit and grey hair gentled, all sorrows eased into the sundrenched serenity of ancient trees.

  Empty with remorse, Arithon opened his fingers. Half-tranced from exhaustion he regarded his circle of quiet dead, clad in leather and blood; or wearing city broadcloth and chain mail pinched with weedstalks and dirt. The only censure for the mage-trained, he sadly found, was adherence to truth and self-discipline. No mind with vision was exempt; creation and destruction were one thread. One could not weave with Ath’s energies without holding in equal measur
e the means to unstring and unravel.

  The blood had left his head. He understood if he tried to move, he would only fall down spectacularly. Oblivious to the shouting and the battering scream of killing steel, he cupped his chin and surrendered to the shudders that racked him. He had acted outside of greed or self-interest, had to the letter of obligation fulfilled his bound oath to the Deshans. Duty did not cleanly excuse which lives should be abandoned to loss, or which should be taken to spare others: Steiven’s clansmen, last survivors of savage persecution, or Pesquil’s headhunters, still heated from their spree of unlicensed rapine and slaughter. No answer satisfied. No law insisted that justice stay partnered by mercy.

  The day’s transgressions abraded against s’Ffalenn conscience like the endless pound of sea waves tearing bleak granite into sand. Through a fog that forgot to track time, Arithon noticed the rhythmic well of fluid from Madreigh’s chest had slowed or stopped. Whether this was death’s doing or the endurance of sap laid deep for long winter, he had no strength to examine.

  He managed to recover his sword, and after that, his footing, before the disorientation that distanced him bled away and snapped his bemused chain of thought. His senses reclaimed the immediate. The belling clang of battle had now overtaken and surrounded him and arrows sleeted past in flat arcs that gouged up trails of rotted leaves.

  Not shadows, this time. The beech tree was solid at his hip. None too steady, Arithon backed against it. Though reawakened to his needs and obligations, his mind stayed bewildered and unruly. Disjointed details skittered across his awareness: that the sun had lowered; that copper leaves in red light trembled as if dipped in blood; that the brawling and the noise were distracting because they were caused by fighters, not shadows dressed up as illusion. Clansman and headhunter and dishevelled knots of city garrison were engaged in annihilation as ferocious as a scrap between mastiffs.