The Curse of the Mistwraith (51 page)

Asandir said in honest discomfort, ‘We can’t be sure.’

Lysaer glanced at his half-brother. But Arithon stayed quiet as Luhaine shed his disapproval to explain.

‘Permit me. What spirits the Mistwraith embodies cannot pass the tower safe-wards. Should your efforts with shadow and light drive its vapours to final extinction inside Paravian protections, the self-aware essence would become sundered from the bounds of the fog that enshrouds it. In brief, its wraiths would be winnowed separate, even as kernel from chaff.’ Warmed to his topic, Luhaine raised spread palms. ‘After that, our Fellowship cannot be sure whether natural death would banish such spirits. Should the entities have ways to evade Ath’s law and continue existence as free wraiths, they might go on to possess our world’s creatures with dire and damaging results.’

‘The methuri that plague Mirthlvain Swamp were created by a similar calamity,’ Asandir pointed out. ‘That might lend you perspective.’

‘Indeed yes.’ Now set for a scholarly diatribe, Luhaine opened his mouth, then caught a glare from Kharadmon. Nettled, he said, ‘I must sum up.’

Kharadmon hitched up an eyebrow. ‘Do go on.’ He tipped his palm in invitation as a courtier might, to defer to a lady in a doorway.

Luhaine stiffly turned his back and resumed with his speech to the half-brothers. ‘To counter the risk of loosing free wraiths, you must drive Desh-thiere to captivity outside of arcane protections. The wards set over Ithamon must serve as your bastion, and also as defence for the land in case of mishap.’

‘Brief, did you say?’ accosted Kharadmon. Despite an image that stayed fixed in serenity as a painting, his impatience was plain as he said, ‘We waste time.’

Unperturbed, Asandir gave the half-brothers his quiet reassurance. ‘The perils are not insurmountable. On faith, we have Dakar’s prophecy, and the strands’ further augury that the Mistwraith can be conquered. Yet there won’t be satisfaction if we stall over details until sundown.’ He tipped his head at Lysaer. ‘Prince?’

Relieved to be excused from the friction between a ghost pair of sorcerers who deeply unsettled him anyway, Lysaer called power through his gift. Light sheeted from his raised fist, a crackling, broad-banded flash that shocked through the murk overhead. Desh-thiere hissed in recoil. A backwash of steam fanned Kieling Tower, torn short as Arithon’s shadow-wrought counterthrust sliced across the breach. Dark flicked the air and the temperature plunged. Snow flurried over the battlement, struck gold by filtered sunlight as the mist layer seared nearly through. The heavens moiled like dirtied water as Desh-thiere surged to choke the gap. Barriers of wrought shadow razed it short, and ice dusted the hollow before the crenels where the image forms of Luhaine and Kharadmon had vanished away, unremarked.

The half-brothers broke off the first stage assault, breathing hard; and as always, the moment they snatched in recovery cost them.

The mist massed in upon itself. Purple-grey and sinister as thunderheads, Desh-thiere battened the winds in dank darkness and settled over the patch of true sky. Lysaer’s fair nature turned grim. Always the fog became thicker and more troublesome to manage after the initial attack. Charged to resentful revenge, grown adept at shaping his craft as a weapon, Lysaer hammered killing power into the gloom that oppressed the landscape.

The grease-thick miasma above the tower flared white, then burned to incandescence as the charge struck. Shadow ripped out in reply, and snow crystals scoured by the gusts slashed across the exposed stone parapet. The mists bulked, denser, poisonously thick as poured oil. Lysaer’s tunic dampened with sweat, and Arithon’s hair whipped to tangles against dripping temples.

The half-brothers fought, while morning gave way to afternoon. Slowly, grudgingly, the Mistwraith’s bounds were harried inward. Sunlight speared down and silvered Ithamon’s knoll with its interlocked stubble of foundations. Notched battlements and broken walls drowned the next minute under yet another countersurge of fog. Light and then shadow punched back. Again a ragged hole appeared. Sky appeared over Kieling Tower, besieged at once by rolling curtains of murk. Arithon cried out as the wraith-driven mists burst his barriers. Stonework shook to a thunderous report as Lysaer extended to heroic lengths to shock back the break in the attack line.

His light slashed into gloom that churned, congested as a blood-gorged bruise. Shadow answered him strongly. Snowfall snatched up into whirlwinds as stress-heated air snapped and shrieked through pocketed blizzards of ice.

And then a sudden and peculiar twist of change: interwoven through the violent play of energies, something tugged subtly out of balance. Across the concussive boom of backlash and a gale like a rising scream, Arithon shouted to Asandir, ‘We’re in trouble!’

Less trained to nuance, Lysaer saw no cause to pinpoint. A third charge gathered in his hands, his sight congested by a darkness dense enough to suffocate, he groped to define his uneasiness. Aware of voices, but cut off from the others by the mist, he closed his fists.

And knew terror, for his gifted powers failed to dissipate.

Lysaer reached to recover control but another will struggled against him: as if the mists had changed nature, without warning turned from a stubborn, resistant barrier that needed ever to be driven, into something repellently uncanny: a creature voracious and alive, that now fed off the very energies summoned to achieve its defeat. Lysaer felt the graze of unseen presences across his flesh.
Things
seemed to twist at his clothing and hair, while a heaviness dragged his thoughts.

Then a surge of overweening elation displaced all trace of alarm. They had triumphed! Desh-thiere now collapsed in a sucking rush toward annihilation.

A shout from Asandir ripped through that giddy unreality. Lysaer’s mad urge to crack the sky with his powers became dashed as someone’s hands snatched his wrists apart. Spell force slapped over his unshed light like soaked woollens thrown down to douse a wildfire.

No victory had been immanent on Kieling. Lysaer gasped in recovery. Murk wrapped him, dank as marshvapours, and his body dripped sour sweat. ‘What happened?’

‘Desh-thiere!’ cried Asandir above winds that keened like death angels whetting their armoury of scytheblades. ‘It’s hurled itself into the breach for a purpose!’

Magelight flashed and the air cleared, or seemed to. Only a circle closed off by some boundary of sorcery answered to Asandir’s will. Beyond Kieling’s walls pressed darkness, damp and impenetrable as shroud felt. Lysaer blinked streaming eyes. Brushed by settling snow, he noticed the winds no longer buffeted his body. Instead he felt crowded by noxious warmth the characterless temperature of shed blood. Pressured by nameless foreboding, Lysaer braced to continue, then flinched as Asandir cruelly tore his wrists apart again.

Affronted by the physical handling, Lysaer tensed to strike off restraint. Asandir met his glare, wordless, until reason displaced princely pride. Shaken to discover how near vanity had come to eclipse his good sense, Lysaer squared his shoulders to apologize.

Asandir forestalled him. ‘I’m not offended and you were never rude. This Mistwraith has aspects that can turn the mind, and now you are warned. Stay guarded.’

Upset and humiliated, Lysaer strove to pick sense out of chaos. ‘The mist flung itself on us like a suicide.’

From across the battlement, Arithon said in a voice scraped and hoarse, ‘That last assault sheared out more vapour than we ever burned away through a half-day. I presume the damage is done?’

‘We’ll see. Luhaine!’ His hold still tight on Lysaer’s wrists, Asandir cracked out, ‘How diminished is the radius of the fog?’

The discorporate mage forwent his tendency to patronize. ‘Only Kieling Tower remains enveloped, which leads me to suppose we have problems. If Desh-thiere’s entities were subject to natural death, why should they rush their destruction?’

Kharadmon agreed. ‘It’s too dangerous, now, to finish outside the tower. Whether our wards are found wanting or not, to cut the mist down on open ground is to beg a bid for escape. These ruins offer a thousand crannies. If the wraiths escape their bindings, they’ll surely scatter and hide.’

‘That’s Desh-thiere’s intention, no doubt,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Or wouldn’t it just lure us to take an outside stand, then make the two princes its target?’

‘It could be attempting to do both.’ Asandir looked like a man faced with torture as his hands slackened, then at last released Lysaer. ‘We have a second choice of action.’

‘No!’ cried Dakar in protest, half-forgotten where he huddled on the sidelines. He strode to the centre of the battlement. Nose running, eyes bloodshot, his hands bunched in fists before his chest, he bristled like a fat banty rooster. ‘You wouldn’t
dare
sully the wards of compassion on this tower! Merciful Ath, how could you think to disarrange the irreplaceable work of ages, and draw evil inside these protections?’

Asandir visibly hardened. ‘I would do so, of sheer necessity.’ His look blazed back at his apprentice. ‘These wards are all that can dependably fence the Mistwraith. I will open them, and let Desh-thiere be driven inside, and see this land safe under sunlight. For the survival of the Riathan Paravians who sanctified this haven, you’ll lend your strength to that cause.’

Shocked, shaking, visibly afraid to hold his ground, nonetheless; Dakar stayed stubbornly rooted.

‘Desh-thiere has three times shown us guile,’ said Luhaine, his image indistinct through the turmoil of darkness and mist. ‘We could be the ones driven, and purposefully, to try just such a desperate action.’

‘The risk must be taken.’ Lysaer came forward. ‘Of us all, I’m the least fit to weigh risks. Yet I cannot set my life above the need to confine this monster. Kieling’s protections will not fail the land. Though we all were to die here, sunlight for Athera would be secured.’ His hair like drowned gold in the gloom, he deferred to Asandir. ‘I prefer to trust you can protect us from the wraiths, as you did on the night my half-brother and I were attacked.’

That mishap had occurred well before Desh-thiere’s teeming entities had been crowded inside shrunken boundaries; yet Asandir kept dread to himself as he switched his most merciless regard back to the Teir’s’Ilessid. ‘So be it, Lysaer. But let your heart not falter. When I call, you will act, and do so without question, to the utter dregs of your strength. Your gift of light will partner Arithon’s shadows, and burn mist until all of Desh-thiere’s entities are driven inside of ward boundaries.’

The words and their depth of commitment struck Lysaer with strange force and finality, as if magic would be bound to his consent. Though warned he must forfeit any later change of will, he scraped up a ragged smile. ‘What resources I have are freely yours.’

Wary though he remained, Asandir showed sincere respect. ‘Ath’s blessing on you, s’Ilessid prince. You do seem to understand the stakes.’

Ever the pessimist, Luhaine said, ‘Let Dakar leave the tower now, then. Should the worst befall, someone must stay outside to guard until Sethvir can set seals on this tower to permanently block chance of reentry.’

‘I’ll get my nose sunburnt and blistered for nothing, waiting for you to come out!’ Yet in his eagerness to quit the site of conflict, Dakar tripped over his feet in the stairwell. His peeved oaths faded with his hurried steps, first muffled by the close-pressed mists, and finally drowned by the moan of the eddying winds.

Desh-thiere swathed Kieling’s battlements in unremitting gloom as the sorcerers made preparations. Kharadmon appointed himself the task of safeguarding Lysaer. Luhaine’s image dissolved also, but wearing an acerbic expression that cautioned Arithon to restraint. Whether moved by precocious knowledge or by edgy s’Ffalenn temperament, any attempt to broach Fellowship guardianship would be handled with flat intolerance.

Lysaer wiped sweating palms. Before he could imagine what arcane defences might demand of him, a circle of blue-white force cracked around him. His eyes were flash-blinded and his senses tipped spinning into vertigo. The wards set over his person by Kharadmon not only laced the surrounding air; they invaded and flared through his most private self with a persistence that raised primal rebellion. Lysaer felt every hair on his body stab erect. For a horrible, drawn out moment, his mind and flesh lay outside self-command, frozen in subjugation to another will. The unpleasant feeling soon faded. Mage-light no longer etched his body to incandescence. Lysaer stretched in reaction. He flexed his hands, then his toes, relieved to find them not locked in paralysis. Then he tried a breath, and felt, like a spike hammered through the grain of growing wood, the ward’s immutable presence.

He retained bodily control, but only as Kharadmon’s protections allowed.

Moved to consternation by the scope of the strictures imposed by his open consent, Lysaer had no chance to wonder how Arithon reconciled such a pact. Above the moan of the wind, and through the ear-stinging pitch of ward resonance, Asandir delivered fast instructions.

‘Once I’ve merged awareness with Kieling Tower’s protections, I won’t be able to respond. Should trouble arise, the discorporate sorcerers who are linked with you will sense your needs and give help as the situation requires.’ Asandir paused.

His eyes, light, brilliant, piercing, studied the half-brothers who, for the cause of restored sunlight and Paravian survival were about to place body, mind and spirit into jeopardy.

Pressed by unspoken anxieties, Asandir added, ‘I’ll seek to key an opening in the wards and signal you when that’s accomplished. Engage the Mistwraith then. With all of your strength and will drive it inside the tower’s protections. Once the last bit of fog is drawn in, I’ll reseal the wards. After that, Luhaine and Kharadmon will strive with you to fend off Desh-thiere’s hostile entities. If Paravian spellcraft can be plumbed for inspiration, and if forces of compassion that were created to be unconditional can be made to yield to necessity, I’ll try to fashion a containment of wardspells. With luck, we can imprison Desh-thiere and keep this tower unsullied.’ He hesitated, then finished off, ‘Hold to this through the worst: the auguries cast at Althain Tower did not forecast any deaths here.’