Again the image paused; and like a file scraping rust from old steel, Sethvir’s commentary resumed.
‘What if the backlash that maimed Traithe was not the mishandling of grand conjury we first supposed? By intent, our colleague may have caused his own binding to be grounded through his flesh. The sacrifice makes sense, if in desperation, he sought to burn out an incursion of the enemy.’
Cryptic as always, and now on the far side of the chamber, Kharadmon said, ‘You suggest Desh-thiere’s aspects besieged his mind.’
‘Yes. Traithe opened himself to its essence, to find its Name, and gain ascendancy over it. He should not have been vulnerable,
Kharadmon seized the logical progression. ‘Traithe would naturally raise wards. But his countermeasure perforce would have been a fatal fraction too slow, perpetually behind the leading edge of Desh-thiere’s attack.’
‘So I surmise.’ Sethvir stared at the space where the spirit of his colleague now rested. Neither of them spoke the painful truth, that to know a true Name in all of its individual ramifications was to hold power to unmake its being. Paradox, and at times cruellest irony, that mages who survived to gain such depths of wisdom were disbarred by understanding of the universe from use of the spells of Unbinding.
Sethvir fixed again on the image he had raised from five hundred years past and resumed the dropped thread of conversation. ‘I postulate that Traithe seared away half of his awareness, truncated his own vision by blasting it out with raw power, that Desh-thiere could be stopped from enslaving him. He burned it out as a hill-warrior might hack off a limb with a septic wound, by his own hand rendering himself crippled.’
Traithe had lost memory in the process, and the greater vision that founded his faculties, and all trace of the Name of the being that had brought him to the brink of total ruin.
In a pass made savage by sorrow, Sethvir waved away his conjured image. ‘We are warned too late. Last night in Ithamon, Desh-thiere’s aspects did not challenge Asandir’s wards. Neither did they retreat; they simply passed elsewhen. Into another time. That implies their purpose was complete. My guess is our Teir’s’Ilessid shows no sign of disparate change because the moment when tonight’s damage shall manifest is still yet to come, and of a surety chosen most carefully.’
‘Arithon’s coronation in Etarra,’ Kharadmon summed up grimly. ‘It will be there. Desh-thiere’s intervention caused the strands to converge without digression.’
Ferociously grim, all without words, Sethvir and Kharadmon shared their night’s surmises: that if Desh-thiere’s aspects were advanced enough to slip the constraints of time, the Fellowship as it stood could do little more than bind temporary wards against recurrence.
‘A bit like closing the barn door after the cattle have been raided,’ Kharadmon raged, and snowflakes whirled like dustdevils from one side of the carpet to the other.
‘Restored back to Seven, we could resolve this.’ Sethvir sighed. As papers and parchments started to flap and whirl across the disarray of his writing table, he grabbed frozen ink-pots and pressed them into service as paperweights. ‘Either still yourself, or stop the natural wind by closing the casement. My belongings cannot handle both at once.’ Sorrowfully mild, the Warden of Althain added, ‘We are as ants, scurrying in vain to stay a rock slide. You know that if we are ever to see an end to this threat, the coronation at Etarra must be permitted to run its disastrous course.’
‘I was aware, and wondering why rats and Dakar’s prophecies were ever let into Ath’s creation.’ The casement swung closed with a bang and brass latches snicked into their settings. Left ringing across windless silence was Kharadmon’s sardonic parting statement. ‘Like the raven in advance of the war, I go to call Traithe to the bloodletting.’
The fenlands of southeast Tysan were a deserted and miserable wilderness to be caught in a snowfall, on the shortened days past solstice. On foot in the mire, deep in a thicket of leafless willows and marsh maples, Elaira braced an arm on her mare’s steaming shoulder. She scraped ice from a lock of hair that had escaped her hood, while flakes flecked with sleet whirled and rattled across frozen pools and the stalks of last season’s cattails. Called away by Morriel’s summons from the Koriani hostel by Hanshire, she had avoided the trade roads along the coast. The Prime Circle by this season would have resettled in winter quarters near Mainmere, where a ruined fortress deserted since the fall of the high kings of Havish overlooked the coast. The southern pass through Tornir Peaks offered the safest route, since the marshes and sink-pools that edged the high country were too sparsely settled to interest the headhunters who ranged through Korias and Taerlin seeking Caithwood’s clansmen as trophies.
However more secure the boglands might be, amenities for travellers were nonexistent. The mare had cast a shoe in sucking mud, and if she were to escape going sore on the rockier ground in the highlands, Elaira was obliged to find a smith.
‘As if any right-thinking craftsman would choose to keep shop in a swamp,’ she complained to the sedges that hooked her ankles, and her only live companion, the horse. The bay nosed her hood, her breath a warm cloud in the damp.
‘Why couldn’t you rip off your shoe in the drifter’s country?’ The enchantress squelched over a hummock. ‘Better horsemen aren’t born in Athera. Here, we’ll be lucky to find a trapper who knows how to work iron.’
The mare stamped, and the skin of frozen water overtop of oozing mud chinked like shattered glazing over the knees of the oak roots.
