Warhost of Vastmark

Urgency pressed him too closely to share the premise behind his bleak forecast. In a fiery flourish of seals, Kharadmon configured an unfamiliar chain of runes and safeguards. These meshed into the primary protections already laid over the tower to receive the hate-driven entities he had battled and failed to outrun.

‘As a last resort, the wraiths dislike the stink of sulphur,’ he finished off in crisp haste.

Ever intolerant of his colleague’s provocations, Luhaine retuned the balance of a sigil the sudden change had tipped awry. ‘I suggest we don’t allow the wretched creatures any liberty to need tactics of such flimsy desperation.’

‘Luhaine! From you, an enchanting understatement!’ Kharadmon’s quick turn around the chamber masked a trepidation like vibrations struck off tempered steel. For should the wraiths which trailed him across the deeps of space escape Fellowship confinement here at Althain, they would gain access to all of Athera. Set loose, their potential for havoc could unleash horrors beyond all imagining.

After all, they were an unfettered aspect drawn here from the original body of the Mistwraith, an entity created from a misguided meddling with the Law of the Major Balance. Its works had driven the Paravians to vanish in despair; in defeat, its dire vengeance had twisted the lives of two princes.

While Luhaine’s ghost churned through brown thoughts over Kharadmon’s tasteless humour, the wards crisscrossing the darkened sky outside flared active with a scream of raw light. Sethvir shouted a binding cantrip, then gave way to alarm as Kharadmon’s hunch was borne through. A burst hurtled down like a meteor storm, in angry red arcs curdling holes through every ward and guard he and Luhaine had shaped from roused earthforce.

‘Ath’s infinite pity!’ Althain’s Warden cried, his fingers wrung through his beard.

‘No,’ Kharadmon interjected, his insouciance torn away by exhaustion that verged on impairment. ‘These wraiths won’t fall on the defenceless countryside. Not yet. They’ll besiege us here first. Incentive will draw them. They desire to steal knowledge from our Fellowship. We’ll be under attack, and if any one of us falls as a victim, there will be no limit to our sorrow.’ His warning fell into a dread stillness, since he alone could gauge the threat now descending upon Althain Tower.

‘Don’t try to close with them. Don’t let them grapple,’ he added in hurried, last caution. ‘Their bent is possession. They can slip traps through time. The best chance we have is to keep out of reach, use this tower’s primary defences for containment, then try to snare the creatures in ring wards.’

The mirror-loop spells to entrap a hostile consciousness back into itself were a simple enough undertaking, provided a mage knew the aura pattern of the spirit appointed for restraint. To Luhaine’s high-browed flick of inquiry, Kharadmon showed tart disgust. Td hardly have needed to flee the fell creatures if I’d held command of their Names.’

And then the wraiths were upon them in a swirling, unseen tide of spite. They poured through the casements to winnow the unshielded spark in the brazier, and cause Sethvir’s scattered tomes to clap shut like trap jaws on bent pages and loose sheaves of quill pens.

Through the last battle to confine Desh-thiere, Paravian defence wards alone had been impervious to the wraiths’ aberrant nature. Even as Asandir had once done in desperation atop another beleaguered tower nine years past, Luhaine fired a charge through a spell net held ready. A power more ancient than any sorcerer’s tenancy surged in response to his need. A deep-throated rumble shook the old stonework as the wards over Althain slammed fast.

The pack of free wraiths bent in hate against the Fellowship were now sealed inside Sethvir’s library.

If Kharadmon had resisted their malevolence alone through an exhaustive toll of years, he was now left too worn from his trials to offer much fight to help stay them. Bare hope must suffice that the Paravian safeguards laid within the tower’s walls would prove as potent against these invaders as the wards once reconfigured against Desh-thiere.

Yet in this hour of trial, the attacking entities inhabited no body spun from mist. These free wraiths held no fleshly tie to life, nor were they subject to any physical law. They could not be lured through illusions framed to malign or confuse the senses. Not being fogbound, no gifted command of light and shadow would suffice to turn them at bay. Lent the knife-edged awareness that no power in the land might contain these fell creatures should they slip Althain’s wards and escape, three Sorcerers stewed inside with them had no option at all but to try and evade their deadly grasp. They must seek to subdue and enchain them without falling prey to possession.

The peril was extreme and the risk beyond thought, for should they fail to contain this threat here and now, the very depths of their knowledge and craft would be turned against the land their Fellowship was sworn and charged to guard.

To surface appearance, there seemed no present enemy to fight. Limned in sheeting flares thrown off by the disrupted fields in the tower wards, the metal clasps of books bit corners of reflection through the gloom. The third lane spark in the brazier recovered its steady blue to cast harsh illumination over the massive black table with its scrawled chalk ciphers and its empty chairs left arrayed at jutted angles. As unkempt as the caches upon his fusty aumbries, Sethvir stood poised, his hair and beard raked up into tufts and his fingers interlaced beneath the threadbare shine of his cuffs. His gaze sieved the air to pick out sign of the hostile motes of consciousness which lurked in the crannies and the shelves.

Unlike his spirit-formed colleagues, he was hampered, his perception tied to mortal senses. The earth link that enabled him to track simultaneous world events out of half trance was no help in a direct encounter. Its use slowed his reflexes. Unlike his discorporate colleagues, he could not see behind to guard his back. To the refined sensitivity of his mage-sight, the wraiths would show as spirit light, brighter if they moved or tried to exert their influence over anything alive. Were they stilled or stalking, poised beyond his peripheral vision, he must rely on hearing, for their auras would be traceless through the air. Yet eyes had to blink; fleshly senses fell prey to fatigue.

And the danger was present and closing.

‘Beware,’ warned Luhaine. ‘I count nine hostile vortices.’

Engrossed in the throes of tuned awareness, Sethvir made them out with more difficulty. Twined amid the jumble of his possessions, the faint, coiling currents of the wraiths seemed sketched against the dimness like strayed dust motes, stroked to clinging eddies by weak static. Ephemeral as they seemed, translucent as the steam wisps off his tea mugs, he was not fooled. The broadened span of his perception could detect their unrest, hazed in vibrations of hatred. These entities cast their essence in the forms of leering faces, yawling mouths, in glass-clear, skeletal fingers that plucked and clawed and pricked like jabbing needles in quest of the barest chink in his defences.

‘Sethvir, don’t let them flank you.’ Thin drawn under stress as the wraiths themselves, Luhaine stood guard by the library door, his stance set opposite Kharadmon’s. For with frightful intent in those first, passing minutes, the victim the wraiths had chosen was the Warden of Althain himself.

Of them all, Sethvir alone owned the talent for splitting his mind into multiple awareness. He was Althain’s Warden, the earth’s tried link, and through him flowed all events to influence the fate of Athera. Were the wraiths to possess him, they could access at will any aspect they chose within the world. They would grasp the last particular concerning the ward-bound fragments of the Mistwraith held captive in Rockfell Pit, even the means to key their freedom.

Sethvir pushed back the shabby maroon velvet of his cuffs. He hooked his stub of chalk from the table rim, then spoke a word in sharp, staccato syllables that snagged the wild force of the elements. The clear air before him turned brittle and hard, sheer as a pane of sheet ice. Onto that enspelled, glassine surface, he scribed a fresh line of ciphers. Each rune as written flared into lines of fire. While the wraiths roiled back, gnashing silent teeth and flailing clawed fists, and fleering fanged snarls at the punitive pinch of bristled energy, the Warden of Althain murmured a litany of unbinding.

Spell-cast air reclaimed its natural state with a cry like rending crystal. The construct traced out in chalk lines stayed adrift, fanned and winnowed on the draughts as burning oil might ride on a water current. To reach Sethvir, the hostile entities must cross through them, or else try to permeate the spell-tempered stone that formed the wall at his back.

One moment the wraiths coiled in an agitated swirl of frustration. Then they vanished.

Sethvir shouted. Behind his ward of spelled air, he shrank a step, cornered by the table, while around him, a roiled press like heat waves off brick, the spirit forms attacked.

‘They’ve breached his defences across time!’ cried Luhaine.

But Kharadmon was forewarned. His counterstrike sheeted around Sethvir’s body. The wraiths frothed in thrashing retreat. Above their heaving moil, a rune blazed, then dissolved to spread a stench like rotten eggs over the space they inhabited.

‘Sulphur,’ said Kharadmon. ‘It’s bought us a handful of seconds.’

‘I shouldn’t act smug,’ Luhaine huffed. ‘Such stopgap measures build no measure of permanence, but only waste what remains of your strength.’ Self-righteously immersed, he undertook to build a vessel of confinement in the prior style used against Desh-thiere.

‘What use to build jars?’ Kharadmon stabbed back in rejoinder. ‘We can scarcely sweep these beings into captivity if we can’t force them back in retreat.’

The quandary held far-reaching implications since a free wraith without Name could not be grappled. These had already defied the Wheel’s passage into natural death. To destroy the unclothed spirit was to unweave a strand of Ath’s creation, a misuse of grand conjury and a direct intervention against the prime vibration that no Fellowship tenet could sanction. The Sorcerers were committed to harm no being, nor to unbind or inhibit any spark of self-awareness, even at the cost of their very lives.

While the entities seethed to renew their assault, Luhaine conjoined his spirit essence in painstaking care with the seals spread across the surface of the tabletop. A moment passed as he asked free consent from the stone. Then curtains of sparks fountained around the bronze tripod of the brazier. In a torrent of force borrowed from the third lane, the discorporate Sorcerer melted the dark rock and reshaped its gold magma to form a canister.

His work singed the air into stinging, dry wind. Unbound sheets of parchment thrashed in scraping distress across the floor to catch on the chair legs and hang on the carved Khadrim that formed the table’s massive pedestal. The wraiths winnowed through like floss caught in current, bent once again on Althain’s Warden. Their caustic contempt rang in dissonance against mage-tuned awareness. Prolonged years of battle against Kharadmon had taught these enemies too well. They understood the limitations of their prey: provoke how they might, twist life as they would, no Fellowship mage would spurn Ath’s trust and the Law of the Major Balance to fling spells of unmaking against them.

The Sorcerers who protected Athera were guardians. Their strength of constraint could be used against them as a weapon to breach their steadfast self-command and turn moral force into weakness.

Whether the powers Sethvir could have raised on a thought to negate any threat to his autonomy tormented him to temptation, none could know as the wraiths closed upon him. He watched their advance with pale. narrowed eyes, his wiry shoulders bowed as if the drag of his robes bore him down. The ink stains showed stark against knuckles bleached and gnarled as stranded driftwood. In a move that looked like a vagary of nerves, he exchanged his chalk stick for two dusty bits of river stone, plucked in haste from the clutter by the windowsill.

‘Don’t try a field charge to corner them.’ Bled from the effort of his own defences, Kharadmon’s voice was a wisp of its usual rich timbre. ‘That sort of energy feeds them.’

‘I saw,’ Sethvir said. His empty hand gripped the table edge. The wraiths fanned about him, less substantial than half-glimpsed puffs of spent smoke. Before their poised menace, he seemed a wizened grandfather, reduced by senility to threatening thrown pebbles to halt the rise of a flood.

‘There’s another way to draw them,’ Sethvir offered. ‘Above anything they want to seize control of my gifts.’

Luhaine responded in fraught fear, ‘Don’t try. You cannot think to risk baiting them!’

But the Warden already chanted a musical phrase in Paravian. The pebbles radiated a kindly warmth through his palm, then chimed back a note of assurance. His binding immediately paired them one to another in tuned resonance.

In the instant the wraiths closed, Sethvir cast the first stone into the obsidian cylinder Luhaine had fashioned from the table slab. The second he pitched to the floor. His throw held no apparent force; yet the river rock struck and shattered into a thousand tiny fragments. These scattered as though life and will lent them impetus to lodge in every cranny of the library.

The same moment, Sethvir’s knees gave way. He slumped against the table, then slid unconscious into a rumpled heap of robes. His sunken cheek lay pillowed in his beard and hair, entangled as a mass of washed fleeces.

‘Ath, the grand idiot!’ Luhaine cried on a shocked snap of breeze. ‘He’s split his consciousness and fused each part into the shards of the rock!’

But the tactic had succeeded. Already the wraiths were diverted, divided and quartering every square inch of floor to retrieve the prize within the pebble’s sundered pieces. Each one of these contained, like a puzzle, a scrap of Sethvir’s awareness. Entirely without fight, the entities could have stolen his emptied flesh. But since access to the earth link was their coveted aim, the body was a useless container to them without the Warden’s talents and spirit. In the predictable arrogance of wraith forms, they spurned the physical housing and pressed in greed to gather and conquer each disparate bit of the Sorcerer’s essence.

‘Will you whine, or will you stand strong?’ Kharadmon exhorted. For the wraiths would possess what they recovered from the stone shards. The only help for Sethvir now lay in two colleagues’ readiness to back his desperate ploy.

Nine hostile entities and a thousand slivers of stone to seek out; the spirits prowled the flagstones, searching hungrily, spinning like unspooled thread between the chair legs and through the dust-clogged mesh of old spiderwebs spanning the feet of the cupboards. Their trackless passage breathed draughts across Sethvir’s slackened knuckles and combed through every moth-hole in his sleeves.

Eyeless, senseless, lured on by the singing glints of spirit light that formed the sundered slivers of their prey, the wraiths were doubly guided in their hunt by the pewter dance of energies which framed the prosaic signature of river stone. They skimmed like gleaners on a threshing floor and claimed their offered prize.

Too late, they sensed the hook and trap the Warden had set in his subtlety, which tied the broken pebble with its whole twin, thrown to rest inside Luhaine’s container. When Sethvir called on that binding and knit the flung fragments of his awareness back into one cohesive whole, the wraiths were pulled with him. Attached, all nine, to a split portion of himself, but not yet allowed full possession to inflict total mastery over him, they found themselves upended and sucked without volition to home with their victim’s conscious will. The spell-forged link to the second pebble, where the Sorcerer now fled, drew the entities to follow in blind compulsion through the neck of the slate flask.

Their collective cry seemed to harrow the air and shiver the books on the shelves.

‘Now!’ Kharadmon’s shout melded with Luhaine’s response. Incandescent spells bathed the cylinder on the table, searing its outline seamless white.

Tired as he was, worn to a shadow of his strength, Kharadmon etched the first seal over the wraiths to imprison them.

‘Let be,’ Luhaine chided. ‘Would you waste yourself to a mute shade?’ Since Kharadmon was ever the sort to spurn sense, he balanced his energies and joined in.

Night mist beyond the casements blazed like spilled oil to the out-flood of light from sparked power. The raised aura of Fellowship spellcraft flung off a mighty corona until the chamber keened in shared tension, and the slates in the floor hummed in stressed resonance to the flux of tempered force.

With time the lights died, leaving the lane-spark in the brazier a needle of blue light in velvet darkness. Draught through the opened shutters stirred through a faint stench of sulphur, tainted with ozone and an ashy miasma of singed dust. The wraiths’ prison rested on the dimpled slab of the tabletop, an obsidian cylinder that tapped and pinged through the stresses of natural cooling.

On the floor, wax still, limp flesh devoid of spirit, Sethvir’s body sprawled in the blood-dark puddle of his robes. The white curve of his lashes never flickered. He did not dream; his breathing was shallow and imperceptibly slow, except to the eyes of another mage.

Across heavy silence, through sorrowful, shared awareness and a stillness that presaged false peace, two discorporate Fellowship Sorcerers steeled themselves to wait. They exchanged no speech. Their fear loomed wide as sky itself. For although the wraiths lay safely contained, the spirit of their colleague was trapped also.

Inside the flask, alone against nine, Sethvir now battled for his life.

‘We cannot abandon him in there,’ Luhaine said at last in a slow, careful phrase of masked pain.

Kharadmon swirled from his place by the casement, to his colleague’s sight a moiled patch of shade that wore spirit light in flecks like fogged stars. ‘No, we can’t. The wraiths will devour his identity.’ A sigh of breeze raised frost on the book spines as he roved in restless currents through the chamber. ‘That’s what became of the people who inhabited the worlds beyond South Gate. The same tragedy would have repeated itself here, had Traithe not spared us all by checking Desh-thiere’s invasion at the outset.’

Had Luhaine still worn flesh, he would have swallowed back the coppery taste of fear. ‘You’re saying the fell mists held intent to enslave our whole world?’

‘They still could,’ Kharadmon pronounced in bleak fact. ‘Were its two sundered portions ever to be rejoined, there’s no doubt left of its strength. All Athera would be laid to waste.’ He need not repeat that the beacon spell set on the solstice had seeded the opening to admit just such a horrid possibility. Forewarned at the time of the danger, he had unwound the spell sent to call him, even exposed himself to attack in the doing. But the clean, fine signature of Fellowship power could not fully be erased without imprint.

A tracery leading back to the spell’s point of origin would linger for several centuries to be tracked. The stakes of the nightmare had widened. Now the wraiths confined at Rockfell Peak were just the bitter edge of a greater peril.

But for now future worries must defer to the weight of present crisis. Inside the sealed flask the battle still raged. Mage-sight could cross the ward boundaries to trace Sethvir’s tactics as he twisted and zigzagged like a hunted hare through the maze of the river pebble’s structure. Attached to him were the wraiths, striving ever to complete their possession.

To aid him, the two colleagues left free must build spells of frightful complexity.

In partnered concentration, they embraced the contours that comprised the black flagon, then softened the bonding of its structure. The wailing resonance of the wraiths inside dragged at the Sorcerers’ focus and struck hurtful harmonics through their auras. They stood fast. Of necessity, they ignored even the rending awareness of Sethvir’s tortured flight. In care, with infinite patience, they crooned a litany to the river pebble and coaxed its solid, round contour to meld its structure with that of the flask.

Like a teardrop in a puddle, the grained bit of granite ceded its separate nature to pool into the obsidian’s denser matrix. Kharadmon and Luhaine paused in slack silence, their rivalry stilled into listening. If luck held and Sethvir had not weakened, he could have preserved his tie to inanimate stone and followed the river pebble’s transmutation. The way had been opened for him to fly in retreat. He could attempt to sieve his beleaguered consciousness through the guard spells borrowed from Althain’s grand warding that Luhaine had affixed in the flask. The conjury itself was a welded amalgamation of Paravian magics and his own wary knitting of defences. Theory held that the pattern of the Warden’s spirit Name should be recognized, mazed as it was with the stamp of the Ilitharis Paravians’ own blessing. The great centaurs themselves had ceded the earth link to Sethvir’s care in the hour when the last of their race had abandoned their post at Althain Tower.

But fear and guessed odds made small footing for hope as the seconds sang by, and Kharadmon and Luhaine held in wait for their fellow to seize his chance.

Sethvir had no reprieve to test his hunches, no moment to hesitate and think. If his choice stood in error, the effects would become irreversible.

His first step was made unsupported and alone, with his two colleagues helpless to lend him guidance. In his passage through the coiled sigils which cross-linked to form the guard spells’ mighty seals, the Warden would hope that the parasitic wraiths would be strained away. Only then could his self-awareness emerge whole and unsullied.

If he misjudged, he could be annihilated by the countersurge of his own defences; or he might be held as the prisoner of his very tower’s fell guard spells, trapped inside a pebble and smothered for all time inside a tomb of warded slate. Worse, perhaps, and most frightening, the wraiths could seize upon some clever delusion, might turn some trick to corrupt the wards and slip by. Should this transpire, the Sorcerer who awakened would be changed from the dear colleague who had entered, an evil too ruinous to contemplate.

Distress drove Kharadmon to unwonted sympathy. ‘Sethvir is most wise and clever enough in his ways to fool even Daelion Fatemaster. An ugly truth will not deter him. He would disperse his very spirit to oblivion before ever he let such a risk walk abroad to harm Athera.’

Luhaine for once had no words. Coiled into tight worry, he maintained a tortured stillness, as if to acknowledge his colleague’s restless movement might cause him to abandon his dignity and fidget.

Hours passed without sign. Breezes off the desert funnelled through the casement, sharp with the bite of autumn frost. The unlatched shutters swung to the gusts and thumped odd tattoos on the window jambs. On a floor gritted with the shattered remains of what had been a blameless river pebble, moonlight sliced oblate patterns.

In time the new dawn masked the stars in leaden grey. The stilled form sprawled upon the chill flagstone regained a flush of rose about the nostrils. One wiry, veined hand curled closed.

‘Tea,’ Sethvir sighed in a wistful, weak whisper. ‘Kharadmon, do you think you might dredge up a spark to kindle the fire? If my memory isn’t damaged, I believe the cauldron’s filled and ready.’

The Warden of Althain was himself; two colleagues withdrew from close inspection of his aura pattern, while a fired ray of sun lit the clouds and etched a blush of leaf gold against the lichened stone of the east casement.