Warhost of Vastmark

JANNY WURTS

The Wars of Light and Shadows Volume 3

I. SECOND CONVOCATION

Sethvir of Althain soaked in his hip bath those rare times when he suffered glum spirits. Lapped like a carp in warm water, his hair frizzled over the sculptured bones of thin shoulders, he sulked with his chin in his fists while the steam whorled up through the hanks of his beard and dripped off the white combs of his brows. Misted and half-closed with melancholy, his eyes seemed to cast their brooding focus on his gnarled toes, now perched in a row on the tub’s rim.

The nails curled in neglected need of trimming.

Of more telling concern to Sethvir, Prince Arithon’s brilliant strike at Minderl Bay had still failed the wider scope of his intent. If the allied northern war host recruited to hound him had been dismantled with lightest losses, Lysaer s’Ilessid’s misled following had not awakened to perceive the stark truth: that what had destroyed their sea fleet at Werpoint had been less a bloody ploy of the Shadow Master’s than the mishandled force of Lysaer’s own gift of light, maligned by Deshthiere’s curse.

The one ship’s captain lent the insight to know differently lay slain, beset in a dingy dockside alley. The footpads who knifed him had been hired by Avenor’s Lord Commander for political expediency, Sethvir knew beyond doubt. As Arithon’s sole witness, and a man who had viewed the unalloyed directive of the Mistwraith’s geas firsthand, the seaman had been killed before he could cast any pall of public doubt upon Prince Lysaer’s judgment in defence. Remanned by a crew of less-questionable loyalty, his benighted brig would sail south with the tide for Alestron, Lysaer s’Ilessid and the pick of his officers on board.

The sorry conclusion weighed like a stone in the heart.

If Arithon had just demonstrated his fullest understanding of the curse that shackled his will, if this second encounter at Minderl Bay had increased his respect for its fearful train of ill consequence, his half-brother Lysaer owned no such searching self-awareness. Misconstrued by the gift of the s’Ilessid royal line, which bound his relentless pursuit of justice, Tysan’s lost prince remained the sad puppet of circumstance. To the root of his conscience, he stayed righteously assured that he held to honourable principles. He believed his born cause was to hunt down and eliminate a confirmed minion of evil.

Sethvir glowered into the soap-scummed surface of his bathwater, then blinked, as if for the barest, fragmentary second he had thought to see stars in the suds clinging about his knobby knees.

Stars’ idle musing sharpened into farsight. The muddled distance in the Sorcerer’s blue-green eyes snapped into sudden, sharp focus. His wet skin stabbed into gooseflesh, Sethvir bolted from his tub. Water splashed jagged stains in his abused scarlet carpet. He snatched up his robe, burrowed it over his wet head, then paused through a drawn-out, prickling shudder as dread raked through him once again.

Grazed against the limits of his awareness, beyond the world’s wind-spun cloak of living air, an event of chilling wrongness carved a line. Its fire-tailed passage jostled the harmonics of the stars into thin and jangling discord.

Sethvir took only an instant to confirm that the upset was bound to an associate Sorcerer’s Name and signature. Kharadmon of the Fellowship was at long last returning from the interdicted worlds beyond South Gate, and an immediate crisis came with him.

The Warden of Althain rushed barefoot from his personal chambers. He slapped wet footprints up the spiral stair to reach the library in the tower’s topmost chamber. Even as his hand tripped the latch and flung wide the oaken door, his cry of distress rang out to summon his disparate colleagues.

Ranged over vast distance, the call roused Luhaine from his sojourn to settle the ghosts drawn back across the veil of the mysteries by the doings of a necromancer, who then abandoned them to winnow in lost patterns over the frost-burned waste of Scarpdale.

Asandir was in Halwythwood, reconsecrating the old Paravian standing stones that held and warded the earthforce; he would ride in driving haste to reach the power focus at Caith-al-Caen, but not in time to trap the dawn sun surge for a spell transfer.

The raven which flew partnered with Traithe sailed on the air currents above Vastmark. Its master tested the fault lines in the slopes, that shepherds too poor to survive losses not pen their flocks through the winter in valleys prone to shale slides. The pair, bird and Sorcerer, were too distant from Atainia to help. No recourse existed. The sense of pending danger grew in Sethvir, sharper and more pressing by the second.

He needed the particulars of what was wrong, and quickly, but Kharadmon proved too beleaguered to send details. The door from the stairwell at Althain had barely slammed shut when Sethvir flung open the casement. Autumn wind sheared fresh chill over his soggy beard and dripping skin, crisp with the musk of dying bracken. The Sorcerer shivered again, hounded by urgency. Before he raised wards and grand conjury against disaster, he could have done with a scalding mug of tea.

The speed of events left no time. An icier vortex of air laced through the wet tails of his beard: vexed as always by the untimely nature of emergencies, Luhaine blew in on a huffed breeze of inquiry.

‘It’s Kharadmon, coming home,’ Sethvir explained. His attention stayed pinned on the white points of stars, strung between flying scraps of cloud. ‘Before you ask, he’s brought trouble along with him.’

‘That’s his born nature,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Like the dissonance in a cracked crystal, some things in life never sweeten.’

Sethvir maintained polite silence, then spoiled all pretence to dignity by gathering his draggled beard and wringing the soggy hanks like a rag. Soapy runnels slid down his wrists and dampened the rucked hems of his sleeves. While the catspaw gusts of his colleague’s irritation riffled the pages of his books, he held his face tipped skyward. Starshine imprinted the glassy surface of his eyes through long and listening minutes.

Then the last tinge of colour drained from his wizened cheeks.

Luhaine’s presence resolved into concentrated stillness. ‘Ath have mercy, what is it?’

Sethvir whirled in an agitated squall of shed droplets. ‘Wards,’ he cried, terse. ‘Two sets, concentric. We must circle all Athera for protection, then ring this tower as haven and catchpoint for a spirit under threat of possession.’

‘Kharadmon! Under siege!’ Luhaine exclaimed.

Sethvir nodded, speechless. Three steps impelled him to the table’s edge. He ploughed a clear space among his clutter of parchments. Two candlestands toppled. A tea mug rocked out into air, spell-caught before it shattered against the stone floor by Luhaine’s fussy penchant for tidiness.

Amid a pelting storm of flung papers, Sethvir set up the black iron brazier and ignited its pan, cold blue with the current of the third lane. Too pressed to trifle with marking his presence with an image, Luhaine immersed his whole being into the lane’s quickened flow, then channelled his awareness through the old energy paths that past Paravian dancers had scribed across the earth to interlink the world’s magnetic flux at each solstice. His task was made difficult by rites fallen into disuse. Everywhere the tracery was reduced to faint glimmers. Many lines were snarled, or severed by obstructions where migrant herders had unknowingly built sheep-folds, or significant trees had been cut, creating sharp breaks in continuity. Meadows long harrowed by the ploughshare’s cold iron contorted the energy flow. The powers Luhaine laced in patterns across the land resisted and sought to bleed from his grasp, to dissipate in useless bursts of static, except in convergence around Jaelot, where Arithon’s past meddling with music at the crux of a lane tide had scoured the paths to clean operancy.

Kharadmon’s straits would not wait for perfection. Forced against his grain to rely upon hurried handiwork, Luhaine was scarcely ready as Sethvir murmured, ‘Now.’

Crowded to the edge of a chair already occupied by a tipsy stack of books, Sethvir tucked his chin in cupped palms. His china-bright eyes glazed and went sightless as he plunged into the throes of deep trance.

Luhaine felt the Warden’s consciousness twine through the lane-spark in the brazier, then beyond to access the earth net. Now interlinked with the broad-scale scope of Sethvir’s specialized vision, he, too, could sense the white-orange fireball which scored the black deeps toward Athera. At firsthand, he grasped the peril drawn in from the worlds sealed past South Gate. The measure of its virulence lay beyond spoken language to express. Whatever fearsome, coiling presence had become attached in pursuit of Kharadmon, it carried a malevolence to stun thought.

Far too methodical for volatile emotion, Luhaine matched effort with Althain’s Warden and cast his whole resource into a call to raise the earth’s awareness into guard.

Not unlike the consciousness of stone, the balanced mesh of forces which comprised the disparate qualities of bedrock, and rich loam, and the fiery heartcore of magma danced to their own staid pace. Ath Creator’s living stamp upon the land owned no concept for desperate necessity. Sluggish to rouse, slower still to catalyse into change from within, the deepest dreams of the earth counted the passage of years and seasons little more than an animal might mark the singular sum of its own heartbeats. Seas and shore noted the trials of men and sorcerers less than the wild deer took stock of biting insects.

To pierce through that current of quiescence, Sethvir and Luhaine rewove the third lane’s bright forces into a chord that framed Name. Attuned to their effort, long leagues to the east, Asandir linked the hoofbeats of the horse who galloped under him into a tattoo of distress. The rhythm struck down through topsoil and stone there, to resound the full length of the fourth lane.

Hours passed before the earth heeded. More minutes, before deep-laid energies quickened in response. In paired, reckless speed, the Fellowship Sorcerers sited at Althain conjoined the roused charge of the world’s two dozen major power lanes.

They took small care to shield their efforts. Any outside mind attuned to the mysteries could not fail to overhear the cry as primal elements sparked awake to the play of meddled mystery. Koriani enchantresses reached for spell crystals to gauge the pulse of change, while mariners shot awake as the winds whined and gusted in unnatural key through their rigging. Sailors on deck cowered and gripped lucky amulets in fear, for across the broad deeps of the oceans, flared lines the blued tinge of lightning sheared beneath the foam of the wavecrests.

In Halwythwood, the grey, lichened standing stones just blessed by Asandir discharged a purple corona of wild power. Along the old roads and on the hillcrests revered in the time-lost rites of First Age ceremony, the spirit imprints of Paravians shone like wisps drawn in silver point and starlight. The bones of forsaken ruins keened in pitched tones of harmonics. An uprooted jumble of carved rock by the fired brick walls of Avenor moaned aloud, though no breeze at all combed through its exposed nooks and crannies.

At Althain Tower, as the last of the energy paths joined, Sethvir pushed erect and scrabbled through his books to find a sliver of white chalk. Within the pooled glow from the brazier, he scribed runes in parallel columns; in circles; in triangles; in counterlocked squares, the symbols of guard and of ward. He bordered the whole with a blessing of protection. Then he added the tracery which framed the tidal surge of life, renewed year to year, century to century, age to age, each thread wound and strengthened to a brilliance of diversity on the natural loom of storm, disease, and calamity.

He sketched the symbols of beginning and ending that, entwined, formed the arc of eternity. He added the patience of stone and the endurance of air, that flowed through all change without resistance; then the blind grace of trees, that reached for the light despite trials of weather and ice.

The widening scrawl of the Warden’s symbols glimmered in pale phosphor against the obsidian tabletop. His fingernails snapped sparks like the clash of flint to steel where power bled through his written tapestry. Minutes passed and stars turned. Nightfall silvered dew on the stems of wild grasses. Sethvir felt these things and weighed them as precious, while his labours tuned and channelled the ozone torrent of raw force; until his wet hair fanned dry, then raised and crackled with static, and the tower’s slate roof sang, each shingle in singular counterpoint.

‘Hurry,’ Luhaine whispered through a thundering gust that swooped in to rattle the unlatched casements. The currents poised between him and Sethvir were fast cresting to the cusp of explosion. To stay them in containment for any span of time demanded more than two Sorcerers’ paired strength. Luhaine dared not slacken his grip. If his control slipped in the slightest degree, the unbalance would trip off an elemental backlash. The rampage of spilled energy could unleash a cyclone of ruin to lash up the ire of the earth. Should natural order be cast into chaos, storms would run riot; whole strips of coastline would be torn into change. Great quakes would shake the dry land and the seas. From the volcanoes that fumed like sleeping dragons in Northstrait to the dormant cauldrons crowning the clouded peaks of the Tiriacs, the great continent itself might crack corner to corner in a seam of burst fault lines, to vent steam and boulders, or spew lava in swathes of destruction.

Sethvir dashed sweat from the tip of his nose and scribed the last flourish on a cipher. ‘Now,’ he whispered into air drawn so taut, the word seemed snapped from strung wire.

Like magma poured from a crucible, Luhaine bent the poised powers of the earth through the construct formed by Sethvir’s rune seals. The ancient stone tabletop rang out like mallet-struck iron. White chalk lines glimmered green, then blazed into light fierce enough to blast untrained sight into blindness.

Sethvir cried out, his outline immolated by a burn of wild radiance too intense for breathing flesh to encompass. He dared not succumb to the flood of bodily sensation. Every faculty he possessed fought to master the influx, then deflect its blind torrent to imprint defence wards in figured arcs across the heavens.

Outside the tower window, the sky flared a fleeting, raw orange. Then lines crossed the stars, tuned in strict mirror image from the arcane markings scribed upon the table. A spiked scent of ozone whetted the winds, and a thunderous report slammed and rumbled above the frost-rimed wastes surrounding Althain.

Then the glow of grand conjury dimmed and faded. Chalked lines of fire subsided to the dull glare of cinders, then dissipated, febrile as blown wisps of ash. Peace remained. The land spread quiet under untrammelled starlight; but to any with mage-sight to witness, the cloak of the night lay patterned across with a spidery blue tracery of guard spells.

Barefoot and rumpled in his water-stained robe, his hair a thatched nest of tangles, Sethvir of Althain regarded his handiwork and muttered a prayer to Ath that his stopgap effort was sufficient. Luhaine was too distressed to grumble recriminations. Already withdrawn from communion with the earth, he weighed the most expedient means by which the wards over Althain Tower could be realigned to aid Kharadmon in his predicament.

Scant seconds remained before the problem came to roost in their midst.

Luhaine demanded more facts. ‘I presume our colleague is beset by wraiths of the same sort and origin as the ones that grant the Mistwraith its sentience.’

Sethvir grunted an assent, his knuckles latched white in his beard. Once again, his eyes were wide open and blank as his awareness ranged outward to track the inbound progress of Kharadmon. A minute passed before he voiced the worst of all possible conclusions. ‘The creatures in pursuit are free wraiths not embodied in any shell of mist.’

Which meant a binding would be needed that was every bit as potent as the one which sealed the jasper flask prisoned inside Rockfell Pit. Luhaine asked a permission, then made a change to Althain’s outer wards that crackled the air beyond the casements. He added in acerbic disapproval, ‘Kharadmon shouldered an unspeakable risk to draw such entities to Athera.’

‘He had no choice.’ Sethvir seemed suddenly as fragile as a figure cast in porcelain as he recovered his chalk stub and scribbled a fresh round of ciphers on the windowsill. ‘Rather, the beacon spell Asandir and I sent to rescue him became the turn of ill luck to force his hand.’

The implications behind that admission were broad-scale and laced with ironies enough to seed tragedy. Wordless in his anguish, Sethvir passed on what he knew: that Kharadmon had heard every call, every thought, every entreaty dispatched from Althain Tower to urge him home. He had been unable to answer, locked as he was into conflict against hostile entities. These had been bent on his destruction from the instant he was recognized for an emissary from Athera, and a Sorcerer of the Fellowship of Seven. The wraiths cut off beyond South Gate desired to assimilate his knowledge of grand conjury for their own ends. In stealth, in patience, Kharadmon had fought to outwit them. Adversity had only reconfirmed the gravity of his quest, to unriddle the Name of the Mistwraith incarcerated back at Rockfell Peak, that its tormented spirits could be redeemed and two princes be freed from its curse.

‘That beacon held the signature map of all Athera’, Sethvir ended in a stripped whisper. ‘We used the very trees to tie its binding.’

Luhaine absorbed the ripples of wider quandary like a thunderclap. Long years in the past, at the hour of the Mistwraith’s first incursion, Traithe had sealed South Gate to close off its point of entry at hideous personal cost. Now, through the conjury sent to recall Kharadmon, the main body of the mists once thwarted from the crossing were offered another means to trace Athera. Until every tree, every sapling and seed that had lent its vibration to the homing spell had lived out its allotted span of days, a tenuous tie would remain, a ghost imprint of the mighty ward dispatched across the void to recontact those sundered worlds. The threat remained in force, that those truncated spirits once a part of Deshthiere’s autonomy might seek to rejoin their fellows still precariously sealed alive in Rockfell Pit.

‘Dharkaron’s black vengeance!’ Luhaine burst out, a shattering departure for a spirit well-known to condemn his colleagues’ oaths as a mannerless lack of imagination. The fear behind his outburst stayed unspoken, that the Fellowship’s covenant with the Paravian races might be thrown irredeemably into jeopardy.

‘Quite,’ Sethvir said in sour summary. Any outside chance of renewed conflict with the Mistwraith meant the Fellowship might need their princes’ irreplaceable talents with light and shadow once again. The scope of fresh setback staggered thought. For as long as the lives of the royal half brothers lay entangled into enmity by the curse, its ever-tightening spiral would drive them toward a final annihilating conflict. The risks would but increase over time.

The Warden of Althain bent a furrowed scowl toward his sprawl of runes and seals. ‘Let us pray that Kharadmon has brought us back answers and a Name for this terror from the gate worlds.’

Luhaine drifted in from a point poised in air beyond the window. ‘Your hope is premature.’ Ever the pessimist, he keyed a seal into power, and, with a flaring crack, a blue net of light enmeshed the tower’s high battlement. ‘First, we have to rescue the rash idiot from his latest tangle with calamity.’

A bone-chilling gust tinged with ozone flayed a sudden gap through the clouds. The wards above Althain flared purple and sealed in a white effusion of sparks. Sethvir laid down his chalk, bemused to dismay, while disturbed breezes settled, riming the windowsill next to his elbow with diamond crystals of ice.

‘Don’t act so virtuous, Luhaine,’ retorted the Fellowship spirit just returned. A peppery insouciance clipped his speech. ‘I recall the days when you did little but sit about eating muffins and leaving smears of butter on the books. To hear you pontificate now, one can’t help but feel sorry. Such windy bouts of language make a sorrowful substitute for the binges you can’t manage as a ghost.’

While Luhaine was left at flustered odds for rejoinder, Sethvir twisted in his seat to face the turbid patch of air inside his library. A pixie’s bright smile flexed his lips. ‘Welcome home to Althain Tower, Kharadmon.’

A riffle like a snort crossed the chamber. ‘I daresay you won’t think so when you see what’s tagged a ride on my coattails.’ The Sorcerer just arrived resumed in flippant phrasing at odds with his predicament. ‘I hate to be the bore to wreck the party, but don’t be startled if the earth wards you’ve set fail to stand up under trial.’