Caught on the uphill end of a precarious and unwieldy load, Lysaer discovered in embarrassment that Sethvir stood on the landing, the voluminous cuffs of his sleeves for once shaken clean of dust.
Sight of the Teir’s’Ffalenn trussed in his bedclothes caused the Warden of Althain to blink like an owl exposed to sunlight. ‘I asked you to bring him down,’ he murmured in vague reproof. ‘Did you have to bundle him up like stolen goods in a carpet?’
‘Next time, you carry him,’ the Mad Prophet retorted between wheezes.
Sethvir hurried ahead down the corridor, maroon robes flapping around feet tucked hoseless into ridiculously oversized fur bushkins. His reply trailed back with all the daft overtones of a hermit caught talking to himself. ‘Teirain’s’Ffalenn are well able to right their own injustices, this one better than most. He’s Torbrand’s descendant, after all, every inch of him touchy. You’re welcome to his revenge by yourself, fool Prophet.’
To this Dakar spoke phrases that cast biological doubt upon Arithon’s already illegitimate ancestry. Sethvir gave back a blank glance and passed ahead into darkness. Their course meandered, stopped, backtracked and circled between ranks of Paravian statuary faintly visible as sparkles of gold-weave and gemstones caught glancing torchlight from the stairwell. Lysaer lost count of how many times he stubbed toes or whacked his elbows and shins; the muscles of his arms and shoulders ached unmercifully. That his discomforts might have been staged as a lesson did not dawn, until the sorcerer paused and without any fumbling, hooked an inset steel ring in the floor. A counterweighted trapdoor sprang open and raw light flooded upward to show features as blithe as a pixie’s. Lysaer recalled with a snap of annoyance
Sethvir’s blue-green eyes held a twinkle. ‘Go ahead. Asandir has the horses waiting below.’
‘Horses!’ Lysaer eyed the narrow stairwell that spiralled downward toward a glow too steady to be lamplight. His skin crept, even as the nuance of his gift confirmed the play of unnatural energies. ‘How did he ever get them down here?’
Dismissing the question as irrelevant, Sethvir beckoned prince and prophet and the unconscious bundle carried between them on ahead. ‘Where you’re going, you’ll be glad not to walk.’ He closed the trap door after himself with barely a whisper of a creak.
The air radiated a tang like a blacksmith’s forge intermixed with the charge of inbound storms. Lysaer checked, while behind him, Dakar snarled in annoyance that princely fainthearted hesitation was going to wind up tripping him.
Lysaer sucked a quick breath and pressed ahead into burgeoning light. Assured by now that the Fellowship’s grand magics would not harm him, his reluctance stemmed as much from indignity. Accustomed to responsibility as a king’s heir, he found the sorcerer’s secretive authority deeply irritating. Had he been apprised of their plans one step beyond the immediate, or been granted some insight to their motivations, he might have felt less unnerved. Traithe alone had addressed this need; but the black-garbed mage had ridden off to tutor the heir to Havish, and some event since arrival at Althain had turned Asandir bleak as chipped granite.
The stair ended. Circular and doorless as a vault, the deepest chamber of Althain Tower was incised into seamless white marble. A floor of polished onyx held eight leering gargoyle sconces arrayed on pedestals at the compass points. No torches burned in their sockets; the light emanated from a webwork of lines scribed across a wide, bowl-shaped depression. The patterning shaped three concentric circles, edged in Paravian runes and centred by an intricate, looping interlace that hurt the eyes to follow. Asandir waited in the middle on a starburst formed by the intersection of five axes, his shadow merged in the silhouette of a massive, high-wheeled mason’s dray. Dakar’s paint mare was harnessed between the shafts and the other mounts tied to the tailboards stamped and blew in nervous snorts. The rap and clang of shod hooves raised no echoes in that windowless, enclosed space, and for all that hellish glare the air retained no warmth. The draft that wafted off the pattern was charged with unnatural, arctic cold.
Touched to spine-tingling uneasiness and soaked in icy sweat, Lysaer shivered. He started at a touch on his shoulder and spun around to meet the myopic, inquiring eyes of Sethvir.
‘You’re looking at a power focus, charged and enabled with the natural forces that flow in lines across the earth,’ said the Warden of Althain in measured reassurance. ‘The energies gathered here will allow Asandir to effect a direct transfer to the ruins west of Daon Ramon Barrens.’
Lysaer shut his eyes against patterns that glared and sparked like fireworks against enigmatic black stone. Through an odd and unpleasant ringing in his ears, he heard Dakar’s petulant interruption. ‘Why not go straight to the focus at Ithamon?’
Sethvir replied, unperturbed. ‘For Arithon’s sake, you’ll travel overland from the focus at Caith-al-Caen.’
‘The Vale of Shadows!’ As if the translation thrust home a violation of something sacred, Dakar cried, ‘Why protect him?’ He rounded in disgust on Sethvir. ‘Arithon showed you how lightly he regards your commitment to Rathain. After his insolence at the summons, do you think he gives a damn for your solicitude?’
‘Suppose with all his heart that he wished he did not?’ Sethvir interjected. To Lysaer, who listened in confusion from the lip of the bottom stair, the sorcerer added, ‘The floor is solid, and certainly safe to step on.’
The oblique shift in subject silenced Dakar. Since Arithon’s dead weight had long since tired his arms and shoulders, Lysaer proceeded forward. For all his apprehension, the pattern’s burning lines caused no sensation beyond a queer tingle as he stepped over and around them. Dakar of necessity straggled after, muttering mutinous curses that attributed Ath’s angels to acts of scatological impossibility.
Still by the stair, Sethvir said nothing.
Asandir was less restrained, when the pair with their burden slung between them crossed the last circle of the focus. Eyes bright and ruthless as sword steel flicked over blankets, belongings and the head that dangled backward, black hair trailing within inches of the rune-scribed floor. ‘Lay the Teir’s’Ffalenn behind the buckboard and see him comfortably arranged. No reason this side of the Wheel can excuse the extra care you should have taken to fix a litter.’
‘I’d sooner coddle a viper,’ the Mad Prophet unwisely retorted. ‘Why rush to stir up disaster?’
‘Arithon gave his trust into your hands without terms the other night,’ Asandir snapped back. ‘Is that how you thank him?’ Low-voiced, he added something else that made Dakar cringe like a kicked dog.
Then the sorcerer’s glance snapped to Lysaer, driving home a rebuke not solely directed elsewhere. Stung for his lapse into pettiness, Lysaer hefted Arithon into the dray. He attended his half-brother’s needs with a servant’s humility, while around him the vault became preternaturally quiet. The horses stopped sidling and stood glassy- eyed, their ears and tails hanging limp. The pattern in the floor began to sing in a tone just outside of hearing and the air gained a charge that lifted the hairs on their backs.
