The Curse of the Mistwraith

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.’

‘They checked in depth, I know,’ Sethvir said, brusque since the past night’s report from Ithamon left him frustrated. Barring self growth and maturation of character, Lysaer was, spirit and flesh, the same young man who had entered Athera through West Gate.

The Warden of Althain cocked his wrist, idly swirling his tea leaves as if the point in debate were not dire, and demanding of his closest attention. To Kharadmon, he admonished, ‘You’re analysing the nature of the universe, based on one view through a keyhole.’

‘Analogies again?’ Cold air swirled snowflakes across the chamber; when embodied, Kharadmon had tended to pace, and as spirit, his restlessness was constant. ‘Which keyhole, then? Back your theory.’

A rise of tufted eyebrows evinced Sethvir to be miffed. ‘Hunch,’ he corrected. He set the tea mug aside with contradictory care; as if soggy herbs could change nature at whim, and become brittle and subject to shatter. ‘My keyhole is present time, and Traithe’s plight should bear out my conjecture.’ His inkstained fingers cupped air. An image flickered to life as defined as a flame on a freshly lit candle. The reflected scene was not new. Time after weary time, in strands and in fire, the Fellowship sorcerers had reviewed the moment of South Gate’s closing, and the fate of the colleague who had singlehandedly stemmed the disaster…

The porphyry pillars of South Gate reared white-edged in the static flash of stressed energies. Weather-forces skewed out of balance and a storm-charged sky raked the earth with lightning. Thunder slammed and rain sheeted like a fall of silver needles through the hellish play of light. Even after five centuries the view could still inspire dread, as Desh-thiere erupted through the portal between worlds. It came on, gale-driven masses of fog like the boiled over brew from a witch’s cauldron. Toward the streaming influx at the gate, a lone figure ploughed its way forward: Traithe, fighting a cyclone of disturbed air that twisted his robes, and harried his progress to a standstill…

There the image poised, with Traithe’s face obscured behind the wind-flagged fabric of his sleeve. One hand raked out to fend off what seemed empty air, or perhaps a questing tendril of mist. Even locked against motion, the recalled moment from the past was confused by the violent extremes of the light.

‘We interpreted the turbulence as wind-shear,’ Sethvir murmured, ‘caused by the current through the gate. Now, I think differently.’

‘An attack by Desh-thiere?’ Kharadmon’s stillness was telling. ‘The vortex centres upon Traithe, true enough, but its content is no more than mist. Sentient life force is nowhere in evidence.’

‘Apparently.’ Sethvir loosed his binding, and the vision continued forward once again. The sting of its following sequence hurt no less, for being a foregone conclusion…

The revealing sleeve cracked away as Traithe raised his hands. His expression no longer reflected the calm of a sorcerer in control of his craft, but revealed a man in abject agony. Thunder reverberated, cut through by his scream as