The Ships of Merior (15 page)

‘That’s possible?’ His host, the master spellbinder Verrain, stood in straight quiet like a cat-tail, furled against the damp in a mud-splashed, brown frieze cloak. ‘I wasn’t sure, I’ve been here so long.’ Full lips that once had wrung sighs from Daenfal’s fairest maidens crooked in humourless irony. ‘Welcome to the bogs of Mirthlvain.’

Sethvir gave his spinning senses a moment more to settle, then stepped off the lichened patterns of a lane focus centuries older than the one at Althain Tower. Gilded with flickers from the rushlight by the doorway, he gripped the wrists of the apprentice mage, who had stood guard over the dread spawn of Mirthlvain for more years than any soul deserved.

‘You have tea?’ asked the Fellowship sorcerer.

His anxious note caused Verrain to grin. ‘My cupboards are stocked.’ He led off up a brick stair, hollowed by moisture and footfalls. ‘The others await you above.’

The pair climbed in darkness alive with the tick and splash of condensation. From some bleak chamber down a corridor, a caged thing chittered and screeled; the echoes cut at the nerves, caused the hair of warmblooded listeners to prickle and stab erect.

‘Karth-eels?’ Sethvir asked.

‘A breeding pair.’ Verrain unbarred an upper doorway to a squeal of rusted hinges. He retrieved a staff of grey ash, while the spill of filtered daylight traced over knuckles left scarred by bites, and claws, and fell scratchings. ‘A new mutation, I fear.’

‘Hardly fresh,’ Sethvir murmured, ‘if these ones you’ve caught are amphibious, with fangs and webbed feet as well as the usual venomed spines.’

Verrain glanced aside in surprise, his eyes so bleak they looked lightless. ‘You’ve seen footed spawnings before this?’

‘Actually, yes. But not for five thousand years.’ In disquiet thought, the sorcerer hitched at the strap of his satchel. ‘Certainly none since the hate-wraiths who caused the aberrations were prisoned in Rockfell pit.’

‘The records in the library don’t list those.’ Verrain ducked to traverse the peculiar, low arches of a connecting hall. One of Meth Isle fortress’s many cats streaked past as he flung back the door to another stairway.

‘No. They wouldn’t.’ Moved to an airy shift of subject, Sethvir said, ‘There’s a most urgent reason why we chose to meet here for the equinox.’

The light strengthened with the climb, warmed to buttery, cloud-hazed sunshine. This far east, the morning was already several hours gone. Windows battened under diamond-meshed grilles opened onto Meth Isle fortress’s vista of slate roofs and terracotta chimneys, tufted under yellow moss and fungus. Tiled gutters with gargoyle spouts loured over a lakeshore scummed with lily pads and beyond them, darker, deeper waters rippled and scaled silver with wind. Mirthlvain’s landscape of steaming mires loomed in the distance, an imprinted silhouette of marsh maple and cypress cobwebbed with trailing, tattered moss.

But the inside air nowcarried welcoming heat and a perfume of clean burning birch. An orange tabby bounded across the landing to weave against Verrain’s shins. He crossed a marble antechamber inhabited by beetles in lichened corners and led into the grand hall beyond.

Past the braced doors, lofty hammerbeamed ceilings hung splotched acid green from the damp. A black iron cauldron steamed on the hob, and there Sethvir’s host gestured with the flick of a dimple on each cheek. ‘Your
tea water. Sufficient to last out the day, I should hope.’

The sorcerer returned a pleased grin, then hastened on to greet the two colleagues who waited, already seated. Other carved chairs with upholstery felted with cat hair sat empty before the stone gryphons that fashioned the table’s massive pedestal.

A white and tortoiseshell tom poured itself from Asandir’s lap as he arose. ‘Sethvir! Come sit. How long has it been since you remembered to eat?’ Tall, windburned, worn lean from travel, he made room for Althain’s Warden, in the process displacing a sleepy kitten.

The black-clad sorcerer opposite hunched over a plate of smoked fish and scones, his mouth too full for speech. But the raven perched on his shoulder swivelled beady jet eyes and croaked.

‘Hello to you too, little brother.’ Sethvir dumped his satchel on the floor and sat, his diffuse gaze no longer bemused, but trained in sharp inquiry upon the quieter of his two colleagues.

Traithe stayed riveted on his food. His wide-brimmed black hat with its tarnished silver band hung from the knurl on his chair arm. The caped sable mantle he still wore failed to mask the tender movements left over from crippling injuries; in the hour of the Mistwraith’s first invasion, Traithe had made tragic sacrifice to unbind the spells on the South Gate portal and cut off the creatures’ point of entry.

When his raven clipped him a peck on the ear, he looked up, his brown eyes dark with affront. ‘Yes,’ he snapped as though to an unwanted inquiry. ‘My scars ache today. But since meeting was called for at Mirthlvain, I presume we save our strengths for something more pressing than small healing.’

Above a twist of frosty hair the raven had tousled, Asandir and Sethvir locked glances. Had Traithe still possessed his full faculties, no one need say that Mirthlvain’s ills were quiescent.

‘Actually,’ the Warden of Althain admitted, ‘this is the closest active focus to Alestron, where one of us needs to pay a visit. A copy of Magyre’s papers has apparently survived and fallen into the hands of the duke’s scholars.’

‘Black powder again?’ asked Verrain, arrived with a stalker’s silence to settle on Traithe’s other side. He had shed his frieze cloak. Lank blond hair tied by velvet ribbons feathered through the ruffles of a dandy’s collar several centuries out of fashion.

Sethvir sighed. ‘The very same old tired story.’ He looked askance at Asandir, who had forgotten to pass on the scones. ‘It’s scarcely on your way, but you’ll need to visit the city before going north to Rockfell to check on the Mistwraith’s confinement.’

Then, mindful the cruellest of Traithe’s distress would not stem from old injuries, Sethvir tucked his hands in his sleeve cuffs. Carefully, aloud, he said, ‘No, I have yet to hear word.’

His inference was to Kharadmon, their discorporate colleague dispatched across the gulf to resurvey the paired worlds left severed by the closure of South Gate. There, for a purpose beyond comprehension, the abomination wrought of mists and trapped human spirits first became amalgamated into the Mistwraith that endangered Athera.

Worries abounded. The icy, lifeless void between stars was inhospitable, even to the bodiless spirit; worse, the alienated worlds presumably harboured the wraith’s greater portion, still at large and potently malevolent. The calamity that resulted from the creature’s confinement here had unveiled frightening truths: for the mist’s bound spirits were intelligent, able to wrest the key to grand conjury from another mind trained to mastery. They had even proved capable of movement and planning across the threshold of time.

Best of any, the Fellowship sorcerers understood the
ugly details. The curse they undertook to unravel to reconcile two princes was daunting in scope, and ranged about with perils that lay outside of all augury.

Kharadmon’s journey had been launched at unmentionable risk. If he suffered mishap and failed to return, far more than the hope of the royal heirs’ reconciliation would be lost. The Fellowship itself might never be restored to its original circle of seven sorcerers.

Amid bitter silence, and stalked by the interest of three cats, the raven spread glossy primaries and dived in to peck at the scones. Traithe beat it back to a flurry of wings, snatched the butter crock away, then hissed until the bird retreated to fluff indignant feathers on his chair back. Since mention of one discorporate colleague brought the other to mind, he said, ‘Luhaine has no plans to join us?’

‘Sadly not.’ Sethvir rescued a scone the bird had mauled and dipped up a creamy scoop of butter. ‘The Koriani witches have renewed their efforts to find Arithon.’ He bit down and chewed with absent relish. ‘For equinox, they’ve planned a grand scrying. A circle of twenty-one seniors, to be matrixed through the Skyron crystal. Luhaine’s needed to try and scatter their energies everywhere else but toward Jaelot, a touchy task. We’d rather his influence wasn’t noticed.’

‘Jaelot?’
Verrain’s expostulation re-echoed off the vaults of the ceiling. ‘That cesspit of snobbery and bad taste? Why Jaelot?’

Asandir sighed, the broad line of his shoulders looking tired. ‘The affair involves an exploit of Dakar’s that’s too idiotic to mention. But to redeem the Mad Prophet’s foolishness, Halliron is confined there till solstice. His apprentice naturally won’t leave him.’ The sorcerer hooked his chin on steepled fingers, not needing to add that a stay of such length left Arithon’s identity as Medlir vulnerable, and not just to auguries done on the balance point of equinox. Since the secret of the Shadow
Master’s alias was the fragile linchpin that frustrated the directive of Desh-thiere’s curse, Luhaine was bound to be misleading enchantresses for some while yet to come.

‘Well,’ murmured Traithe in dry conclusion. ‘This isn’t so much a convocation as a gossip list of our weaknesses.’

‘From which we can certainly spare a moment for minor healing,’ Sethvir interjected with a glance of prankish triumph toward his colleague. ‘For the task that lies ahead of us tonight, we can’t do without your sense of humour.’

A flick of amusement rekindled the laugh lines at the corners of Traithe’s spaniel eyes. ‘What’s amiss that’s any worse than the monsters mewed up in these mires?’

Turned blankly vague, Sethvir fiddled pastry crumbs out of the folds of his cuffs. ‘The Koriani Council’s pursuit of Arithon s’Ffalenn. But let that bide for a little.’

His wistful glance toward the cauldron moved Verrain to arise and fetch mugs, and steep a pot of bracing tea.

When eventide dimmed the Mirthlvain marshes, the peepings and shrills, the skreels and the croaks of its nocturnal denizens racketed across the shallows of Methlas Lake. The mists had not yet arisen, to lure out the will o’ the wisps and the seeping flares of the marshlights. Unquiet waters lay black as a facet of obsidian, stippled by the light-prints of stars, and one anomaly: a thread of reflection sculled on the shore’s dying currents, cast out into darkness by a firelit casement high up in Meth Isle fortress.

There, around the stone table in a hall dimmed to cavernous shadow, three Fellowship sorcerers hunched in conference. They concluded their survey of far-reaching responsibilities, for they alone had been left as guardians of Athera’s ancient mysteries since the old
races’ inexplicable disappearance. Wards of protection that confined creatures dangerous in malice had been checked over world gates and preserves. As always, defences had weakened; four months of difficult travels lay ahead for Traithe and Asandir. The demands on them both were relentless, with their discorporate colleagues committed elsewhere. Of two other sorcerers outside tonight’s active circle, none spoke: the shade of Davien the Betrayer remained banished in seclusion since the hour of the high kings’ fall; Ciladis the Lost, still gone beyond reach, on his failed quest to find the Paravians.

The sole augury that forecast the Seven’s reunity, the last hope to accomplish the old races’ return: all remained jeopardized by the Mistwraith’s curse, and two princes shackled into enmity. Brought at last to that point, and the reason for gathering at Meth Isle, Sethvir peered into his empty mug. The tea leaves scummed in the dregs deceptively appeared to absorb him, while his eyes mapped the sonorous currents of the earth, and the fine, singing tracks of distant stars. ‘It is time.’

Gaunt and silent, Asandir arose. He collected the used crockery, Verrain’s chipped pot with its sprung wicker handle, and the moth-eaten quills filched from the library. With hands that moved much more freely, Traithe rolled up a marked map. He slipped the parchment into its case and across the cleared table, spread the black cloth of his cloak.

Sethvir stooped by his chair to rummage something from his satchel. While the cats piled next to Verrain’s ankles scampered off, and the one in his lap stretched and left, the Guardian of Mirthlvain out of habit used mage-sense to tag the cause of their unrest. But this time no aberrated creature from the swamps had strayed inside to be hunted. Verrain’s query touched the edge of a cold ward, a boundary field laid down to contain a flux of refined vibration. He realized, alarmed, that the Fellowship meant to cast strands. The augury they could
wring out of still air and power would be exactingly accurate, and undertaken only at grave need. More disturbing still, the Warden of Althain straightened up and offered him a tin canister and stone pipe.

Verrain need not unseal the container. The pungency that seeped from the dried herb inside charged his senses with dreadful remembrance of its poisons. Shaken, he said quickly, ‘I shouldn’t need tienelle to follow the progression of a strand pattern.’

Sethvir did not back down, but cradled the master spellbinder’s hands within his own tepid palms. ‘Tonight, we’re not sounding the future.’ Fallen into shadow as Asandir made a spell to darken the glow of the fire, the Warden looked oddly wizened; momentarily no sorcerer at all, but an old man rubbed spiritless and thin by a lifetime’s uncountable sorrows. ‘You weren’t told earlier. But the Mistwraith’s curse that sets Lysaer and Arithon into conflict is far worse than a geas of fixation. The knowledge which might shed light on their condition lies two ages back in the past.’

A creeping shudder harrowed Verrain’s nerves. ‘You wish to tune the strands to examine the
methuri
that created the abominations here at Mirthlvain?’

‘Desh-thiere’s binding over the princes is not far removed from the corruptions effected by the hate-wraiths.’ Asandir folded his lean length and sat with his usual economy of movement. ‘Both arose from the meddling of spirit entities. Both were imprinted into living flesh, with bonds of compulsion that can’t be undone without losing the victim in death.’

As Sethvir’s touch slipped away, Verrain flicked open the little tin, his dimples erased by trepidation as he cleaned and packed the stubby pipe. The biting smell of the tienelle enveloped him, fierce enough to make him cough. Just how a strand casting could be ranged across time, he desperately wished not to learn.