The Curse of the Mistwraith (80 page)

Eyes shielded, Dakar heard Asandir give his colleague word. A violent crack cut the air. Heat flashed across the pit, stinging exposed skin, and accompanied by spitting rains of sparks that left behind an acrid scent of brimstone.

‘It’s safe to look,’ Asandir said presently.

Dakar lowered his hands, to find the flask at the centre of the pit encircled by a cold blue halo. If the light was subliminally faint, its effects upon the mind were not: just standing within the ward’s proximity caused a bone-deep, aching discomfort. Whatever arcane unpleasantness the Fellowship sorcerers used to fashion their prisons, Dakar refused to know.

Asandir also seemed reluctant to endure the ward’s resonance since he started immediately up the ladder. Dakar hastened after, glad to be quit of Rockfell with its dread overtones of magic and the supremely dangerous entity left there in incarceration.

Morning sunlight washed through the opening to the outside by the time Dakar crawled off the ladder. Never so pleased to breathe in cold air in his life, he did not even mind the prickle against his skin as the icier draft that was Kharadmon flowed from the well on his heels.

‘Are you entirely clear?’ Asandir asked his discorporate colleague.

Kharadmon shot off a phrase in the old tongue that surprised Dakar to incredulity. Before the Mad Prophet could take stock and appreciate the discorporate mage’s use of expletives, Asandir said, ‘Help me drag the cover back over the well.’ He indicated the massive round slab that rested ajar across the opening.

Dakar glared at the offending rock. ‘Don’t be saying I need the exercise,’ he griped before Kharadmon could bait him further.

‘You know,’ Kharadmon observed in blithe enthusiasm, as Dakar grunted and heaved and the stone grated, and slowly gave way to brute force. ‘Be careful how you place that. I much doubt you can see round that beer gut of yours to tell if you’re going to crush your toes.’

Caught with every muscle straining and the veins in his neck about to burst, Dakar could do naught but grit his teeth. When at length the pit was covered over, he was too breathless to effect a rejoinder. His pique lasted all the way through the setting of the secondary wards. Hours passed. By the time the Fellowship mages finished raising spells and guard circles to assure permanence, the chamber floor showed no flaw to indicate the existence of any pit.

Outside, Dakar expected, fully exposed to the weather, the pair would repeat the exhaustive process until the cliff-face was impenetrable. ‘By Ath,’ he commented sourly. ‘You’ve taken precautions enough to repel Dharkaron himself. One would hope after this, that Rockfell pit would prove more secure than ever it has in the past.’

Asandir cast a jaundiced eye at his apprentice. ‘It might, you know, if we tried dark practice, and chained a slain spirit to stand as sentinel.’

‘Oh no.’ Dakar backed up a step and crashed heavily into spelled stone. ‘You’d hardly drag me up mountains for exercise if you’d wanted to make me a sacrifice.’ Nonethless, he moved his fat bulk with alacrity through the portal onto the outside ledge. While the Fellowship sorcerers resumed painstaking labour and set their final seal over the rock at the head of Davien’s stair, he remained inordinately quiet.

By noon, Rockfell Peak was secured. The trio of visitors departed, leaving behind them the Betrayer’s watching gargoyles and serried banks of clouds that drifted to the play of frigid winds. Confined the Mistwraith might be, but its toll of damages upon their world remained yet to be measured. For down in a lightless pit of rock, sealed behind fearful rings of wards, Desh-thiere’s wraiths brooded in confinement, awaiting the vengeance curse laid on two half-brothers to burgeon into bloodshed and war.

Warning

Unsettled through the days since the scrying in the dyeyard warehouse, Elaira walked the tideflats of Narms. Around her, twilight cast grey veiling over wind-ripped clouds and fine drizzle. Here the rush of incoming waves dampened the bayfront clamour of barking dogs and the hurried curses of wagoners who threaded low-slung fish-carts back from market. A stiff breeze off the water carried away the endless bickering of children and singsong cries of woodvendors and the boys who sold buckets of steamed crabs layered in straw to keep them hot. Ahead, a meandering shadow against gloom, a beggar scavenged the tidemark for cork floats or broken slats from fish crates that could be salvaged for firewood.

Elaira heard only the waves and the crying gulls who dipped and whirled, minutes away from night roosting. Troubled already in spirit, she was wearied from playing at pretence. She would not return to a meal with Morriel’s entourage at the hostel, to pick at food when she had no appetite. She refused to retire, to huddle frustrated under blankets touched dank by the salt-laden fogs that smothered Narms after dark. This one night she would resist the demands of sleep; would not close her eyes and dream again of fine-chiselled s’Ffalenn features that reproached her in aggrieved accusation.

What could not be forgiven, she had done. The repercussions could not be reversed. The Prime Circle had sealed their final decision; formal verdict would be sent out at midnight, when the lane tides ran least disturbed by static thrown off by the sun. The Prime’s decree concerning the latent danger Arithon presented to society allowed for no mitigating circumstance: his moves were to be exhaustively tracked. Wherever his intent could be hampered and dogged, Koriani would act to disadvantage him.

Elaira sidestepped a patch of seaweed thrown up in tangles on pale sand. Ahead, the beggar paused to rest on a rock, the rags that tied his hooded head flapping in the wind. She passed him by without greeting, which was unlike her, since his kind had replaced her family through early childhood.

She rounded a jumble of boulders, then picked her way over the breakwater that protected Narms harbour from the sea. Sheltered there, fishing smacks and trader galleys loomed at anchorage, or sat low on their marks, made fast to the bollards at the wharf. Deck lanterns threw greasy orange streaks across waters pocked with light rain. At the taffrail of the nearest vessel, a woman crooned a melody, her knees tucked up under a fishing tarp as she peeled vegetables for her supper. Down the docks a bent grandfather trundled a wheelbarrow of cod toward the street, while a boy and his brother mended nets. The reek of fish offal and the squabble of the gulls that dipped and dived through dank pilings checked Elaira as if she had run against a wall.

She deliberated, aware that to go forward was to tread the safer path. What she wanted more was seclusion; and a salt pool left behind by the tide that she could use to attempt forbidden scrying.

She shivered under her damp cloak. The intention that lurked at the edge of her thoughts was dangerous; foolish. Still, she turned back toward the beach.

She found herself alone with temptation. The beggar had gone, the rocks where he had perched glistening with barnacles burnished by the torchlight off the street. The bayside surf was overlaid by deeper thunder, as two stout brewer’s boys rolled tuns from an ale dray parked outside a tavern. Sailors caroused in the side alley, laughing, while the shrieks of a bawdywoman taunted them to sport their prowess in her bed. The din of workaday humanity seemed remote and without overtones of comfort. Made aware that her months in the fenlands of Korias studying herb lore had retuned her nature to prefer silence, Elaira sighed. Change had overtaken her too fast since her unlucky foray to meet Asandir. She picked a spot where the breeze blew clean off the water and sat, her head propped in her hands. She watched the incoming surf, but tonight no iyats rode the waves to refuel their energies on the forces of winds and tides.

Night fell gloomy and damp. At her feet, ruffled over in pewter-edged ripples, lay the tidepool she longed for. Torn by indecision, she wondered which of her loyalties she should suffer for: the one, to Arithon, already breached; or the other, now cruelly strained, which tied her to Koriani service through sworn bond to a spell-crystal that Morriel would certainly use to break her.

Eyes closed, her hearing awash with the seethe of salt foam, Elaira reviewed the unalterable absolutes that imprisoned her in misery. Where once she could have lightened her mood with flippant behaviour and sarcasm, now the frustrated, circling grief of knowing a man with indelible intimacy ate at her, night and day. The surcease of physical release was denied her. That one act of spirited curiosity had caused her to be culled, and now used, as Morriel’s personal instrument to map Arithon’s motivations, could neither be escaped or avoided.

But interlinked with this were other trusts acquired in her visit to Enithen Tuer’s Erdane garret.

‘Girl, you’re shaking, and not at all from the cold,’ said a kindly voice from the shadows.

Elaira started, then exclaimed aloud as a hand lightly grasped her shoulder.

The beggar had not left her, but stood, guarded from prying eyes and wind by an overhang of sea-beaten rock. His earlier appearance had deceived. Clad all in black, he wore no ornament. None of his clothing lay in tatters. What had first been mistaken for a frayed headcloth was revealed now as a raven, hunched and damp on its master’s shoulder, regarding her with eyes too wise for a bird’s.

‘Who are you?’ Elaira blurted. But before he gave answer, she knew. His eyes upon her were too still and deep to encompass any less than the vision of a Fellowship sorcerer.

A wave that was larger than most hurled and broke against the shore. Fingers of foam clawed up the rocks, then splashed back in silver lace. His voice as he addressed her held the same ageless timbre as the sea. ‘I am Traithe, sent by Sethvir to give you a message from the Fellowship.’

As Elaira moved to speak, he restrained her. Though his step was careful and lame, his hands could grip hard enough to bruise. ‘No. Say nothing. You’re aware that the wrong words could set your vows to your order in jeopardy.’

She stilled, shocked by his bluntness.

Traithe said, ‘Understand, and clearly, that my purpose here is to shield you from any such breach in your loyalty.’

Stung still by guilt-ridden thoughts, Elaira’s sensibilities fled. She wrenched off Traithe’s hold and stepped back. ‘My Prime might command my obedience. She does not own me in spirit!’

‘Well spoken.’ Traithe sat, which irritated the raven to a testy flapping of wings. He raised a scarred knuckle to soothe its breast feathers, then peered slantwise at her, chagrined as a grandfather caught in a bout of boy’s mischief. ‘Hold on to that truth, brave lady.’

Yet his affirmation of natural order could not undo vows sealed to flesh through a Koriani focus-stone. A piece of herself that Elaira was powerless to call back had been given over into Morriel’s control. Her ambivalence toward the traps that Traithe most carefully never mentioned gave rise to an outraged admission. ‘Ath’s mercy, I was six years old when the Prime Circle swore me to service. They claim, always, that power must not be given without limits. But lately, I suspect my seniors prefer their trainees young, the better to keep their talent biddable.’

Traithe reached out and touched her, a bare brush of fingers against her hand. Yet warmth flowed from the contact, and a calmness that lent her surcease to think.

Unsure his kindness did not mask warning like a glove, Elaira chose a rock and sat also. ‘Courage saved nothing two days ago.’ She laced unsteady hands around her knees, self-conscious in the sorcerer’s frank regard.

‘If you speak of Arithon, he doesn’t need any man’s saving.’ Petulant and ready to roost, the raven sidled and clipped its master a peck on the ear. Traithe called it a rude word, which prompted Elaira to smile.

‘Better.’ The sorcerer had a crinkle to his eyes that bespoke a readiness to laugh. ‘The occasion wasn’t meant to be solemn.’ He pushed his bird from his shoulder, then watched with what seemed his whole attention as it croaked indignation, and finally settled in a nook and tucked its head under one wing. ‘Let me say what I was sent for, and see if your heart doesn’t lighten.’ As Asandir had done once before to ease her nerves, Traithe bent down and made a small fire. The kindling he used was a beggar’s gleaning of broken cork-floats and bits of jetsam. Flame caught with a hiss in the dampness, and shed fine-grained haloes in the drizzle.

Oddly content to be still, Elaira wondered whether some spellward of quietude had been set along with the flames.

Traithe answered as though she had spoken. ‘What peace you feel is your own, but it may perhaps be helped by the ward of concealment placed over this space between the rocks.’ He grinned in gleeful conspiracy. ‘To your sisterhood, this fire doesn’t exist.’

Elaira said, ‘Then you know about—’

He sealed her lips fast with a finger. ‘Let me say what we know. Otherwise,’ he stopped, let his hand fall. Inscrutable as a stone in a millpond, he studied her a moment with his head cocked, then yielded before her straight strength to his impulse. ‘Otherwise, Sethvir was most plain, the misery of remorse will later drive you to use this tide pool. In saltwater that will fail to protect you from discovery, you will attempt to send warning of your sisterhood’s doings to the one of my colleagues who might listen.’

On her feet before she could react rationally, Elaira backed at bay against the rocks. Even her lips were white.

As if she had not budged, Traithe continued. ‘Which act would be treason against your Prime Senior’s directive.’ He tipped up his face, sharply and brutally blunt. ‘Unnecessary treason, brave lady,
which is why you will sit back down.
Morriel may not own you in spirit, but she does command your absolute obedience. The Fellowship can shield from her what happens by our actions, but not what you undertake in free will.’

The rush of waves through sand and stone seemed to consume all the air for the moment while Elaira poised, half on the edge of panicked flight. In the end, she sat because her legs gave out; and because Fellowship sorcerers would hardly stand back and allow the half-brothers to commit a whole kingdom to war without some emphatically sound reason that Koriani intervention of any kind might shortsightedly come to disrupt. In a croak more like the raven’s than human speech, Elaira capitulated. ‘Say your piece.’