The Curse of the Mistwraith (21 page)

This drew a gasp from Felirin who knew at least a dozen ballads made in praise of the Sunlord’s long reign.

Asandir smiled. ‘May the memory of those days never fade. Yet Cianor Sunlord did little but possess the sword. He assumed the Paravian crown in Second Age 2545, and as others before him, took up the king’s blade out of preference. By then Alithiel carried a second name, Dael Farenn, or kingmaker, because three of her bearers had succeeded the end of a royal line.

‘But if the sword brought kingship to her wielder, she never became a cherished possession. Awkward size made her handling a burden and though the Isaervian blades that survived the mishaps of time were coveted, no Paravian lord cared to claim one that carried a tragic reputation.

‘Cianor eventually awarded Alithiel to a man, for valour in defence of his sister, Princess Taliennse. Her Grace was rescued from assault by Khadrim in the very pass we just crossed.’ Here Asandir nodded in deference to Arithon. ‘The emerald in your sword was cut by a sunchild’s spells. The initial in the leopard crest changes with the name of the bearer, and since the blade fits the hand of a man to perfection, each heir in your family has carried her since.’

Asandir folded long hands. ‘Arithon, yours is the only Isaervian blade to pass from Paravian possession. To my knowledge, she is the last of her kind on the continent.’

Lysaer regarded the polished quillons with rueful appreciation. ‘Small wonder the armourers of Dascen Elur were impressed. They held that sword to be the bane of their craft, because no man could hope to forge its equal.’

Asandir rose and stretched like a cat. ‘The centaur Ffereton himself could not repeat the labour. If, in truth, he still lives.’

Felirin raised dubious eyebrows. ‘Did I hear right? Could a centaur be
expected
to survive for eighteen thousand years?’

The sorcerer fixed the bard with a bright and imperious sadness. ‘The old races were not mortal, not as a man might define. The loss of the sun touched them sorely, and even my colleagues in the Fellowship can’t say whether they can ever be brought to return. The tragedy in that cannot be measured.’

A stillness descended by the fireside, broken by Asandir’s suggestion that all of them turn into their blankets. The weather was shortly going to turn, and he wished an early start on the morrow. Arithon alone remained seated, the sword handed down by his ancestors braced in its sheath across his knees. The flames flickered and burned low and subsided at last to red embers. Hours later, when the others seemed settled into sleep, he put the blade aside and slipped out.

Mist clung in heavy, dank layers beneath the evergreens, and the darkness beyond the cave was total. Yet Arithon was Master of Shadow: from him, the night held no secrets. He walked over rocks and roots with a catsure step and paused by the rails that penned the horses.

‘Tishealdi,’ he called softly in the old tongue. ‘Splash.’

The name fell quiet as a whisper, but movement answered. An irregular patch of white moved closer and a muzzle nosed at his hand; the dun, come begging for grain. Arithon reached out and traced the odd marking on the mare’s neck. Her damp coat warmed his cold hands and the uncomplicated animal nearness of her helped quiet the turmoil in his mind. ‘We can’t leave, you and I, not just yet. But I have a feeling we should, all the same.’

For he had noticed a thing throughout Asandir’s recitation: while in the presence of the bard, the sorcerer took care to avoid any mention of his, or Lysaer’s surname.

The mare shook her head, dusting his face with wet mane. Arithon pushed her off with a playful phrase that died at the snap of a stick. He spun, prepared for retreat. If Dakar or the sorceror had followed him, he wanted no part of their inquiries.

But the accents that maligned the roots and the dark in breathless fragments of verse were the bard’s. A bump and another snapped stick ended the loftier language. ‘Daelion’s judgement, man! You’ve a miserable and perverse nature to bring me thrashing about after you and never a thought to carry a brand.’

Arithon loosened taut muscles with an effort concealed by the night. ‘I don’t recall asking for company.’

Felirin tripped and stumbled the last few yards down the trail and fetched against the fence with a thud that made the boards rattle. The dun shied back into the snorting mill of geldings, and the grey, confined separately, nickered after her.

The bard looked askance at the much-too-still shadow that was Arithon. ‘You’re almost as secretive as the sorcerer.’

Which was the nature of a spirit trained to power, not to volunteer the unnecessary; but Arithon would not say so. ‘Why did you come out?’

Felirin returned a dry chuckle. ‘Don’t change the subject. You can’t hide your angst behind questions.’

Arithon said nothing for an interval. Then with clear and deliberate sting he said, ‘Why not? You know the ballads. Show me a hero and I’ll show you a man enslaved by his competence.’

The bard took a long, slow breath. A difficult man to annoy, he had neatly and nearly been goaded to forget that Arithon’s mettlesome nature defended a frustrated talent. ‘Listen to me,’ Felirin said quickly. An honest desperation in his entreaty made Arithon ease off and give him space. ‘Promise me something for my foolishness. There’s a singer, a Masterbard, named Halliron. If you meet him, I beg you to play for him. Should he offer you an apprenticeship, I ask for your oath you’ll accept.’

Silence; the footfalls as curious horses advanced from the far side of the corral. Then a chilly gust of air rattled through the trees. Arithon pushed off from the fenceboards and cursed in an unfamiliar language through his teeth. ‘Like sharks, you all want a part of me.’ His voice shook; not with fury, but with longing.

Felirin smiled, his relief mixed with guilt-tinged triumph. ‘Your oath,’ he pressured gently. ‘Let me hear it.’

‘Damn you,’ said Arithon. In a shattering change of mood, he was laughing. ‘You have it. But what’s my word against the grandiloquent predictions of a maudlin and drunken prophet?’

‘Maybe everything,’ Felirin finished gently. ‘You’re too young to live without dreams.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I didn’t.’ Lightly firm in his irony, Arithon added, ‘Right now, I wish to go to bed.’ He walked away, left the bard to thwarted curiosity and the crowding attentions of the horses.

Backtrail

On the downs of Pasyvier, by the flames of a drifter’s fire, a seer speaks sharply to a grande dame returned from the autumn horse fair. ‘Say again, you saw a sorcerer? And with him a blond-haired stranger who spoke the speech of the true-born? I tell you, if you did, there will be war…

In the hall of judgement in West End, seated on his chair of carved oak and carnelian, a town mayor listens, sweating, to a similar description from the half-wit who played fiddle in the square…

Under mist in the Peaks of Tornir, a wild, screeling wail calls Khadrim in retreat back to spell-warded sanctuary; and the harmonics ring of death by spell-cursed steel not seen for a thousand years…

VI. ERDANE

The walls of Erdane had been raised at the crossroads two ages before the uprising which threw down the high kings had bloodied its maze of narrow streets. Now, five centuries later, the city wore change like a tattered, overdressed prostitute. Guild flags and a mayor’s blazon fluttered over the Grand West Gate, built by Paravian hands of seamless, rose-veined quartz. The stone at street level was left pitted and scarred by siege-weapons, and greyed by the passage of uncounted generations of inhabitants. Had the sentries in the mayor’s guard been as vigilant as their counterparts in times past, they would have challenged the woman in the shepherd’s cloak who passed the gatehouse, hooded. Boots of sewn sealhide showed beneath her ankle-length skirts, but their soles were not made for walking. Her hands were calloused from the bridle-rein, and her eyes a clear and disturbing grey.

But the captain of the watch barely glanced up from his dice game and the teenaged soldier who lounged on his javelin stayed absorbed by a whore, who paraded her bedizened attractions for the eyes of a loud-voiced drover.

Elaira, Koriani enchantress and message-bearer for the Prime, entered Erdane unremarked between a wagon bearing three sows and the rumbling wheels of an aleseller’s dray. She was the first of her kind to pass the city gates for close to four hundred years and the only one to try without any sanction from her seniors. Had she been recognized for what she was, she would have been stripped and publicly burned after barely a pretence of a trial.

Other women had suffered that sentence inside the past half-decade. If the mayor of Erdane suspected the charges against those accused were false, his conscience never bothered his sleep. What troubled his guildmasters and council to cold sweats was the fear that powers from the past might arise out of legend and claim vengeance. For unlike the commoners and the craftsmen, the Lord Elect of Erdane had access to archives that detailed a history of conspiracy and murder. To him, to his council and his general of armies, the sun was no myth, but a harbinger of sorcery and certain doom.

Elaira was cognizant of the risks. She kept her knotworked hood pulled low over her forehead and took care not to pass between the flirtatious whore and her sources of male attention. When the ale dray pulled up precipitously to avoid a running urchin, the enchantress ducked out of the main thoroughfare. She hastened down streets of marble-fronted guild-halls, threaded across the artisans’ district, then turned through a moss-dark arch.

The alley beyond was barely wider than a footpath. Fallen slates and rat-chewed ends of bone clogged the gutters. Seepage dripped in mournful counterpoint to the moss-crusted planks of half-rotted, open-air stairways; and from spell-charmed strips of tin nailed up to ward off iyats. Unlike many such talismans, these held true power to guard. Elaira could sense the faint resonance of their protections as she wound her way past ill-smelling puddles and locked shutters.

This slum by the edicts of town law should never have managed to survive: it had no wineshops or pot-traders on the lower levels. Dirty children did not play in the gutters, and drunks did not snore off binges; whores sought no customers here, nor did headhunters with old campaign scars loiter between assignments to boast of kills. This was a street whose inhabitants Erdane’s mayor sorely wished to eradicate; except that in the teeming maze of the wall district, its location was most difficult to know. Wayfarers came seeking the archway and found themselves inexplicably side-tracked. They might blink and miss the entry, or be distracted by a noise or a thought; and before they had grasped they had missed something, they would have passed on by.

For anyone untrained in spellcraft to pause here, even for a second, was to become lost in a mage-worked tangle of deception.

Elaira found the stairwell with carved gryphons on the newels. This was the house; here. She had all but sold her jewel for directions. For the Koriani matron who had received the scrolls from the Prime had been garrulous enough to repeat rumour. If she was right, the mayor’s most persistent nightmare was already half-way realized: a Fellowship sorcerer and two old-blood princes were temporarily in residence within Erdane.

Elaira mounted the alarmingly shaky stairway and paused on the landing at the top. With a shiver of sinful anticipation she knocked and asked for entry. ‘Is this the home of Enithen Tuer?’

A muffled clang, then the ring of a bar being drawn back; the door cracked and a white-lashed milk-pale eye peered through. ‘Ath’s Avenger, it’s a witch,’ rasped a reedy, aged voice. ‘Girl, you’re very brave or just stupid.’

Elaira tightened her grip on her cloak laces. ‘Probably stupid.’ She held back a nervous laugh. ‘Are you going to let me in?’

The eye blinked. ‘I will. You may be sorry.’

‘I will be sorry.’ Elaira threw an unsettled glance over her shoulder; the alley remained empty, dimming rapidly in the falling dusk. Nobody watched from the rows of shuttered windows. Still, her proscribed visit would be noticed very fast if she tarried too long in the open. As the door creaked wider, Elaira stepped through in a rush that betrayed apprehension.

A tiny, hunchbacked crone bounced backward out of her path. ’Yeesh. Came here without sanction, did you?’

Elaira pushed back her hood. The room did not match the alley’s run-down squalor but was snug and comfortably furnished. Candles lit the enchantress’s face like a cameo against the purple-black silk of a second cloak concealed underneath the rougher wool. Inside, somewhat mussed by the muffling layers, coiled a braided knot of bronze hair. ‘Maybe I just want my fortune told.’

The crone grunted. ‘Not you. And anyway, you don’t need a seer to tell your future’s just branched into darkness.’

‘Sithaer,’ Elaira sucked an unsteady breath. ‘So soon?’ She fumbled at the ties of her wraps and caught sight of two young men who watched her, interested, over a half-completed game of chess.

Elaira’s eyes widened. They were here! And unmistakably royal, the bloodlines perpetuated over many generations still apparent as the nearer one rose to meet her. Light from the sconces edged pale s’Ilessid hair in shining gold. The prince possessed an elegance that went beyond his handsome face. His eyes were jewel-blue. He carried his well-knit frame with the dignity of a man schooled perfectly to listen, and a pride unselfconscious as breathing.

‘Lady, may I?’ he asked in courtly courtesy; and hands tanned dark by alien suns reached out and slipped the shepherd’s cloak from her shoulders.

Unused to male solicitude, Elaira blushed and evaded his smile, and found her sight drawn to the other prince, whose black hair at first glance had caused him to blend into shadow.

This one regarded her with eyes of s’Ffalenn green, and something else: the still, small shock of an awareness that recognized power. Elaira repressed stark surprise, while the s’Ilessid prince said something polite that her mind interpreted as background noise.