‘Oh, come on!’ Dakar griped. ‘A miser in a poorhouse has more to say than you! Why not admit you know why Asandir has me carrying his Ath-forsaken Mistwraith to the summit of Rockfell Peak?’
‘You need the exercise?’ Kharadmon quipped. A daisy fell out of nowhere and brushed past Dakar’s left ear.
The Mad Prophet swiped it away. He scraped forward, his shoulder pressed to the mountain, until the narrow ribbon of trail reached a switchback half-blocked by boulders. There he seized the opportunity to plump himself down. The perch he chose was moss-grown. Seepage from a glacial spring made him grimace and huff like a walrus, yet laziness triumphed. A soaked rump notwithstanding, he bent at the waist and shucked off the knapsack. Inside, girdled with tingling guard-spells, lay the flask that bottled Desh-thiere. ‘I should heave this off the nearest precipice, and see you all juggle spells to catch it back,’ the Mad Prophet suggested nastily.
‘Try,’ Kharadmon invited.
Dakar’s glower deepened. ‘A damned iyat has more sense of fun than you.’
‘I should hope so.’ Below their vantage, the slow-falling speck that was the daisy winked out. A second later, Kharadmon’s image unfurled, extravagantly poised in midair. ‘Or I’d throw you off the cliff, and see how far and long you’d bounce.’
‘Do that.’ Dakar sighed. ‘Break my back. I’d like to lie down and rest for six months or maybe a year.’
Kharadmon stroked the spade-black beard that thrust from his chin. Piebald hair streamed on the winds that whipped off the snowfields higher up and his green eyes glinted, shrewd. ‘You’re thinking your master has misused you?’
‘Not me,’ Dakar snapped. ‘I said so before: Prince Lysaer.’ Cautious not to try Kharadmon’s impatience, he heaved to his feet, and with a martyred roll of his eyes, resettled his pack on sore shoulders. ‘Sithaer take your Fellowship’s grand plans, you used a good man and then broke him.’
‘Ah.’ Kharadmon flicked away into nothing. A cold draft at odds with nature, he flowed upslope against the wind.
Dakar resumed inching up a track better suited for small goats. ‘You don’t agree,’ he said sourly.
The discorporate mage surprised with an answer. ‘You’ve seen Asandir take deer for the supper pot.’
‘He never hunts anything I ever saw.’ The Mad Prophet bent, clawed out a pebble that had worked its way into his boot-top, then sidestepped through a hair pin bend, his buttocks pressed to sheer rock while his beer-gut jutted over sky. ‘Asandir just goes out and sits in a thicket somewhere. Eventually a buck happens along, lies down, and dies for him.’
‘He projects his need and asks,’ Kharadmon corrected tartly. ‘The deer chooses freely, and its fate and man’s hunger end in balance.’
‘You’re not saying Lysaer
The trail doubled back, its frost-split stone scoured lifeless except for mustard and black flecks of lichen. From ahead, Kharadmon sent back, ‘No. Your prince answered circumstance according to his inate character. The Fellowship imposed nothing outside his natural will and intentions.’
Dakar viewed the next span with trepidation, and ended by scrabbling forward on hands and knees. Gravel loosened by his passage slid and bounced, and finally rocketed into the abyss that was Rockfell vale. Between stertorous panting, he gasped, ‘You can’t claim…Desh-thiere’s wraith…submits to any law of the Major Balance.’
‘Where opening did not already exist, the creature could not have gained foothold,’ said Kharadmon.
Squatted now on his hams and blowing harder, Dakar squirmed to shift the bite of the packstraps. Already blistered on his heels, his temper had abraded to match. ‘But Sethvir as much as admitted the s’Ilessid inborn gift was at fault. Had Lysaer not been driven to seek perfect justice, the wraith would have found nothing to exploit.’
Frostily unmoved, Kharadmon said, ‘If so, our Fellowship has a reckoning to answer for.’
Dakar took a second to recognize capitulation. ‘Well then!’ he cried, and closed for the kill. ‘Why in Ath’s name did you surrender Lysaer knowing he’d have no defence?’
The flicks and slaps of breeze that expressed Kharadmon’s displeasure died into ominous stillness. Even the winds off the ridges dared not cross the imposed circle of his silence. ‘Because,’ his reply cracked back at length, ‘Ath Creator himself did not insist that his works spring perfectly formed from the void. We are permitted our mistakes, for which, my fat prophet, you should kiss the earth daily and be grateful.’
Hunkered like a bear on damp haunches, Dakar prepared to argue further. But a second voice admonished from below: ‘Best give less thought to Lysaer’s business and more to your own, which is jeopardized. The outcrop where you’ve chosen to pontificate is not terribly well anchored to the scarp.’
The Mad Prophet ejected a filthy word. Sweated over more than bad footing, he scooted forward and cautiously peered downward.
Soundless, graceful, in a stroll that disallowed fourteen thousand feet of vertical drop, Asandir ascended the switchback just below. Grey hair, grey cloak, with both wrists adorned by talisman bracelets runed in white metal, he was silver from head to foot.
‘Where did you disappear to this morning?’ Dakar shot back. ‘I cooked some breakfast and found you gone, and never a word of instruction as to what you wished me to do.’
Asandir stopped. His brows lifted. The mouth underneath never moved. He looked at Dakar and said acidly, ‘That’s no reason to threaten to pitch Desh-thiere off any handy vertical precipice.’
‘Ah, fiends,’ moaned Dakar. ‘A man can’t say one word without you hearing it.’ He hugged the cliff face resignedly and hauled himself back upright.
‘Sethvir heard you, too.’ By then, Asandir had hooked the loops of the knapsack. As the Mad Prophet obligingly shrugged off straps, the sorcerer reappropriated custody of Desh-thiere’s flask.
Lightened enough to try boldness, Dakar stole a glance slantwise at his master. ‘What were you doing,
