Lysaer held to patience. ‘I did.’
Arithon only closed his eyes.
The s’Ilessid prince had no choice but to sustain the conversation by himself. ‘Our sorcerer contacted Sethvir immediately. The Fellowship sensed nothing amiss, and Dakar was too busy butchering sheep to have an opinion.’
Somewhere downslope in the ruins, a fox barked. A field mouse rustled through dry grass seeking seeds, and the mist coiled close, despite the wind. Arithon unfolded from his huddle, set his lyranthe carefully by his ankle and rubbed at his temples, disturbed.
Lysaer knew relief, that after Sethvir and Asandir had drawn blanks, the Master did not dismiss his concern as groundless fancy.
In fact, Arithon’s disquiet was all personal. To open his mage’s perception and sound for whatever uneasy presence had troubled Lysaer was to invite laceration from within. The very timing was a curse. The fullness of Ithamon’s spirit legacy was too painful to be sorted, so soon after Asandir’s revelation concerning the old races’ survival. Paravian wards did indeed dampen the sting from Ithamon’s hauntings; yet since Kieling’s protections were framed of compassion, and Arithon took hurt from his exposure, he had never thought to look deeper. Not once had he paused to question whether something else inherently harmful might have sourced the grace of the wards’ surcease. Now that Lysaer had spoken, he berated himself for carelessness. Repeatedly the Rauven mages had stressed that assumptions were the weakness of the learned.
‘Asandir and Sethvir found nothing, you say.’ The statement mused upon fact, and did not ask for answer.
Unsettled by the moist cling of Desh-thiere, Lysaer stopped worrying at the old carving. ‘You feel it, too,’ he accused.
Arithon shook his head, emphatic. ‘Just now, I feel nothing. By choice, you understand. If I were to open myself, allow even a chink through my defences, I’d be helpless and probably crying.’ He sighed, slapped his hands into his lap, and tilted his crown back into the stone that braced up his spine. ‘Did you by chance bring a handkerchief?’
‘My valet always carried mine for me,’ Lysaer apologized. He shrugged in wry humour. ‘Will my shoulder do for a substitute?’
The offer was friendly and genuine; also painful as a slap to a man who wished no ties at this moment to anyone outside himself. Pressured to reflexive antagonism, Arithon curbed his angst. A threat that might stem from Desh-thiere was too dangerous a development to be sidelined for personal hurt; never mind that his half-brother lacked perception to understand that he did not care at any cost to drop his inner barriers to use mage-sight in this place.
When nothing moved beyond Arithon’s clothing in the ceaseless sweep of the wind, Lysaer said, ‘You need not act on my word alone.’
Arithon cut off protestations. ‘On the contrary. Given your nature, only a fool would ignore your worry. This begs to be seen to at once.’
Now Lysaer shot upright in dismay. ‘Here? This minute?’ It was night, and stingingly cold, never mind that the ruins themselves were unnerving in the extreme.
Clammy and chill, the mist had closed down like a shroud. Objects a half stride away were invisible and the air smelled of damp decay.
The s’Ilessid prince tried humour to shake off a rising uneasiness. ‘I always supposed you were crazy. Should I be amazed that you want to freeze your balls to marbles in a ghost hunt?’
Arithon’s hand shot out and clamped his half-brother’s wrist. ‘Don’t speak.’ He reached down and recovered his lyranthe with a haste that caused Lysaer alarm.
Amid the dark ruins, the wind had suddenly dropped. Their perch on the corbel abruptly and for no sane reason seemed precarious. Lysaer resisted a near to overpowering urge to grab for the weapon he had stupidly left behind in the tower. He stifled his need to ask what was wrong, while his half-brother poised, stone still and apparently listening.
The mist held their surroundings pent in gloom. Hearing recorded only an eerie quiet that, under scrutiny, became suspect. No owls called. The mouse in the grass had frozen or fled in fear, and the very air seemed to have gone scentless, the frosty edge of snow and pending storm dissipated into cold that had no character.
Arithon’s grip tightened on his half-brother. Just on the point of speaking, the tension that held him seemed to snap. He shot without words to his feet, dragging his half-brother after him. As if something he alone could perceive gave pursuit from the depths of the ruins, he pitched into a run. Lysaer was jerked headlong into flight across the courtyard and onward into a cross alley. Broken walls slapped back echoes of their footfalls and shadows closed over them like ink. A fallen oak barred their exit; Arithon bashed through like a hunted animal, unmindful of the scrape of bare branches as he turned his shoulder to spare his lyranthe. Unsure why they should be fleeing, and perversely suspicious that he might have been spooked by a prank, Lysaer asked to slow down before their dash through the ruins wound up ripping good clothes. But his breath came too fast for speech, and the hold on his wrist hauled him onward.
A moment later, he lost inclination to argue.
Though the breeze had utterly died, on their backtrail, the limbs of the downed tree rustled: someone or something was following.
‘If I made a mistake, I just compounded a second one,’ Arithon said, making Lysaer start. ‘I should have removed our conversation to one of the warded towers.’
‘What mistake?’ Apprehension drove Lysaer to interpret past mage-trained obtuseness. ‘Our talk was noticed? Do you guess that some aspect of Desh-thiere is alive?’
‘More than that.’ Arithon tugged him to the left, past the pit of a caved in cellar. ‘This mist we’ve been given to subdue could be an intelligent entity, and hostile.’
Alarmed, Lysaer said, ‘Asandir didn’t know?’
They turned down a thoroughfare slippery with mossed over stone, and laced with weeds and briar. Bits of what may have been pottery skittered and chinked underfoot. Perturbed, absorbed and strangely, invisibly harried as they hacked through hummocks of ivy and tripped uphill toward Kieling Tower, Arithon gasped back, ‘Likely not.’
