The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘Ath’s eternal mercy,’ was all the sorcerer said. Yet as a shifting log in the fireplace fanned a spurt of flame, shadows shrank to show alarm on a face seldom given to uncertainties.

‘But that can’t be possible,’ Dakar interjected. ‘If it were, how could Desh-thiere’s vapours cross Kieling’s wards at will?’

‘Easily,’ Arithon murmured, unnerved also, but applying himself to the problem through habit and years of self- discipline. ‘The mist is no more than a boundary wrought of dampness. The entities I encountered move within it, self-contained. Paravian defences bar them entrance, but not the fog that imprisons their essence.’

Asandir did not contradict the Master’s supposition. At some point his awareness had faded from the room, diffused outward into a net that expanded over the ruins.

Arithon was seer enough to catch impressions in resonance. Under his grandfather’s tutelage at Rauven, he had studied the close-woven relationships that conjoined all worldly things. As he had traced the paths of his teacher’s meditations into the nature of such interconnectedness, so he followed Asandir’s scrying now. Yet where the Rauven mages had known how to feel out the paths of the air, to read in advance the wind-spun flight of dry leaves; how to sense warmth amid mist-chilled trees and recognize a bird asleep with head tucked under wing; how to link with the weighty turn of the earth, the limning of frost crystals on grasses raked dry by the season, the perception of a Fellowship sorcerer saw deeper.

Fully aware of Arithon’s attentiveness, Asandir hid nothing. And like the unfolding of a painted fan, or a span of fine-spun tapestry shown whole to a blind man through miracle, Arithon saw familiar natural forms wreathed about with the silver-point etchings of their energy paths. The sheer depth of vision overwhelmed him.

Asandir did not see stone, but the crystalline lattices that matrixed its substance, and beyond that to the delicate, ribbon-like glimmers that were the underpinnings of all being, that stabilized vibration into matter. More, as a man might know his most treasured possessions, the sorcerer recognized everything he scried, not according to type, but in Name, that unique understanding of every object’s individuality. He held the signature of each plant, from the seed that had thrown up its first sprout, to the days of sunlight and storms that marked its growth, to the twigs and every turned leaf ever shed by the grown tree. One oak he would know from every other oak, living or decayed or unsown, on the basis of just one glance. Stresses, disease or the robustness of perfect health were delineated plainly to his eye. He knew frost crystals, not as frozen water, but as single and separate patterns in all of their myriad billions. Their Names were as visible to him as signatures. He knew the pebbles of the dry water course, each and every one by touch, and the tangles of bundled energies that signified each grain of sand. The detail, the sheer magnitude of caring such depth of perspective demanded, dwarfed the watching spirit.

Arithon found himself weeping. Not only for himself, and the deadness of his senses, but for the beauty of common weeds, and the unendurable complexity of the shed husk of a beetle’s wing. He saw again, through finer eyes, the resonance of Paravian presence, and saw also that the coarseness in a clod of horse dung was held into balance by the same singing bands of pure energy. In Asandir’s pass across the ruins of Ithamon, Arithon realized just how shallow was his own knowledge, and how inadequate. In punishing clarity, he understood the scope of just what he had abandoned when he had left Rauven, and yielded himself to another will, another fate, another calling; now, most bitterly, the loss would repeat and compound, as he assumed a second unwanted crown.

Then Asandir closed down his field of concentration. Released from that terrible mirror of truth that embodied a Fellowship mage’s awareness, Arithon came back to himself and recalled the dangers that had prompted the search.

For all its awesome depth, the scrying disappointed. Tumbled stonework had harboured nothing untoward, only the mindless tenacity of lichens living dormant under the mantle of winter night. The sorcerer had unreeled his probe past the city’s edge, across untold miles of Daon Ramon’s heartland, but no sign had he encountered anywhere of those aspects of Desh-thiere that had launched attack with such startling virulence.

No movement could be found but the flight of night-hunting owls; no death beyond the grass roots grazed by hares; no sound but the play of wind through dry brush. The Mistwraith’s fog was just that – mist coiled cold in the hollows, lifelessly damp and inert.

Asandir snapped off the last of his vision in a curtness born of frustration. ‘I cannot find it.’ His voice held a scraped edge of pain, not for humiliation that his resource seemed short for the task, but for failure and heartsore apology, that the Fellowship’s oversight had imperilled two princes whose safety was his charge to secure.

‘But how can that be?’ Dakar cried, his hands too cramped to pick up the spoon to stir the stewpot.

And Arithon wondered the same. The arts of grand conjury were wrought from the force that quickened the universe. Asandir’s vision had but confirmed Rauven’s teaching: that all things were formed of energy, arrangements of bundled light that were subject to natural law. The awareness of this truth, defined to absolute perfection, granted the mage-trained their influence. To know a thing, to encompass its full measure in respect was to hold its secrets in mastery. Life-force was the basis of all power; as a confluence of collective entities, Desh- thiere’s consciousness should have been vividly plain. That its nature could in any way stay hidden seemed outside of sane comprehension.

To anyone trained to the subtleties of power, it felt as if an evil of unknown proportions had sown chaos across the fabric of natural order.

His plaintiveness a mask for desperation, Dakar said, ‘What in Athera could escape the vigilance of the Seven?’

‘Nothing of Athera.’ Arithon shifted gaze to the sorcerer, his earlier antagonism set in abeyance. ‘I was blind to the Mistwraith’s aspects also, until the moment they chose to attack.’

Asandir stirred. ‘Neither strands nor seer can read Desh-thiere, only its effects. That this trait may also apply to the moment we know as the present is dangerous enough, but pursuit of the reason must wait. My first concern stems from need to build sound defences, that our efforts don’t call down some worse threat.’

Dakar watched, afraid to move, as Fellowship mage and s’Ffalenn prince shared a deep understanding. Jolted to fey sight by the combined effects of exhaustion and fear and disillusion, for a split second, Dakar perceived the scintillant brilliance of Asandir’s being in mirror-image, alike except in dimension to the pattern that was Arithon.

Then the trickster play of firelight and the fusty smell of drying wool over-rode the spellbinder’s fickle talent. The tableau shrank back to the unremarkable: a careworn, weatherbeaten old man in a rumpled mantle bent over a younger one left limp and tired.

To the Master so narrowly delivered from the malice of the Mistwraith he had pledged to subdue, Asandir said, ‘Sleep. Let the problem bide in my hands until morning.’

A gentle edge of spellcraft laced the words. Calm to a depth that transcended pity, Asandir waited for the