The Curse of the Mistwraith (79 page)

Soundless, graceful, in a stroll that disallowed fourteen thousand feet of vertical drop, Asandir ascended the switchback just below. Grey hair, grey cloak, with both wrists adorned by talisman bracelets runed in white metal, he was silver from head to foot.

‘Where did you disappear to this morning?’ Dakar shot back. ‘I cooked some breakfast and found you gone, and never a word of instruction as to what you wished me to do.’

Asandir stopped. His brows lifted. The mouth underneath never moved. He looked at Dakar and said acidly, ‘That’s no reason to threaten to pitch Desh-thiere off any handy vertical precipice.’

‘Ah, fiends,’ moaned Dakar. ‘A man can’t say one word without you hearing it.’ He hugged the cliff face resignedly and hauled himself back upright.

‘Sethvir heard you, too.’ By then, Asandir had hooked the loops of the knapsack. As the Mad Prophet obligingly shrugged off straps, the sorcerer reappropriated custody of Desh-thiere’s flask.

Lightened enough to try boldness, Dakar stole a glance slantwise at his master. ‘What were you doing, anyway?’

Asandir attended the packstraps, in need of commodious readjustment to fit his slimmer anatomy. ‘What did you use here, spider’s knots?’ He abandoned the tangle, and more efficiently called a spell to clear the ties.

‘I’m no sailor, to be handy with strings or a sewing awl.’ It served any sorcerer properly, Dakar thought, to have left him in charge of such matters. He watched, envious, as the rawhide slithered free of itself with a sinuous ease of living snakes. ‘How did you do that?’

Silver-grey eyes now flicked up, keenly bright in their scrutiny. ‘Which question did you actually want answered?’

Hopeful, Dakar said, ‘Both.’

But Asandir’s mood since Etarra had not been the least bit forgiving. ‘When a peak such as this has served through two ages as a prison, prudence would dictate a check to be sure the rock is still willing to absorb the antagonism of the entity we wish to confine.’

‘And how does one bribe old stone into becoming a sewer for human refuse?’ Dakar smirked.

Asandir looked back at him, serious. ‘Rocks outlast all our doings. Longevity gives them great respect for politeness, a tendency you would benefit from copying.’

‘You can have your stones and your trees, and your communion with both for permissions,’ Dakar retorted. ‘I’ll save my appreciation for a paid woman, if we don’t break our necks on this peak.’

A warning shift in Asandir’s regard prompted Dakar to spin around and resume clambering up the trail. As stones gouged his knees, he vowed under his breath that henceforward he would restrict his inquiries to spells that could untie string. Then the next time he attracted a pack of mischief-bent iyats, he need not cut his laces to pry his boots off.

The ledge faded out at the snowline. Confronted by a rock face cracked into vertical ladders and packed under scabs of blue ice, Dakar swallowed. ‘We’re not going up that.’

Nobody answered. He blinked, rubbing sweat from his eyes. ‘Well, I’m not going up that.’

‘You could spend the night here,’ Asandir agreed. ‘You might even be comfortable, before the storm.’

‘What storm?’ Dakar studied the sky, which deepened now toward clear aquamarine. Sunset was nigh, but the air smelled of glacier, not snow. ‘There aren’t any clouds! I could spit and hit the moon.’

Asandir kept climbing. The Mad Prophet fidgeted from foot to foot while arcanely frigid air eddied upward, as Kharadmon also passed him by.

Dakar scrubbed his face on his tunic sleeve, then reviewed his position. The pitch they had already climbed was frightful, Rockfell’s southeastern exposure a needle to split the wind. The nethermost spine of the Skyshiels nipped the horizon all around, while below, hulking as somnolent dragons, two ridges hoarded the valley between. Farthest down, dark tarnish in a gloom of cut-off sunlight, river Avast’s ice-fed streamlets wound through forested ravines napped and ledged like rumpled velvet.

Just looking made Dakar’s head spin. He could wait, but if he nodded off to sleep for one second he would tumble off the cranny that marked the trailhead. Above, sharp rocks as bleak as nightmare swooped up, lost in clouds gilt-hemmed by failing daylight. Asandir had already disappeared. Beaten at last to resignation, Dakar stuffed his fat hands in a cleft and inched upward toward fog that was powdered with whirling snow. He inhaled the flakes repeatedly as he climbed. Eyes squeezed shut, he spoke through teeth clamped against a sneeze, and hoped to Sithaer that Asandir would take pity on him. ‘How much further?’ His muscles felt wrapped in hot wire.

Kharadmon’s chuckle answered. ‘Not far at all. Unless you prefer to keep scrabbling along by your fingernails?’

Suspicious of some prank, Dakar risked a look.

Then he, too, laughed aloud. Not half a pace to his left, some capricious carver had fitted a staircase into the rockface. Elegant to the point of absurdity, the risers were black marble adorned at edge and corner with leering, haughty gargoyles. An extravagance of scrolled newel posts had once supported railings, until weather had scoured the brass away. Now only fastening holes remained.

‘Damn me,’ exclaimed Dakar. ‘What fool engineered that?’

‘Davien.’ As if bemused by the quirks of his mounte-bank colleague, Kharadmon qualified. ‘Fifteen centuries back, when he fashioned the pit into Rockfell, Davien insisted the stone of the mountain might decide one day to shrug him off. He was right to assume that anyone who braves the ascent thus far does a mage’s business here.’

Crabbing sideways across the face, Dakar was ill-inclined to argue with the Betrayer’s skewed sense of logic. He caught a post, swung onto the stair, then bit back his relief as the inimical gazes of gargoyles seemed to follow his progress hungrily. He tested the risers with suspicion. Everything else Davien had built was untrustworthy and clever with traps; if this stairway was either harmless or safe, it should be the glaring exception. Dakar almost wished he was clinging like an insect to wild rock.

Dewed with clammy fog, the Mad Prophet broke through the cloud layer. Ahead, the last sunshine glared off Rockfell’s knifepoint summit. Suspended between that pinnacle which supported heaven, and a netherworld floored with combed cotton and shaded rose and purple by the encroaching twilight, Dakar sucked in a nervous breath. Dire cold froze the hair in his nose. He coughed, which caused Asandir to beckon impatiently from the ledge where Davien’s stairway ended.

The pack by then rested at Asandir’s feet, a lump of weather-stained canvas that Dakar gave a wide berth upon his arrival. The thing might appear as innocuous as somebody’s bundled picnic, but even an apprentice’s awareness could sense the hedging sting of guard-wards from two paces away.

Asandir poised before a vertical slab of black rock, his ear pressed to its mirror-smooth polish and his palms resting flat on either side. He seemed prepared to spend motionless hours that way, while his apprentice shivered, abandoned to boredom.

A whining snap split the air.

‘Kharadmon,’ Asandir commanded, and suddenly, sharply, stepped back.

Dakar smelled ozone, then all but fell over as a bolt stark as lightning seared across the blank stone. A mapwork of convoluted spell craft flared across the face, chiselled with charged lines of runes. Lit blue by a chained might that dazzled and dwarfed him, Asandir stood unmoved, while from below, the fog moiled up in disturbed billows to hedge Rockfell round with anvil formations like thunderheads.

Though only nature responded in reaction to the proximity of energized coils of power, the likeness to the moving mists of Desh-thiere left Dakar hollow with dread. The sun had dipped low. What sky remained visible glowed aquamarine, the moon a burning disc as fey in its light as the dagger-edged fire of raw spells. But these rang in high, subliminal vibration, haloed by silver-blue veilings of disturbed fog. Then abruptly as the power had been raised, it flickered, flared violet, and faded.

Where rock had been lay a door.

Dakar gaped. ‘How did you do that?’

Asandir muttered words about physical rearrangement, and briskly hooked up his pack. A second later he vanished into the square black vault that formed the unsealed entrance to Rockfell.

Flash-blind and blinking, Dakar advanced more cautiously. Swallowed at once by the dark, he felt oppressed to the point of suffocation. But the air came and went from his lungs, unrestricted. The innards of the mountain were dry, bone-cold and smelled like metal filings and dust. The doorway at his back seemed a cube rinsed with light, as dangerously transient as a tienelle vision. ‘You didn’t happen to bring candles?’ Dakar asked wistfully.

Out of pity, Kharadmon made a light. Its spark spread through gloom to reveal a bare chamber carved on floor and walls in complex patterns and runes of guard. At the centre rested a slab, set askew to reveal a pit containing a bottomless well of blind darkness. The cobwebbed rungs of a ladder poked through, its origin swallowed in shadow.

Asandir hefted the sack with the flask and started down. Before he had done three steps, dry wood gave way beneath his boot. Slivers whispered falling through air and long seconds elapsed before their impact echoed back, proving the shaft had a bottom.

The well was dreadfully deep.

Unfazed at being poised on rotten footing over what amounted to an abyss, the sorcerer said, ‘Kharadmon? You’ll need to strengthen the ladder or Dakar will surely break his neck.’

‘I’m not going down there!’ The Mad Prophet folded his arms across his chest and obstinately planted his toes.

‘If you don’t, you’re quite likely to freeze.’ Pragmatic, Asandir waited while the rungs under his hands flared red under Kharadmon’s binding. He moved on, his hair stirred by air currents that funnelled down into the pit.

Dakar steeled himself and swung onto the ladder that dropped away into the unknown. His hands left sweatmarks on wood still warmed from enchantment. He forced himself to start down, while Kharadmon’s light travelled with him until he was encircled by stone walls. The descent seemed to go on forever. His calves quivered as overstressed muscles bore his weight. The Mad Prophet could not shake the impression that the well had been cut deeper than the roots of Rockfell mountain itself.

The jar as his foot struck the bottom almost startled him out of his skin. He looked about. The shaft ended in a five-sided cell, scrawled with entangled sigils and spiralling lattices of power that made the eyes burn and the head swim in vicious, twisty dizziness.

‘Don’t stare,’ Asandir cautioned. ‘The patterns here both dazzle and bind. You could lose your mind in this maze of wards to the point where even I can’t call you back.’

Such were the safeguards upon the chamber that the sorcerer’s warning fell dead against the air. Even the echoes were trapped. Dakar ripped his gaze away, then knuckled his eyes until they teared. ‘What was the last thing confined here?’

Kharadmon snorted in contempt. ‘You might better ask what last escaped. Everything ever shut in here eventually worked its way out.’

‘Not the iyats,’ Asandir contradicted. He ran his fingers over the walls. His touch raised uneasy vibrations in the air that riled the skin but made no sound. Green sparks danced from the contact causing Dakar to grit his teeth. Unperturbed, the sorcerer added, ‘Those were released, you’ll remember, to add havoc to Davien’s rebellion.’

‘We’re not going to sleep here,’ Dakar interrupted. He felt claustrophobic, and strongly inclined to throw up.

Asandir glanced abstractedly over one shoulder. ‘I advise you to try. You’ll feel less ill with your eyes closed, and rechecking the symmetry of these wards will likely take most of the night.’

‘You didn’t need me,’ Dakar retorted. ‘Why insist that I come?’

‘But Kharadmon told you already.’ Impatient, Asandir abandoned the intricacies of his spell-work. He turned full around and gave Dakar a regard that was testy enough to peel skin. ‘Your body needed the exercise.’

Which point incensed Dakar to black rage. He filled his lungs to shout imprecations.

No word emerged. His jaw opened, shut and opened again like a fish’s. His eyes bulged. Then, in some odd fit of difficulty that had no visible cause, his features crumpled in frustration and his knees buckled. His Fellowship master caught him before he collapsed.

Laughing, Asandir lowered the Mad Prophet’s bulk the rest of the way to the floor. ‘How timely.’

Kharadmon’s ripe chuckle answered. ‘Quite.’ His image unfurled, posed in satisfaction over Dakar. ‘He’ll sleep through the night. Good. That should leave us some peace in which to work.’

The next thing Dakar knew, Asandir was shaking him awake.

‘Get up,’ the sorcerer insisted. ‘You’re lying across space we need for the final defence ward.’

Dakar grumbled, and finally yielded to the prodding that urged him back to his feet. His bones ached from hours spent on hard and chilly stone, and his eyes felt bored through by a blast of unbearable light. He determined after a moment that the glare emanated from the centre of the pit. He blinked, squinted through hurting vision and, at the heart of the dazzle, barely made out the shadowy outline of the flask that contained the Mistwraith.

About then he noticed that his skin tingled as if drenched by a tonic, and all of his body hair had lifted. Throughout his service with Asandir, he had never witnessed such a presence of raw force. For once in his life awed to silence, he gaped.

From behind him, Asandir’s voice rose and fell in incantation. The words, Dakar noticed uneasily, were not in any language ever spoken upon the soil of Athera; and the halo of light that netted Desh-thiere’s flask was not solid, but seemed as he stared to be composed of flecked light that shuttled in convoluted, interlocking spirals that ached the eye’s attempt to follow.

Then a grip closed on his wrist and tugged him back. ‘Cover your face. At once,’ Asandir commanded. ‘Or the energy flare as Kharadmon sets the ward will leave you blind.’

Dakar began to comply, then paused. ‘Wait,’ he said on impulse. ‘Let me help.’

‘You can’t.’ Asandir’s curtness stemmed from weariness. He worked to soften his delivery as he added, ‘I can’t. The energies involved would vaporize flesh. The final binding must be sealed by Kharadmon alone.’