Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts
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shadow of his strength, Kharadmon etched the first seal over the wraiths to imprison them.
‘Let be,’ Luhaine chided. ‘Would you waste yourself to a mute shade?’ Since Kharadmon was ever the sort to spurn sense, he balanced his energies and joined in.
Night mist beyond the casements blazed like spilled oil to the out-flood of light from sparked power. The raised aura of Fellowship spellcraft flung off a mighty corona until the chamber keened in shared tension, and the slates in the floor hummed in stressed resonance to the flux of tempered force.
With time the lights died, leaving the lane-spark in the brazier a needle of blue light in velvet darkness. Draught through the opened shutters stirred through a faint stench of sulphur, tainted with ozone and an ashy miasma of singed dust. The wraiths’ prison rested on the dimpled slab of the tabletop, an obsidian cylinder that tapped and pinged through the stresses of natural cooling.
On the floor, wax still, limp flesh devoid of spirit, Sethvir’s body sprawled in the blood-dark puddle of his robes. The white curve of his lashes never flickered. He did not dream; his breathing was shallow and imperceptibly slow, except to the eyes of another mage.
Across heavy silence, through sorrowful, shared awareness and a stillness that presaged false peace, two discorporate Fellowship Sorcerers steeled themselves to wait. They exchanged no speech. Their fear loomed wide as sky itself. For although the wraiths lay safely contained, the spirit of their colleague was trapped also.
Inside the flask, alone against nine, Sethvir now battled for his life.
‘We cannot abandon him in there,’ Luhaine said at last in a slow, careful phrase of masked pain.
Kharadmon swirled from his place by the casement, to his colleague’s sight a moiled patch of shade that wore spirit light in flecks like fogged stars. ‘No, we can’t. The wraiths will devour his identity.’ A sigh of breeze raised frost on the book spines as he roved in restless currents through the chamber. ‘That’s what became of the people who inhabited the worlds beyond South Gate. The same tragedy would have repeated itself here, had Traithe not spared us all by checking Desh-thiere’s invasion at the outset.’
Had Luhaine still worn flesh, he would have swallowed back the coppery taste of fear. ‘You’re saying the fell mists held intent to enslave our whole world?’
‘They still could,’ Kharadmon pronounced in bleak fact. ‘Were its two sundered portions ever to be rejoined, there’s no doubt left of its strength. All Athera would be laid to waste.’ He need not repeat that the beacon spell set on the solstice had seeded the opening to admit just such a horrid possibility. Forewarned at the time of the danger, he had unwound the spell sent to call him, even exposed himself to attack in the doing. But the clean, fine signature of Fellowship power could not fully be erased without imprint.
A tracery leading back to the spell’s point of origin would linger for several centuries to be tracked. The stakes of the nightmare had widened. Now the wraiths confined at Rockfell Peak were just the bitter edge of a greater peril.
But for now future worries must defer to the weight of present crisis. Inside the sealed flask the battle still raged. Mage-sight could cross the ward boundaries to trace Sethvir’s tactics as he twisted and zigzagged like a hunted hare through the maze of the river pebble’s structure. Attached to him were the wraiths, striving ever to complete their possession.
To aid him, the two colleagues left free must build spells of frightful complexity.
In partnered concentration, they embraced the contours that comprised the black flagon, then softened the bonding of its structure. The wailing resonance of the wraiths inside dragged at the Sorcerers’ focus and struck hurtful harmonics through their auras. They stood fast. Of necessity, they ignored even the rending awareness of Sethvir’s tortured flight. In care, with infinite patience, they crooned a litany to the river pebble and coaxed its solid, round contour to meld its structure with that of the flask.
Like a teardrop in a puddle, the grained bit of granite ceded its separate nature to pool into the obsidian’s denser matrix. Kharadmon and Luhaine paused in slack silence, their rivalry stilled into listening. If luck held and Sethvir had not weakened, he could have preserved his tie to inanimate stone and followed the river pebble’s transmutation. The way had been opened for him to fly in retreat. He could attempt to sieve his beleaguered consciousness through the guard spells borrowed from Althain’s grand warding that Luhaine had affixed in the flask. The conjury itself was a welded amalgamation of Paravian magics and his own wary knitting of defences. Theory held that the pattern of the Warden’s spirit Name should be recognized, mazed as it was with the stamp of the Ilitharis Paravians’ own blessing. The great centaurs themselves had ceded the earth link to Sethvir’s care in the hour when the last of their race had abandoned their post at Althain Tower.
But fear and guessed odds made small footing for hope as the seconds sang by, and Kharadmon and Luhaine held in wait for their fellow to seize his chance.
Sethvir had no reprieve to test his hunches, no moment to hesitate and think. If his choice stood in error, the effects would become irreversible.
His first step was made unsupported and alone, with his two colleagues helpless to lend him guidance. In his passage through the coiled sigils which cross-linked to form the guard spells’ mighty seals, the Warden would hope that the parasitic wraiths would be strained away. Only then could his self-awareness emerge whole and unsullied.
If he misjudged, he could be annihilated by the countersurge of his own defences; or he might be held as the prisoner of his very tower’s fell guard spells, trapped inside a pebble and smothered for all time inside a tomb of warded slate. Worse, perhaps, and most frightening, the wraiths could seize upon some clever delusion, might turn some trick to corrupt the wards and slip by. Should this transpire, the Sorcerer who awakened would be changed from the dear colleague who had entered, an evil too ruinous to contemplate.
Distress drove Kharadmon to unwonted sympathy. ‘Sethvir is most wise and clever enough in his ways to fool even Daelion Fatemaster. An ugly truth will not deter him. He would disperse his very spirit to oblivion before ever he let such a risk walk abroad to harm Athera.’
Luhaine for once had no words. Coiled into tight worry, he maintained a tortured stillness, as if to acknowledge his colleague’s restless movement might cause him to abandon his dignity and fidget.
Hours passed without sign. Breezes off the desert funnelled through the casement, sharp with the bite of autumn frost. The unlatched shutters swung to the gusts and thumped odd tattoos on the window jambs. On a floor gritted with the shattered remains of what had been a blameless river pebble, moonlight sliced oblate patterns.
In time the new dawn masked the stars in leaden grey. The stilled form sprawled upon the chill flagstone regained a flush of rose about the nostrils. One wiry, veined hand curled closed.
‘Tea,’ Sethvir sighed in a wistful, weak whisper. ‘Kharadmon, do you think you might dredge up a spark to kindle the fire? If my memory isn’t damaged, I believe the cauldron’s filled and ready.’
The Warden of Althain was himself; two colleagues withdrew from close inspection of his aura pattern, while a fired ray of sun lit the clouds and etched a blush of leaf gold against the lichened stone of the east casement.
In response to Luhaine’s furious and silent burst of censure, Sethvir propped himself on one elbow and scrubbed at wisps of beard that had hung themselves up in his eyebrows. ‘What else could we do?’ He said in cold conclusion, ‘I couldn’t let these free wraiths come to be mewed up in Rockfell alongside Desh-thiere’s captive consciousness.’ If mishap occurred and the two halves of this monster should ever chance to recombine, there could be no end to the world’s suffering. ‘It’s all right,’ he added, then looked up and blinked, a smear of dust on his nose. Unshed tears glistened in his eyes. ‘At least through the course of a partial possession I’ve recovered true Name for these nine. It’s a pitiful start. But we now have the means to unravel the wickedness that binds them. Shall we not make an end and restore their lost path to