The Curse of the Mistwraith (53 page)

Light answered, a hedging dazzle of wards thrown up by Kharadmon. Trailing half a beat behind, the sorcerer’s protections failed to guard. Lysaer suffered jumbled impressions that overwhelmed the hurt to his hands. The tumult within him screeled to a whirlwind, scattering memories like debris. Through a ripped up jumble of impressions, he sensed Fellowship spellcraft flash lines of fire through past and future, hounding the Mistwraith’s assault.

The chase re-echoed down every channel of Lysaer’s being. Impressions surged and recoiled, his own mixed with others too alien for comprehension. Past moments snapped out of recall with edged clarity: the Lady of South Isle’s lips on his, and her warm fingers twined in his hair…a night from early childhood when he had sat on the palace battlement with the chancellor’s arm around his waist, as he recited the names of winter stars.

Then, in punishing detail, a later experience wrought of harsh sun and burning winds, and a thirst in his throat like torture.

Dissociated wholly from the present, cut off from joined conflict with the Mistwraith, Lysaer tumbled face-down once again in the scorching sand of the Red Desert. Arithon s’Ffalenn stood over him, blood-streaked features contorted with unforgotten antagonism.

‘
Get up
!’ the command a lash across a mind pinned by a vice-grip of sorcery. Pain followed, lacerating the last bastion of conscious will.

‘
Get up
!’

Then himself, a prince born royal, broken and screaming as personal dignity was trampled down and violated by the bastard half-brother
who was ever and always Amroth’s enemy.

Lysaer shuddered, racked once again by annihilating hatred for the s’Ffalenn born to mastery of shadows. Only now, in forced reliving, righteous s’Ilessid fury was shared and fanned hotter by a ravening horde of demon spirits.

The pain this time raged redoubled as sorcery flared and sparked in an effort to hack the wraiths away.

The psyche in torment turned to tricks. Spiralled down a tunnel like delirium, Lysaer glimpsed another place, a railed wooden gallery atop an outdoor staircase that overlooked a vast public square. The space between brick-faced halls and mansions was packed with a seething mob; and amid that multitude, one face:
of a black-haired enemy who was wholly and unforgivably s’Ffalenn.

The scene folded in on itself and vanished. Fire blistered Lysaer’s hands. He screamed for a torment more terrible still, of sorcery scourging his inner mind. The invading hordes of wraiths shrieked and gibbered inside his skull. Their cries stormed together, tangled then merged to a mindless blast of noise. Raw force answered their wail and a barrage of sparks as thick as scalding rain. The spirits broke and threshed into spinning flight like singed leaves. Lysaer felt sucked under by tides of faintness and confusion.

Voices that were human turned distant, broken, then surged back clearly as a hand strongly steadied his elbow.

‘Well done!’ The tones, Asandir’s; the touch, that of a sorcerer enfleshed. Kharadmon’s enslaving presence had withdrawn.

Lysaer leaned into the support, breathing hard, and dizzied past reach of self-control. His mind felt scoured; empty. Even his gifted sense of light seemed deadened, consumed as flaked ash in a smelter’s pit. Fragments of nightmare flitted through his grasp and faded even as he grasped to recall them. A frustrated urgency remained, disrupted as Asandir spoke again.

‘Lysaer? You’ve been party to a miracle. The Mist-wraith’s captivity is accomplished.’

Belatedly aware he still breathed, that his palms stung with blisters that could heal, Lysaer at last managed speech. ‘It’s bottled?’

For answer, Asandir drew him gently to his feet and forward two stumbling steps.

The narrow jasper cylinder still rested upright on the battlement. Ward-light shimmered over its contours, which now showed no opening at all. The container was permanently sealed seamless, and the sky, cloaked in natural darkness, showed a terrifying tapestry of stars.

They were hard-white, blue, and stinging violet, too bright by half to be mistaken for the heavens of Dascen Elur that Lysaer had known throughout childhood. None of the constellations matched any taught him by the chancellor.

The meaning took a long, sweaty moment to register.

‘Desh-thiere,’ Lysaer croaked. ‘It’s banished.’ His handsome, weary face showed the grace of relief before he crumpled in exhaustion against Asandir.

For a moment the sorcerer who supported him showed an expression of unalloyed sorrow.

Then, roused to purpose, he called brisk command to the Shadow Master braced against the wall. ‘Help me get your brother down to shelter. After that, if you can manage the lower stair, call Dakar in. He’s going to be needed to doctor burns.’

Legacy

The evening after Asandir had ridden south with his discorporate colleagues to better secure the imprisoned Mistwraith, Lysaer sat with his back to the lee of a stone embrasure that once had been favoured as a trysting place by generations of s’Ffalenn princesses. Between hands swathed in bandages and healing unguents rested a flask of telir brandy, left as a courtesy by the sorcerer before his departure.

The contents were already half-consumed.

Disappointed to have slept through the first day of restored sunlight, the s’Ilessid prince applied himself to belated celebration as he pondered Athera’s savagely brilliant constellations, strewn in cloudless splendour overhead. ‘To our victory,’ he toasted and offered the flask to his half-brother, who paced, too quietly for his step to be heard through the ongoing sigh of the winds.

Arithon paused, a dark silhouette against a million points of light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I’d drink instead to the crown that awaits you in Tysan. You’ve fully earned your right to royal privilege.’

The expected note of bitterness was absent from his half-brother’s manner. Taken aback, that the Shadow Master’s quirky nature should relentlessly continue to confound him, Lysaer smiled as Arithon accepted the brandy, took a token swig and gently handed back the flask.

‘You can’t be looking forward to Etarra,’ Lysaer pressed. ‘There’s more on your mind than you let on.’ He touched the bottle to his lips. The telir brandy went down with hardly a burn in the throat; the warmth came later, a glow like a bonfire in the belly. ‘You might feel better if you drank.’

Arithon returned a quiet chuckle. ‘I don’t feel bad. Just monstrously tired. Still.’

‘Still, what?’ The liquor was subtle: it undid barriers as a rake would seduce a prim virgin. When Arithon forbore to respond, Lysaer frowned in mildly euphoric irritation. ‘You’d think, after Desh-thiere’s defeat, the almighty Fellowship of Seven could reward you by finding a replacement hero to shoulder Rathain’s throne in your place.’

Arithon turned smoothly and set his hands on the wall. For a time he, too, seemed absorbed by the stars. ‘They won’t because they can’t, I suspect.’

‘What?’ Lysaer elbowed up from his slouch, setting off a gurgle of sloshed spirits. ‘What do you mean by
that
? I hate to match sweeping leaps of logic while I’m tipsy.’

A disturbance sounded from inside the roofless chamber that fronted the flagstone terrace. ‘Dakar,’ Arithon observed, though he had not turned to look. ‘Hot on the scent of the brandy, no doubt.’

Sounds of a stumble and a muffled curse from the ruins affirmed his idle supposition.

Yet Lysaer on a binge could be bullishly stubborn; in judgement impaired further by fatigue, he resisted the interruption. ‘You’re implying, friend, that our
Fellowship of Seven
might not have a choice as to whose head they crown at Etarra?’

Not exasperated, but only lingeringly weary, Arithon said, ‘I think not. My best guess being that, with or without our ancestor’s knowledge, somebody meddled with our family history.’ Silent, perhaps frowning, he tipped his head sidewards in inquiry.

‘Consent was given,’ affirmed Dakar from the depths of the archway that led to the terrace. ‘On behalf of your line, sealed in blood by Torbrand s’Ffalenn, on the day Rathain’s charter was drawn by Ciladis of the Fellowship.’

‘There you are,’ Arithon said in light irony to his half-brother. He accepted the brandy that s’Ilessid diplomacy offered out of instinct to console; after a deep swallow and a sigh he relinquished the flask and ended, ‘I leave you all the joys of the night. I’m certainly too spent for witty company.’

The Shadow Master vanished into the archway, even as the Mad Prophet emerged, wearing an unlikely combination of ragged tunics layered one over another like sediment. These were topped by Asandir’s cloak, the silver-banded hem of which dragged the flagstones around Dakar’s stocky ankles.

Lysaer studied the Mad Prophet’s choice of wardrobe with raised eyebrows, while Dakar, vociferously defensive, slouched against the wall that Arithon had lately vacated. ‘I’m getting a cold,’ he said, in excuse for the purloined cloak.

Since the timbre of Dakar’s voice held no sign of a stuffy head, Lysaer sensed a lecture coming on the effectiveness of telir brandy as a medicine for pending coughs. He forestalled the diatribe by offering the flask, and stuck like a terrier to his topic. ‘What did Arithon mean, and what consent did his ancestor give at the writing of Rathain’s charter?’

Caught in mid-swallow, Dakar choked. He recovered himself, began afresh and sucked at the flask until forced to stop and gasp for air. Then he sniffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘Obviously not.’ Too bone-tired for finesse, Lysaer hooked the brandy bottle back. He regarded Dakar’s spaniel eyes and said equably, ‘I need not inquire, if that were true.’

Dakar started to blot his dribbled chin with the cloak hem, then recalled the garment’s true owner in time to use his sleeve cuff for the purpose. ‘Damn and damn,’ he said softly.

‘Once for the brandy, which I won’t share unless you speak,’ Lysaer surmised. ‘The other for the trouble you’ll have earned, when Asandir discovers you’ve borrowed his best cloak without leave.’

‘All right.’ Dakar shrugged in resignation. ‘The royal bloodlines are irreplaceable, as Arithon already guessed.’

‘Due to prophecy?’ Lysaer swished the flask suggestively.

‘No.’ Peevish, Dakar gazed fixedly on the brandy. ‘The Fellowship chose three men and two women to found Athera’s royal lines. They were selected, each one, for a dominant trait that would resist corruption and other pressures that power brings to bear on human nature. It is a grave thing to alter or to influence unborn life. Yet that is what the sorcerers did, to ensure fair rule through generations of dynastic succession. They set a geas ward that would fix those chosen virtues in direct line of inheritance. Your ancestor gave them consent, for all the good that does you.’ Here, Dakar’s own bitterness showed, for an apprenticeship that more times than not seemed the result of manipulation.

Always smooth, Lysaer passed over the flask. Information desired from Dakar on the nature of the Fellowship’s workings was invariably touchy to extract. ‘What does that mean for Arithon?’

Brandy vanished down the Mad Prophet’s gullet in prodigious swallows, and this time Asandir’s best cloak did not escape usage as a napkin. ‘Ah well,’ sighed Dakar. ‘It means that our arrogant Master of Shadow can never escape his nature.’

This time Lysaer wrapped his arms around his knees, content to let the spirits work their magic. The breeze whispered softly over the terrace and the terrible, alien constellations burned fiercely through the interval that followed.

In time, Dakar took another pull from the flask. He peered mournfully into the dregs. ‘Torbrand s’Ffalenn was a man of natural empathy, a master statesman, because he could sense what motivated his enemies. He ruled as duke in Daon Ramon, and the compassion of the Riathan Paravians formed the guiding light of his policies. Which means, my friend, that Arithon will forgive the knife that kills him. He cannot do otherwise. To understand and to sympathize with the needs of every living thing is his inborn nature, the forced gift of the s’Ffalenn line as bequeathed by the Fellowship of Seven.’

Lysaer took a moment to sort a cascade of revelations. This penchant for s’Ffalenn forgiveness explained many of the quirks of his half-brother’s personality; behaviour he had considered wayward, until he was given a key to understanding. It explained why Arithon would be vicious in contention up until the moment of defeat; how he could effortlessly shed any grudge for his balked desires, to embrace a crown he absolutely did not want without sign of bitterness or rancour. Lysaer stared at his hands, which were cold beneath their dressings. The blisters throbbed, but he had ceased to dwell on their discomfort. He badly wanted to beg back the flask of telir brandy, for in a heartbeat, his cheerfulness had vanished. Yet courage in the end became his failing. He had to ask. ‘And s’Ilessid? What gift from my ancestor do I carry?’

Morose, Dakar said, ‘You will always seek justice, even where none can be found.’

A moment later, Lysaer felt the flask pressed back into his poulticed hands. Careful not to fumble through his bandages, he swallowed brandy in gulps. For abruptly, his euphoria over Desh-thiere’s defeat had faded. Now he wanted to get drunk, to embrace the oblivion of forgetfulness before his busy mind could exhaust itself in perverse and futile review of past events. He could study a whole lifetime and probably never determine which actions were of his choosing and which others may have been influenced by those virtues bound by magecraft to his bloodline.

‘Arithon was wise to seek his bed,’ the prince concluded. ‘I’m certainly too tired for this.’

Generously leaving the last of the spirits for Dakar, he set the flask clumsily on the flagstones, rose to his feet and took his leave.

Dakar remained, solitary. Night breezes worried his unkempt hair, while he picked in turn at the immaculate wool of Asandir’s cloak. The Mad Prophet could wish until his heart burst that the flask by his elbow was still full; or that he knew a spell to conjure rotgut gin out of air. Any crude alcohol would have served to get him drunk enough to forget the nerve that had made him question the burns on Lysaer of Tysan’s hands. Maybe then he could sleep with the knowledge Asandir had revealed, in the hour before his departure.