Disparity remained, a sting in the mind that raised puzzlement.
For Desh-thiere was not repulsed. It did not conjoin in conflict with Asandir’s bared might, but with disorienting and baffling speed, seemed to fade beyond the pale of dimensional awareness.
The repercussions of this anomaly blurred as Arithon collapsed against the sorcerer’s shoulder.
There came no respite even then.
Harsh fingers seized his arm, spun him remorselessly around. He was aware of steel-grey eyes and Asandir’s implacable will boring into his consciousness with the directness of an awl piercing cloth. He had no reflex left to flinch. ‘I’m all right,’ he managed to convey, through the roaring cyclone of ward-force.
‘We’ll see,’ Asandir replied. To Dakar he added, ‘Drag Lysaer, or carry him. But we must get back to Kieling as quickly as we may.’
‘Lysaer?’ Arithon asked weakly. He felt sick. The ground seemed to twist and buckle under his feet.
Asandir’s response came back clipped. ‘Alive. Can you walk?’
The Master took a step and stumbled. Hands caught him up before he fell, cruel in their hurry to keep him moving. He managed to find his balance before the sorcerer lost patience and lifted him, but he remembered little of the journey back through Ithamon’s twisted lanes to the safety of the upper citadel.
Arithon’s next impression was sight of the interlaced carving inside the double arches of Kieling Tower’s lower entry. The runes seemed reversed and upsidedown, an angle of view that disoriented him until he realized: Asandir had needed to carry him after all. He had a raging headache. The searing brilliance of mage-light that had sourced the sorcerer’s protections had gone, rendered unnecessary by the ringing, subliminal vibration that marked the bounds of Paravian wards. A quietude as abiding as the heart-rock of the earth enfolded around the party in Asandir’s protection.
The calm brought surcease, but no ease of mind.
The near to cataclysmic forces the sorcerer had raised against attack remained stamped indelibly into memory.
Awe remained.
It was one thing to sense past shielded resonance to the potential of a Fellowship mage; quite another, to experience such potency unveiled in the close-pressed immediacy of action. Flame from the wall sconces showed Asandir’s face, etched into the planes of his bones by passage of the powers channelled through him. That a spirit of such vast resource should still be walking, clothed in humanity and flesh, defied comprehension. And yet the mage was himself. His expression reflected no grand depths, but only self-recrimination as he turned his head and saw Arithon had recovered awareness.
‘My prince, I’m sorry.’ This admission played no part in the conflict that, only hours before, had sealed a prince to an unwanted destiny.
Disarmed, even shamed by the affection in Asandir’s concern, Arithon evaded the personal. ‘How did you know Lysaer and I needed rescue?’
Driven off by banality, the poignancy of the moment fled. Asandir said, ‘I was given warning. The wards in your sword, Alithiel, came active and all but set fire to your clothes chest.’ The sorcerer helped Arithon to a chair by the hearth, tossed him a blanket, then moved briskly to assist Dakar with Lysaer, who was unconscious still, and pale as a carving in wax.
Kieling Tower’s wardroom no longer held the bleakness of an edifice standing whole amid a ruin. Its worn plank floor was made cheerful by a spread of Narms carpet, hauled from Althain Tower in the dray. Asandir’s books lay piled near a wrought brass candlestand on an ebony inlaid table. Four chairs, without cushions, had been salvaged from a dusty upper chamber. In the pot over the flames, stew still bubbled as though all in the world were yet ordinary. Burrowed in blankets and handed a mug of bitter tea, Arithon lay settled and still, content to let the resonance of the Paravian defences permeate his awareness. He drew in the smell of cedar from the delicate, patterned panels that adorned the wardroom walls. To mage-trained eyes, the interlaced carvings of vines and animals sang with vibrant inner resonance. Whatever Paravian artisans had done the reliefs had instilled true vision in the work. To behold them was to share an echoed reflection of the great mystery that endowed the land with life. Slowly, the chill that had invaded the inner tissues of Arithon’s body flowed away into warmth. He released a last violent shudder. As if called by that movement from across the room, Asandir arose, leaving Dakar to watch the s’Ilessid prince, who was sleeping, perhaps under spell.
A second later, the sorcerer knelt at Arithon’s side in concern. ‘You look steadier. Can you tell me what happened?’
Haggard as though he had stepped intact out of nightmare, Arithon considered the muddled impressions that remained. ‘You saved our lives and didn’t see?’
The sorcerer rested slack hands on his knees and stared aside into the fire. The play of bronze-gold light deepened the creases around his mouth and other finer lines that arrowed from the corners of his eyes. ‘I know you were assaulted by a manifestation of Desh-thiere. I’m not clear why, or how. Even Sethvir was fooled into belief the creature wasn’t sentient.’ If the admission humbled him, it did not show; his gaze remained lucent as sun-flecked crystal beneath the jut of his frown.
Arithon closed his eyes, hands that had not stopped shaking clamped hard on his tea mug. ‘You were looking for an entity that had just one aspect?’ he suggested, for the moment no prince, but a mage sharing thoughts with a colleague.
Across a chamber whose unearthly symmetry was made squalid by the smell of mutton grease, Dakar stowed his bulk by the settle, surprised. ‘But there’s no living spirit in existence that a Fellowship mage cannot track!’
Arithon fractionally shook his head. Desh-thiere had proved the exception: a thing wrought of who knew what malice, in the sealed-off worlds beyond South Gate.
Asandir maintained a charged stillness. As if perplexed by a twist in a puzzle, he only appeared detached as he said, ‘Whatever the Name of the Mistwraith, it maimed Traithe’s continuity of function. Are you telling me the creature has spirit, and that it encompasses more than one being?’
‘Try thousands,’ Arithon whispered. He opened his eyes. ‘Too many to number separately, and all of them bound captive in hatred. Our efforts with light and shadow here have been systematically reducing the mist and the area that confines them, nothing else.’
