and the fifth lane’s inherent energies surged in sympathetic resonance.
Barefoot, terrified and stripped down to animal reflex, Verrain wrested the flux apart with a cry that echoed outward into the night beyond his walls. He rocked under a buffeting slap, shared by Dakar, as the awesome, fiery rush of power deflected through his body, and on, into the deft control of the sorcerers who held the barrier along Mirthlvain’s perimeter. Although stepped down to a finer resonance by the pair Asandir and Sethvir, the current’s passage was a dry, lacerating wind of agony. Dakar drew gasping breaths and struggled. He must preserve self- identity against the burning assault of sensation experienced by Verrain, or risk himself and all who depended on him.
The powers whipped and raged. Dakar fought not to be swept from control, though he had no anchor. The chair beneath his body had no meaning, nor the stone under his feet. He was a mote in a whirlpool, flexed, twisted, shoved and driven until physical orientation seemed an illusion cast outside reality.
Sethvir sensed the Mad Prophet’s distress, even through the shaping of the third lane’s raw bands. ‘Sometimes it helps if you hold someone’s hand,’ he said gently, and offered his own.
Dakar accepted with a gratitude compounded by desperation. Like a boulder in the thrash of a millrace, the touch steadied him. Distantly he was conscious of Sethvir’s link with Asandir, and the incomprehensible strength they engaged to tame the wild pulse of the third lane. Dakar blinked tears, or maybe sweat from his eyes. Confusion enveloped him, and a duality that dizzied. He endured, held to the body seated at Althain Tower, though a part of him also stood, barefoot, chilled and blinded by the inflamed focus pattern that channelled the untapped fifth lane. Dakar suffered with Verrain as wave after wave of energies coursed through their twinned awareness, to be snatched and turned again, before they merged in ruinous concert with the native currents underfoot.
Beyond moss-streaked keep walls and across the silvered waters of Methlas Lake, the mists of Desh-thiere muted a dance and flash of blue light, as the last two sorcerers in the chain fused with the borrowed powers to stabilize their defence ward. The critical moment arrived, when the vast and intricate matrix had been strengthened enough to be passed into the control of one sorcerer. Apprehension stirred through the circle gathered at Althain.
‘Steady, hold steady,’ Asandir said aloud.
Traithe returned a sharp nod.
Dakar felt Sethvir’s fingers tighten over his own. He had no chance to wonder if stress or reassurance prompted the gesture, for Verrain’s recoil as the power-flow shifted unbalanced him as well.
Through a terrible, precarious interval, the Mad Prophet battled for cohesion, the will that held him to cognizance gone febrile as a spider’s silk stretched against a gale. By the time the onslaught eased, Luhaine, once known as Defender, now contained the serpents’ migration, bolstered by assistance from Althain Tower. With one mage less in the link every risk lay redoubled. Dakar’s mouth felt packed with ash. Should the energy flow from Althain to Meth Isle keep fail now, Luhaine’s barrier would crumple and meth-snakes in teeming thousands would descend like a plague upon the countryside.
Yet such perilous preparation had at last freed the other sorcerer on site at Mirthlvain to act. Ruthless as Ath’s avenging angel, Kharadmon brought his powers to bear upon the boglands. Stale pools lashed up into foam as a living torrent of serpents seethed, pursued out of cranny, mud-pool and reedbed by a corona of killing light. The serpents writhed in futile flight, turned at bay against Luhaine’s ward. They struck at air, at wind-lashed hummocks and in a madness of frustrated fury at each other’s struggling flesh, while the night passed and their hordes were pared back relentlessly by the efforts of the Fellowship’s circle.
Then Verrain faltered at Meth Isle. The fifth lane focus there crackled to a blaze that signalled cataclysm.
Caught without warning, Dakar felt his senses upend into vertigo. All his control unravelled. His teeth clenched, every muscle cramped, and his body twisted as if he tumbled in a fall from a great height.
Warned by Dakar’s groaned shout, Sethvir sensed the disaster. As though he was not enmeshed in rapport with Asandir, the whole untamed force of the third lane whipped to submission between, he severed the power transfer. Snapped out of range of all pain, the Mad Prophet slammed back in his chair. His composure dissolved into ugly, racking sobs that were the best he could manage for breathing.
‘Ath,’ he gasped, half-unhinged. ‘I feel like every hangover I ever earned has joined force in triplicate to plague me.’
Swept by giddy hysteria, Dakar jammed a fist in his mouth to stop his babbling tongue. His vision had gone patchy and his ears boomed to a surf-roll of sound. Somewhere in the echoing, hollow void where thought seemed to flurry and vanish, he re-encountered the current channelled in from the Master of Shadow, reduced now to an ember, but pitched with the same, rock-steady vibration that had marked its presence from the start. Merciless in his need, Dakar seized upon that glimmer. He tapped Arithon’s source to anchor failing senses and recover the strength to look up.
‘Luhaine’s ward!’ he cried out, pierced by a raw blade of fear.
A stark silhouette against the blue-white glare of laneforces, and the pallid grey light beyond the casement, Asandir caught his shivering shoulders. The sorcerer’s fingers were not steady; but the grip they delivered bruised bone. ‘Bide still, Dakar, it’s all right.’
The supporting hands fell away and the Mad Prophet slumped forward, his cheek cradled on crossed forearms. Beside him, a haggard Traithe had done likewise. Through ears muddied with bell-tones of ringing sound, Dakar heard Sethvir’s voice assure that before the defences failed, the meth-snakes had been reduced to manageable numbers. Kharadmon might track down and eradicate the survivors with a fair chance of success.
Verrain’s collapse had been due to exhaustion and overextension. Luhaine would tend him and keep watch at Mirthlvain until the Guardian spellbinder’s recovery.
Like a shell sucked clean of meat, Dakar allowed himself to be ushered to his feet. He was aware of jostling and of movement, as the sorcerers bore him up along with the limp form of Arithon s’Ffalenn. Perversely vindicated, that at least such damnably arrogant self-discipline had just limits. Dakar inclined toward a rich laugh; except the crushing intensity of his headache permitted only breathless speech. ‘The prodigy overreached himself. Bothersome meddling mind of his will have no choice but to sleep off the reaction now.’
‘Indeed,’ Sethvir responded in remarkable pique. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn won’t escape his bed for at least the next few days.’
The sorcerer said something more in the lilting cadence of the old tongue, but the words escaped comprehension. Poised at the head of the stairs, Dakar swayed precariously. His knees let go all at once. As a falling rush of darkness claimed him, he fuzzily concluded that drunken binges befuddled a body less than overindulgence of magecraft any day. Most urgently, he needed to remember to clarify that point with Asandir.
