Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts
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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