Given time, he might have qualified, but a clear and sudden jab of energy against defences he had never let down urged him to cry out a warning. ‘Call light from your gift, now!’
For retreat was no longer an option.
Whatever invisible entity had attracted Lysaer’s notice had flanked them and circled their position. Arithon slammed to a halt, jerking his half-brother to him. He spun in a half-turn, his shoulder set to Lysaer’s as he fought to dredge up wards laced of shadow and what magery he had learned from Rauven.
On faith, Lysaer matched his efforts. Brilliance speared outward, dissolving darkness in a magnesium glare of white heat. Crackled into turbulence by conflicting fields of shadow, close-bound coils of mist recoiled with a shriek of steam. Over the hiss, the prince said, ‘What’s happening? Are we under attack?’
‘I fear so.’ Encumbered by his instrument, Arithon sidestepped, jostling Lysaer through a portal and into a weed-choked yard.
‘Do you know, from what?’ Outside the thin blue ring that glimmered in manifestation of his half-brother’s hastily wrought ward, Lysaer could see little beyond mist and cracked stone and darkness. He brightened his gift. Light picked out the ragged brick of a forge chimney, and a quenching trough blackened with moss. Lysaer banged his hip as he scraped past. He tripped and recovered his footing in time not to stumble over the sharpening wheel that lay canted before a rust-flaked stockpile of scrap.
Arithon came back with a curse. ‘We face nothing friendly. Beyond that, I won’t probe. It’s spirit-formed, and unravelling my defences as fast as I can maintain them. I’m not about to drop barriers to see what seeks to get in.’ He ripped off his cloak, tearing clasps, and wrapped up his precious lyranthe. Regret marked his face in the flash and dazzle of wardlight as he stooped and abandoned his instrument on the flagstone. ‘I’d hate to fall and see her break.’
Distressed that his half-brother should abandon his most priceless possession, Lysaer asked, ‘Where are you taking us?’
‘Here. The armourer’s.’ Arithon veered toward a pitted anvil, visible in silhouette against the corona thrown off by his protections. ‘If Desh-thiere’s aspects are an earthforce, iron may help turn them back.’
But the explanation fell on deaf ears. Lysaer was lost to response. The scintillant hedge of light he had raised to drive back the mist snapped out at the next step. Darkness returned, impenetrable, and without a sound raised in warning the s’Ilessid prince crumpled at the knees.
Aware too late that his primary wards were ineffective, Arithon grabbed his half-brother’s clothing to break his fall. Through a fast fading glimmer of failed spell-craft, he perceived a ghostly circle of faces. They closed in, leering with bloodthirsty ferocity. Sweat-drenched with fear, Arithon caught a fleeting impression: their image was wrought of seething mist and their strength was that of a multitude.
These were no part of Ithamon’s troubled spirits, but something separate and wholly evil.
Unbalanced by Lysaer’s sagging weight and frightened to outcry by the suffocating sense of closing danger, Arithon let go his mage-formed barrier and lashed out in a fury of shadow.
Night became blackness distilled.
The ever-narrowing band of hostile entities winnowed into a dusting of new snow, the mist that clothed their form pared away. Their essence of ferocity stayed untouched. A probe lanced Arithon’s mind. He screamed, repulsed, his knuckles spasmed tight in his half-brother’s cloak. Lysaer was dead weight, unconscious, injured, or worse. Just how the attacking Mistwraith had pierced through arcane protections to strike could not be figured. In moments, Arithon saw his own reserves would crumple. He would be helpless as his half-brother.
Horrified and desperate that not even shadow brought protection, the Master found himself cornered without remedy against an aspect whose resources dwarfed his awareness.
In denial of acknowledged human frailty, he strove to fashion another barrier-ward. Counter-forces ate at his efforts like a school of feeding sharks. His guard-spells were chopped up piecemeal, his concentration too slow to recoup. Only freak luck had spared him, the protective inner block he had initially raised to distance the haunting of Ithamon’s ruins. That shield of itself was under siege, then giving way before an onslaught as relentless as the tides.
Arithon gritted his teeth. He grasped after fraying concentration, panting in the throes of an effort that taxed him like physical pain. Still, the entity streamed past. It cut against his awareness with the pressure of a dull knife driven by the weight of all the world. As he tried and failed again to grapple the disembodied beings that pressed him, he at last knew the scope of the enemy.
The Mistwraith was more than just aware. It was intelligent and bent on retaliation against the princes who were its sure bane. But how it had hidden its multiply faceted nature, even from the Fellowship of Seven, Arithon lacked resource to determine. Battered to the bitter edge of consciousness by an assault his skills could never stem, he staggered.
Light flashed.
Harsh, searing glare rinsed away the dark. Running footsteps sounded over the wind-rush of foundering senses, and a shout echoed through Ithamon’s ruins.
Beaten to his knees in wet moss, Arithon ripped out a reply. His cry brought help. A ward circle slashed into existence with a fountainhead of purple-white sparks. Hands caught his shoulders in support and Asandir’s voice said, ‘Let go. Dakar has hold of Lysaer.’
Awash in dizziness, shocked off balance by the proximity of forces beyond imagining, Arithon loosed his grip. ‘Desh-thiere,’ he gasped out. ‘It’s self-aware. More dangerous than any of us guessed.’
‘Let me turn my shields against it,’ said the sorcerer. No longer leashed, his power radiated from him until the air in his presence blazed light, a flash and dazzle of force too piercing for fleshly endurance. Vibrations of palpable current caused inert rock to ring with shared resonance until the earth itself sang in answer. Arithon braced against shock from the contact as Asandir towed him to his feet.
But the sorcerer’s touch stayed surprisingly human and warm until the moment sensation itself became cancelled by the annihilating surge of the wardfields. Asandir’s protections unfurled around beleaguered flesh like a deluge of rays from a beacon. Arithon felt the invading pressure against his innermind relent with a soundless howl of rage.
