The Curse of the Mistwraith (62 page)

Asandir slammed into Lord Diegan’s guest parlour with Dakar hard on his heels. They were met by the commander of the guard, blandly seated, the decanter of wine he had been on the verge of pouring frozen in his hand in mid-air.

His typically Etarran urbanity made no impression upon the sorcerer, whose gaze flicked to the other set of goblets that rested on the tray, their half-consumed contents abandoned. As the terrier subsided snarling under the nearest stuffed stool, Asandir studied Diegan with a chilling, unpleasant intensity. ‘Where has Lysaer gone?’

To the amazed admiration of Dakar, Diegan’s nerve never faltered. He replaced the wine crystal on its tray with a faint, controlled clink. ‘Your man left to have words with his crony, the Teir’s’Ffalenn. Should that disturb you?’

‘We’ll know shortly.’ Asandir stepped past the casement. His shadow swept over the commander of the guard, dimming the glitter of gemstones that studded his ceremonial pourpoint. Before Diegan’s magnificence, the sorcerer’s dark robe hung sheenless as a pauper’s cheap felt. ‘I want you to think, and answer carefully. While in your presence, did Lysaer show a loss of awareness? Did his attention seem to drift, even for a second?’

As Diegan made to brush off the question, the sorcerer advanced again and forestalled him. ‘I said, answer carefully. For if you noticed such a lapse, your friend could be endangered. One of Desh-thiere’s separate wraiths may have evaded captivity. If, unbeknownst to us, such a creature came to possess Lysaer, all of Etarra could be threatened.’

Diegan gave the matter his dutiful consideration, then raised his goblet to curled lips and sipped. His eyes reflected black irony as he said, ‘When Lysaer left this chamber, he seemed in perfect self-command.’

‘And before then?’ Asandir sounded worried.

‘Never mind the commander of the guard,’ Dakar burst out. ‘He’s got lying written all over him.’

‘Then keep him here under house-arrest!’ Asandir stalked on across the carpet. ‘We don’t need a call to arm the garrison to complicate disaster any further.’ He paused at the far wall, studied the bookshelf and after a second’s hesitation reached out and thumbed the hidden catch. The false panel swung open, wafting telltale traces of Talith’s lavender perfume. After an irritated glance toward Lord Diegan, Asandir departed in Lysaer’s footsteps, through the bolt-hole that led to the street.

‘Fiends take you!’ Dakar yelled after his master. He charged to the panel and wedged it before it could quite fall shut. Though the gloom beyond by now held only drafts, he shouted anyway. ‘Will somebody bother to tell me what in Ath’s creation I have prophesied?’

He received no answer; just a rip in his hose from the terrier, which in a belated fit of courage scuttled out from hiding and bit his ankle. Dakar’s defensive kick cleanly missed. The door fell to with a thud. As the dog retreated to snarl over its pillaged shred of stocking, Diegan hefted his decanter toward the invader still left in his parlour. ‘Share a drink to soften misfortune?’

Dakar groaned. Already riled beyond sense by the effects of clairvoyance and a hangover, he pressed fat palms to his temples. ‘Wine won’t help. The entire universe has gone crazy.’

Diegan offered a chair and pressed a filled goblet upon the Mad Prophet. ‘Then let’s forgo sanity also and both get rippingly drunk.’

No sooner had the curtains been lowered over the windows of Etarra’s great council hall, than a hammering rattled the main entry. Despite the fact Traithe had sealed the doors with a minor arcane binding, one heavy panel cracked open. A raw streak of daylight slashed the foyer, raising a sparkle like a jewel-vault across the agitated assemblage of officials in their wilting feathers, dyed furs, gold chains and gem-studded sashes of rank.

Since none of Etarra’s citizens held magecraft to challenge his warding, Traithe straightened hurriedly from the prostrate body of the Lord Governor. The raven on his shoulder kept balance to a flurry of wingbeats as he turned around to confront the disturbance.

Arithon’s voice pealed out through the gloom. ‘Where’s Asandir?’

Rapacious to recover their plundered advantages, every Etarran official not overawed by Morfett’s collapse pressed forward, blinking against the sudden daylight. The few who were closest recognized the dishevelled figure through the glare; the rest saw and identified the shining circlet that betokened Rathain’s rights of royal sovereignty.

‘Sorcery!’ someone cried from the fore. Heads turned, hatted, bald and formally beribboned and jewelled. ‘Here’s the prince, burst through spells of protection. All the dread rumours are true!’

A surge crossed the gathering like a draft-caught ripple through a tapestry.

More muttering arose. ‘It’s him. Teir’s’Ffalenn. A sneaking sorcerer, after all. His Grace of Rathain.’

The prince in the doorway called again. ‘In Ath’s name, is there any Fellowship sorcerer present?’

Traithe thrust through the press that jammed the foyer, his attention narrowed to include only Arithon’s pale face. Though loath to create a public spectacle, he had no choice but bow to need. ‘Asandir’s gone to find your half-brother. Sethvir’s at the south gate armoury. The streets are not at all safe.’

Heartsick to realize he could not beg help, denied even privacy to speak plainly, Arithon called back, ‘I can’t stay here!’

Assuredly, he could not. The high council was keyed to animosity. If Traithe’s presence momentarily stayed bloodshed, that abeyance would not long suffice. Every minister’s layers of lace and brocades held hidden daggers and jewelled pins that could be turned in a moment to treachery; not a few would have in attendance paid assassins masquerading as secretaries.

Having interposed his own person between the threatened prince and the dignitaries in the chamber at large, Traithe sorted limited options. That Luhaine seemed nowhere in evidence was sure indication that the nexus of change forecast in the strands at Althain Tower had fully and finally been crossed. The wrong intervention now might displace the sequence of events that framed Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy. Traithe raged at his impaired powers; unlike his colleagues, he could not gauge the broad import of this crisis at a glance. The best he could offer was a gesture. ‘My bird will lead the straightest course toward Sethvir.’

The raven might have been a lifeline to salvation, for the relief that touched Arithon’s face. This, the governing officials of Etarra observed. They began to press Traithe’s back like wolves grown bold before weakness. Another moment, and the pack of them would turn as ungovernable as any mob in the streets.

‘Go,’ Traithe called. The raven arose, flapping. Air hissed across splayed feathers as it shot through the gap in the door. Arithon shouldered the panel closed, just as the foremost ranks of the guild masters broke in a rush to tear him down.

Crippled, Traithe was, but not powerless. As aggression crested around him, and elbows jostled him aside, he sensed to the second when the minds of the governor’s council became aligned in mass will to wreak violence. Traithe seized his opening through their passion. He attached an entanglement of energies and their intent to commit murder was bent aside and bridled as his warding snapped into the breach.

Shouts trailed off into quiet, cut by a sigh of rich cloth. The battering rush toward the doorway juddered to a slow fall forward as every man who wished harm to his prince folded at the knees and collapsed. No townsman at the end was left standing. Nestled in their crumpled brocades, lying across flattened hats and fur-trimmed cloaks, every official in Etarra’s high government settled where he lay, fast asleep.

Alone on his feet, one scarred, silver-haired mage regarded the rows of prostrate bodies, his heart aggrieved at too small a victory, won too late. The irony cut him, that but for Dakar’s infernal predictions concerning the Fellowship’s recovery, Arithon might now have returned here for sanctuary until the raven could summon Sethvir.

The downed councilmen snored on, oblivious.

‘May every last one of you be harrowed by nightmares for your ignorance!’ Traithe cursed in surly, sorrowful fervency. Then he straightened his wide- brimmed black hat and applied himself to the task of setting wards of guard over every door, every window, every closet and cranny in the chamber, that the ministers of Morfett’s council should stay mewed up until the course of the tragedy forecast by the strands could guarantee what hope could be salvaged for the ill-starred Black Rose Prophecy.

Lysaer closed his eyes as a third, fierce tingle played across his flesh. A still part of him analysed this, and concluded that Fellowship sorcerers must be seeking him through spellcraft. Heated elation followed. In uncanny certainty, he realized he was no longer quite what he had been; the pattern sought out by the sorcerers’ probe had ceased to match his personality. Once he should have felt alarmed by an insight more appropriate to a mage-taught perspective. Obsessed now by compulsion to serve justice, he never questioned what caused the deviation, or his odd self-knowledge of its existence.

The paradox passed unregarded, that he lurked like a fugitive in an alley, all for a promise to call his half-brother to task. To Lysaer, this moment, the urge to uncover any latent breach of faith became overridingly important.

Every quandary that tormented his conscience and broke his night’s rest with disturbed dreams had narrowed into sudden, lucent focus.

Lysaer gave a laugh in self-derision. He had fought so hard to give Arithon the benefit of the doubt that objectivity itself became obstructive. He shivered and sweated, berating his idealistic foolishness. He had only to question all along. For if Arithon was established as a liar, the ongoing weeks of heartsick recrimination might at one stroke become banished. Avar’s bastard as a proven criminal presented Lysaer with moral duty to defend the merchants and townsmen.

A resolution in favour of complaints he understood would be a frank relief.

‘I’ll find you,’ he swore to the shadows, Arithon’s name behind the vow. His tingling discomfort now replaced by fanatical resolve, he moved on.

Stray dogs that skulked across his path whined and shrank from his scent. When a braver bitch snarled and hounded his track, he dispatched a flick of light and stung her to yelping flight.

That cruelty to any animal would have been beyond him just minutes before never once crossed Lysaer’s mind. He picked his way over cracked paving and discarded bits of broken pottery and emerged from the alley into the brighter main thoroughfare.

People crowded the avenue, converging toward the square to attend the royal coronation. A sun-wrinkled farmwife stared at Lysaer’s emergence, chewing toothless gums as she leaned on a strapping, dark skinned grandson. Children darted past on both sides, tossing painted sticks in a throwing game that held careless regard for the neat clothing bestowed by their steadfast merchant parents. These, Arithon’s intended victims, Lysaer greeted courteously. He smiled at a cake vendor, and paused to help her boy push her cart across the gutter.

The servant in attendance at Morfett’s front doorway knew Lysaer by sight. Politely admitted inside, he asked and was granted leave to see himself to the guest suite on his own.

No sorcerer guarded the back stairwell: Luhaine’s wards were all faded. The room where Arithon quartered held only a still warmth of sunlight through latched, amber-tinged casements. Lysaer paused, breathing hard on the threshold. He surveyed the chamber more closely.

The callous character of its occupant stood revealed to casual inspection: in a king’s cloak left crumpled into the cushions of a divan, and the gift of a carbuncle scabbard spurned and abandoned on the floor.

Lysaer scowled, that the sacred trust of royal heritage should suffer such careless usage. Only the lyranthe lovingly couched on the windowseat gave testament to the heart of the man.

Urged by a pang so indistinct he could not fathom its origin, Lysaer crossed the echoing floor. By the time he reached the alcove, his feelings had fanned into rage. He shouted to the room’s empty corners, ‘Are Rathain’s people of less account than minstrelsy?’

Silence mocked him back. The silver strings sparkled sharp highlights, mute, but all the same promising dalliance.

Rathain’s prince would be reft from distractions; Etarra’s needs
would
be served. Lysaer reached out and struck the instrument a flying blow with his forearm.

Parchment-thin wood, spell-spun silver, all of Elshian’s irreplaceable craftwork sailed in an arc above the floor tiles. The belling dissonance of impact lost voice as the lyranthe’s sound-chamber smashed and each scattered splinter whispered separately to rest in a swathe of trammelled sunlight.

‘You cannot hide, pirate’s bastard,’ Lysaer vowed. Heat and chills racked his flesh as he spun, crunching over fragments, and burst back through the breached doorway.

The streets outside were packed by a crushing mob. Every tradesman and commoner turned out with their families now crowded toward the square before the council hall. Even a few white-hooded initiates pledged to Ath’s service had left their hospices in the wilds to attend. Lysaer let the flow of traffic carry him. He felt no remorse for his destruction of Arithon’s lyranthe; besieged by his drive to right injustice, he gave full rein to the ingrained gallantries of his upbringing. Lysaer touched shoulders and patted the cheeks of children, offered kind words to the plain-clad people in the streets. They stood aside for him, gave him way where the press was thickest and smiled at his lordly grace.

Rathain’s prince must be like him, they said; tall and fair-spoken and pledged to end the corruption in Etarra’s trade guilds and council.

Lysaer did not disabuse the people of their hope. The whispered turbulence of his thinking bent wholly inward as the untroubled faith of Etarra’s commonfolk caused him to measure his own failing. He too had allowed himself to be misled by the prince of Rathain; he, Amroth’s former heir, who had lost blood kin to s’Ffalenn wiles, should at least have stayed forewarned.

A touch upon his arm caused Lysaer to start. He glanced in polite forbearance at the matron with the basket of wrinkled apples who gave him a diffident smile. ‘Did you lose track of your folk, sir?’