‘We leave the road here,’ Asandir called while Dakar and Arithon pulled up. ‘Dismount and stay close. Every minute counts.’
Saddle-galled and sore, Lysaer managed not to stagger as his numbed feet struck ground. He swiped back wet hair and surveyed a site that seemed unremittingly desolate. ‘Here?’
Asandir turned the black’s bridle and shouldered without reply into holly and briars that hooked and snagged threads from his cloak. A stone’s throw back from the verge the brush subsided. Trees eaten hollow by age choked the light and faint depressions and upthrust stone kerbs revealed the ruin of an older road. Asandir pointed out a canted megalith traced over with weather-worn carving. ‘That stone marks the third lane, one of twelve channels of earthforce we will tap for swift travel to Althain. The soil itself sings with power, here.’ As if the land’s living pulse could also be drawn to sustain him, the sorcerer quickened pace.
Forced to keep up, Lysaer and the others stumbled over lichen-capped stones and splashed through bogs, their road-weary mounts trailing droop-tailed and tired over hummocks browsed short by deer. The failing day dimmed the mist in louring veils, broken ahead by a wall that once had been dressed white marble. The eroded pillars of an arch yet stood where the way had originally passed through. Beyond, patched with bracken and a criss-crossed stitchery of game trails, the land sloped into a bowl-shaped hollow too symmetrical to be natural, and ringed by oaks scabbed over with ancient blotches of lichen.
Footfalls silenced by wet leaves and moss, the party moved through the green-tinged twilight of the grove. In places of thinned vegetation, iron-shod hooves clanged across weathered black agate. Runes were inset in the half-bared slab, fashioned from a light reflective mineral. Passing seasons had matted debris across the design, but the artistry in those fragments left visible roused an uncanny prickle across the skin.
Lysaer tugged his wet cloak around his shoulders, while Arithon scuffed away sticks and leaves to lay bare the ringed pattern of a cipher. ‘A power focus,’ he mused in an awed whisper.
Asandir stopped his horse. ‘Yes. We stand at the centre of the Great Circle of Isaer, built in the First Age to channel earthforce to guard the halls of the earliest Paravian kings. Those defenceworks are long vanished, yet the Circle itself was maintained, at least until the conquest of Desh-thiere.’
Arithon passed his reins to his half-brother and took an entranced step forward.
‘Don’t stray,’ Asandir cautioned. ‘In fact, you might wish to rest. This will be your last chance before we relocate to Althain Tower.’
Arithon regretfully contained his curiosity. ‘Are there any Paravian cities left standing?’
Sorrowfully the sorcerer shook his head. ‘Unlike mortal men, the old races seldom built, and then only through necessity. What holdfasts remained from the First Age were laid waste in the course of the rebellion, except the towers of the citadel at Ithamon. Those stand protected by mighty wards, and the armies who came to desecrate could not enter.’
But mention of the city ruled by s’Ffalenn ancestors withered Arithon’s interest. He retrieved his horse and subsided into thought while Asandir fetched a flask from his saddlebag and offered a round of strong spirits.
Too late, Arithon noticed Dakar’s unusual abstinence. He ran his tongue over his lips, but detected no trace of an aftertaste, nor any sweetness that might mask the suspect taint of drugs. His knees turned weak despite this. He had time to see Lysaer slump forward before his own senses whirled into vertigo. In the maddening space of a heartbeat, and despite his most desperate anger, he collapsed on wet stone in an oblivious heap beside his brother.
‘That was a dirty trick,’ Dakar observed.
Asandir shoved the stopper in the flask of ensorcelled spirits, his eyes steely with urgency. ‘Necessary, my imprudent prophet. Meth-snakes are stirring across Mirthlvain even as we speak, and I need you to quiet the horses.’
Dakar caught the reins the sorcerer threw him, then haltered the drifter-bred chestnut. Pale from more than his headache, he coaxed four lathered mounts into a huddle, then squeezed his eyes stoically closed while the paint rubbed her headstall against his chest, and the insolent dun lipped his cloak hood. ‘Keep doing that,’ he murmured, over and over like a litany. ‘Just keep on, and pay no mind to the wizardry.’
The last time he had been told to steady horses through the topsy-turvy disorientation of a lane transfer, he had suffered a dislocated shoulder. Unless Sethvir had much changed his ways, there would be a dearth of hard spirits in Althain Tower’s cupboards, even for medicinal emergency.
For Arithon, the spell-wrought sleep induced by Asandir did not last undisturbed. Brushed first by a passing energy current, then immersed in a burgeoning bloom of ward radiance, his enchanter’s sensitivity reacted, even through the veil of unconsciousness. Trained reflex took over and aligned his awareness to trace the source. The vibrations pursued by his innermind assumed hazy form, and he roved a landscape like dream, but not.
Even asleep, a part of him recognized that the energy net which drew him into vision was not fancy, but a peril less forgiving than a sword’s edge.
Arithon perceived a stand of reeds thrust through the ink-still waters of a marsh, no mere bog, but a vast expanse of wetlands criss-crossed with crumbled walls. Mist and night chilled air already dank with rotting vegetation: in the absence of moon or stars, ward-glyphs glimmered above drifted fog, wraith-pale and sharp-edged as blades, their forces interlocked to form a boundary. Inside, under apparently calm pools, the swamp’s depths moiled; serpents darted and dived, fanged, venomed, and guarded by a still figure in russet. Disturbed as if startled by footsteps in a place where no man dared tread, the watcher looked up sharply.
A soundless shock jarred the vision as the eyes of the guardian and the perception of the dreamer met; then the marshlands whirled away, replaced by a lofty tower chamber, walled with leather-bound books, and centred by an ebon table upon which a brazier burned like a star. Around this charged point of power, truesight identified the signature energies of Asandir, the Mad Prophet’s muddled contradictions, and a third mage strangely shadowed and overhung by the spread wings of a raven. That moment Arithon felt his awareness gathered in by a touch of inexpressible gentleness. His vision narrowed to encompass the face of a fourth mage seated with the others.
Mildly snub-nosed, seamed like crumpled parchment, the sorcerer’s features expressed grandfatherly bemusement, lent a benign touch of frailty by a woolly shock of white hair and beard tangled for want of recent grooming. The impression of childlike senility proved deceptive. Half-buried beneath bristled brows, eyes of diffuse green-grey reflected all the breadth of Ath’s Creation.
‘Teir’s’Ffalenn,’ pronounced a voice that rang through Arithon’s mind like the sonorous stroke of a gong.
The Master of Shadow snapped awake. His eyes opened to a red-carpeted chamber warmed by a hearth of banked embers. A kettle dangled from an iron hook wrought into the serpentine loops of a dragon. Nearby stood a marble plinth, but in place of artwork or china ornament, this one held a tea canister that somebody thoughtless had left open.
