Fugitive Prince (76 page)

Head tipped askance, Sethvir weighed his task through the extended spectrum of mage-sight. Refined perception unveiled the
streaming cloud of the aura, and the energy knitted in layered octaves of transmission over the skin. Each bandwidth received his remorseless survey.

The damage he mapped made him ache with shared sorrow. A mage of Asandir’s strength and stature should celebrate his existence wrapped in a mantle of pure light. His raiment of spirit
was
the limitless power of creation, maintained into flawless balance. The axis of his being should shine as a beacon, his shimmering vitality stitched like tamed lightning through the tapestry of sinew beneath. For a Fellowship Sorcerer, self-renewal became reflex. The infinite whole sustained his existence, channeled and tuned to harmonic alignment that flowed with each breath and surged to the rhythm of each heartbeat.

Instead, Sethvir beheld a fabric rubbed threadbare as old muslin. Where the weave should have blazed with energetic life, he saw dull voids, their edges dimmed to a fuzzy, splotched gray, etched like dark tarnish on lead. Where the energy vortices tangled, he reached through his mage-sense, raising the resonance and stroking out blockage. He coaxed each stressed channel, and whispered phrases of compassionate encouragement to the inner will, which would comprehend frequency and sound. No effort was spared. Past the blinds of unconsciousness, Asandir’s senses still functioned. The mind would record, and the body respond, and rally the life force for healing.

Sethvir tuned with his breath, then used specific harmonic tones, released with ritual intent. His ordered precision called sparkling light to bridge and then settle the gapped paths of each stress-torn meridian. Nor were his hands still, all the while. He tapped through resistance, threaded current in bright bands through a body he knew like a brother’s.

Sealed in timeless concentration, his work seemed a moment displaced from the far-distant past. Throughout their Second Age trials against drake spawn, he had accomplished the same service many times, as Asandir had done likewise for him.

Yet when three hours of meticulous labor failed to seal over the deficit which opened stray gaps in the flux, Sethvir straightened. He sighed and faced the damaging fact that Asandir needed more than rest and quiet. His prolonged manipulation of the entropic forces inside the grimward had shifted the polarities in his body. Those subtle interfaces grown too damaged to clear must be combed back into alignment by magnetics.

Sethvir arose. With remarkable strength for his wiry stature, he grasped Asandir’s slackened wrists and arrayed his muscled frame into line with the north and south axis of the pattern. The large,
craftsman’s hands he placed palm upward on the intercepting arcs where the circles for sun, moon, and the twelve mariner’s stars straddled the east and west meridian. He removed the scorched leather of Asandir’s boots, stripped off the soiled hose underneath. Bare heels were arranged on the southernmost angles of the grand hexagon which connected the sixfold arcs of the earth circle.

“Forgive,” he apologized. “The bath that you long for will just have to wait.” Through a monologue of trivia, the Warden of Althain combed the smoke-stained, tangled hair with his fingers. He smoothed the stressed wrinkles from singed leather and cloth, and loosened the ties of laces and corded silk belt.

“Lie easy. You won’t be abandoned,” he whispered, hands flat on Asandir’s forehead.

Then he rose and poured all his worry into haste.

Upstairs in his stillroom, Sethvir scoured his cupboards, fingers flying. He bundled dried leaves of sage and sweetgrass and cedar. Each herb was separately tied in specific laced patterns of dyed string. Returned to the focus, he set his offerings in the sockets of the carved gryphons which crouched in stilled vigil at the compass points. He shaved birch and oak bark from two faggots filched from his woodpile and leaved them into a spill. Then he blew golden runes into the crumbled lumps of copal resin snatched from his jar in the library. When all was laid ready, he faced north. His single, rolling word of command called a spark from the earth’s vibrant consciousness.

For a long-drawn moment, plant fragrances mingled with the old stone of the chamber. Then a seed of white flame arose from the spill and winnowed smoke like living blue silk. Sethvir held the kindled bark aloft. He spoke an appeal, received a permission, then turned east and called a wild spark from the mantle of air, and bid each sconce by Name to ignite.

The stone gryphons crouched, crowned in the south’s cleansing fire.

As if tuned to resonance by ordinary flame, the pattern whispered and bloomed to a coruscation of golden light.

Barefoot, Sethvir walked the pattern’s outer circle. He blew out the wood spill and scribed phrases of runes in a knitted, running line of streamed smoke. Where the written hoop closed, he positioned himself on the key figure, invoked mastery, and stepped his mind’s vibration into attunement with the majestic chord of the third lane.

Again he invoked a release; then he asked a second permission. The pattern sang back, embracing his being through contact with his
bare soles and charging the smoke runes to a glowing royal purple. Ringed in bands of unconditional, free conjury, Althain’s Warden spread his arms wide. His blessing and invocation called power from sun, moon, and stars, and raised each grand circle of the focus to capture its counterpart reflection.

One moment, he paused to give thanks. Then he appealed, and received third and final permission, which granted his use of raised power to heal.

In careful stages, he mediated the balance, tamed and down-stepped the whorled vortex of magnetic energy which belted the central axis of the pattern. In spare, precise steps he aligned the subtle currents to match the damaged imprint of Asandir’s aura. His work was meticulous. A misstep would trigger failure, or a backlash to fuse havoc down to the heart-core of the earth. The contact points of entry must be utterly precise, each line mathematically correct. No angle must jar. The ranging harmonics of each thread of power must sing exactly on key, the energy colors of each step in conjury matched to the individual.

Time passed. The patterning built, then glimmered with resonant harmony. Mage-sight revealed the comatose Sorcerer cocooned in a geometric lattice of pure light.

Sethvir squinted through the balefire glare of his handiwork. Made wise through his earth sense, he knew the planet’s energies could heal all that lived under sky, given time to allow their quiet influence.

But to a grievously shorthanded Fellowship, idleness was not an affordable option. As Sethvir completed the last step to fine-tune the outer band of energies, a waft of chill air flapped his robe against the spiked bone of his ankles.

He paused, caught his streaming beard in two tufts, and accorded the invasive breeze a glance like the tart nip of hoarfrost. “You took your sweet time arriving.”

“Well, your summons was thoughtlessly inopportune.” Luhaine huffed into a spin across the chamber. “The Koriani Prime Matriarch’s trouble enough without you upsetting her complacency.”

“She’s just about paralyzed,” Sethvir corrected, while escaped strands of hair slashed his ears, and streamed smoke from the sconces made his eyes water. “She’s been battened in silk quilts and healers since the hour she wakened without the strength to stand up.”

Luhaine disagreed. “Her temper’s a volcano waiting to blow.” Tight, spinning eddies kicked trails through the fug as the spirit whirled again and plowed on in lugubrious pique. “You knew her First Senior’s in detention at Capewell? Yes? Then I scarcely need
mention the mischief that’s certain to brew the moment she’s called in to give her formal accounting. You’ll have to agree the next round of intrigue will go all the worse for no watchdog on Morriel then.”

Sethvir braced his feet against Luhaine’s errant tempest, still clutching beard, while his eyes shone the vacant, flat blue of polished turquoise. “Whatever the Koriathain are plotting must wait upon Asandir’s need.”

Luhaine ceased his petulant prowl in the cavernous vicinity of the stairwell. “Very well. A few minutes won’t hurt.”

Sethvir cocked his head, all his faculties disconcertingly aligned on the present. “When you left,” he said, concise, “Morriel was teaching a green initiate the selective process for expunging the dross of an unwanted vibration without detuning a quartz-crystal matrix.”

Luhaine was not mollified. “Which tidbit happens to bear directly on why Asandir needs assistance at all.” In a blasting, crisp sibilance of arctic air, he exploded. “You’d think, having blinded the advantage of his mage-sight, the Teir’s’Ffalenn could refrain from twisting the snake’s tail
this once!”

Sethvir’s brows rose. He opened clenched hands. The cascade of freed beard spilled down his chest like wool dropped fresh from its carding. “You speak of Prince Arithon’s gracious return of Lirenda’s personal spell crystal?”

“I refer to the specific disharmonies in her quartz that he retuned with compassionate melody, yes.” Luhaine shrank to a pinpoint of cold and lit on the snout of a gargoyle. “Morriel knows we left Dakar to guard him, but a spellbinder’s wards are not an infallible protection.”

To stave off the chill, Sethvir retrieved his bushkins, and frowned at a spot worn long past salvage with a patch. “We are grown too few to manage our burdens, and since we can’t borrow our spellbinder back, you’re going to be gone more than minutes.” He eased his tired footwear over baby pink toes, chin tipped toward the prone form arrayed in the pattern. “Asandir can’t be left to heal unattended. Traithe’s south in Havish, finishing the wards on the coast for King Eldir. Who’s left but me to ride out and rebalance the damaged seal over that grimward?”

A spirit obsessed with tight focus, Luhaine paused at last and seized the gist. “Ath spare us from ruin!
How long was Asandir in there?”

Sethvir declined comment. The intricate conjury drawn and sealed through live lane force offered a grim enough testament: Asandir’s sacrifice had detained him to the bitter limit of survival. His perilous
victory had stabilized the unruly fabric of the haunt’s dream long enough to spare one more foolhardy human from the throes of a fatal predicament. Now came the cruel cost: the grimward’s tangential polarities had drained his regenerative faculties beyond the point where he could recover on his own.

“I couldn’t have done that,” Luhaine said outright. “Never mind the fact I don’t possess a body.” Blunted now to respect like scraped bedrock, he admitted, “Prince Arithon’s life is essential to see the Black Rose Prophecy completed. But to take on such risk for the sake of a misguided captain at arms was an act of softhearted insanity.”

For the penalty extended beyond individual infirmity; the Fellowship’s resources were already taxed beyond salvage. Luhaine could not shoulder the task which faced Sethvir. Stripped of mortal flesh, the fine energies of his spirit would become misaligned and erased upon contact with the raging, dire forces ringed inside the spelled bounds of a grimward.

Too fussy a perfectionist to stay passive in a crisis, the discorporate Sorcerer abandoned his perch on the gargoyle. He drifted over the pattern of the focus, and gave Sethvir’s work his critical inspection. Where he perceived nuance beyond reach of an entity encumbered by flesh, he came and went as a stiletto point of light, fretting a chain of minute adjustments to the energies already laid down. Luhaine concluded on a note of grudging admiration. “What has been gained for that one life, but a dangerous, misguided incentive? You know Sulfin Evend has sworn to become all Lysaer ever asked of a warrior priest.”

“Balance,” Sethvir snapped. His unwonted shortness revealed his own depth of misery as he padded toward the lower stairwell. Under the vaulted archway, he turned, his beard ends and hair wisped into frost cobwebs against the blank shadow beyond. “When Asandir wakens, he’s to rest. Make sure he does if you have to barricade the doors to contain him.”

“Borrow his horse, then,” Luhaine suggested. “You won’t keep him, otherwise.” The eddy of his presence settled and rearranged, surrounding his colleague’s battered form in a mantle of radiance that blazed sympathy in contradiction to his dour, ending comment. “Stubborn as old granite, and pernicious when crossed. Well you are!” Luhaine insisted, as though Asandir had spoken in defense.

Sethvir hid his smile behind his crooked fist and ducked out, while Luhaine lectured the unconscious colleague he tended. “You’ve shown the bad grace and poor manners to walk through my being before, when I tried making sensible comments on your health.”