Curse of the Mistwraith

Power rose like current to his will. From an inner wellspring beyond his understanding, the force coursed outward, its passage marked by a thin tingle. Aware of deficiencies in his method, but unsure how to correct them, Lysaer grappled the energy with studied concentration, then opened his hands. A snap answered his motion. Light arced, brilliant, blinding, and struck sand with a gusty backlash of heat. When flash-marked vision cleared, no trace of the shadow remained.

Arithon released a pent-up breath. The face he turned toward his half-brother showed open admiration. ‘You did well. That shadow contained a sorcerer’s geas, compulsion bound by enchantment. Contact would have forced our minds to possession by whatever pattern its creator laid upon it. Dharkaron witness, that one meant us harm. There’s not much left of Mearth.’

Warmed by the praise, Lysaer moved ahead with more confidence. ‘What makes the spell susceptible to light?’

Arithon lengthened stride at the prince’s side. ‘Overload. The geas appears as shadow because it absorbs energy to maintain itself. But the balance which binds its existence isn’t indestructible. A sharp influx of force can sometimes burn one out.’

Lysaer had no chance to ask what might have resulted had his handling of his gift failed them in defence. A pool of darkness, twin to the first, seeped from beneath a jumbled heap of masonry. After a moment, the thing was joined by a second.

Arithon aligned mastery with will and raised a barrier against them. Green eyes intent, he watched the blots of blackness weave against his ward. Even as he strengthened his defences, another trio stole around an overturned pedestal.

‘Ath’s grace, the place is riddled with them.’ Lysaer glanced nervously to either side, fighting to hold the calm necessary to focus his gift. Arithon said nothing. Although the Gate lay no more than a stone’s throw away, the distance between seemed unreachable. Pressed by necessity, the prince plumbed the source of his talent and struck.

Light cracked outward. Unexpectedly blinded by a flat sheet of radiance, Arithon cried out. Sand, barrier and shadows roared up in a holocaust of sparks. Wind clapped the surrounding ruins like a fist as hot air speared skyward in updraft. Stunned for the span of a second, Lysaer swayed on his feet.

Hard hands caught his shoulder. ‘Keep moving.’ Arithon pushed him forward.

Lysaer managed a stumbling step. When his senses cleared from the explosion, his eyes beheld a vista of nightmare. Arithon’s ward extended like a bubble overhead; shadows battered the border, licking and wheeling and insatiably hungry to pry through to the victims inside. The prince glanced at his half-brother. Tense, sweat-streaked features flickered as shadows crossed the afterglow of sunset. Arithon looked whitely strained. If he became pressured past his limit, Lysaer feared they might never live to reach the Gate. Second by second, the shadows thickened. At each step, his half-brother’s defences became ever more taxing to maintain.

Lysaer gathered strength and lashed out. Light flared, blistering white, and seared the horde of shadows to oblivion. The prince trod over ground like heated metal. Determined to escape Mearth’s sorcerous threat he ran, narrowing the distance which separated him from the world portal. At his side, Arithon erected a fresh barrier. For still the shadows came. From cracks in stone and masonry, from chinks in the sand itself, the scraps of darkness poured forth. Forced back to a walk, the brothers moved within a vortex of flitting shapes.

Breath rasped in Lysaer’s throat. ‘I think the light energy draws them.’

‘Without it, we’re finished.’ Stripped to bleakness by fatigue, Arithon missed stride and almost stumbled. As if his loss of balance signalled weakness, the shadows closed and battered against his barrier with inexhaustible persistence.

Lysaer caught his brother’s wrist. He gathered himself, pressed forward, smashed back. Mearth shook with the blast. Stonework tumbled, glazed with slag. Desperation drove the prince to tap greater depths. Light hammered outwards. Sand fused into glass. Winds raised by the backlash gusted, howled, and flung Arithon like a puppet against his half-brother’s shoulder. Their next step was completed locked in mutual embrace.

‘Sithaer, will they never relent?’ Lysaer’s cry burst from him in an agony of exhausted hope. Though the Gate lay a scant pace ahead, his eyes discerned nothing beyond a horrible, flittering darkness. Pressed on by the awful conviction that his banishment rendered him powerless, Lysaer took a reckless step and channelled the whole of his awareness through his gift.

Arithon caught his half-brother at the moment of release. ‘Easy, Lysaer.’ He tempered the wild attack with shadow, but not fast enough to deflect its vicious backlash.

Light speared skyward with a report like thunder. Sand churned in the fists of a whirlwind and scoured the surrounding landscape with a shriek of tormented energy. Lysaer’s knees buckled. Arithon caught him as he fell. Barriers abandoned, he locked both arms around his half-brother and threw himself at the bright, mercurial shimmer of the Gate.

Darkness closed like a curtain between. Conscious still, Arithon felt icy chills pierce his flesh. Then the geas snared his mind. A shrill scream left his lips, clipped short as the white-hot blaze of the Gate’s transfer wrenched him into oblivion.

Predators

A man traverses a misted maze of bogland; slime pools ripple into motion as he passes, and footfalls pad at his heels, yet he pays no heed, prodding the hummocks as he steps with a staff of plain, grey ash…

Clad in leather and fur, a band of armed men lie in ambush beside a bearded captain, while a packtrain laden with silk and crystal emerges from a valley banked in fog…

A black, winged beast narrows scarlet eyes and dives off a ledge into cloud, and a long, wailing whistle summons others into formation behind its scale-clad tail…

IV. MISTWRAITH’S BANE

The silvery sheen of West Gate rippled, broke and spilled two bodies into the foggy wilds of Athera. Blond hair gleamed like lost gold through the cross-hatched fronds of wet bracken.

‘S’Ilessid!’ Dakar’s exuberance shook raindrops from the pine boughs overhead as he swooped like an ungainly brown vulture to claim his prize.

The sorcerer Asandir followed with more dignity but no less enthusiasm. ‘Careful. They might be hurt.’ He stopped at Dakar’s side and bent an intent gaze upon the arrivals from Dascen Elur.

Dirty, thin and marked by cruel hardship, two young men lay sprawled on the ground unconscious. One fair-skinned profile revealed s’Ilessid descent. Though the other face was blurred by tangled hair and a dark stubble of beard, Asandir saw enough to guess the eyes, when they opened, would be green.

When neither traveller stirred with returning life, Asandir frowned in concern. He bent and cupped long, capable fingers over the nearest sunburned forehead. Misted forest and Dakar’s chatter receded as he projected awareness into the mind of the man under his hands. Contact revealed immediate peril.

The sorcerer straightened. Questions died on Dakar’s lips beneath the sheared steel of his glance. ‘They’ve been touched by the shadows of Mearth. We must move them to shelter at once.’

Dakar hesitated, his tongue stilled before a thorny snarl of implications. The shadows’ geas bound the mind to madness: already Athera’s hope of renewed sunlight might be ruined. Sharp words prodded the Mad Prophet back to awareness.

‘Attend the prince, or your wager’s lost.’ Quickly Asandir unpinned his cloak and wrapped the dark-haired man in its midnight and silver folds.

A pale, uncharacteristically sober Dakar did likewise for the s’Ilessid. Then he forced his fat body to run and fetch the horses from their tethers.

Asandir had requisitioned use of a woodcutter’s cottage the day before. Since the Mistwraith’s conquest of sky and sunlight, men shunned the old places of power. West Gate proved no exception; the woodcutter’s dwelling lay five leagues from the site, seven hours’ ride on mounts doubly laden, and night fell early over the fog-shrouded forest.

Dakar cursed the dark. Branches clawed him, wrist and knee, as his horse shouldered through trackless wilds. Rain splashed down his collar. Though chilled to the marrow, the Mad Prophet refrained from complaint, even though his cloak had been lent to another. The five-hundred-year hope of all Athera rested with the unconscious man in his arms. The s’Ilessid prince he sheltered was heir to the throne of Tysan, yet not so much as a hearthfire would welcome his arrival to the kingdom he should rule. The woodcutter was away to West End for the autumn fair; his dwelling lay vacant and dark.

Night gave way to dawn, cut by misty reefs of pine trees. Sorcerer and prophet at last drew rein inside the gabled posts of the dooryard. The cottage inside was dry and functional, two rooms nestled beneath a steep, beamed roof. Asandir placed the refugees from the Red Desert on blankets before the hearth. When he had a fire lit and water set heating in an iron kettle over the flames, he knelt and began stripping sodden clothing from the nearest body.

The door banged. Finished with bedding the horses in the shed, Dakar entered, his arms weighed down with a dripping load of tack. ‘Why didn’t you start with the Prince of Tysan?’

Asandir did not look up. ‘I chose according to need.’ Tattered cloth parted under his hands, revealing a chest marred across by an ugly scab. Older weals glistened by flamelight, and scarred wrists showed evidence of recent and brutal captivity.

‘Ath’s mercy!’ Bits jingled against stirrups as Dakar dumped his burden on the settle. ‘Why? Is he outcast or criminal, to have been punished like that?’

‘Neither.’ The sorcerer’s brisk tone discouraged questions.

Concerned, Dakar bent over the s’Ilessid. To his immediate relief, the prince had suffered nothing worse than desert exposure. With a feverish efficiency quite outside his usual manner, Dakar saw his charge bathed and moved to the comfort of a pallet in the next room. When he returned to the hearth, he found Asandir still preoccupied.

Dakar pitched his bulk into the nearest chair and grimaced at the twinge of stiffened muscles. Chilled, damp and wearied through, he failed to appreciate why Asandir wasted time with a servant when the West Gate Prophecy in all probability stood completed by the s’Ilessid heir in the other room. After a brief struggle, impatience triumphed over prudence; Dakar interrupted. ‘Is he truly worth such pains?’

The sorcerer’s glance returned warning like ice-water. Apt to be maddeningly oblique, he said, ‘Did you notice the blade he carries?’

Dakar extended a foot and prodded the discarded heap of clothing by Asandir’s elbow. Frayed cloth tumbled to expose the smoky gleam of a sword hilt. Above the graceful curve of quillon and guard, an emerald glimmered in a setting too fine to be mistaken for anything crafted by man. Dakar frowned, more puzzled than enlightened. Why would a peasant carry a blade wrought by Paravian hands?

‘Why indeed, my Prophet?’ Asandir said aloud.

Dakar swore in exasperation. His mind was clumsy from lack of sleep. All three Paravian races, unicorns, centaurs and sun children, had vanished since the Mistwraith’s foggy conquest. The sword was an impossible paradox. With a sizeable wager and his most coveted prediction as yet uncertainly resolved, the Mad Prophet succumbed to annoyance. ‘Dharkaron take you, I’m tired of being baited. Can’t you tell me straight just once in a century?’

Incredibly, his outburst drew only silence. Cautiously, Dakar looked up and saw his master’s head still bent over the renegade from Dascen Elur. Firelight bronzed both figures like statuary. Shown all the signs of a long wait, Dakar settled back with a sigh and stretched aching feet toward the hearth. Practicality yielded better reward than prophecy and time, and since Asandir had chosen quarters of reasonable comfort for a change, Dakar refused to waste time fretting. With hedonistic simplicity, he nodded in his chair and slept.

When the first reedy snore escaped the Mad Prophet’s lips, Asandir’s forbidding manner softened. His fingers smoothed black hair from a profile all too familiar, and his smile widened with amusement. ’So, our Prophet thinks you a servant, does he?’

Sadness weighted the sorcerer’s phrase, even through his humour. How had a royal son of s’Ffalenn come by the abuse so cruelly marked into youthful flesh? The sight was an offence. Dascen Elur must have changed drastically in the years since the Fellowship sealed the Worldsend Gate for the cause of Athera’s drowned sunlight.

Asandir studied burned, peeling features and silently asked forgiveness for the past. Then he shut his eyes and focused his awareness to know the mind beneath. Swift, direct and deft as a surgeon’s cut, his probe should have pierced the surface layers of memory undetected by the will within. But against all expectation, the s’Ffalenn cried out. His body twisted against the sorcerer’s hold and his eyes opened blindly.

Asandir withdrew, startled. ‘Peace,’ he said in the old tongue. The word closed like a snare, blanketing all sensation of roused awareness. Intent as a falcon, the sorcerer waited until eyes as green as the promise of a sword’s emerald misted over and closed.

Calculation framed Asandir’s thoughts. Somewhere, this prince had received training in the arts of power: his mind was barriered, and his strength considerable if his defences extended beyond waking perception. Gently, the sorcerer straightened the scarred limbs. He had no choice but to break through, and not only to heal the damage wrought by the curse of Mearth. Upon this man, and the s’Ilessid heir with him, rested the hope of an age.

Asandir steadied himself and began again. He blended shallowly with the mind beneath his hands, as water might soak dry felt. Despite his subtlety, the s’Ffalenn scion noticed. Uneasiness transmitted across the link, and the sorcerer felt the skin under his touch roughen with gooseflesh.

‘Easy.’ Asandir kept his contact fluid, melting away whenever the mind he explored tried to grapple his hold. He did not possess, but waited, patient as stone. Eventually the man raised his own identity against intrusion of the unknown. Arithon; the word brought Asandir to sharp attention. Whoever had named this prince had known what they were about, for the Paravian root of meaning was ‘forger’, not of metals, but of destiny.

The sorcerer’s surprise roused opposition. Asandir dodged his charge’s challenge, shaped his will as a mirror and deflected Arithon’s defence back upon itself. The Master countered. Before the sorcerer could lose his awareness in a maze of reflected selfhood, he yielded to apparent passivity. But across his wary mind lay a will whetted keen as a knife. Against him, Asandir released a word tuned entirely to compassion. ‘Arithon.’

Nothing happened. Taken aback, Asandir paused. This prince could not be other than mortal. Logic paralleled his initial surmise. Suffering could alter a mind, Ath knew, and Arithon had known more than any man’s share. With abrupt decision, the sorcerer pitched his second attempt with the force he would have accorded a near equal.

Resistance broke this time, but not as Asandir expected. The Master drove across his own barriers from within, as if recognition of his opponent’s strength inspired a desperate appeal for help. Through the breach stormed images poisonously barbed with s’Ffalenn conscience, and also, incredibly, s’Ahelas foresight, which linked cause to consequence! yet the revelation’s enormity barely registered.

Bound into sympathy with Arithon’s mind, the sorcerer knew a quarterdeck littered with corpses. Through a sheen of tears he watched a father’s streaked fingers worry at an arrow lodged between neck and heart. The laboured words of the dying man were nearly lost in the din of battle. ‘Son, you must fire the brigantine. Let Dharkaron take me. I should never have asked you to leave Rauven.’

Fire flared, crackling over the scene, but its presence seemed ice beside the cataclysmic rebuttal in the mind which guided the torch. ‘Fate witness, you were right to call me!’ But Arithon’s cry jarred against a canker of self-doubt. Had he avoided the constraints of Karthan’s heirship, he need never have faced the anguished choice: to withhold from misuse of master conjury, and to count that scruple’s cost in lives his unrestricted powers could have spared. Sparks flurried against his father’s bloodied skin, extinguished without trace like Karthan’s slaughtered countrymen.

‘Fire her, boy. Before it’s too late…let me die free…’

‘No!’ Arithon’s protest rang through a starless, unnatural night. ‘Ath have mercy, my hand has sealed your fate already.’ But rough, seaman’s hands reached from behind and wrenched the torch from his grasp. Flame spattered across the curves of spanker and topsail. Canvas exploded into a blazing wall of inferno, parted by a sudden gust. Debris pinwheeled, fell, then quenched against wet decking with a hiss of steam; but the mizzen burned still, a cross of fire streaming acrid smoke.

‘Move, lad,’ said the seaman. ‘Halyard’s burned near through. Ye’ll get crushed by the gaff.’

But instead Arithon dropped to his knees beside his father. He strove in abject denial to staunch the bleeding loosed by that one chance-shot shaft. But the same hands which had snatched the torch jerked him away.

‘Your father’s lost, lad. Without you, Karthan’s kingless. ’ Weeping outright, the brigantine’s quartermaster hurled him headlong over the rail into the sea.

There followed no respite. Guided by pitiless force, the scene began to repeat itself. Yet by then, Asandir had gained control enough to recognize the pattern of Mearth’s curse. Originally created to protect the Five Centuries Fountain from meddlers, Davien’s geas bent the mind into endless circles around a man’s most painful memories. The effect drove a victim to insanity, or, if he was rarely tenacious, to amnesia, since the only possible defence was to renounce recall of all but innocuous past experience.

Asandir snapped the cycle with a delicacy born of perfectly schooled power. Released, the mind of Arithon s’Ffalenn lay open to his touch. With gentleness tempered by compassion, the sorcerer sorted through his charge’s memories. He began with earliest childhood and progressed systematically to the present. The result wrung his heart.

Arithon was a man multiply gifted, a mage-trained spirit tailored by grief to abjure all desire for ruling power. Scarred by his severe s’Ffalenn conscience and haunted past healing by his mother’s s’Ahelas foresight, Arithon would never again risk the anguish of having to choose between the binding restraints of arcane knowledge and the responsibilities of true sovereignty. Asandir caught his breath in raw and terrible sympathy. Kingship was the one role Athera’s need could not spare this prince.

Descended of royal lines older than Dascen Elur’s archives, Arithon was the last living heir to the High Kingship of Rathain, a land divided in strife since the Mistwraith had drowned the sky. Although Arithon’s case begged mercy, Asandir had known the separate sorrows of generations whose hopes had endured for the day their liege lord would return through West Gate. That the s’Ffalenn prince who arrived might find his crown intolerable seemed tragic beyond imagining.

Asandir dissolved rapport and wearily settled on his heels. Years and wisdom lay heavy on his heart as he studied the dark head in the firelight. Arithon’s freedom must inevitably be sacrificed for the sake of the balance of an age. Direct experience warned the sorcerer of the depths of rebuttal a second crown would engender. He also understood, too well, how mastery of shadow, coupled with an enchanter’s discipline, granted Arithon potential means to reject the constraints of his birthright. Athera could ill afford the consequence if the Mistwraith that afflicted the world was ever to yield its hold on sunlight.

Asandir stifled the pity aroused by slim, musician’s fingers whose promise begged for expression even in stillness. Arithon’s fetter marks no longer moved him, awakened as he now was to the inconsolable grief of spirit engendered by a sandspit called Karthan. Asandir sighed. If he could not release this prince from kingship, he might at least grant peace of mind and a chance for enlightened acceptance.

‘Ath’s mercy guide you, my prince,’ he murmured, and with the restraint of a man dealing a mercy-stroke, he re-established contact with Arithon’s mind. Swiftly the sorcerer touched the links of association which made kingship incompatible with magecraft and set those memories under block. His work was thorough, but temporary. The Law of the Major Balance which founded his power set high cost on direct interference with mortal lives. Asandir controlled only recognition, that Arithon be spared full awareness of a fate he would find untenable until he could be offered the guidance to manage his gifts by the Fellowship of Seven.

Afternoon leaked grey light around the shutters by the time the sorcerer finished. The fire had aged to ashbearded coals, and Dakar at some point had abandoned his chair for a blanket spread on the floor. His snores mingled in rough counterpoint with the drip of water from the eaves.

Asandir rose without stiffness. He lifted Arithon and carried him to the next room where an empty cot waited. Sleep would heal the exhaustion left by the geas of Mearth. But Asandir himself was not yet free to rest. Directed through the gloom by a coin-bright gleam of gold, he knelt at the side of a s’Ilessid prince whose destiny was equally foreordained.

Dakar woke to darkness. Hungry and cold, he shivered and noticed that Asandir had allowed the fire to die out. ‘Sorcerers!’ muttered the Mad Prophet, and followed with an epithet. He rose and bruised his shins against unfamiliar furnishings until he located flint, striker and kindling. Nursing annoyance, Dakar knelt on the empty blanket and set to work. Sparks blossomed beneath his hands, seeding a thin thread of orange against the wood.

With bearish haste, the Mad Prophet moved on to the woodcutter’s root-cellar. He emerged laden like a farmwife with provisions; but the whistle on his lips died before any melody emerged. New firelight flickered across imperious features and the folds of a bordered tunic: Asandir stood braced against the mantel, imposing as chiselled granite.

‘Well?’ Dakar dumped cheese, smoked sausage and a snarl of wrinkled vegetables onto the woodcutter’s trestle table, then winced over the words uttered in bad temper only moments before. ‘How long have you been waiting?’

‘Not long.’ The sorcerer’s voice revealed nothing.

Dakar disguised a shiver by rattling through the contents of a cupboard. He knew better than to expect Asandir would forgive his latest slip of tongue. With obstinate concentration, the Mad Prophet selected a knife and began slicing parsnips. A second later, he yowled and pressed a cut finger to his mouth.

Asandir seemed not to notice. ‘Daelion’s Wheel, what a tangle your prophecy has spun!’

Dakar lowered his hand, startled. No hidden veil of meaning emerged to chastise his impudence. Complex and awesomely powerful as a Sorcerer of the Fellowship was, Asandir seemed wholly preoccupied. Too lazy to bother with amazement, Dakar dived in with a question. ‘Now will you explain why a serf carries a Paravian blade?’

Asandir’s brows rose in sharp surprise. ‘Is that all you saw? Best look again.’

Hunger forgotten, Dakar abandoned the vegetables. The sword still lay on the floor beside the hearth, the glitter of its jewel like ice against the rags. The Mad Prophet had not noticed the rune cut into the face of the emerald earlier. Now, the sight made his fat face crease into a frown. Absently blotting his bloodied thumb on his tunic, he moved closer. No, he thought, impossible. Anxious for reassurance, Dakar closed sweaty hands over chill metal and pulled.