VII. PASS OF ORLAN

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The morning following Arithon's escapade at the Four Ravens, Asandir
recalled the horses from the smithy where they had been reshod, then
rousted a hung-over Dakar from the brothel that had sheltered him
through the night. Whether the Mad Prophet had been sober enough to
enjoy the doxie whose bed had warmed him appeared dubious; he sat the
paint's saddle with a pronounced list. Yet the malaise that unstrung his
balance seemed not to dampen his complaints.
    'When I pass beneath the Wheel, Dharkaron Avenger's going to seem
like an angel of mercy.' He crooked his reins in one elbow, cradled his head
and managed with well-practiced grumpiness to direct his injury toward
Asandir. 'You said we'd be in Erdane for two more days.'
    The sorcerer replied too softly to overhear; but the effect upon Dakar
was profound.
    His cheeks went white as new snow. Suddenly straight in his saddle, he
swung the paint's head and promptly spurred down the lane toward the
gates. No further protest escaped him, even when the party clattered out of
Erdane and turned eastward at a pace guaranteed to inflame his hangover.
    Lysaer for once forbore from teasing. Aware that his half-brother had
stolen out last night by himself, and disappointed not to have been asked
along, he gained no chance for tactful inquiry; Arithon's night-time outing
remained unexplained. No mention was made of the tunic which a
peculiarly wakeful Enithen Tuer had snatched off to wash before dawn.
Asandir's mood seemed preoccupied and brisk and had been so since
daybreak. Had Dakar felt inclined to be talkative he might have offered a
fellow miscreant fair warning: with a Fellowship sorcerer, silence on any
topic boded trouble.
    Yet Arithon was disinclined to worry in any case. With the mystery
behind his mind-block resolved, the cutting edge eased from his reserve.

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Left less wary than watchful now that he understood the stakes involved a
kingship, he trusted time and circumstance would show him an opening to
overset Asandir's prerogatives. Until then, he rode at his half-brother's side
and not even his restive mare diverted him from rapid-fire conversation.
Lysaer welcomed the entertainment. Since too much quiet let him brood
over the undermining losses of his banishment, he fielded Arithon's quips
in a spirited enthusiasm that outlasted interruptions by fast-riding
couriers and packed farm-drays, and once, a dusty band of cattle whose
herd-boys yipped and goaded their charges to market.
    Then, as with West End, the farmlands thinned and ended. One hard
day's travel beyond Erdane the way became wild and untenanted. The
scrublands of Karmak gave rise to forested downs laced with streamlets.
The mist seemed alive with the rush of running water and the air keen and
brittle with coming snow. More than once, the party started deer from the
thickets. If the bucks were royally antlered, their incoming winter coats
were fiat and lacking gloss; even after summer's forage, the does were sadly
thin.
The mist's blighted legacy afflicted more than creatures in the wild.
After nightfall, perhaps due to the chill, Asandir relented and engaged a
room at a run-down wayside tavern that in better times had been a hospice
tended by Ath's initiates.
  'What became of them.~' Lysaer asked.
    'What happens to any order of belief when its connection to the
mysteries becomes sullied?' Asandir chose not to entrust his tall stallion
to the ill-kempt groom, but attended to his saddle girths himself. 'Desh-
thiere's darkness disrupted more than sunlight on this world. The link that
preserved was lost along with the Riathan Paravians.'
    The pent-back sorrow in his statement did not invite further inquiry;
and if the carved gates at the innyard were still intact, the beautiful,
patterned sigils of ward had lost any power to guard. The tavern's musty
attic proved to be riddied with iyats, which perhaps explained the dearth of
clientele.
    By the time the sorcerer banished the pests the hour had grown late;
the commonroom with its great blackened beams stood lamentably
empty. While here the accents of outland strangers did not provoke
hostilities, still the stooped old innkeeper took care not to turn his back.
He served his odd guests in silence, while his wife stayed hidden in the
kitchen.
    The fare was bland and too greasy; Lysaer left his plate barely
touched. Arithon had seen worse on a ship's deck. After sighs and a
martyred show of eye-rolling, Dakar righteously forwent ale for mulled
cider and a bowl of the inn's insipid stew. The bread had no weevils that
he could see, so he ate it, and Lysaer's portion, too. Then he stalked
from his emptied bowls to a bed that he swore would have lice and
mildew in the blankets.

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    This failed to secure him permission to retire in the hayloft. Perhaps as a
precaution, Asandir sat all night in the hallway, his back against the door
panel.
    'Unforgiving as a reformed priest,' Dakar commiserated to Arithon; yet
whether the sorcerer stood vigil to curb the excesses of his apprentice or to
curtail further outings by the Master of Shadow, or whether he simply
wished space for clear thought, the Mad Prophet was too wise to ask. He
flopped crosswise on a mattress of dusty ticking and his chain reaction of
sneezes changed into snores that would have done credit to a hibernating
bear.
    Busy scooping ice from the enamelled ewer of wash-water, and striving
to rise above low spirits, Lysaer regarded the sleeping prophet with a mix of
laughter and distaste. 'If he weren't apprenticed to a sorcerer he would have
made a splendid royal fool.'
    'What a curse to lay on a king,' Arithon observed from the comer where,
stripped down to his hose, he spread out his blankets on bare floor. A
cockroach scurried up from a crack near his foot; he reacted fast enough to
crush it, changed his mind and let it race to safety under the baseboard.
'Not mentioning that every princess within reach would have her bottom
pinched to bruises.'
    Lysaer splashed frigid water on his face, gasped and groped for his shirt,
that being the nearest cloth at hand; the innkeeper was too stingy to
provide towels. The prince charred his half-brother, 'I'd say that upbringing
by mages left you cynical.'
    By now half-muffled under bedclothes, Arithon said in startled serious-
ness, 'Of course not.'
    Lysaer rested his chin on his fists and his damply crumpled shirt.
Statesman enough to guess that the meat of the matter sprang from
Arithon's ilbstarred heirship of Karthan, and not eased that the thrust of
s'Ffalenn wiles now bent toward contention with Asandir, he gently
shifted the subject. 'Well, the loss of your roots doesn't bother you much.'
    One corner of Arithon's mouth twitched. After a moment, the expres-
sion resolved to a smile. 'If it takes sharing confidences to prove that you're
wrong, there was one young maid. I was never betrothed, as you were.
Sithaer, I barely so much as kissed her. I think she was as frightened of my
shadows as I was of telling her my feelings.'
    'Perhaps you'll find your way back to her.' The wind whined mournfully
through the cracks in the shutters and a draft stole through the small room;
touched by the chill, Lysaer shrugged. 'At least, we could ask Asandir to
return us to Dascen Elur once we've defeated the Mistwraith.'
    'No.' Arithon rolled over, his face turned unreadably to the wall.
'Depend on the fact that he won't.'
    'You found out something in Erdane, didn't you,' Lysaer said. But his
accusation dangled unanswered. Rebuffed and alone with his thoughts,
and hating the fate that left him closeted at the whim of a sorcerer in the

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fusty lodgings of a second rate roadside tavern, he shook out his damp shirt
and blew out the candle for the night.

Two days later the riders in Asandir's party reached Standing Gate, a rock
formation that spanned the road in a lopsided natural arch. Centaurs in past
ages had carved the flanking columns into likenesses of the twins who
founded their royal dynasty. Since before the memory of man the granite had
resisted erosion: the Kings Halmein and Adon reared yet over the highway,
their massive, majestic forelegs upraised in the mist and their beards and
maned backs stained the verdigris of old bronze with blooms of lichen.
    Mortal riders could not pass beneath their shadow without experiencing a
chill of profound awe. Here the footfalls of the horses seemed to resound
with the echoes of another age, when the earth was fresh with splendour and
Pararians nurtured the mysteries. Standing Gate marked the upward ascent
to the high valley pass of Orlan, sole access through the Thaldein mountains
to Atainia and lands to the east.
    But even under the frosts of coming winter, in the years since the fall of the
high kings travellers who fared through Standing Gate never passed unob-
served.
    Asandir's party proved no exception, as Arithon discovered in a pause to
water his mare on the bank of a fast-flowing creek. Muffled against the stiff
breeze, he sat his saddle with both stirrups dropped and his reins slipped
loosely through his fingers. Suddenly the dun flung her head up. Her rider did
not see what had startled her; the woolien hood of his cloak masked his
peripheral vision as she snapped sideways and wheeled. Stalled from bolting
by an expert play on the reins, the mare crab-stepped, stopped and blew
noisily. Her sable-edged ears pricked toward a stand of scrub pine that
rattled and tossed in the gusts.
 Nothing moved that did not appear to belong there.
    Yet when Arithon urged the mare on she stamped and rigidly resisted.
Warned by her keener senses, he recovered his stirrups and stroked her neck
in pretence of coaxing her away; at the same time he centred his mind and
cast an enchanter's awareness over the thicket.
    A man crouched there, motionless, clad in jerkin and leggings of sewn
wolfskin. Weather had roughened his face beyond his years and his ruddy
hair had tangled from the wind. The consciousness Arithon touched held a
predator's leashed aggression paired with tempered steel: a matched set of
long knives and a javelin with a braided leather grip.
    Although to face away from the thicket as if no armed man watched his
back was a most unwelcome exercise, Arithon pressed his mare forward in
earnest. The instant the rocky footing allowed a faster pace, he trotted his
horse and caught up with the others.
    Dakar regarded him sl antwise as the dun overtook his paint. 'How was the
assignation? Or did you dawdle to swim?'

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    'Neither.' Arithon returned a grin of purest malice. 'Remind me to
recommend you as chaperone for some jealous pervert's catamite.'
    He ignored the Mad Prophet's thunderous scowl and disturbed Asandir's
preoccupied silence. 'We're being watched.'
    The sorcerer's gaze stayed trained ahead, as if he saw beyond the misty
road which wound upward between steepening rocky outcrops. 'That's not
surprising.'
    Wise to the subtleties of mages, Arithon withheld unwelcome ques-
tions; presently the sorcerer's steely eyes turned from whatever inward
landscape he had been contemplating. 'This is the townsmen's most
dreaded stretch of highway. The clans that ruled Camris before the
rebellion make their stand here. If we were a caravan bearing metals or
clothgoods we would require an armed escort. Not being town-born, our
party has little to fear.'
    'The Camris clans were subject to the high king of Tysan?' Arithon
asked.
    Asandir returned an absent glance. 'The old earls of Erdane swore fealty.
Their descendants will not have forgotten.'
    Unfooled by the sorcerer's apparent inattention, Arithon reined in his
mare. As she curvetted and recovered stride by the shoulder of Lysaer's
chestnut, the green eyes of her rider showed a glint of veiled speculation.
Covered by the clang of hooves on cleared rock, he said, 'We're going to see
action in the pass.'
    Lysaer rubbed a nose nipped scarlet by the chill, his expression turned
gravely merry. 'Then someone better tell Dakar to tighten his saddle girth,
or the first quick move his paint makes will tumble him over on the rocks.'
    'I heard that,' interjected the Mad Prophet. He flapped his elbows, his
reins and his heels, and contrived to overtake the half-brothers without
mishap. To Lysaer he said, 'Let's be sporting and wager. I say my saddle
stays put with no help from buckles, and you'll kiss the dirt before I do.'
Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. 'And one thing further -
there won't be any trouble in the pass.'
    'Don't answer,' said Arithon to his half-brother. 'Not unless you fancy
pulling cockle burrs from your saddle fleeces.'
    'That's unfair,' Dakar retorted, injured. 'I only cheat when the odds are
hard against me.'
    'My point precisely.' Arithon ducked the swing the Mad Prophet pitched
in his direction, then sidled his mount safely clear as the paint's saddle slid
around her barrel and disgorged her fat rider in an ignominious heap on the
trail.
    By the time the commotion settled and Dakar had righted the paint's
maladjusted tack, fiurries eddied around the rocks. The snowfall thickened
rapidly. Within minutes all but the nearest landmarks became buried in
whirlwinds of white. The storm that had threatened through the past day
and a half closed over the mountains, whipped in by a dismal north wind.

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    The riders continued over ever-steepening terrain. Bothered by
Arithon's mention of trouble, Lysaer urged his horse past a stand of
boulders to find opening to speak with Asandir.
'When we reach the next town, might I sell my jewels to buy a sword?'
The sorcerer returned a look like blank glass, his cragged brow sprinkled
with settled snow. 'We'll cross no more towns before arrival at Althain
Tower.'
    More forthright than his half-brother, Lysaer persevered. 'Perhaps we
could find a tavern keeper with a spare blade available for purchase then.'
    Asandir's vagueness crystallized to piercing irritation. 'When you have
need of a weapon, you shall be given one.'
    The sorcerer urged his mount on with speed. Concerned lest the road
became mired too deeply for travel, he allowed no stop until dusk, and then
only for the barest necessities. The riders fed their horses and swallowed a
hasty meal. Sent out to assess conditions, Lysaer returned to report that
even should the blizzard slacken, the gusts had increased; drifting might
render the mountains impassable by daybreak.
    'We'll be through the pass before then,' Asandir stated flatly. Despite
outspoken resentment from Dakar, the sorcerer quenched the fire and
ordered the horses resaddled.
    The riders pressed eastward through a long and miserable night. All but
blind in the blizzard, they made tortuous headway through the dark. The
road narrowed to a trail hedged by knife*edged promontories and sheer
drops, each dip and ditch and gully smoothed innocently over by drifts.
Horses floundered through heavy footing or clattered perilously across
ice-sheened rock. The winds buffeted all the while with heavy, relentless
ferocity. Manes and cloaks became mantied in ice. The driving sting of
snow crystals needled any exposed patch of flesh and hands and feet ached
from the penetrating cold.
    The horses forded the icy current of the Valendale and emerged, dusted
with hoarfrost from spume thrown off by the waterfalls. In times before the
Mistwraith, the cascades could be seen falling like ribbons of liquid
starlight as the feed springs of hundreds of freshets tumbled over clefts into
the gorge.
    Daybreak saw the riders deep into the pass of Orlan. By then the snowfall
had eased, but Desh-thiere's mists sheathed the saw-toothed ridges and the
wind still cut like a sword. The riders traversed the high notches
submerged in whipping snow-devils as gusts stripped the black rock of
the Thaldeins and harried across a desertscape of drifts.
    At times visibility closed until only the mage-trained could maintain
sure sense of direction. Asandir and Arithon broke trail by turns, relieved
on occasion by Dakar; yet despite the cold and the rough, floundering gait
of his horse through the snow, the Mad Prophet unreliably tended to fall
asleep in his saddle. Since a rider who blundered over a precipice was
unlikely to be found before the thaws, and Asandir stayed wrapped in his

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silences, the chance to take fate by the horns became too tempting for
Arithon to resist.
    He chose his moment to volunteer, then pressed his dun to the fore.
Throughout the next hour he drew gradually ahead, until a lead of fifty paces
separated him from the others.
    Here, at the storm-choked heart of the pass, the road dropped sheer on the
north side, cliffs of trackless granite fallen away into a gulf of impenetrable
mist; south, escarpments towered upward to summits buried in storm. The
drifts lay chest-deep and packed into layers by the gusts. Curtained in wind-
whirled snow, Arithon spoke gently to his mare as she shouldered tiredly
ahead. His deadened hands gave rein as she stumbled; he balanced her,
coaxed her forward with the promise of shelter and bran as she clawed
toward a scoured expanse of rock. Stung by a gust that watered his eyes,
Arithon ducked his face behind his hood just as the mare struck out off
packed footing. Her legs skated wildly. Pitched against her neck as she
scrambled, Arithon kicked free of the stirrups and dismounted. He flung his
cloak over her steaming back and freed his dagger. When the mare steadied
he lifted a foreleg and chipped out the ice ball that had compacted in the
hollow of her hoof. The relentless snows had long since scoured away the
preventative smear of grease applied on the banks of the ford.
    When a glance backward showed the others halted to tend their own
mounts similarly, Arithon straightened. Hopeful the barbarians were still
watching, he hooked the dun's reins and led her off without troubling to dust
the accumulated snow from his shoulders. His jerkin had soaked through in
any case, with his cloak left draped across the flanks of his mount. The mare
was dangerously weary and chilled, and if her reserves became spent, the
pass offered no shelter.
    Arithon crossed the cleared patch, battered by blasts of driven ice. Beyond,
where the gale's direct force was cut by an overhanging rock spur, the drifts
lay piled and deep. The mare sank to her brisket and floundered to an
uncertain halt.
    While the weather continued to howl outside this one pocket of stillness,
a voice called challenge from above.
    'Don't move.' The accents were crisp, commanding, and by town stand-
ards, purely barbarian. 'Make one sound and you'll gain a dead horse.'
     The dun snorted hot-headed alarm. Grasping for advantage in mired
 footing, Arithon dug his knuckles in her ribs. As she shied face-about toward
 the cliff, he snatched the cloak from her flank, cracked the cloth to fan her
 alarm, then let the force of her spin fling him sideways. The mare was a fast-
 moving target when the barbarian made good his threat. An arrow shot from
 a niche overhead nicked a gash across her shoulder, then buried with a hiss in
 rucked snow.
     The sound and the sting undid the dun. She bolted in panic, her gallop
 striking sparks from exposed stone as herd instinct impelled her to
 backtrack. She hit the last expanse of drifts in a white explosion of

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snow-clods, then disappeared completely as a gust roared like smoke across
the trail.
    Sheltered under cover of the eddies, Arithon dropped his cloak, drew
Alithiel and flattened his back against the underhang. The wind lulled.
Tumbling snow winnowed and settled to unveil chaos as the mare charged
through the oncoming riders. Her loose reins looped the nose of the chestnut
and spun him plunging in a spraddle-legged stagger. Lysaer kept his seat
through skilled horsemanship, but could not avoid collision with Asandir's
black. Both mounts floundered sideways. Nose to tail just behind, the paint
and the pack pony rocketed back on their hocks. Pans clanged and a poorly-
tied tent flapped loose. The pony ripped off a buck that scared the paint, and
caught sound asleep in the scramble, Dakar toppled head-first into a
snowdrift. He flopped back upright shouting epithets referring to bitch-bred
donkeys; while bearing their food*stores and necessities, the pack-pony
joined the paint and the dun in headlong stampede down the trail.
    Arithon seized the moment while the others were delayed and took swift
stock of his surroundings. In a cranny above his sheltered hollow he caught
his first glimpse of his attacker: a gloved hand, a sleeve trimmed in wolf-fur
and the dangerously levelled tip of a deer-arrow, the broad, four-bladed sort
designed to rip and kill by internal bleeding. Arithon repressed a shiver
through a moment of furious reassessment. Chance had favoured him: his
horse had escaped without worse damage than a scratch. But if his spurious
ploy was not to bring disaster, he would have to do something about Lysaer.
Like the spirited dun, the prince had too much character to meet any threat
with complacency.
    The drawn broadhead abruptly changed angle; Arithon jammed himself
tight to the rock as the archer's torso momentarily reared against the sky.
    The man wore leather and undyed wolf pelts. Hair spiked with frost
fringed the rim of his brindled cap and an impressive breadth of shoulders
matched the recurve bow held poised at the rim of the abutment. Motion-
less, afraid to exhale lest the plume of his breath disclose his position,
Arithon grinned outright as his adversary took painstaking aim down the
defile.
    'Move away from the rocks!' the archer called. 'I have you covered.' The
moan of a rising gust drove him to urgency. 'Move out! Now!'
    The wind peaked. Snow sheeted in a blanketing shower and the barbarian
fired blind. As the shaft slashed through his discarded cloak, Arithon scaled
the rockface, sobered by discovery that clansmen balked at killing not at all.
He kicked through a cleft and sought the lair of the bowman before his
reckless ploy had time to backfire.
    The gust passed and the air cleared. As the archer leaned out to account for
his hit, the Master stalked, his footfalls silenced by snow.
    The archer discovered his error, cursed and whirled to cover his back. He
caught his erstwhile quarry in the act of a counter-ambush. Unfazed by
surprise and fast for his bulk, he nocked another arrow. Arithon's thrown

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dagger sliced his bowstring in mid-draw. The bow cracked straight in
backlash. Snapped around by a severed end of cordage, the arrow raked the
clansman's wrist.
    'Fiends!' the scout cursed. He disentangled his arm from his disabled
recurve, not quite soon enough. Arithon closed his final stride and poised
Alithiel for a fatal thrust through the throat.
    Brown eyes met green through a tigerish instant of assessment. Though
larger by a head and doubly muscled, the barbarian chose not to risk a grab
for his dagger; the blade at his neck was too nervelessly steady.
    'Try not to be foolish,' Arithon said. He looked up at his bulkier
adversary with an expression implacably shuttered. 'By the love of the
mother who bore you, I urge you to think. Ask why I would do a thing, then
forfeit all I had gained.' Slowly, deliberately, he turned his blade and
dropped it point downward between the cross-laced boots of his captive.
    Steel sliced through snow and stood quivering, the dark metal with its
striking silver tracery the dangerous invitation to a riddle. The clansman
bridled fury with an effort. A moment passed, filled by the howl of wind
and the wet swirl of snow, and the slow drip of blood from the fingers of a
weapon-calloused hand. The smoke-dark steel in the drift stayed un-
touched amid gathering spatters of scarlet. Then, as if nothing untoward
had just happened, the barbarian's lips twisted into a vexed and humour-
less smile. 'Move and you die,' he told Arithon. 'Behind you stand six of my
companions, every one of them armed.'
    Arithon felt a prick at his lower spine. At bay on the point of a javelin, his
complacency remained unshaken. 'I'm required to surrender twice?'
    His unforced clarity of speech caused a stir through the band that had
trapped him.
 The bowman alone stayed unmoved. 'Take the upstart,' he snapped.
    'Grithen, you're wrong,' somebody protested~ the voice sounded female.
'This catch is certainly no townsman.'
    'You say?' The red-headed ringleader swore. 'Do you see clan identifica-
tion anywhere on this bastard? Accents can be faked. If this man were
clan-born but in league with the mayors, he'd know better than to leave
town walls.'
    Arithon looked at Grithen, calm through an uncomfortable blast of
wind. 'And if I am neither?' His indecipherable expression stayed with
him. 'What then?'
    'Well, whoever values your foolhardy hide will pay us a bountiful
ransom.' Grithen signalled left-handedly and this time, his henchmen
responded.
    Anthon found himself pitched forward into the snow. Hands searched
his person for weapons, found none and pinioned with a thoroughness that
hurt. Arithon twisted his head sideways. 'Furies of Sithaer!' he exclaimed
in derisive and blistering consternation. 'Had t wanted a fight, don't you
think I'd have knifed something more than a bowstring?'

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    'Then why trouble with decoy and ambush in the first place?' Wolfishly
contentious, Grithen exacted payment for the shame of his earlier
misjudgement. 'Bind him.'
    Jerked to his feet, Arithon watched with a sailor's appreciation as the
scouts cut their rawhide laces and expertly tied up his wrists. Then he
averted his gaze, spat blood from a cut lip and endured an ignominious
interval while more cords were looped tight around his ankles. 'The heart
of the dilemma,' he conceded to Grithen in a final, acid afterthought. 'Did I
act out of purpose or folly? You'd better figure out which, and quickly.'
    Down the trail, Asandir's party had successfully recovered their strays;
they were starting back up the pass with obvious urgency and concern, and
though no one appeared to watch them, their progress was covertly
marked.
    'Suppose I had a companion too prideful to submit to a threat.' Arithon
looked keenly at his captor, who was frowning and flicking blood from his
leathers. 'Say my friend had no fear of danger and he forced you to harm
him to make your capture. That might be a pity. His skin is pricelessly
valuable.'
    Grithen whistled and shot a triumphant glance at his henchmen, one of
whom was indeed a scarred and grim-faced woman. Then his leonine beard
parted in a grin of forthright appreciation. 'Which one is he? I assure you,
we'll handle him as delicately as a flower.'
    Arithon raised his brows. 'Flower he isn't, but don't worry. If he doesn't
co-operate and surrender, my life will surely be forfeit.'
    Grithen caught up the hilt of Arithon's relinquished blade and tested the
balance, his smile turned suddenly corrosive. 'You're a boy-lover,' he
concluded in disgust. 'That's why you gave yourself up. To protect your
beloved.'
    'By Dharkaron,' Arithon murmured, 'how you'll wish that was true.' He
showed no rancour at the insult; and at long last his barbarian captor saw
past his hostage's wooden expression. The wretch he ordered manhandled
and tied and dragged toward the edge of the outcrop was desperately
struggling not to laugh.
    'Mad,' Grithen concluded under his breath. He traced the sword's edge
with a fingertip and flinched as the steel nicked flesh. Uneasy, but too
rabidly committed for retreat, he whistled the call of the mountain hawk
and alerted the band still in hiding to initiate the next stage of his ambush.

The dun mare shied back, snorting over the jingle of bit rings and gear as
the riders approached the promontory where their companion had lately
come to grief.
    'Whoa,' Lysaer soothed gently. Astride his disgruntled chestnut and
leading his half-brother's mount by the bridle, he slacked rein as the mare
jibbed backward. 'Whoa now.' The patience in his voice overlaid a worry

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that burned his thoughts to white rage. Obstinate the Master of Shadow
might be, and most times maddeningly reticent; yet as Lysaer combed
through wind-whipped snow for a man perhaps fallen and injured, he did
not dwell on past crimes or piracy. However cross-grained, no matter how
secretive or odd a childhood among mages had made him, Anthon's
motives before exile had likely not been founded in malice.
    He was kin, and the only other in this mist-cursed world who recalled
that Lysaer had been born a prince.
    The mare shied again, hauling the chestnut a half-pace sidewards. Fixed
and diligent in his search, Lysaer kept his seat out of reflex. He swept the
grey rocks and the trampled spread of drifts and finally sighted the cloak,
crumpled in a shallow depression, and pinned by the black shaft of an
arrow. His breath locked in his throat. The dun had not come by the gash
on her shoulder through mishap: now he had proof.
    Tautly controlled as a clock spring, Lysaer looped the dun's lead through
a ring on his saddle and addressed Asandir crisply. 'Arithon suspected
trouble in these mountains. Why?'
    Before the sorcerer gave answer, shouts cut the misty pass. The
abutments came alive with archers.
    'Halt!' called a bearded ruffian from the cliff-top. 'Dismount and throw
down your arms!'
    Lysaer spun in his stirrups, his bearing of command unthinking and
wrath like torchflame in his eyes. 'What have you done with my half-
brother?'
    'Shot a hole in his cloak, as you see.' Accustomed to arrogance from the
mercenaries hired to guard caravans, the barbarian dared an insolent grin.
'If you're minded to protest, I can add to that.'
    He rapped orders to someone in position over his head. There followed a
flurry of activity and a bundle appeared, suspended over the cliff face by a
swinging length of rope. As the wind lulled and the snow settled to clear
the view, Lysaer recognized Arithon, bound hand and foot and suspended
face-first over a drop that vanished straight down into mist. The brutes had
gagged his mouth.
    Lysaer forgot he no longer held royal authority. Very pale, but with
unassailable dignity, he accosted the raiders on the ridge. 'Lend me a blade.
For the sake of the life you threaten, I'll set honour above cowardly
extortion and offer trial by single combat as settlement.'
    'How very touching!' The barbarian ringleader raised up a dark-bladed
weapon, unmistakably Arithon's Alithiel, and set the sharpened edge
against the hanging cord. One ply gave way, loud as a slap in the silence.
'You mistake us for our ancestors, who perhaps once affected such
scruples. But as long as mayors rule there are no fair fights in this pass. Who
will hit ground first, you?' The ruffian dismissed Lysaer and dipped the
sword toward the hostage who dangled without struggle over the abyss. 'Or
this one, who provoked us by drawing first blood?'

157


    'Would that Arithon had done worse!' Lysaer cried back in indignation.
'Unprincipled mongrel pack of thieves! Had I an honour-guard with me, I'd
see the last of you put to the sword!'
    A hand restrained his arm, Asandir's, restoring Lysaer to the shattering
recollection that his inheritance was forever lost; in cold fact he owned
nothing but a poignard to manage even token self-defence.
    'Dismount as they wish, and quickly.' The sorcerer did so himself, while
more barbarians armed with javelins closed in a ring from the cliffside.
    St~ff with wounded pride, and galled enough to murder for the brutality
which had befallen his half-brother, Lysaer watched in seething compli-
ance as Asandir threw the reins of his black to his apprentice and
confronted the cordon of weapon-points.
 'Who leads this party?' the sorcerer demanded.
    'I'll ask the questions, greybeard,' said the red-bearded young spokesman
who descended in a leap from the outcrop. Cocksure, even ruthless with
contempt, he strode through the circle of his companions.
    'Ask then,' Asandir invited in silken politeness. 'But take care, young
man. You might gain other than you bargain for.'
    'You overstep your value, I think,' the barbarian said, while the wind
parted the furs of his jerkin and cap and spun the fox-tail trappings on his
belt. 'The advice of old men is widespread as the mist and as easily
ignored.' He gestured a bloodied fist at the hostage strung over the
mountainside. 'For his life, and yours, some grandchild or relative had
better come up with a ransom.'
    'It's not gold you want.' Asandir surveyed the barbarian from his red-
splashed boots to the crown of his wolf-pelt cap. 'For your sake, you should
have heeded the wisdom of your elders! Vengefulness has lured you into
folly.'
    The raid leader drew a fast breath. He found no words. The sorcerer
pinned him with a regard like deathless frost, then killed off refutation
with a command. 'Lysaer, come forward and remove your hood.'
    The barbarian gave way to blind outrage. 'The next man who speaks or
moves will wind up butchered on my signal!'
    fNot so easily,' rebutted the one who stepped forth, a figure muffled in
ordinary wool, whose fingers bore neither ring nor ornament as he slipped
off his gloves and raised his hands; but a man so unconsciously sure of his
position that every clansman present paused to stare.
    Dark cloth slipped back to reveal honey-gold hair, blue eyes still glacial
with fury and features that reflected a bloodline not seen in Camris for
centuries, but recognizable to every clan along the Valendale.
    'S'Ilessid!' exclaimed the scar-faced woman at the fore. 'By Ath, he's
royal, and who else could be his spokesman but the Kingmaker himself,
Asandir?'
    Jolted as if struck, Lysaer saw the sorcerer return the barest nod. 'At least
one among you recalls tradition. I bring you Prince Lysaer, Teir's'Ilessid,

I58


scion of the high kings of Tysan, and by unbroken line of descent your
liege lord.'
    The snow seemed suddenly too white, the air too painfully thin and
.cold to breathe; stunned by the impact of astonishment, Lysaer stood as if
paralysed.
    The raid leader went from ruddy to waxen pale. First to react, he
stepped back, undermined by horrified, weak-kneed humility. 'Merciful
Ath, how was I to know?' He set Arithon's sword point-down in the snow
at Lysaer's feet and dropped to his knees. 'My liege,' he said in strangled
apology. 'I place myself and my companions at your mercy.'
    'At last you recall the manners of your forefathers, Grithen, son of
Tane.' Asandir's cool regard passed over the barbarian to encompass the
shocked ragged circle of aggressors as bows and javelins were lowered,
then let fall with a clatter onto the trail; movement followed. All the
scouts in the company prostrated themselves before their prince until
only the sorcerer, Dakar and a stunned-speechless Lysaer remained
standing.
    For half a dozen heartbeats nothing stirred on the exposed spine of the
ridge but swirls of gale-whipped snow. The revealed heir to Tysan's high
kingship kept his feet and his bearing only through unbending royal
pride.
    Then, encouraged by a smile from Asandir, the reflex of command
reasserted; the prince raised a voice of stinging authority. 'Restore my
half- brother to firm ground and set him free.'
    A pair of scouts scrambled to their feet, sped by the mention that the
captive they had manhandled was royal also. Lysaer showed their con-
sternation little mercy, but swept up Arithon's sword. 'You,' he said
coldly. He touched the naked blade against the nape of Grithen's neck.
'Mayors might rule in Erdane, but honour shall not be forgotten. Remain
on your knees until my half-brother is returned safely to my side. Then,
since anger might bias my fair opinion, I leave your fate in the hands of
Asandir.'
    'That won't be necessary,' the sorcerer interjected. 'The Fellowship of
Seven pass no judgement upon men, but Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, will
properly perform this office. She is qualified, having dispensed the king's
justice in the absence of her liege most ably through the last two decades.'
    Chilled through his leggings by melted ice, and shamed by the steel
which revoked his last vestige of dignity, Grithen submitted without a
whimper: if the s'Ilessid prince was displeased by the rashness of his
scouts, Maenalle was going to be mortified. Her verdict was certain to be
ruinous, and no comfort could be gained from the fact that Lord Tashan,
clan elder and Earl of Taerlin, had opposed the attack from the start. No
doubt the old fox had recognized a true sorcerer, Grithen thought in
despair; word of Asandir's party had perhaps crossed the passes already.
 Stilled with dread, acutely suffering from cramped muscles, Grithen

159


silently cursed his sour luck. Given Maenalle's hard nature, he would not
be the least bit surprised if he became disbarred from his inheritance as a
result of this one ill-favoured raid.

160


An Arrival

Despite Asandir's insistence that Grithen not send ahead with the news of
Prince Lysaer's arrival, his party with its escort of clan scouts was greeted
at the head of the valley by no less than Maenalle herself, companioned by
a ceremonial guard of outriders.
    With the storm past and the cloud cover thinned, the mists of Desh-
thiere prevailed still; the vale beyond the passes lay enshrouded in
featureless gloom. Warned by the clear call of a horn, then by the dimmed
flash of gold trappings, Grithen groaned in pained apprehension. Lord
Tashan had indeed roused the camp, for no less than a Fellowship sorcerer
could get Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, out of hunting leathers and into
anything resembling formal dress.
    A companion jeered in commiseration. 'Who would have guessed the old
earl could still skip on his shanks like a lizard?'
    The young lord responsible for the disaster in the pass was not the only
one taken aback. At the head of the column beside Asandir, the freshly
pronounced heir to thd throne of Tysan hid confusion behind princely
decorum as he confronted the glittering guard from the outpost.
    'The woman who wears the circlet and the tabard with your colours is
Maenalle,' Asandir said quickly. 'She is Steward of the Realm, last heir to a
very ancient title. She and her forbears have safeguarded Tysan's heritage
in the absence of the king through the years since the rebellion. Let me
speak to her first. Then you shall greet her with due respect, for all that she
rules she has held in your name.'
    The travel-worn arrivals drew rein before the ranks of clan outriders.
This company wore no furs, but livery of royal blue velvet and swordbelts
beaded with gold. The bridles of their matched bay coursers were gilt also
and polished to smart perfection. The woman at the fore was boyishly
slim, mounted side-saddle and fidgeting with impatience. Her habit was

161


sable, her fur-trimmed shoulders and slender waist engulfed by a tabard
bearing the gold star blazon of Tysan. In her hand she carried a sprig of briar,
and her greying, short-cropped hair was tucked back under a silver fillet. She
rode to meet Asandir, drew rein as he dismounted, then laughed a merry
welcome as he raised his hands and swung her down.
    A servant took her horse and the sorcerer's as she raised tawny eyes and
offered greeting. 'Welcome to Camris, Asandir of the Fellowship.' Her voice
was clear as a sprite's and younger than her face, which wore the years well
on prominent cheekbones. 'You do us high honour, but thank Ath, not often
enough for me to grow accustomed to wearing skirts!'
    From her hands, Asandir accepted the thorn-branch that symbolized the
centuries of bitter exile. A smile touched his eyes. Smoothly as a drawn
breath he engaged his arts. Green suffused the stem between his fingers. A
burst of new leaves unfurled from the barren sprig, followed by a bud, then
the wine-deep flush of a flawless summer rose.
    While the company looked on in awed silence, the sorcerer stripped the
thorns and tucked the bloom into the steward's fading hair. 'Lady Maenalle,'
he said gravely. 'After this I dare say you'll need skirts for better occasions.'
He turned her gently, raised her hand toward the rider on the chestnut who
sat his saddle like a man born to rule. 'I give you Prince Lysaer s'Ilessid, scion
of Halduin the First, and by blood-descent, your liege lord.'
    Lysaer looked down at the steward his kingship would supplant, a woman
who radiated command in her own right through every unconscious move-
ment; unsure of his new-found status, he anticipated a reaction of enmity,
resentment, even shock. But Maenalle's hawk-bright eyes only looked
stunned for a second before they filled with tears. Then she cried aloud for
sheer joy, curtseyed without thought for slushy ground and gave up her hand
for his kiss.
    'My royal lord,' she murmured, looking suddenly fragile beneath the
mantling weight of state finery.
    Feeling dirty, reminded the instant he smelled her perfume that he reeked
of woodsmoke and sweat, the prince set his lips against a palm welted with
callouses like a swordsman's. He mastered surprise at the steward's
mannish incongruities, overcame embarrassment, and belatedly applied
himself to courtesy.
    'Your arrival is the light of our hope made real.' Maenalle smiled brightly,
turned, and shouted back to her escort of men-at-arms. 'Did you hear? A
s'Ilessid! A blood descendant of Halduin himself! Lysaer, Teir's'Ilessid has
returned to reclaim the throne of Tysan!'
    A mighty shout met her words. Protocol was abandoned. Men leaped from
the backs of their horses and closed in ecstatic excitement around the
steward and their acknowledged prince.
    'You must forgive any disrespect, your Grace,' Maenalle shouted over the
tumult as Lysaer was swept from his saddle, embraced and pummelled
roundly on the back by dozens of welcoming hands. 'Five centuries was a

162


very long time to wait for your coming and the times in between have been
harsh.'
    Too breathless to manage even banal reply, Lysaer struggled to recover
equilibrium. Accustomed to royal propriety, and formal even with friends,
the rough-cut camaraderie of Maenalle's discipline bruised his dignity.
Thrust unwarned into inheritance of a kingdom unknowably vast, he
coped with no knowledge of precedence to lend him grace.
    The whole-hearted abandonment of decorum permitted no opening for
questions, not about the prince's return from Dascen Elur, nor concerning
the demeaning, mishandled raid in the Pass of Orlan. Tactfully reminded
by the sorcerer that the storm had kept his party travelling through two
nights with scanty sleep, Maenalle called her escort back to order.
Quickly, efficiently, her outriders formed up into columns and set off to
hustle their prince and all his company to the comforts of the clan lords'
west outpost.

While the needs of royal guests were attended to and tired horses led off to
stabling, the crude plank door of the camp cabin appointed as the steward's
privy chamber clicked gently shut behind Maenalle. She had shed the
magnificence of circlet and tabard. Shadowy in the fall of her black habit,
her leathered hair pale as a halo around her face, she regarded the sorcerer
who warmed himself by the hearth across a cramped expanse of bare floor.
Although the room functioned as an office, it held neither pens nor
parchments, nor any furnishing resembling a desk. A dry wine tun in one
corner was stuffed with rolled parchment maps. Past an unsanded table,
the only hanging to cut the drafts through ill-fitted board walls was a
wolfpelt pegged up and stretched with rawhide.
 'You wished to speak to me,' Asandir prodded gently.
    Startled to discover she had been holding her breath, Maenalle clasped
her hands by her hip where her sword hilt normally rested. 'You can tell me
now what you wouldn't say in public.'
    She had always had blistering courage; warmed by air that smelled of
cedar and oiled leather, Asandir peeled back damp cuffs and chafed his
wrists to restore circulation. When he faced her next, he was unsmiling. 'If
your people wish to celebrate, the festivities to honour their prince's
return must be brief. An outbreak of virulently poisonous meth-snakes has
arisen in Mirthlvain. They derive from migrant stock, and if they spread in
widespread numbers, our departure could be urgently swift.'
    Still sharp from her interview with Grithen, Maenalle said, 'Dakar
already told me: you planned to travel on to Althain Tower in any case.'
She pushed away from the door panel, pulled a hide hassock from the
fireside and perched with an irritable kick at the skirts that mired her
ankles. 'Distant troubles in Mirthlvain don't explain your cagey choice of
language.'

163


~i~7You're asking to know if you can shed your office along with your
                tabard?' Asandir's sternness loosened into a smile. 'The Seven have not yet
                formally sanctioned Lysaer's accession to Tysan's crown, that's true. But
                not because the prince is unworthy.'
              'Well, thank Ath for that.' Maenalle arose and walked the floorboards.
          Though she wore hard-soled boots for riding, her footfalls out of habit
          made no sound. 'If I told the camp they couldn't celebrate, I'd probably face
          an armed uprising.'
               Moved by her leashed note of hope, Asandir spoke honestly and fast. 'If
           Lysaer and his half-brother can successfully defeat the Mistwraith, you
           shall have your coronation as swiftly as injustices can be put right.'
               'Are the old records true?' Maenalle seemed suddenly hard as sheathed
           steel as she propped her back against the chimney nook. 'Was your
           colleague who barred South Gate against the mist's first invasion left
           broken and lame by his act?'
               'Yes.' Seeing tension quiver through her, Asandir arose, touched her
           elbow and gently urged her to take his chair. In contrast with her staunch
           strength, her bones felt fragile as a bird's. 'I'll not give you platitudes.
           Desh-thiere is an unknown and dangerous adversary. Dakar's prophecy
           promises its bane clearly enough. But no guarantee can be given that the
           half-brothers who shoulder the burden of its defeat will emerge from their
           trial unscathed. Lysaer's official sanction for royal succession must be
           withheld until full sunlight is restored.'
               Outside the nailed flap of hide that shuttered the window, boisterous
           calls and laughter set a dog yapping over the everyday screel of steel being
           ground on a sharpening wheel. Maenalle took a moment to recover the
           steadiness to trust her voice. 'What will become of my clansmen if our
           s'Ilessid heir is left maimed or dead?'
               Now reluctant to meet her brave scrutiny, Asandir faced the fireside. 'If
           Lysaer is impaired, he will have heirs. If he is killed, we know for certain
           there are other s'Ilessid kinsmen alive beyond the Gates in Dascen Elur.'
           To show to what extent he shared her worry, he added, 'The kingdom of
           Rathain is not so lucky. Since the Teir's'Ffa.lenn now with us is the last of
           his line, rest assured, Lady Maenalle. The Seven will guard the safety of
           both princes to the limit of our power and diligence.'

164


A Return

The journey south from Erdane to the old earl's summer palace in the
foothills ordinarily took three days for a rider travelling light. Though
the return dispatches Elaira carried for the Prime were not urgent, she
crossed the distance in less. A sudden freeze and the late season's sloppy
mud discouraged caravans at a time when the trade guilds had stock-
piled their raw materials for the winter. Left the solitude to order her
priorities, the enchantress used her travel allowance for extra post
horses instead of lodging. She could hope that a late night arrival might
allow her the chance for a hot bath and a rest before she faced reckoning
for the Ravens.
    Weather conspired to foil her. In the dark, through driving rain,
landmarks became invisible and the lane leading westward from Kelsing
had fallen to decay since the Mistwraith. Only the ghostly trace of wheel
rots crossed the barren hilltops; the sheltered soil in the valleys encour-
aged brush and thickets, and oak groves choked the washes under
obliterating drifts of rotted leaves. Since the mare collected from the last
livery stable was her own beloved bay, Elaira could hardly drive at speed
through scrublands riddled with gullies and badger setts that could snap a
horse's legs on a misstep.
    Daybreak was well past when, skin wet and sore and made cross by
storm and delay, she reined in the little mare before a disused postern that
let into the ruined palace gardens.
    A novice initiate awaited her. Miserable in the heavy fall of rain, she
announced with clipped asperity that the incoming message rider was
expected to report at once to the main hall.
    Elaira dismounted with a dispirited sigh. If word of her doings concerned
the Prime Council, she would have been met on arrival however
inconvenient the hour. Rain hammered in sheets across the flags, rinsing

165


rivulets through the arches overhead. Elaira draped her reins on the mare's
steaming neck and started to loosen girth buckles.
    'You should call a groom for that.' The novice was shivering, as
thoroughly drenched as Elaira, except that her vigil had been performed
after breakfast and a warm night's sleep. 'The Prime Enchantress is
displeased and delay will just worsen your case.'
    Elaira felt the cold go through to her marrow. 'Morriel wants me?' She
tried and failed to hide distress. 'But I thought--'
    'That today was the time appointed to review the orphan wards,' the
novice interrupted, prim to the point of cattiness. 'It should be. Your
doings in Erdane caused the roster to be rearranged.'
    A tingle of blood suffused Elaira's face. Already her disgrace had seeded
gossip. Had she not been the daughter of a street thief before the Koriani
claimed her for training, shame might have hampered the wits that
allowed her to rally. 'I'd best not wait for a page, then. If their evaluation
has been put off, the boys will have time on their hands. You'll only need a
minute to find one to see my mount cooled and stabled.'
    The pages were all eating dinner at this hour, and serve one junior novice
right, Elaira thought as she fumbled with icy fingers to unbuckle the
satchel of dispatches from the saddle rings. If the Prime herself was
displeased that made for worries enough without every new snip in the
order troubling to point up the fact. Before the fiummoxed girl could utter
protest, Elaira surrendered her reins, shouldered her burden of papers and
pushed on through flowerbeds choked with bracken and hedgerows run
together into moss-green tunnels snarled with creepers and thorn.
    The wing to the ladies' chambers nested amid the overgrowth like a pile
of moss-rotten stone. The beams that roofed the porticos had caved,
spilling slate like shattered pewter over what once had been marble
mosaic. Elaira kicked down a daunting stand of weeds to reach the
doorway. The original portal of cedar and filigree had long since rotted
away. Bronze hinges cast in a tracery of rose leaves now hung on rough-
hewn planks nailed together with a strip of boiled cowhide. Wet leaves
jammed the sill. Elaira wasted minutes in prying the panel open; she
persisted rather than go around the front way, would endure obstacles far
worse before she traipsed in her dripping, draggled state past the eyes of her
curious peers.
    That prideful scruple cost her skinned knuckles and added sweat to her
smell of wet horse. Militant despite Asandir's counsel of temperance,
Elaira hastened through a chain of mouldering bedchambers; if the Prime
Enchantress saw fit to demand audience after an all night ride with no
bath, she deserved to endure the result.
    In better, idle moments, the carved wainscoting and decaying bas-reliefs
that ornamented the cornices and ceilings invited daydreams of the
original inhabitants. But on a morning made gloomy by cascades of falling
rain, the rooms of dead earls' ladies seemed musty with sorrowful

166


memories. Elaira let herself out into a brick and flagstone inner corridor and
proceded through shadowed archways and around puddles let in by leaks to
the anteroom where the enormous halfwit who served as Morriel's door-
guard granted her instant admittance.
 The gentle man was not smiling, a distressing sign.
    Left alone beneath the cavernous vaults of the great hall while the panels
boomed shut on her heels, Elaira stopped short. The chairs before the
friezework dais stood empty and no fire burned in the grate. The Prime
Council's review had not just been deferred, but cancelled for today
altogether. No disdainful circle of seniors awaited; only two cowed-looking
page-boys, scarcely twelve years of age and identically blond, bearing the
paired standards and crested crane device that symbolized Morriel's author-
ity.
    The Prime herself held audience. Aged and thin as a whip, she sat her seat
of power looking faded in official purple robes and skin as translucent as
antique porcelain. Yet her shoulders were not bowed; her hand on her order
was unyielding as northfacing granite, hard as the diamonds that netted her
bone-white hair and flashed on her blue-veined wrists. Couched amid
calculating wrinkles, her eyes gleamed black as a carrion crow's.
    Clumsy at the worst of moments, Elaira tripped on the hem of her
travelling cloak.
    Morriel looked up at the sound, sharp cheekbones and hawk nose
enhancing her bird-like rapacity. She waved her hand. The bundle of cloth
by her elbow stirred upright and turned around with a feline grace. Elaira
caught her breath in true fear as she identified First Enchantress Lirenda,
present all the while, and whispering in the matriarch's ear. Clad in
judiciary black, veiled in muslin, she stood in attendance as Ceremonial
Inquisitor.
    For her late transgressions in Erdane, Elaira was not to suffer enquiry, but
the formal, closed trial reserved for enchantresses who broke their vows of
obedience.
    Frowning, scared and chilled from more than damp clothing, Elaira
reviewed her mistakes: she had spoken with a sorcerer, but not to betray her
order's secrets; she had gambled with a drunken prophet, but except for
flouting an unwritten code of manners, she had committed no indecency. If
Erdane's officials had caught her at spell-craft, she might have burned, but
no others in the sisterhood had shared her risk. Last and surely least, her talk
with the s'Ffalenn heir in the hayloft had passed in absolute innocence.
    Why should she be called in for judgement as if she had plotted a grand
offence?
    Rumpled and travel-stained before her seniors' immaculate presence,
Elaira lowered the message satchel. She slipped the strap from fingers gone
nerveless and threw off her muddied cloak. Her knees shook through her
curtsey, a detail made obvious by her riding leathers. Somehow she man-
aged a level voice. 'I stand before my betters to serve.'

167


    Prime Enchantress Morriel inclined her head, the shimmer of her
diamonds and lace netting pricked with light like new tears. She did not
speak; since by custom the Prime addressed no outsiders, oath-breakers
fell under the same stigma.
    First Enchantress Lirenda spoke in Morriel's stead, her enunciation as
ominous as the cross of swords behind her veil. 'Junior initiate Elaira, you
were sent north with routine dispatches for the house matron outside of
Erdane. Instructions did not mention taverns, or brothels, or card gambling
with drunken prophets who consort with sorcerers of the Fellowship.'
    Left light-headed by the pound of her fast-beating heart, Elaira returned
the only excuse she could plead. 'I was told to be observant, to bring back
the news of the road.' Dakar had told more in five minutes than lane
watchers had gleaned through a month of tedious observation; yet that
truth would but incense the Prime further. Elaira stared at the floor.
~Mistakenly, I thought facts were of greater importance than the methods
used to seek them.'
    Morriel twitched a finger at Lirenda, her nail a yellowed claw against
thin-skinned china fairness. 'Ethics do not matter?'
    The First to the Prime elaborated upon the matriarch's arid statement.
'Dakar sober would hardly reveal his master's purposes. Drunken, he is
incapable of separating fact from fancy. Not in collective memory has our
order stooped to scouring brothels and taprooms for knowledge of events.
To your shame, you're the first initiate who has tried.'
    The Prime rapped her knuckles against the ebony arm of her chair.
Lirenda stepped to a side table and fetched a steel-bound coffer secured by a
mesh of interlaced wardspells that shed a resonance to wring dread from
even the least talented perception. The page-boys behind Morriel's chair
shifted in wide-eyed discomfort as the First Enchantress laid the box on the
silk-covered lap of the Prime.
    The Koriani matriarch released the wards one at a time. As protective
enchantments gave way with snaps like over-wound harp-strings, Elaira
fixed desperately on the young pages. Though their sex disbarred them
from training, the children had spent their early lives surrounded by arcane
mysteries. Whatever they had witnessed concerning that coffer's contents
made them quake to the soles of their feet.
    Lirenda accepted the unsealed box from the Prime and raised the lid.
Inside, the focus jewel of Skyton glittered cold blue as an ice shard.
Although this crystal could not channel anywhere near the same degree of
power as the amethyst Great Waystone lost since the rebellion, any
enquiry directed through its matrix would be impossible for Elaira to defy.
    Only the thinnest tissue of secondary circumstance masked her
forbidden interview with Asandir. One straight fact, one opening to invite
a direct question concerning her doings in the earlier evening, and her
paper-thin weaving of subterfuge at the Ravens would collapse.
  'Begin,' Morriel commanded, her eyes fixed darkly on her Inquisitor.

168


'Look into the crystal, Elaira,' Lirenda instructed. 'Surrender your will
absolutely.'
    The accused must show immediate compliance, or else condemn herself
outright by refusing a direct command. Consumed with anxiety, aware
that if she were judged guilty, the self-awareness that defined her
individuality would forever become forfeit, Elaira bent her mind into the
crystal's twilight depths. She locked her teeth against protest and lowered
her inner barriers.
    Arcane restraints blazed over her mind like the slamming jaws of a trap.
Her senses swam through a moment of vertigo; then the gloomy expanse of
the hall was seared away by an indigo force that smothered her will to
quiescence. Elaira drifted. Dissociated from her surroundings, she did not
hear Lirenda's voice asking questions, nor did she frame verbal replies.
Instead, like some tired, played-over script, past scenes were pried out of
her memory and picked through in embarrassing detail.
    She saw the face of Arithon s'Ffalenn, framed by a cloak hood wrong in
the grip of white knuckles; again and again until she ached, she braved the
smoky taproom of the Ravens and waited while Dakar spoke a name. Time
froze, looped back, paused again while the moment was analysed, her
tiniest reflections jabbed out and examined. Somewhere in a locked off
corner of her mind she was screaming in frustration and fear~ but the
inquest continued inexorably.
    The past became present. Again she wrought spells to stem the mob of
headhunters, and again she made her stand amid the cluttered shelves of
the Ravens' pantry. Since the enchantress on lane watch had discovered
her in the hayloft, her business at Enithen Tuer's and her interview with
Asandir were mercifully left overlooked; but the particulars of her
encounter with Arithon were exhaustively tracked and studied, until the
brief moment he had touched her hand, and the brush of his fingers
removing straw from her hair sawed at her nerves like pain.
    Every word he had spoken, every line she had replied was replayed,
dissected to underlying nuance and then cross-checked against her later
reflections in the course of her return journey south.
    By the time her tormentors released her will from the shadowed blue
confines of the focus jewel, Elaira was no longer merely tired, but
physically hurting from exhaustion. Emotionally ragged, all but reduced to
tears, she recovered self-awareness in fragments. Hearing returned first
and gave her Lirenda's voice emphatically expounding a point.
    '... for this I remain unconvinced. She's possibly hiding something. I
strongly advise a deeper probe.'
    The Prime's reedy voice interjected, while Elaira struggled to overcome
draining dizziness. Aware of a hard chair beneath her, of ice-cold feet cased
in tight-laced, sodden boots, she dragged a breath against the sensation of
weight that bound her chest. Even through confusion, she realized she had
not betrayed Asandir's trust because her inquisitors had combed only

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those events where her overriding concern for Arithon s'Ffalenn had
eclipsed any thought of her interview. Left in dread of a possible second
inquest, Elaira knew that chance could not possibly spare her twice.
    Lacerated in nerve and mind, she was driven at last to rebellion. 'What
earthly purpose can another interrogation prove?' Her eyesight came and
went, rent by patches of darkness. 'I'm aching with weariness, and so stiff
it's a trial just to sit here. If I'm disgraced, name my punishment and be
done, for nothing else prompted my doings in Erdane beyond an ill-advis.ed
quest after knowledge.'
    'Tell her to be silent!' Morriel's immutable eyes fixed on the space above
Elaira's head. 'The initiate has no cause for impertinence. Plainly she has
inclinations toward a personal entanglement with the Teir's'Ffalenn, but
she is so emotionally disorganized she seems unaware of her lapse. Let me
remind that as Koriani she is pledged to avoid involvement with any man,
no matter how exalted his bloodline.'
    Elaira bowed her head. A sorcerer of the Fellowship had entrusted her to
be wise: trapped by his steel-clad expectation, she stifled an impetuous
retort and overlaid defiance with submission. The hush in the chamber grew prolonged.
    Lirenda seemed faintly disappointed. After an interval, Morriel said, 'I
withhold judgement. Inform the accused.'
    The First Enchantress removed her veils, her manner stiff with thwarted
vindication. 'You are warned, Elaira. Dissociate yourself from the Prince of
Rathain. Cleanse your thoughts of his memory and dedicate your heart to
obedience. You are charged to be mindful. Your actions henceforward shall
be weighed until the Prime sees fit to issue verdict.' Morriel inclined her head.
    Frostfly, Lirenda interpreted. 'You are declared on probation and hereby
excused from this audience.'
    Elaira pushed upright and curtseyed before the dais. Measured by the
carrion-bird scrutiny of the Prime, watched enviously by the duty-bound
page-boys, she beat quick retreat from the hall. Relief left her weak in the
knees. Lirenda might cling to suspicions, but Morriel seemed satisfied that
a card game had prompted her sojourn into Erdane; there would be no more
inquiries, no deeper truth-search by crystal, not unless she incited further
cause.
    Adroit enough to dodge her communal quarters and the questioning
curiosity of her peers, Elaira slipped out to the stables to check on her
travel-weary mare. Surrounded by horses, the near-to mystical quiet of
their presence scented by straw and oiled leather, she groomed the bay's
damp-matted coat with unseeing, mechanical efficiency. In the yard
outside, a boy-ward whistled as he split kindling for the kitchens; but the
ordinary peace of the moment failed to settle her composure.
    By now recovered enough to think, Elaira reviewed the ramifications of
Morriel's suspended verdict. Her unease increased. In cold reflection, the

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accusation concerning Arithon no longer seemed silly and far-fetched. The
restraints of probation felt unpleasant to the point of suffocation, and the
shadowed stillness of the stables offered no refuge at all.
 Not when the smell of hay and warm horses reminded inescapably of the
man.
    Stung by a pitfall that should never, ever have entrapped her, Elaira
threw aside brush and curry and let herself out of the stall. The mare
shoved a friendly nose over the door, her nudge for attention unnoticed.
Her young mistress saw nowhere but inward. With the ritual phrase, 'you
stand warned,' ringing in cold echoes through her mind, Elaira cursed for a
long and breathless minute in the gutter dialect of her early childhood.
    The words of Enithen Tuer returned to haunt her. 'You don't need a seer
to tell your future' s just branched into darkness.'
    Shivering in her damp and crumpled leathers, Elaira fled into the misty
afternoon. Four hours and an eternity ago, a warm bath and bed had been all
the earthly comfort she had desired.

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Portents

On the marshy banks of a sink pool, a serpent with blood-dark eyes pauses,
flicks its tongue, then slithers purposefully through a crevice in a
crumblingly ancient stone wall; it is followed a moment later by another,
and another, until soon a horde of its fellows seethe after, breaking eddies
through murky waters and shivering pallid ranks of reeds...

North and west, under a hide tent pitched in misty forest, a scar-faced
barbarian chieftain tosses in sweat-soaked furs; yet before his lady can
waken him from the grip of prescient dreams, he has seen the face of his
king, and the blood of his own certain death...

In a wild stretch of grasslands, on the crest of a wind-swept scarp, four tall
towers loom above a ruined city, while rainfall gentle as tears rinses the
shattered foundations of a fifth...

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VIII. CLANS OF CAMRIS

Lysaer awoke at dusk to strangely carved walls, a warm fire and blankets of
softest angora that wrapped his sweating limbs in clinging, suffocating
heat. He tossed away the coverlets, rose naked from the feather mattress
and paced across fine carpet to a casement paned with glass. Outside,
clustered around a snow-trampled compound spread the tents, stone huts
and rough, log-timbered buildings that comprised the permanent moun-
tain outpost maintained by the clans of Camris. Amid falling gloom, the
descendants of Tysan's aristocracy set about their evening chores as they
had through five centuries of exile. They carried cressets, because lanterns
were scarce. Most wore the leathers and furs of wilderness scouts. Grim in
aspect as occupants of a war camp, or a settlement too long under siege, no
one walked without arms, even those few who were women. If any of the
tents housed families, Lysaer sighted no children, though he lingered
unseen at the window to study his new subjects while they were yet
unaware.
    Shouts arose from two hunters who dragged in the carcass of a deer. A
woman called back in derision, and laughter dissolved into banter that
coarsely disallowed even token respect for her gender. Lysaer rested his
coin-bright head on his wrists. He did not feel refreshed. Nightmares had
dogged his sleep and the expensive scents of sandalwood oil and rare spices
upon his skin left him faintly queasy. The beautifully appointed
furnishings at.his back gave no comfort: gold-embossed chests and
patterned carpets were far too much an anomaly in this bleakest of
mountain settings.
    'We give you the King's Chamber,' Maenalle had said matter-of-factly
as she opened a door to a room that held the atmosphere of a lovingly
maintained shrine. The manservant who brought water for the royal
bath had explained that every clan encampment in Tysan kept similar

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ol

quarters, perpetually held in readiness for the day of their'sovereign's
return.
    Deferentially left to his privacy, unused to being worshipped as a legend
come to life, Lysaer badly needed to speak with Asandir.
    But the sorcerer had gone off with the clan chiefs while he, as
acknowledged royal heir, had been spirited off for food and rest. Where
Arithon might be was difficult to guess; presumably, Dakar would have
found oblivion in some ale barrel by now. Lysaer scrubbed clammy palms
across his face, distressed to be left at a loss in a land where civilized
merchants would slit the royal throat, and barbarians who preyed on the
trade roads welcomed their prince with open arms.
  tYour Grace?' said a youthful voice by the doorway.
    Lysaer started, spun and only then noticed the page-boy who hovered
past the edge of the candlelight.
    'I'm Maenalle's grandson, Maenol s'Gannley, your Grace.' Barely
eleven, his livery too large over breeches of cross-gartered hide, the boy
bowed with a confidence that any senior courtier might have envied. 'I've
been sent to assist with your dressing.'
    Unable to foist his bleak thoughts on a child, Lysaer returned the charm
that had endeared him to other footpages back in Amroth. 'What have you
brought, master Maenol?'
    The boy grinned, showing a broken front tooth. 'People call me Maien,
which means mouse in the old tongue, your Grace.' His grin widened and
his small, tabarded shoulders straightened with pride. 'What else would I
bring but your hose, surcoat and arms?'
    The boy stepped toward a stool and chest where an array of courtly
clothing had been laid out. The sword in its sapphire scabbard was gilded
steel, adorned by blue silk tassels, and in its way as venerable as Alithiel.
    'Daeltiri,' Maien said in response to his prince's admiring glance. 'The
blade of the kings of Tysan. When the city of Avenor was desecrated, one
part of the royal regalia was entrusted to each clan lord for safekeeping.
Until today, the Earls of Camris have faithfully held your sword.' The boy
crossed the chamber, impatience reflected in the toss of his ash-brown
hair. 'But hurry, your Grace. The banquet in the main hall cannot begin
until you're ready.'
    Lysaer slipped into the silken hose, lawn shirt and finely-embroidered
tabard with a relief that bordered on shame. He had not appreciated the
comforts of rich clothing until he had been made to do without. Humbled
by the honest recognition that he desired the throne these clansmen
offered at least as desperately as their disunited realm needed sound rule,
he laced gold-tipped points and fastened mother-of-pearl buttons and tried
to dismiss his suspicion such luxuries might have been dishonestly
procured. As Maien buckled the sword Daeltiri at his side and handed him
the matching chased dagger, Lysaer, Prince of Tsan, felt whole for the first
time since exile through Worldsend.

1 74


    He quieted his creeping doubts over the lifestyle of the realm's subjects
until he could know them better. Under fair consideration, he might find the
differences between Athera's wild clansmen and Amroth's more sophisti-
cated courtiers were just reflections of profoundly changed perception. He
was no longer the pampered prince who had been haplessly tossed through
the Worldsend Gate. In a rakingly perverse turn of conscience, he wondered
which promised the sounder reign: the cosseted and idealistic royal heir he
had been before banishment, or the more self-sufficient man who needed a
crown to feel complete.
    Outside, the temperature had fallen severely. Chilled through his fine
velvets, Lysaer followed Maien's lead across the compound and through the
midst of brisk activity as a company muffled in furs and armed with bows
and javelins prepared to depart on patrol. Faces seamed by weather and scars
lit at the sight of their prince. The men and two women offered him brisk
salute while they checked laces and shouldered javelins, then slipped
quietly away into the gathering mountain dusk.  'Where are they going?' Lysaer asked.
    Maien regarded his prince slantwise. 'Out to the pass on night watch, your
Grace.'
    'To raid caravans?' Almost, Lysaer let slip the contempt he held for such
thievery.
    'Partly,' said the grandson of Tysan's steward, brazenly unabashed. 'They
guard the camp, as well.'
    The pair skirted the blood-spattered snow where the deer carcass had
lately been butchered. The prince received a smile and a wave from another
sword-bearing woman who carried yoke buckets toward the horse pickets.
Past the tied-back flap of a tent, a man whistled over the scrape of a blade on a
whetstone. Maien turned down a much-trampled path that led through a
final stand of cabins, threaded into a steep-sided defile, and dead-ended
before the shadowed double arch of a gateway cut into the mountain. The
doors were armoured. Stonework barbicans built against the rocks on either
side lent the impregnability of a fortress. If the place had ever seen battle, any
scars had been painstakingly repaired; four fur-clad sentries stood duty, the
leather-wound grips of their javelins worn shiny from hard use. They
dressed weapons in smart salute at the approach of their liege.
    Maien spoke a password at a niche. Lysaer heard the clank of a windlass
and a dismal rattle of chain; then the great portals ground on their hinges and
cracked open.
    Asandir strode from the gap. 'Good, you've arrived.' He dismissed the
prince's young escort with a smile. Maien darted ahead to alert the herald as
the sorcerer ushered Lysaer from the cold into the torch-lit vault of an outer
hall. Walls and floor of rough-hewn stone sheared his voice into echoes as he
said, 'Maenalle awaits you.'
    Above the din as the defenceworks were laboriously cranked closed,
Lysaer said, 'You might have given me warning.'

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    'I might have done the same for Grithen's clansmen,' Asandir returned.
'I chose not to.'
    Stonewalled, and for no apparent cause, Lysaer reined back annoyance.
'Is this a kingdom that encourages lawlessness?'
    Asandir regarded the prince with eyes like unmarked slate. 'This is a
land afflicted by mismanagement, greed and vicious misunderstanding.
The clans rob caravans to ease a harsh existence, and the mayors pay
headhunters to exterminate as a means to ease their terror. Your task is not
to judge but to set right. Your royal Grace, justice must be tempered by
sympathy if the unity of the realm is to be restored. So I did not explain,
because words cannot substitute for experience.'
 The heavy doors boomed shut, leaving a ponderous quiet.
    Asandir gestured toward the light and warmth that spilled through a
second set of arches. 'Go in,' he urged, while ahead, in cultured accents,
Maenalle's appointed herald announced the royal presence. 'For these
people you are the living embodiment of hope. Listen to their woes and
understand what they've sacrificed to preserve their lives and heritage.'
    Lysaer squared his shoulders under his exquisitely embroidered tabard.
What Asandir expected of him was a great deal more than tolerance: he
could return no less than his best.
    'You are favoured with the gifts of your ancestors,' Asandir reassured as
they walked side by side into a chamber transformed since afternoon. 'If
the Seven believed you incapable, you would never have stood before these
clans as a candidate fit to rule.'
    The drab rock walls beyond the threshold were covered over by
tapestries, masterful weaving and bright dyes depicting a kingly proces-
sion that celebrated the first greening of spring. Lysaer stared in delight.
For an instant, he seemed to view through a window into prior age, when
Paravian habitation had graced hills unsullied by Desh-thiere's mists.
Here in shining glory lay the centaurs' fire-maned majesty, spritely
dancers wreathed in flowers who were the fair-formed sunchildren, and
mystical as moonlight on water, the snowy grace of unicorns. Entranced,
caught into thrall by emotion, Lysaer blinked; and the spell snapped. The
weaving on the wall became just a fabric of ordinary thread, worked with
extraordinary artistry. Dazed by split-second bewilderment, Lysaer shook
off gooseflesh and continued after Asandir and Maien, over patterned
carpets imported from far-off Narms. Torches were replaced by tiers of wax
candles, and glittering in their smokeless light were the clan-born of the
west outpost, descendants of Camris's aristocracy.
    They looked the part, Lysaer thought in astonishment. Divested of furs
and weapons, reclothed in velvets, dyed suedes and jewelled brocades, one
could almost forget that most of the women carried sword scars, or that the
wrists of young and old alike were lean as braided sinew from the hunt.
    Maenalle waited at the head of a delegation of clan lords. Regally gowned
in black and adorned with silver interlace, she wore only a badge of rank to

176


denote her office. 'Colours are never worn in the royal presence,' she
explained in response to Lysaer's compliment that a brighter wardrobe
would become her. 'By tradition, the Steward of the Realm wears sable,
since the true power of governance lies in the crown. Before the rebellion
my office was sometimes called caithdein, or shadow behind the throne.'
She regarded the prince at her side, her tawny eyes fierce in a face too
weathered from outdoor living. 'Liege, I am proud to become so once
again.'
    There was no envy in her, Lysaer observed, while she steered him
through introductions to the officers and elders of her council currently
in residence at the outpost. As she guided him past a bowing honour-
guard and rows of candle-lit, damask-covered trestles toward the dais at
the head of the hall, he watched with a ruler's perception. Maenalle did
not resent yielding leadership to a younger, unknown man; in steady,
unquestioned and understated confidence, she placed absolute faith in
the s'Ilessid name.
    Prepared for the eventual trial of winning loyalty from these fierce and
independent clansmen, of proving his fitness to rule, Lysaer found the gift
of her trust unnerving.
    He was shown to the seat of honour at the centre of a trestle covered by
fine linen and set with an earl's ransom in crested silver and crystal.
Asandir was placed on his right, Arithon and Dakar to the left, while
Maenalle and the elder clan chiefs assumed the places opposite, between
their prince and the lower hall as surety for their hospitality. Since
potential threat must first pass through their ranks, any retainer who
sought harm to a guest must first commit public treason and strike his
sworn lord in the back. Visitor's rights had not been forgotten in the
wildest reaches of Camris, although in the towns, old ways had been
replaced by the fashion of placing important persons at the head of the
boards.
    'Insult as well as folly,' Maenalle admitted sadly. 'A guest seated there
is isolated, a target for foul play should a turncoat defile the lord's house.
What respect can a host claim, who would expose another in place of
himself?'
    Hiding discomfort, Lysaer watched Maien pour the wine. Amroth's
court had kept no such elaborate custom, and rather than risk insult out
of ignorance, the prince forbore to comment.
    A touch on his forearm recalled his thoughts; Asandir, with reminder
that the hall expected guest-oath. That ritual at least was familiar. Lysaer
rose to his feet. The glittering array of gathered clansfolk stilled deferenti-
ally before him as he raised his goblet in fingers too proud to tremble.
    'To this house, its lady and her sworn companions, I pledge friendship.
Ath's blessing upon family and kin, strength to your heirs, and honour to
the name of s'Gannley. Beneath this roof and before Ath, I share fortune
and sorrow as your brother, my service as steadfast as blood kin.'

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    Maenalle arose, smiling, to complete the ancient reply. 'Your presence is
our grace.' She raised her calloused hands, took the prince's goblet and
drank a half portion of the wine.
    Lysaer accepted the cup back from her, drained it and laid it rim
downward on the table between. 'Dharkaron witness,' he finished clearly.
    Maenalle faced around toward her following. 'Honour and welcome to
s'Ilessid!'
    As prince and steward took their seats to thunderous cheers from the
clan scouts the banquet began in earnest. Accustomed to court fare as
Lysaer was, he could not help being impressed. Surrounded by all but
barren rock, caught at impossibly short notice, the Camns barbarians
provided hospitality as fine as any grand fete held in Amroth. But although
in manner and bearing these people seemed flawlessly refined, their high-
table conversation better reflected the temper of the culture underneath.
    'The arrogance of the townsmen swells beyond belief,' the eldest chief,
Lord Tashan confided over his soup. 'We confiscated a wagon recently.
Among the goods were paper documents dividing land into portions and
allotting coin value to each.' The spry old lord laughed hugely. He set aside
his spoon and fingered his goblet without drinking, concern threaded
through his amusement. 'Next they'll be trying to tax the air a man
breathes, do you guess ?'
    'Mortals have been known to presume far worse,' Asandir interjected. A
sharp glance warned Lysaer to silence as he added, 'What was done with
those papers ?'
    'We burned them,' Lord Tashan said in disgust. Now he did take a
swallow, a deep one. 'Without ceremony, as tinder to kindle a watchfire.
It's an affront against Ath's creation to number a mountain among one's
possessions. Thrice damned to Sithaer, and Dharkaron's curse on the
mayor who started the infamy. If he dares to cross Orlan, we'll speed the
Wheel's turning for him, and send the blooded arrow to his heirs.'
    Asandir locked eyes with the older noble. 'The matter is beyond your
jurisdiction, and the mayor's life subject to the king's justice.'         
    The chieftain bowed to the rebuke, but his outrage smouldered hot as
the candle-caught glint of his rubies as he turned in appeal to Lysaer. 'I ask
pardon, my prince. Avenor has been five centuries in ruins, and as many
years have passed since a royal heir has graced our land. Survival has forced
a harsh code of law, and from habit, I forgot my place. Judgement remains
the king's right. But I'm confident you'll resolve the matter firmly on the
day your high council reconvenes.'
    Lysaer hid unsettled thoughts by toying with the meat on his plate.
Land-owning, an inalienable tradition on Dascen Elur, appeared to be
bloodletting violation in Tysan. The prince held the concept daunting and
uncivilized that he might one day be expected to punish a man for laying
claim to the farmland he tilled. If Tysan's charter of governance denied the
security of home and hearth-rights, small wonder the townsmen had let

178


sedition from a spiteful sorcerer incite them to bloody rebellion. Anxious
to change the subject, if not the injustice of such laws, Lysaer admired the
exceptional beauty of the tapestries.
      Lord Tashan chuckled with relish. 'They were the unwilling donation
of the first Mayor of Erdane, damn his memory.'  'Stolen?' Lysaer prompted.
    The old chief's smile faded. 'Not precisely, my liege. The weaving was
originally done by the masters at Cildorn, before the old races vanished
from the world. The clan chiefs of Taerlin paid fair price for the art,
though the records that prove this burned when their holdings were
stripped in the uprising. The more valuable spoils were sent north,
catalogued as tribute. As a protest, my kinsmen in Caithwood saw fit to
lighten the mayor's wagons. The bloodstains washed out, well enough.
But the forest caves turned dismal with mildew since the mists, so the
Paravian tapestries were brought here for preservation.'
    Lysaer measured the cavernous grotto surrounding him with new eyes:
ruffians who lived by the sword would have small use for grand celebra-
tions. The chamber where these barbarians feasted had not originated as a
guest hall; more likely it had been fashioned as a storehouse, a vault
carved into mountain rock to safeguard generations of plunder.
    Maenalle's eldest son, and Maien's father, went on to describe the
particulars of that historical first raid. Tashan's comment concerning
bloodstains had been no understatement. Trapped in public scrutiny,
Lysaer hid disgust like a diplomat. Nobly born or not, these folk endorsed
outright robbery. Filled by dismay, the prince who must one day rule
them understood that the fine cloth, the jewels, even the plates and
cutlery that graced the table were no less than the spoils of generations of
ambush and murder. Upright trade did not exist among these clansmen;
only knowledge of arms and tracking and a predatory penchant for
raiding. Alarmed to find his hands shaking, Lysaer set down his fork. His
adroit attempt to change the subject was foiled by his half-brother, whose
forthright laughter encouraged further tales of thievery from their hosts.
    Unpleasantly reminded of the past, Lysaer lost interest in the food.
Anthon had sailed with Karthish pirates; naturally it followed that he
had no sensibilities to offend. That he showed no rancour for the rough
handling inflicted upon his person in the pass seemed a perverse and
unlikely reaction for a man whose intense preference for privacy seemed
the cornerstone for an unforgiving character.
    The musician who had played Felirin's lyranthe by the fireside pos-
sessed the skills of a consummate actor; for such depths of sensitivity
could surely not sanction tonight's callous enjoyment of violence. Left
heartsick and isolated by the temper of Tysan's clansmen, Lysaer strove
without success to rally his equanimity; he had seen the hardworking
merchants in Amroth suffer the butt of s'Ffalenn effrontery too many
times for complaisance. The blight on s'Ilessid justice remained, and the

179


bitter taste of outrage transferred to any brigand who presumed to rob for
gain.
    Lysaer endured the meal; guest courtesy forbade him to do otherwise.
Distant, even majestically polite, he listened to the rounds of wild stories
until the boards were drawn for the revels. Then without compunction he
sought counsel from Asandir.
    'How can I rule these clansmen?' he demanded. 'The townsfolk are no
less Tysan's subjects than they. In all fairness, is it right to set brigands
and thieves as overlords above the very same craftsmen they have
victimized?'
    Asandir broke off contemplation of something in the chamber's far
corner and weighed the prince's distress with silver, imperious eyes. tHave
tolerance, your Grace, at least until you've sat at a mayor's table and
listened to the boasts of his headhunters. For where a townsman has lost
riches, the clans have paid with the blood of kinsmen and heirs. These
whom the townborn name barbarians have seen their children slaughtered
like game deer, their wives, sisters, and daughters mercilessly raped and
murdered. They inhabit the wastes and the wilds, because everywhere else
they are persecuted.'
    Hands clenched hard in his lap, Lysaer drew breath to temporize. The
sorcerer cut him off. 'Do not presume that I justify the lifestyles of
clansman or townborn. I only point out the dissent that has plagued this
land through the centuries since Darien's rebellion. When sunlight is
restored, we must all strive for peace. You'll have time to study the
problems before then, and no end of encouragement and counsel at the
time you finally assume your crown.'
    Further discussion was curtailed by the evening's entertainment, a
superlative demonstration of knife-throwing, followed by sword dancers
who performed an intricate display to no other accompaniment than the
rhythmic chime of crossed steel. Lysaer applauded their performance in
admiration, for although he had watched similar gymnastics in Amroth,
the dancers had never been female. The steps exhibited for his pleasur~ in
Camris had been dangerously more demanding, and performed at
frightening speed.
    Warmed by the prince's enjoyment, Maenalle apologized for lack of the
gentler arts. 'We don't risk our bards in the mountains. Masters of the
lyranthe remain in the foothills with our families, that our children learn
grace before hardship.'
  Lysaer's surprise must have showed.
    'I forget you weren't raised among us,' Maenalle apologized. 'We're not
entirely the barbarians the townsmen name us. Our women serve with the
scouts until marriage, and after that only by choice. The experience at
arms is necessity, for in the event of attack, some of the mothers must
defend while the households are taken to safety.'
  Left selfconscious by his steward's perception, Lysaer did his best to

180


return her direct courtesy. 'Your hall need not go tuneless this night. My
half-brother is accomplished on the lyranthe.'
    'But I have no instrument,' Arithon protested, as if all the while his ear
had been tuned to the exchange. Having somehow evaded the ceremony
due the half-brother of a prince, he wore his plain tunic and much-worn
scabbard still. Though conspicuous in his lack of finery his preferences had
been humoured without offence until Maenalle saw fit to correct matters.
    'You shall have your pick of instruments,' she announced, and waved
over one of her captains. 'Escort the prince's half-brother to the vaults and
let him choose a lyranthe that suits him.'
    Servants rolled one of the smaller tapestries aside and a key was brought
that fitted the grilled doorway behind. Arithon and the leather-clad captain
took candies and disappeared within, while Lysaer, who had not missed
proof that his surmise concerning treasure-stores was accurate, involved
himself with praising the knife-dancers.
    An interval later, Arithon returned. Resting in the curve of his arm was a
lyranthe so battered and plain it almost looked fit to be discarded. The
tuning pegs were chipped and not one string remained intact.
    'He would have none of the jewelled ones,' the officer who escorted him
explained hastily.
    Maenalle's gaze turned stormy. 'Do you mock us?' At her tone, the
knife-dancers melted away; nearby clansmen broke off conversations and
went very suddenly still.
    Arithon looked up from the instrument on his arm. 'I chose the best,'
he said, bemused beyond thought for deceit. 'Listen, lady.' He whistled
very softly over the sound board just ahead of the bridge. The wood in
his hands caught the tone and responded in a resonance of absolute,
dusky purity.
    The sound caused Asandir, involved in discourse with Lord Tashan, to
turn and stare. 'Ath in his mercy,' the sorcerer exclaimed. 'Allow me to
examine that lyranthe.'
    Clansmen stepped aside as the sorcerer approached and lifted the worn
old instrument from Arithon's hands. Asandir ran his fingers down the
wood, scraped grime off one tarnished fret, then turned the neck in his
hands to view the back. There, begtimed under layers of yellowed lacquer
lay a single Paravian rune, inlaid in abalone that somehow through the
years had not chipped.
    'Well, here we are,' the sorcerer murmured. He scraped at the inlay with
a fingernail and bared a rainbow glimmer of fine pearl. 'There was truth to
the tale that a second lyranthe crafted by Elshian remained behind on the
continent.' He returned the instrument to Arithon with reverence. 'One is
held in trust by Athera's Masterbard, Halliron. The other now belongs to
you, by courtesy of Camris generosity. Guard her well. The sunchild
Elshian was the most gifted bard known to history and an instrument
made by her hands sings more beautifully than all others.'

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    Maenalle laughed in flushed triumph at Arithon's evident dismay.
'Return us the gift of your playing,' she said, and dispatched Maien to the
tents to fetch wire.
    But Asandir raised a hand in restraint. 'Wait, lady. Brass strings will
break on that instrument.' He considered a moment, then added, 'If you
provide a few ounces of silver, I can refit her as the maker intended.'
  Without hesitation, Maenalle removed her left bracelet.
  'Any bent spoon would do as well,' Asandir said gently.
  Maenalle's eyes flashed. 'Mine the honour, Kingmaker.'
    The sorcerer inclined his head, accepted the heavy, interlaced band and
cupped it between his palms. The clansmen crowded closer to watch as,
unmindful of his audience, Asandir bowed his head. No other move did he
make, but a power sang upon the air. The bracelet in his hands shimmered,
then flashed incandescently white. The watchers nearest to Arithon felt a
sear of heat on their faces. Yet the sorcerer's flesh did not burn. His hands
moved, and the light grew blinding, and the ones who dared the dazzle saw
the metal in his grip glow red. As if he handled nothing in the least beyond
the ordinary, the sorcerer twisted the ore between his fingers and drew out
a glowing filament.
    The task took scarcely a minute; then light and magic faded and the
sorcerer opened unmarked fists. He held half an arc of silver knotwork and
a shiningly perfect length of wire. As if the ruined symmetry of Maenalle's
bracelet prompted him to further inspiration, he gave a mischievous
glance to the lady steward, then murmured, 'Indeed, it is not meet that so
great a gift should keep such mean appearance.' And spell- light rinsed his
hands once again as he reached out and cupped the fragment of interlace to
the unadorned fretboard of the lyranthe.
    A snap like a shock whipped the air. When the sorcerer released the old
wood, the silver knotwork remained, its pattern transmuted into the
ebony as though stamped there from the day of creation. Arithon ran his
fingertip over the result. He felt not a single raised edge; the inlay had fused
with the surface beyond any hint of a flaw.                          ~
    When the lyranthe was re-strung with the sorcerer's spell-tempered wire,
the virtue of Elshian's craftwork became apparent from the instant Arithon
struck the first note for tuning. The scratched wood in his hands came alive
with a tone that touched the farthest recesses of even that cavernous stone
hall. Harmonics seemed to shiver and melt upon the air, and every conversa-
tion faltered to a hush. Speakers forgot their next words and listeners heard
nothing beyond the dance of Arithon's fingers and the languid, gliding
sweetness of the strings as he turned each peg to true the pitch. When his
work was done and the first full chord rang out under his hands, he stopped
breathing, bowed his head, then damped the magnificent sound to silence.
    'Lady Maenalle,' he said, in his voice a jar like heartbreak. 'This lyranthe
is too fine for me. Let me play this one night and return her for your
masterbards in the lowlands.'

182


    But the Steward of Tysan dismissed his conscience with an imperious
lift of her chin. 'I don't begrudge you my bracelet,' she called across the
quiet. 'And our bards, every one of them, passed over that instrument for
another of prettier appearance. Since they chose by their eyes and not their
ears, I call their claim forfeit.'
Arithon's hand remained frozen against glittering bands of new strings.
'If the word of a prince carries weight, I stand by Maenalle's judgement.'
Lysaer chose a seat and by example all in the chamber followed suit.
'Brother,' he said on a strange edge of exasperation, 'will you have done
with moping and play?'
    Lacking the knowledge of Athera's own lore, Arithon chose a sea ballad
from Dascen Elur, a lively recap of a pirate raid in which a wily captain
reduced three merchanters to ruin. Although the names of the vessels were
changed in deference to his half-brother, Lysaer remembered the incident
well; the metchanters had died badly, the seamen's widows and their
families forced to beg charity to survive. Yet singer and lyranthe wove their
spell deftly. The clan lords responded to the tale in raucous and whole-
hearted enjoyment. No one beyond the performer ever guessed how the
laughter stung their prince's pride. In fairness, Lysaer could not blame
Arithon: his duty was to please his hosts, and in a camp without wives or
sweethearts, he had performed with a minstrel's true insight, his choice
most apt for the setting. Yet the thievery that delighted these barbarians
had roots in a past that reminded how terribly wide lay the gulf between
subjects and sovereign.
    Lysaer took his leave early, pleading weariness. He retired to the small
chamber with all its comforts, but hours passed before he undressed and
went to bed, and the peace of sound sleep did not visit him.

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Confrontation

The hour grew late. Candles burned low in the hall by the time Arithon
plucked the closing bars to his last dance jig of the evening. Although
admiring listeners still surrounded him and the exultant flush remained
high on his face, he silenced the rich tones of Elshian's instrument with
something very near to relief.
  'Another drinking song!' called a roisterer from the back.
    Arithon shook his head and set the lyranthe gently down on the boards of
an empty trestle. 'My fingers are shot, my voice long gone and I've a kink in
my back from too much sitting.'
  'Have a beer then,' a younger woman invited.
    'What, and spoil my head for clear thought?' Arithon rose, grinning with
the abandon of a thief. 'I've swallowed enough to ruin me already. Too
much praise has done the rest. Have some mercy and let me retire while I
still have the wits to find my bed.'
'She'd likely show you to hers,' somebody quipped from the sideline~.
But the admirers nearest at hand perceived the musician's weariness.
Reluctantly they parted to give him passage between the bare trestles, the
last few occupied chairs and the boys who cleared away goblets and
gathered up the linens from the feast. Though the clansmen of Camris had
entertained lavishly, there were no drunks on the floors. The celebrants
who lingered in the late hours were alert enough that an alarm from a
messenger could see their finery exchanged for weapons at short notice.
Quietly, unobtrusively, Arithon crossed the expanse before the arch. He
disappeared into the gloom of the outer hallway without drawing
Maenalle's notice; but slumped in a heap with one hand still curled around
an ale mug, Dakar opened one eye. He saw ^sandir break off his discourse
with a clan chieftain and take purposeful strides toward the door.
  'I thought so,' the Mad Prophet mumbled through his knuckles. 'Our

184


Master of Shadow is going to catch an ungodly dressing down.' Dakar
licked his lips and smiled before he slipped back into stupor; but his self-
righteous prediction proved slightly premature.
    Asandir did not follow Arithon immediately, but visited the quarters of
Tysan's prince for a lengthy interval first. Afterward, as the winds sang
cold off the heights and the mists of Desh-thiere obscured the early blush
of coming dawn, the sorcerer let himself out to find Arithon.
    The Teir's'Ffalenn was alone at the horse-pens, his back to the inside
rails and his hands busy working tangles from the black forelock of the
dun. Asandir approached without sound across the compound of trampled
snow. For all his care, he was noticed. Arithon spoke as the sorcerer paused
behind his shoulder.
    'Elshian's lyranthe should remain here.' Pain threaded a voice worn
rough by extended hours of performance. Too spent for nuance, Arithon
added, 'Better than I, you know how little she will be played.'
    Asandir folded his arms on the top rail of the fence. Cloakless and
hoodless in the cold, the wind stirred his silver hair and the night-darkened
fabric of his tunic. 'Much can change in the course of five centuries.'
    Arithon at this moment preferred to forget the legacy left him by
Darien's enchanted fountain: he shrugged. 'Quite a lot has not changed at
all in the course of five centuries.'
    At which point, directly confronted with the purpose of his visit,
Asandir abandoned tolerance. 'Did you believe me unaware of what
happened in the loft of the Ravens' stableyard? Or that, the other day in the
pass o~ Orlan, you baited Grithen and his scouts with intent to force my
hand and expose your half-brother's inheritance ?'
    'Lysaer has what he longs for: a crown and the cause of truth and justice.'
The dun blew softly through her nostrils, stepped back, and left Arithon's
hands empty. The cold made him wish he had his gloves.
    Asandir seemed impervious to the wind's cruel bite. 'Let me tell you a
thing, Teir's'Ffalenn. You were left to your devices because the mindblock
I set was never intended to bend your will.'
    'Was it not?' Arithon retaliated fast and hard as a blow. 'Then why bother
setting any ward at all?'
    The sorcerer did not rise to anger. Measured and wholly mild, he said,
'Would you warm a man just tortured by fire before an open hearth? The
memories of your failures in Karthan were all too hurtfully recent.'
    Arithon flinched. The sorcerer pressed on remorseless, though he never
once sharpened his voice. 'Maenalle was to receive the Prince of Tysan
today. The Fellowship had already decided. She would have been informed
of his lineage in private, that Lysaer not learn of his heritage until he had
experienced the atrocity of the mayors firsthand. Except that your
meddling with events caused your half-brother an unpardonable shock,
and Grithen has been sent in shame to the camps in the low country. He
may be denied his inheritance.'

185


 Now Arithon went still as fire-hardened stone.
    Asandir resumed, quietly precise as the tap a gemcutter might use to
shear diamond. 'Grithen is the last living heir to the late Earl of Erdane.
Since his two siblings died on a headhunter's spears, yesterday's affray in
the pass could disrupt a succession that has endured since the years before
the uprising.'
    Arithon did not leap to claim the implied responsibility. Inflectionless
as the windborne scrape of loose ice, he said, 'You're telling me things that
might all have been prevented.'
    'If the Fellowship were to use power to compromise a man's destiny,
yes.' Asandir regarded the knuckles left at rest on the midnight cloth of his
sleeves while Arithon absorbed implications: that his fate was neither
absolute nor proscribed. That he might cross the corral, saddle the dun
mare, ride out and not be pursued, except by townsmen who mistook him
for a clan-born barbarian. Or he might take up the superlative lyranthe
given him by Maenalle and study under her bards in the lowlands to the
advanced senility of old age.
    Arithon faced around and met the sorcerer's eyes, which were clear as
mirrors and as matchlessly serene. 'You would let me go that simply?'
    'I would.' The sorcerer added, 'But let us be accurate. Would you let
yourself?'
    Struck on a nerve left raw since Dascen Elur, Arithon could no longer
curb bitterness. 'Dharkaron, Ath's Avenger might show more mercy.'
    'Who will speak for the clansfolk of Rathain?' Asandir said, a dark and
terrible weight of sorrow behind his words. 'For them, what mercy will
there be when the sun returns, and the townsmen order killings caused by
fear of a king who is not there?'
    Arithon made a sound halfway between a sob and a curse. The biting
sarcasm he used to deflect unwanted inquiries would not serve, but only
drive through Asandir's tranquillity like a spear cast through seawater:
passion dispersed without trace by the infinite. The sorcerer watched his
struggle with neither cruelty nor challenge, but only an understanding as
steady and deathless as sunlight.
    Through a throat racked by tears he refused to acknowledge, Arithon
said, 'You give me Karthan, all over again.'
'The man would not stand here, who did not choose Karthan first.'
'Oh, Ath,' Arithon let go a twisted laugh. 'The bitterest enemy is myself,
then.' For the open-handed freedom set before him was no choice at all:
just the repeat of a fate poisoned through by an unasked for burden of
human suffering.
    'I asked only that you travel with me to Althain Tower,' Asandir said.
'Wherever else will you find the guidance to reconcile your powers as a
mage with the responsibilities of your birthright?' The compassion in his
tone was a terrible thing, a whip and a scourge upon a mind already mauled
by the quandaries of duty. Arithon spun away, weeping regardless, and

186


le

le

t$

 r
 1
 t

cursing the light hand of his tormentor. One threat, one compulsion, one
word spoken with intent to bind would have given him opening to escape.
    But Asandir closed the net with a pity that shattered and crucified. 'If
you finish the journey, your case will be brought before the Fellowship. I
can make no promise. But if a compromise can be found to release you from
kingship, I will plead in your fayour.'
    'The last nail in the coffin,' Arithon managed. 'Of course, under protest, I
accept.' The air ached his lungs and his head hurt. His back to the sorcerer,
his eyes on the shifting shadows of the horses, he clung to the fence, mostly
to keep his hands from violence.
    Asandir looked at him and did not miss the murderous undertones of
conflict. 'For Desh-thiere, the Mistwraith, the Fellowship has no other
choice.'
    'Ath,' Arithon said. He managed a savage jab at humour. 'Dakar would
be crushed if we wrecked his precious prophecy. But against the Mist-
wraith, I do recall giving my word.'
    'Of the two, your kingdom is equally important.' The sorcerer might
have departed then, his movements masked by a gust from the north.
    Yet Arithon sensed his intent. Not yet ready for solitude, he whirled
around, met the endlessly deep eyes and planted a barb of his own. 'Then
we understand each other all too perfectly well.'
    Given clear warning that Arithon remained ambivalent concerning his
inheritance, Asandir showed no annoyance. Rueful instead, he listened to
the sigh of the wind across the compound as though it held answer to all
suffering. 'I'd like to know,' he said at last to the prince who waited in
jaggedly prideful silence, and who was far too wise to vent frustration
through belief that the Fellowship sorcerers were his enemies. 'If our roles
were reversed, what would you do?'
 Arithon hesitated barely an instant. 'Find the Pararians.'
    Asandir sighed. A sadness settled over him as oppressive as the mists on
the mountains. 'We tried,' he said bleakly. 'Ciladis of the Fellowship took
on that quest, for he treasured the old races most of all.' A minute stretched
painfully through silence. 'He never returned.'
    As if the night were suddenly too dark, or the cold off the peaks too
penetrating, Asandir abandoned the subject. He strode back toward the
lights of the outpost, leaving Arithon to the company of the horses and a
moil of frustrated thoughts.

187


Traithe

Set on a knoll above the scrub-covered dunes that bordered the Bittern
Desert, the spire of Althain Tower endured winds that never eased. Time
and seasons might change, but in snowfall or sultry summer, drafts
moaned through the shutters on the highest floor, riffling the corners of
parchments caught between musty stacks of books. Unwashed tea mugs
nested between the piles like abandoned eggshells in straw; walled round
by clutter, surrounded by unstoppered ink wells and a row of meticulously
sharpened quills, Sethvir of the Fellowship minded his cataloguing. While
his awareness ranged far and wide beyond his tower eyrie, tracking events
and portents that encompassed the grand movements of armies to the
change of polliwogs into frogs, he penned neat script onto parchment and
recalled candles only as an afterthought. Darkness came and went in its
daily rhythms, unmarked by sleep or lighted sconces.
    And yet amid the wail of a gust off the fells, when something flutried at
the casement as slight as the scuffle of a mouse, Sethvir lifted his head. Hks
poet's eyes lost their vagueness as he laid aside his quill pen.
    'Traithe?' he said, on his feet in an instant. A six-day accumulation of
dust billowed up from his robe as he shoved between chairs heaped with
scrolls and opened the shutters on a predawn sky coiled with mist.
    Rewarded the next moment by a downward rush of dark wings, the
sorcerer's pensive frown melted. 'Welcome back, little brother,' he
greeted the raven that alighted on the knotworked border of his cuff.
The bird croaked. It cocked a pert head and blinked an eye intent with
intelligence.
    Sethvir shut the casement, a detail he intermittently neglected. 'Did you
bring your master, little one?'
    The raven hopped to his shoulder and reproachfully preened its left
primaries. When Sethvir responded by waiting, it shifted its feet and spoke

188


 again, sharply impatient. The sorcerer chuckled. 'All right, I'm on my
 way.'
     Forgetful that wet ink now hardened on his favourite nib, the Warden of
 Althain bore the bird from the copy chamber and down the bare spiral
 stairwell that accessed the tower's nine levels. Shadows of past ages
 lingered thickly here, but no place more than at ground level, where the
 mist-filtered gleam of first light etched the marble-carved statues of
 centaurs, sunchildren and unicorns. Jewelled eyes and gilt trappings
 flashed at Sethvir's passage, wakened to glittering reflections as he
 brightened the torches by the tower's sole entry. At the foot of a shallow
 flight of steps, Sethvir caught a ring from a recessed socket and slid aside
 gold-chased panels of red cedar. The dusty smells of books and old
 tapestries gave way before the sharper tang of oiled steel, while new
 flamelight threw grim highlights over a clockwork array of counter-
 weights and chain. The raven unfurled its wings for balance as the sorcerer
 set hands to the windlass. He cranked back the bars on two massive,
 metal-bound gates, which opened on a vaulted sally port cut through the
 base of the tower.
    Here the drafts sang in dissonance through arrowloops and murder
holes. Sethvir touched ink-stained knuckles to a secondary barrier of
carved oak; the arcane bindings he released next collapsed in a blue-white
sheet of clean fire, letting in the moist scents of grasses and mist and damp
earth.
    Sethvir paused, fieetingly touched by regret. That Althain Tower had
ever needed its antiquated, second-age defenceworks was sorrowful
enough; but that he should require wards, and that he should need to
unbind such protections to admit another sorcerer of the Fellowship went
beyond tragedy.
    The guard-spells that Sethvir had dissolved on a thought, that he could
have stepped through with little more difficulty than breathing, lay
beyond the grasp of Traithe who, at cost of the greater share of his powers,
had singlehandedly sealed the south Worldsend Gate in the hour of
greatest peril. For the Mistwraith that afflicted Athera was but one
splintered portion of a vaster whole; had Traithe not limited its access,
Desh-thiere's rank coils would have strangled more than sun, but choked
off all life on the planet.
 The raven flapped irritably.
    'All right, little brother.' Harried back to duty, Sethvir unbarred the
wooden doors.
    Outside, beyond the battered barrier of a final portcullis, stood a
sorcerer, his deeply-lined face and hooked nose shadowed under a wide-
brimmed hat. A patterned silver band and straight-cut silver-white hair
were the only bright aspects about him; the rest of his clothing including
scuffed boots was fashioned of unadorned black. The raven did not wait for
Sethvir, but bounded through the grille to light on its master's shoulder.

189


'Welcome,' murmured the Warden of Althain, the usual misty distance
restored to his blue-green gaze. 'I trust your passage was swift?'
    Traithe of the Fellowship shrugged, his iron-clad stoicism shaded in-
elfably toward disgust. 'I was only in Castle Point.'
    The clang of the outer winch re-echoed through the arch while the
portcullis ground ponderously upward. Traithe shouted over the din. 'I
searched for six days before I found a captain still willing to sail the
coastline!'
    The portcullis stopped. Sethvir ejected a rude word that rang isolate across
fallen silence. Then he said, 'That frustration won't last, my friend. Banish
Desh-thiere, and you can restore the lost arts of navigation.'
    'But that would take-- ' Traithe's sombre mien transformed before a
smile of wounding hope. 'The Prophecy of West Gate? Is this why you called
me? A prince has returned from Dascen Elur?'
    'Princes,' Sethvir said succinctly. 'S'Ilessid and s'Ffalenn, on their way
here with Asandir.'
    Traithe chuckled outright. 'Even better! Ath, I was going to grumble
about sore feet, and here, you'll have me dancing on them instead.' He
reached down, lifted the saddle and bridle heaped by his boots as though he
no longer felt the miles he had ridden through the night.
    Determinedly bent to mind the winch, Sethvir took no brightness from
his tidings. That Traithe, who had sacrificed more than any to avert the
desecration of Desh-thiere, who was most vulnerable to harm if town
factions should discover his identity, who through these late and troubled
years was most resilient over his failures- that of the Seven, Traithe must
wait weeks and travel miles to receive news that Asandir, Kharadmon and
Luhaine had all known on the wings of the moment itself was a grievous
injustice.
    Through the passage, Sethvir re-set gates and defence-wards with the
motions of long habit, while Traithe regarded the statues commemorating
old-race heroes of a past that now seemed febrile as a dream, though the
jewelled settings were polished bright and the caparisons on the centaurs
hung rich as if fresh from the loom. 'However the world comes to suffer, the
sanctity of Althain remains unbreached. Your wardenship rests lightly,
here.'
    Mildly pleased, Sethvir returned a vague gesture. 'The upstairs is
shambles. If you ask for tea, we'll need to scrounge for clean cups.'
    Traithe made his way in halting steps toward the stairwell. 'Well, you do
have more on your mind than all the rest of us put together.'
    'Sometimes.' Pursued by echoes, forgetful of lamps, the Warden of
Althain began the ascent. Through the pause as Traithe deposited his h~)rse
gear in the armoury, he added, 'Right now, just Mirthlvain.'
    Traithe tripped on a doorssill, and not because of his limp. For Mirthlvain
Swamp to command his colleague's undivided attention meant trouble of
fearful proportions. The raven resettied disturbed balance with an indignant

190


 ruffle of feathers while, worn from travel, and oppressed by the mists,
 Traithe felt the frost go through to his bones. He fumbled at his belt,
 hooked the thong that hung his flint striker and seeded a spark in the
 sconce by the storage level.
     In the sulphurous flare of new lamplight, Sethvir's gaze glinted hard and
 immediate as chipped glass. 'Forgive me,' he said. 'The tea must wait.
 Meth-snakes have bred with cierlan-ankeshed venom and Verrain has just
 now sent word: there are many of them, and a mass migration is
 imminent.'
     Unsurprised that a disaster of such shattering proportions should be
 announced in the midst of banalities, Traithe said,'And the others?' Worry
 eclipsed his weariness. If these meth-snakes spread beyond Mirthlvain,
 countryfolk from Orvandir to Vastmark could be decimated in a matter of
 days.
    'I've called them.' Sethvir's voice seemed to echo beyond the confines of
Althain's stairwell, to bridge the wide leagues that separated the far-
scattered members of the Fellowship.
    'Well, at least I'm at hand to be helpful,' Traithe added, and this time his
bitterness showed.
    Still focused and fully attentive, Sethvir surveyed his companion from
lined, dark eyes to scarred hands, to the limp and travel-stained cloak that
the raven had torn threadbare at the shoulders. 'There was never a time
that you failed us, old friend.'
    Then, as if Desh-thiere's desecrations were trivial and large-scale
catastrophe from Mirthlvain did not threaten the Kingdom of Shand, the
sorcerer clapped both hands to his temples in contrition. 'Dear me. There
must be a thousand or so books heaped in the upper library and Ath's own
jumble of inkwells lying about without caps. By nightfall, we're going to be
needing the table underneath.'
    'Well,' said Traithe benignly. 'Between you and the spawn of the
rnethuri, we've got a dashed handful to tidy up.'
    'Mess?' Fixed on the underlying concept, Sethvir raised bristled eye-
brows. 'There's really no mess. Just not enough corks for the inkwells,
that's what drives me to chaos.' He whirled and rushed up the stairs.
    Traithe followed. In the deliberate, sure-footed manner that masked the
worst of his infirmities, he lit sconces the entire height of Althain Tower.
Asandir might not need them, nor would Kharadmon and Luhaine; but
two princes arrived from Dascen Elur were bound not to welcome a mage's
disregard of the dark.

191


S umm on s

Far off, where daybreak has long since brightened Desh-thiere's oil-thick
murk, cold winds whip across the grass-gowned hills of Araethura, stirred
by the essence of a sorcerer who whirls his way south in grave haste...

South and west, with the ease of an entity long discorporate, a second
sorcerer once called the Defender rides the force of the flooding tide in
response to distress call from Althain...

Under gust-swept peaks in Camris, wrapped in dawn-lit mist, the sorcerer
Asandir pauses as if listening on the threshold of his quarters in the
barbarian outpost; a moment passes, then he whirls at a run for the guard
post to prepare for immediate departure...                          ,

192


IX. AL THAIN TOWER

Accustomed to threats and fast action, Maenalle's scouts had horses
saddled and provisions secured on the pack pony only minutes after the
urgent summons from Althain Tower reached the west outpost and
Asandir. Lysaer emerged from his quarters looking hollow-eyed. Secretly
relieved to be quit of the company of subjects he found disturbing, he
remained in flawless command of his manners, a trait young Maien
admired as he held the stirrup for his prince to mount. Not all men would
be so pleasant to serve after being rousted at dawn on the heels of a rowdy
celebration.
    Arithon sat his dun looking murderous. He had not rested. Neither had
he been so far into his cups the evening before that indulgence should have
spoiled his sleep. As Asandir swung into the black's saddle, the Master
said, 'I should have liked to ask for audience with Lady Maenalle.'
    The sorcerer adjusted his reins without reply; and while the wind chased
a cloak-snapping blast of cold off the heights, his reason for silence became
apparent.
    'If you wanted to speak for young Grithen, spare the trouble,' announced
Tysan's lady steward, present all the while as observer. Dressed like her
scouts, her hair bundled under the hood of a sewn-hide cloak, she had
passed unnoticed in the bustle.
    Grudging to show surprise beyond a fractional rise of one brow, Arithon
greeted her. As close to apology as Lysaer had ever seen him, he said,
'Surely I have reason to plead the man's case.'
    Maenalle's features stayed hard. 'Tysan's scouts do not act for personal
vengeance. No matter what the provocation, they are forbidden to take
hostages. We are not like Rathain's clans, to extort coin and cattle for
human lives. For breaking honour, Grithen must answer. The fact he was
invited into his temptation, and that his action also threatened his liege

193


bears very little on his punishment. The code that condemns him is one
that upholds clan survival.'
    The dun sidled under Arithon's hand as he fielded the nuance in
challenge. 'You disapprove of your counterparts to the east?'
    Maenalle's lips tightened. Though aware that the dun's combative
crabsteps reflected the mood of the rider, she responded in the bluntness
that abashed the most brash of her scouts. 'Unlike your subjects in
Rathain, my following need not contend with the trade city of Etarra. Feud
between clanborn and townsman is pitiless there. In the eastlands the
governor's council can execute a man for the offence of singing the wrong
ballad. Play your lyranthe in those halls with caution, young prince.'
    The Shadow Master said, 'Spare the title, lady. I might never
acknowledge any claim to the city you speak of.'
    Maenalle stood braced against a vicious blast of wind. 'Would you risk
the perception that inspires your talent by hardening your heart against
need?'
    And Arithon suddenly laughed, his anger absolved by admiration for her
unflinching toughness. He bent in his saddle, raised Maenalle's hand and
kissed her sincerely in farewell. 'Were you caithdein of Rathain I might
find myself sorely oppressed. Dare I suppose that Etarra's governors would
also find their ways compromised?'
    Strikingly free of vindictiveness, Maenalle said, 'If you want my earnest
opinion, there can be no remedy for Etarra, except to raze it clean to the
ground.'
    Piquant as her remark was, the chance was lost to pursue it as Dakar
emerged from his cabin, stumbling in the grip of two scouts. They had
needed to shepherd him into his clothes, for his voice arose in complaint
that his breeches were laced inside out, and both his boots on wrong feet.
His keepers only smiled at his protests and hoisted him toward his waiting
horse. Maenalle disengaged her hand from Arithon's grasp and took
hurried leave of her sovereign. If Lysaer's response was cool with propriety,
the reason became lost in the rush. The instant the Mad Prophet's bulk wls
stowed astride, Asandir wheeled his stallion and urged his party to the
road.
    'Ath's mercy,' Dakar cried in vociferous injury. 'What disaster brings
this uncivilized change of plans? I thought I could nurse last night's
hangover under dry blankets for a change.'
    Asandir answered between the snow-muffled thunder of hooves. The
words 'Mirthlvain' and 'meth-snakes' carried forth with incisive clarity
and Dakar's recalcitrance withered.
    Lysaer observed this. Despite an ambivalence resharpened by last
night's ballads, he spurred abreast of the dun mare. If the unaccustomed
rub of Maenalle's lyranthe left the creature wayward and edgy, the Master
was seasoned to her tricks. Aware his half-brother would respond though
his hands were full, the prince called over her rebellious snorts. 'The page

194


who wakened me said our sorcerer had received emergency summons from
Althain. What horror in this land do you suppose might be worse than
Khadrim?'
    The Master grinned back in speculation. 'We do seem in a hurry to find
out.' He did not add that Maenalle's scouts had shown him maps: Althain
Tower lay ninety leagues distant, a six-day journey over roads sparsely
stationed with posts for adequate remounts. Yet Asandir spurred toward
the foothills at a pace not intended to spare horseflesh.
    After scrambling descent of a rock-strewn slope, the riders clattered onto
a level stretch flanked by wind-stunted cedars. The footing softened to
frost-crusted mud, safe for a prudent trot. Asandir shook his black to a
canter, and conversation dwindled before the need to duck clods spattered
up by its hooves.
    The peaks lost altitude as the sorcerer's party progressed. Under muted
daylight, the heavy snows of the passes thinned to slush sluiced by ribbons
of run-off. Lowland damp blunted the cold to a miserable ache and the
horses streamed lathered sweat. The dun abandoned her antics, her wind
and energy consumed entirely by ru. nning, and still Asandir pressed on, the
stride of his rangy black unfiagging through league after passing league.
    'By the Wheel,' Lysaer called in distress. 'Is he going to run our horses till
they founder?'
    Dakar roused from his misery, surprised. 'Asandir? Never.' Morosely, he
added 'one could wish the sorcerer spared some pity for the aching head of
his apprentice.'
    'Magecraft,' Arithon explained as Lysaer questioned such unnatural
display of endurance. 'Touch your horse and you'll feel the energy.'
    Lysaer stroked his chestnut's steaming neck, and snatched back from
the tingling warmth that surged in a wave from his fingertips. Nettled to be
alone in his ignorance, he glanced across whipping strands of mane. 'Could
you make such a spell?'
    Arithon regarded his brother with eyes unnervingly thoughtful. 'Not for
so long, and not without harm. A balance must be maintained. If the horses
don't suffer, the sorcerer must stand as their proxy.'
    Curiosity overshadowed Lysaer's distrust. 'Then Asandir depletes
himself to replenish the strength of our mounts?'
     'In effect, yes.' As if reluctant to elaborate, Arithon faced forward into
the wind as they thundered on into the lowlands. Morning wore on toward noon.
    The countryside steadily flattened and the road improved to a span of
stone paving scored white by the passage of cartwheels. Asandir pressed
the horses to gallop through gentle hills and vine-tangled orchards,
stopping only once at a wayside tavern to buy raisins, sausage, bread and
spirits for refreshment. While his companions ate and swallowed dry
whisky, horseboys towelled lather from the horses and checked their
hooves for loose shoes. Within minutes the company was back in their

195


saddles, still cold, still sore, but none more haggard than the sorcerer, who
seemed a figure pinched out of clay as they clattered back onto the
thoroughfare.
    'How much longer can he keep this up?' Lysaer asked as his horse picked
up a brisk trot. The pause at the tavern had not refreshed him. His muscles
had stiflened, wet breeches had chafed his knees raw and he owned no
mage-trained detachment to set such discomforts out of mind.
    Dakar glanced wistfully over the gates of a farmstead; smoke from the
chimney carried an aroma of roast ham. Lighted cottage windows
glimmered through bare trees and birch copses, their cheery shelter as
useless as mirage to travellers harried by rain and mounts hard-driven over
slate grey and glistening with puddles. When Lysaer repeated his query the
Mad Prophet shrugged like a sodden crow. 'Who can fathom the limits of a
Fellowship sorcerer? I've studied for centuries and I daren't.'
    Lysaer was too spent to question whether magecraft or lying obstinacy
gave rise to the Mad Prophet's claim to unnatural longevity.
    Cantering again, they crossed a blacksmith's yard. Blocked by a packed
herd of sheep across the roadway, Asandir wheeled his black into the
weed-choked ditch by the wayside. His party followed, raked by branches,
while the ewes beaded up in alarm against the far bank and the abused
shepherd's shouted invective faded behind.
    The rain fell harder and farmsteads thinned away into wilderness before
the sorcerer at last drew rein. Engrossed in miserable discomfort, Lysaer
jounced against the chestnut's crest as it clattered to a halt underneath
him.
    'We leave the road here,' Asandir called while Dakar and Arithon pulled
up. 'Dismount and stay close. Every minute counts.'
    Saddle-galled and sore, Lysaer managed not to stagger as his numbed feet
struck ground. He swiped back wet hair and surveyed a site that seemed
unremittingly desolate. 'Here?'
    Asandir turned the black's bridle and shouldered without reply into
holly and briars that hooked and snagged threads from his cloak. A stone's
throw back from the verge the brush subsided. Trees eaten hollow by age
choked the light and faint depressions and upthrust stone kerbs revealed
the ruin of an older road. Asandir pointed out a canted megalith traced over
with weather-worn carving. 'That stone marks the third lane, one of
twelve channels of earthforce we will tap for swift travel to Althain. The'
soil itself sings with power, here.' As if the land's living pulse could also be
drawn to sustain him, the sorcerer quickened pace.
    Forced to keep up, Lysaer and the others stumbled over lichen-capped
stones and splashed through bogs, their road-weary mounts trailing
droop-tailed and tired over hummocks browsed short by deer. The failing
day dimmed the mist in Iouring veils, broken ahead by a wall that once had
been dressed white marble. The eroded pillars of an arch yet stood where
the way had originally passed through. Beyond, patched with bracken and a

196


criss-crossed stitchery of game trails, the land sloped into a bowl-shaped
hollow too symmetrical to be natural, and ringed by oaks scabbed over with
ancient blotches of lichen.
    Footfalls silenced by wet leaves and moss, the party moved through the
green-tinged twilight of the grove. In places of thinned vegetation, iron-shod
hooves clanged across weathered black agate. Runes were inset in the half-
bared slab, fashioned from a light reflective mineral. Passing seasons had
matted debris across the design, but the artistry in those fragments left
visible roused an uncanny prickle across the skin.
    Lysaer tugged his wet cloak around his shoulders, while Arithon scuffed
away sticks and leaves to lay bare the ringed pattern of a cipher. 'A power
focus,' he mused in an awed whisper.
    Asandir stopped his horse. 'Yes. We stand at the centre of the Great Circle
of Isaer, built in the First Age to channel earthforce to guard the halls of the
earliest Paravian kings. Those defenceworks are long vanished, yet the
Circle itself was maintained, at least until the conquest of Desh-thiere.'
    Arithon passed his reins to his half-brother and took an entranced step
forward.
    'Don't stray,' Asandir cautioned. 'In fact, you might wish to rest. This will
be your last chance before we relocate to Althain Tower.'
    Arithon regretfully contained his curiosity. 'Are there any Paravian cities
left standing?'
    Sorrowfully the sorcerer shook his head. 'Unlike mortal men, the old
races seldom built, and then only through necessity. What holdfasts rem-
ained from the First Age were laid waste in the course of the rebellion, except
the towers of the citadel at Ithamon. Those stand protected by mighty
wards, and the armies who came to desecrate could not enter.'
    But mention of the city ruled by s'Ffalenn ancestors withered Arithon's
interest. He retrieved his horse and subsided into thought while Asandir
fetched a flask from his saddlebag and offered a round of strong spirits.
    Too late, Arithon noticed Dakar's unusual abstinence. He ran his tongue
over his lips, but detected no trace of an aftertaste, nor any sweetness that
might mask the suspect taint of drugs. His knees turned weak despite this.
He had time to see Lysaer slump forward before his own senses whirled into
vertigo. In the maddening space of a heartbeat, and despite his most
desperate anger, he collapsed on wet stone in an oblivious heap beside his
brother.
 'That was a dirty trick,' Dakar observed.
    Asandir shoved the stopper in the flask of ensorcelled spirits, his eyes
steely with urgency. 'Necessary, my imprudent prophet. Meth-snakes are
stirring across Mirthlvain even as we speak, and I need you to quiet the
horses.'
    Dakar caught the reins the sorcerer threw him, then haltered the drifter-
bred chestnut. Pale from more than his headache, he coaxed four lathered
mounts into a huddle, then squeezed his eyes stoically closed while the

197


paint rubbed her headstall against his chest, and the insolent dun lipped his
cloak hood. 'Keep doing that,' he murmured, over and over like a litany.
'Just keep on, and pay no mind to the wizardry.'
    The last time he had been told to steady horses through the topsy-turvy
disorientation of a lane transfer, he had suffered a dislocated shoulder.
Unless Sethvir had much changed his ways, there would be a dearth of hard
spirits in Althain Tower's cupboards, even for medicinal emergency.

For Arithon, the spell-wrought sleep induced by Asandir did not last
undisturbed. Brushed first by a passing energy current, then immersed in a
burgeoning bloom of ward radiance, his enchanter's sensitivity reacted,
even through the veil of unconsciousness. Trained reflex took over and
aligned his awareness to trace the source. The vibrations pursued by his
inn ermind assumed hazy form, and he roved a landscape like dream, but not.
    Even asleep, a part of him recognized that the energy net which drew
him into vision was not fancy, but a peril less forgiving than a sword's edge.
    Arithon perceived a stand of reeds thrust through the ink-still waters of a
marsh, no mere bog, but a vast expanse of wetlands criss-crossed with
crumbled walls. Mist and night chilled air already dank with rotting
vegetation: in the absence of moon or stars, ward-glyphs glimmered above
drifted fog, wraith-pale and sharp-edged as blades, their forces interlocked
to form a boundary. Inside, under apparently calm pools, the swamp's
depths moiled; serpents darted and dove, ranged, venomed, and guarded by
a still figure in russet. Disturbed as if startled by footsteps in a place where
no man dared tread, the watcher looked up sharply.
    A soundless shock jarred the vision as the eyes of the guardian and the
perception of the dreamer met; then the marshlands whirled away,
replaced by a lofty tower chamber, walled with leather-bound books, and
centred by an ebon table upon which a brazier burned like a star. Around
this charged point of power, truesight identified the signature energies of
~sandir, the Mad Prophet's muddled contradictions, and a third mage
strangely shadowed and overhung by the spread wings of a raven. That
moment Arithon felt his awareness gathered in by a touch of inexpressible
gentleness. His vision narrowed to encompass the face of a fourth mage
seated with the others.
    Mildly snub-nosed, seamed like crumpled parchment, the sorcerer's
features expressed grandfatherly bemusement, lent a benign touch of
frailty by a woolly shock of white hair and beard tangled for want of recent
grooming. The impression of childlike senility proved deceptive. Half~
buried beneath bristled brows, eyes of diffuse green-grey reflected all the
breadth of Ath's Creation.
    'Teir's'Ffalenn,' pronounced a voice that rang through Arithon's mind
like the sonorous stroke of a gong.

I98


The Master of Shadow snapped awake. His eyes opened to a red-carpeted
chamber warmed by a hearth of banked embers. A kettle dangled from an
iron hook wrought into the serpentine loops of a dragon. Nearby stood a
marble plinth, but in place of artwork or china ornament, this one held a tea
canister that somebody thoughtless had left open.
    Arithon blinked. Disoriented, he stirred, then recalled Asandir's
ensorcelled flask. If transfer from the power focus at Isaer had been accomp-
lished while he slept, this place would be located in Althain Tower. He lay
on a cot under blankets. His boots had been removed; also his tunic, belt and
breeches. He still wore his shirt, damp yet from rain. A heartbeat shy of a
curse, Arithon spied his missing clothes, slung over a chair alongside a bridle
in need of mending and a snarled up twist of waxed thread. An awl jabbed
irreverently upright through a sumptuous velvet seat cushion. His sword,
drawn from its sodden sheath and oiled, rested against a table heaped with
books, some flopped face downward. Others were dog-eared at the corners,
or jammed with torn bits of vellum or frayed string pressed into service as
page markers. The dribbled remains of a tallow dip lay couched in an
exquisite silver candlestand, and chipped mugs, used tea spoons and mis-
matched inkwells filled any cranny not encroached on by clutter.
    Nested amid oak-panelled walls and age-faded tapestries, the air of
friendly disorder offered the weary traveller a powerful incentive to relax
and rest. But charged to disquiet by the tingling, subliminal ache that
partnered the proximity of thundering currents of power, Arithon felt
nettled as a cat in a drawstring bag. Although Lysaer lay curled in content-
ment in a cot alongside, his half-brother tossed off his blankets, arose and
pulled on his rain-damp clothing. Since his boots were nowhere to be found,
he crossed the thick carpet barefoot and opened the chamber's single door, a
studded oaken panel strapped and barred with heavy iron. The sconcedit
stairwell beyond removed any doubt that Althain Tower had been built
primarily as a fortress. Chilled by fierce drafts through the arrowslits,
Arithon stepped out and closed the latch softly behind him. A moment of
considered study revealed the power's source to be above him. He set foot
upon worn stone and climbed to the highest level, where he encountered a
narrow portal as starkly unornamented as the first. The latch and bar were
forged iron, frosty to his touch as he set hand to the grip and cracked the
panel.
    Inside lay the round, book-lined room from his dream. The central table
was supported by ebon carvings of Khadrim, and seated there, faced away
from him, were Dakar, Asandir and a black-clad stranger. Opposite sat
another, robed in maroon with sleeves banded in dark interlace and rubbed
thin at the cuffs. He was neither tall nor portly, but his presence had a
rootedhess like the endurance of storm-whipped oak and his face and eyes
matched that of the sorcerer who had spoken his title and aroused him.
    'Arithon of Rathain?' said Sethvir, Warden of Althain, in gentle inquiry.
'Enter, and be welcome.'

199


    Dakar swivelled around in astonishment. 'You should be asleep and
beyond reach of dreaming,' he accused as the Shadow Master stepped
through the doorway.
    'How could I?' Aware of all eyes upon him, not least the attention of the
black-clad stranger, Arithon pulled out an empty chair and sat. He rested
his hands on the table edge, careful not to look directly into the brazier.
More like a spark than natural flame, its blue-white blaze carved the
chamber into starred, knife-edged shadows, but radiated no heat, for its
source was drawn direct from the third lane. To Dakar, Arithon retorted,
'Could you lie abed with such a grand spate of earthforce in flux just over
your head.~'
 To Sethvir, he added, 'I came to offer help, if you'll accept it.'
    Befuddled in appearance as any care-worn old man, the Warden of
Althain said, 'We cannot deny we're short-handed. But you should be
aware, there is peril.' Though mild, the look that followed searched in a
manner unnervingly subtle.
    Read to his innermost depths, Arithon was touched by a contact so
ephemeral it raised no prickle of dread; and yet, the image conveyed to him
was harrowing. The swamp-dwelling serpent he had first seen in dream
recurred now in migrating thousands, possessed of an intelligence that
hungered, and envenomed with a poison more dire than anything brewed
up by nature. Secure within Althain Tower, Arithon felt the restlessness
that drove the meth-snakes in their hordes to seek the defenceless
countryside beyond the marsh. Shown the villagers, children and good-
wives whose lives were endangered, he was given, intact, the knowledge of
the forces currently at work to stay the migration; then, in blunt honesty,
the daunting scope of energy needed to eradicate the threat.
    'Now then,' Sethvir finished aloud. 'You would take no shame, if you
wish to retire below and sleep. A wardspell might be set to isolate your
awareness, if you desire.'
    Arithon measured the Warden, whose kindliness masked a razor-keen
perception. After a slow breath he said, 'If I were to retire, I'd be asking no
protections where plainly none can be spared.'
    As he made no move to rise, Sethvir laced together fingers blue-veined as
fine marble. 'Very well, young master. Our Fellowship would be last to
deny that against the meth-snakes of Mirthlvain every resource is needful.
You may stay, but these terms will apply.' His regard pinned Arithon
without quarter. 'You will lend support to the spellbinder, Dakar;
unconditionally, and from trance state. You will hold no awareness of the
proceedings as they occur, and retain no memory afterwards.'
    Severe strictures; Arithon understood that if the conjury went awry, his
life would be wrung from his body as a man might twist moisture from a
rag. He would have no warning, no control, no shred of self-will. Across the
table, the sorcerer in black watched him with feeling akin to sympathy~
Asandir stayed firmly nonjudgemental. If heirship of Rathain seemed no

2OO


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hindrance to a perilous decision, expectations remained nonetheless.
Whipped to resistance by that certainty, the Master moved on to Dakar,
and there read fatuous contempt, for why should any trained master lend a
brother's trust to an apprentice who binged on beer to evade discipline.~
    Moved to black and bitter humour, the Master looked back at Sethvir. 'I
accept.' The words were charged with challenge: if limits existed to the
free will Asandir had inferred he still possessed, he would risk his very life
to expose them.
    The Warden of Althain rested misty, poet's eyes upon the Master. 'As
you choose. You may set your mind in readiness at once, for meth-snakes
won't wait for second thoughts.'
    Arithon bowed his head, aware through closed eyes of Dakar's unadulter-
ated dismay. The faintest smile curved the s'Ffalenn mouth, then faded as he
engaged his self-discipline and submerged his consciousness into trance.
    A great deal less gracefully, and with a martyred sigh the Master of
Shadow was quite beyond hearing, Dakar gathered his own, more
scattered resources.
    Through the isolated interval of concentration, while the Mad Prophet
assimilated the link offered by Arithon, Sethvir turned in piercing dismay
toward Asandir.
    'Difficulty with the succession was an understatement, my friend.' The
Warden of Althain waved an exasperated hand at Rathain's now uncon-
scious prince. 'You inferred a past history of blood feud, but this!'
    At Traithe's blank look of inquiry, $ethvir hooked his knuckles through
the tangled end of his beard. 'Our Teir's'Ffalenn has the sensitivity imbued
in his forefather's line, but none of the protections. His maternal
inheritance of farsightedness lets him take no step without guilt, for he
sees the consequences of his every act, and equally keenly feels them.'
    'That doesn't explain his recklessness,' Traithe said. 'Nor such guarded
resentment.'
    'No.' Asandir answered his colleague levelly. 'A prior conflict between
ruling power and trained awareness of the mysteries has already broken
Arithon's peace of mind. An attempt on my part to ease his despair
misfired and nearly earned his enmity.'
    Sethvir steepled his hands, thoughtful. 'Set him free, then. Let him
pursue his gift of music, marry, and let us seek Rathain's prince among his
heirs. After the passage of five centuries, what is another generation, or
even two ?'
    'I beg to differ,' Traithe broke in, his quiet, grainy voice tinged to regret.
'If Etarra's merchant factions are not curbed with the advent of clear
sunlight, their intrigue could grow too entrenched to break.'
    Silence fell, harsh under the glare of the brazier. Each of three Fellowship
sorcerers pondered upon the trade city that commanded the heart of
Rathain's trade-routes. There the old hatreds ran deepest, and there mis-
guided justice had brewed a morass of bloody politics and decadence. For

201


Etarra, there could be no tolerance. The prince who assumed Rathain's
crown would be charged with dismantling that nest of corruption, and no
chance offered better opportunity than the time of Desh-thiere's defeat,
when governors and guilds would be plunged into disarray by the return of
the open sky.
    'The long-range effects bear careful study,' Sethvir concluded. 'We shall
cast strands, when this matter of meth-snakes is resolved.' Then, since the
task of quelling serpents was dire in itself, he took brisk stock of their
resources.
    Two other Fellowship sorcerers rushed to the site of trouble had earlier
raised a barrier ward to seal off the swamp. Their combined efforts were
barely sufficient to stay the serpents' migration, which left Mirthlvain's
guardian, the spellbinder Verrain, alone in the old watch-keep at Meth Isle.
Although the fortification had been augmented with a fifth lane power focus
to combat worse horrors in the past, an unaided apprentice could never man
such defences without becoming charred to a cinder.
    'I see no alternative but to shape and direct the power from here.' Sethvir
sighed in naked regret. 'What else can we try but to bend the third lane
current across the continent in a reduced vibration that Verrain can safely
transfer to bolster the barrier ward?'
    To hear such a note of uncertainty from the Warden of Althain was
enough in itself to inspire fear. By now in firm rapport with the resources
lent by Arithon, Dakar shot a glance around the table. Traithe was openly
sweating and Asandir sat with one fist braced in trepidation. In a stillness
more eloquent than words, each sorcerer faced the appalling truth: never in
five thousand years of history had they been so critically understaffed. The
circle they would close for the task of saving Shand would only be effective
as its weakest link. Miserably conscious of his shortcomings, Dakar
knotted clammy hands and cursed Arithon s'Ffalenn for scheming arro-
gance. Never mind that the Master's magecraft held none of the shifty
cunning his conscious mind affected; however he might disparage Dakar for
slipshod ways, the trust he gave in trance was clear-edged and forthright as
his music.
    The paradox that a spirit so exactingly controlled should vengefully
surrender all that he was into jeopardy jabbed like insult.
    For as Sethvir described the coming trial, Dakar would become the
check-rein on that awesome flow of power to be channelled through Verrain
thousands of leagues away. If the spellbinder at Meth Isle should misstel~,
and Dakar keep less than perfect vigilance, the influx sent from Althain
would merge unchecked with the fifth lane. The overload would sear the
heartlands of three kingdoms to waste, while the meth-snakes that com-
pelled such unconscionable risk would themselves evade annihilation.
    Riddled through by anxiety, Dakar started at a touch upon his shoulder.
Sethvir stood beside him, his manner tempered with sympathy. 'We ask a
great deal more than is reasonable of you.'

202


    Dakar shook his head, struck mute. He had watched a man suffer death
by cierlan-ankeshed venom; the memory still harrowed him in night-
mares. Any stresses he might share through his link with Verrain must
surely be less than the horrible invasion that threatened Shand.  'I'11 cope,' Dakar mumbled.
    The Warden of Althain was never so easily deceived. 'You will guard
Verrain's well-being and your own. Arithon's strength will back you, but
his safety will be mine to secure. He need never know. But as the last living
s'Ffalenn, his line is too precious to risk.'
    Sethvir gave Dakar a last pat in reassurance, then bent over Arithon's
limp form and with a gesture wove a protective ward that stung the
eyesight to witness.
    Although relieved of a burden, the Mad Prophet felt galled to no end that
the Master should pass scatheless through a direct challenge of the
Fellowship's wishes. 'It's not as if he gave a whistle for the land, or the
people, or even a spit over principles,' Dakar grumbled as he stuffed shaky
fingers in his cuffs to wedge them still.
    Already attuned to larger matters, Sethvir returned a vague murmur.
'You misunderstand the man gravely.'
    But since the Mad Prophet had been engrossed beyond hearing through
the Fellowship's recent discussion, Dakar believed only that Arithon's
genius for duplicity had caused Sethvir himself to be misled. The Warden
of Althain settled in his seat with a rustle of robes, and his trusting regard
touched his colleagues.
    No spoken signal passed between the three, yet when the Fellowship
sorcerers at Althain commenced rapport, the air in their presence
quickened at the call of some unseen current. Shadows swelled as the
spark in the brazier condensed to a pinpoint, dim at first, then waxing as
their touch bound the pulse of Athera's third lane ever more relentlessly
into focus. The light flared to piercing brilliance. Forced to avert his eyes,
the Mad Prophet was awed to find the sorcerers unmoved by the dazzle.
Rooted as stone, they twined the earthforces tighter still, until the
chamber resonated with a palpable, mounting charge. A stinging bite of
ozone eclipsed the smell of books. The tower's granite walls lost aspect,
became edgeless and transient before that vast tide of power which itself
seemed to cancel time.
    The atmosphere became stillness before storm, and out of pent silence,
$ethvir spoke a word.
 Light arced from the brazier toward Traithe.
    He received it unflinching, cast it around space and time in a manner
that defeated reason. A snap sheared the air into wind as the ray honed out
of earthforce bridged the wide distance to Meth Isle.
    Dakar bit his lip. The salt taste of sweat seemed unreal on his tongue, as
if the proximity of lane-force estranged him from bodily sensation. Then
the connection completed. His thoughts were slammed to incoherence as,

203


across the breadth of the continent, the spellbinder who was Guardian
of Mirthlvain recaptured the current sent from Althain. The focus pattern
on the stone floor at Meth Isle keep flashed scarlet as power lapped against
power, and the fifth lane's inherent energies surged in sympathetic
resonance.
    Barefoot, terrified and stripped down to animal reflex, Verrain wrested the
flux apart with a cry that echoed outward into the night beyond his walls. He
rocked under a buffeting slap, shared by Dakar, as the awesome, fiery rush of
power deflected through his body, and on, into the deft control of the
sorcerers who held the barrier along Mirthlvain's perimeter. Although
stepped down to a finer resonance by the pair Asandir and Sethvir, the
current's passage was a dry, lacerating wind of agony. Dakar drew gasping
breaths and struggled. He must preserve self-identity against the burning
assault of sensation experienced by Verrain, or risk himself and all who
depended on him.
    The powers whipped and raged. Dakar fought not to be swept from
control, though he had no anchor. The chair beneath his body had no
meaning, nor the stone under his feet. He was a mote in a whirlpool, flexed,
twisted, shoved and driven until physical orientation seemed an illusion
cast outside reality.
    Sethvir sensed the Mad Prophet's distress, even through the shaping of the
third lane's raw bands. 'Sometimes it helps if you hold someone's hand,' he
said gently, and offered his own.
    Dakar accepted with a gratitude compounded by desperation. Like a
boulder in the thrash of a millrace, the touch steadied him. Distantly he was
conscious of Sethvir's link with Asandir, and the incomprehensible
strength they engaged to tame the wild pulse of the third lane. Dakar blinked
tears, or maybe sweat from his eyes. Confusion enveloped him, and a duality
that dizzied. He endured, held to the body seated at Althain Tower, though a
part of him also stood, barefoot, chilled and blinded by the inflamed focus
pattern that channelled the untapped fifth lane. Dakar suffered with Verrain
as wave after wave of energies coursed through their twinned awareness, to
be snatched and turned again, before they merged in ruinous concert with
the native currents underfoot.
    Beyond moss-streaked keep walls and across the silvered waters of
Methlas Lake, the mists of Desh-thiere muted a dance and flash of blue light,
as the last two sorcerers in the chain fused with the borrowed powers to
stabilize their defence ward. The critical moment arrived, when the vast and
intricate matrix had been strengthened enough to be passed into the control
of one sorcerer. Apprehension stirred through the circle gathered at Althain.
  'Steady, hold steady,' Asandir said aloud.
  Traithe returned a sharp nod.
    Dakar felt Sethvir's fingers tighten over his own. He had no chance to
wonder if stress or reassurance prompted the gesture, for Verrain's recoil as
the power-flow shifted unbalanced him as well.

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    Through a terrible, precarious interval, the Mad Prophet battled for
cohesion, the will that held him to cognizance gone febrile as a spider's silk
stretched against a gale. By the time the onslaught eased, Luhaine, once
known as Defender, now contained the serpents' migration, bolstered by
assistance from Althain Tower. With one mage less in the link every risk
lay redoubled. Dakar's mouth felt packed with ash. Should the energy flow
from Althain to Meth Isle keep fail now, Luhaine's barrier would crumple
and meth-snakes in teeming thousands would descend like a plague upon
the countryside.
    Yet such perilous preparation had at last freed the other sorcerer on site
at Mirthlvain to act. Ruthless as Ath's avenging angel, Kharadmon brought
his powers to bear upon the boglands. Stale pools lashed up into foam as a
living torrent of serpents seethed, pursued out of cranny, mud-pool and
reedbed by a corona of killing light. The serpents writhed in futile flight,
turned at bay against Luhaine's ward. They struck at air, at wind-lashed
hummocks and in a madness of frustrated fury at each other's struggling
flesh, while the night passed and their hordes were pared back relentlessly
by the efforts of the Fellowship's circle.
    Then Verrain faltered at Meth Isle. The fifth lane focus there crackled to
a blaze that signalled cataclysm.
    Caught without warning, Dakar felt his senses upend into vertigo. All
his control unravelled. His teeth clenched, every muscle cramped, and his
body twisted as if he tumbled in a fall from a great height.
    Warned by Dakar's groaned shout, Sethvir sensed the disaster. As
though he was not enmeshed in rapport with Asandir, the whole untamed
force of the third lane whipped to submission between, he severed the
power transfer. Snapped out of range of all pain, the Mad Prophet slammed
back in his chair. His composure dissolved into ugly, racking sobs that
were the best he could manage for breathing.
    'Ath,' he gasped, half-unhinged. 'I feel like every hangover I ever earned
has joined force in triplicate to plague me.'
    Swept by giddy hysteria, Dakar jammed a fist in his mouth to stop his
babbling tongue. His vision had gone patchy and his ears boomed to a surf*
roll of sound. Somewhere in the echoing, hollow void where thought
seemed to flurry and vanish, he re-encountered the current channelled in
from the Master of Shadow, reduced now to an ember, but pitched with
the same, rock-steady vibration that had marked its presence from the
start. Merciless in his need, Dakar seized upon that glimmer. He tapped
Arithon's source to anchor failing senses and recover the strength to look
up.
 'Luhaine's ward!' he cried out, pierced by a raw blade of fear.
    A stark silhouette against the blue-white glare of lane-forces, and the
pallid grey light beyond the casement, Asandir caught his shivering
shoulders. The sorcerer's fingers were not steady; but the grip they
delivered bruised bone. 'Bide still, Dakar, it's all right.'

205


    The supporting hands fell away and the Mad Prophet slumped forward,
his cheek cradled on crossed forearms. Beside him, a haggard Traithe had
done likewise. Through ears muddled with bell-tones of ringing sound,
Dakar heard Sethvir's voice assure that before the defences failed, the
meth-snakes had been reduced to manageable numbers. Kharadmon might
track down and eradicate the survivors with a fair chance of success.
    Verrain's collapse had been due to exhaustion and overextension.
Luhaine would tend him and keep watch at Mirthlvain until the Guardian
spellbinder's recovery.
    Like a shell sucked clean of meat, Dakar allowed himself to be ushered
to his feet. He was aware of jostling and of movement, as the sorcerers bore
him up along with the limp form of Arithon s'Ffalenn. Perversely
vindicated, that at least such damnably arrogant self-discipline had just
limits, Dakar inclined toward a rich laugh; except the crushing intensity of
his headache permitted only breathless speech. 'The prodigy overreached
himself. Bothersome meddling mind of his will have no choice but to sleep
off the reaction now.'
    'Indeed,' Sethvir responded in remarkable pique. 'Our Teir's'Ffalenn
won't escape his bed for at least the next few days.'
    The sorcerer said something more in the lilting cadence of the old
tongue, but the words escaped comprehension. Poised at the head of the
stairs, Dakar swayed precariously. His knees let go all at once. As a falling
rush of darkness claimed him, he fuzzily concluded that drunken binges
befuddled a body less than overindulgence of magecraft any day. Most
urgently, he needed to remember to clarify that point with Asandir.

206


w~trd~
 had
~und,
 the
~ight

sion.
dian

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)ore
~ely
 USt
 ~of

ld

Strands

Eventide saw the Fellowship sorcerers, Asandir, Sethvir and Traithe
gathered once more in Althain Tower's upper chamber. The blaze of the
brazier lent crispness to profiles already hardened by the demands of the
times. Conversation stayed light as they waited upon their colleagues
Kharadmon and Luhaine, both of whom as discorporate spirits were able to
cross the continent from Meth Isle at whim. Certain topics were avoided;
as unfiinchingly as any Fellowship sorcerer still physically embodied had
weathered the setbacks engendered by Desh-thiere and Davien's rebellion,
none cared to count how many places would stand empty tonight. In better
years, at other summons, the ebony table had seated the full Fellowship of
Seven, five high kings and a representative from the three Paravian races:
apprentice spellbinders had not been required to shoulder responsibilities
beyond their training to fill, and mist had not smothered the land to the
harm of the fruitful earth.
    Sethvir sought his usual solace, scrounging in his cupboards for tea,
when Traithe's raven raised wings and flapped, disturbed by a draft that
spilled through the east casement. The sudden inrush of wind carried a
distinctive scent of grasslands spiked with frost.
    Poised with his hands full of crockery, Sethvir addressed what seemed
vacant air. 'Kharadmon? You're not too spent to project an image? The
Mad Prophet, I think, would be appreciative.'
    As the eddy swirled to stillness, the tower chamber rang with deep
laughter. 'Where is Dakar?' said a voice in resonant Paravian that issued
from a point inside the shutter.
    A shadow coalesced in the spot, resolving into the slender form of a
sorcerer in sable and green. A cloak lined in orange silk spilled from
elegantly-set shoulders; the face inside the hood was an elfin arrangement
of angles, accented by a spade-shaped beard, a glib smile and a hooked nose.

207


The apparition raised tapered hands and pushed the cloth back, smoothing
black-and-white streaked hair. Freed from shadow, the eyes were pale
green and direct as a cat's. The visual projection of the discorporate mage
Kharadmon skimmed a glance over the assembled company, and in
thoroughly changed inflections repeated, 'Where is Dakar?'
    'On his way.' Asandir gave a boyish grin. 'Though I fear a bit the worse
for drink. Sethvir had cider in his cupboard and our prophet drank it dry to
blunt the aches of exhaustion.'
    Kharadmon's smile widened to show foxy, even teeth, and features that
had no substance in reality flashed a look of pure deviltry.

Two storeys below Althain's topmost chamber, the Mad Prophet roused
from dreamless stupor with a start that cracked his knee into Sethvir's
chess table. Ivory and ebony counters cascaded to the floor, the clatter of
their upset entangled with Dakar's peevish oath.
    'Dharkaron's Chariot!' He catapulted from the armchair that had
supported his untimely nap, slammed into the table again and slipped and
skated across rolling pawns through several unbalanced steps. A spectacu-
lar trip landed him belly-down across a footstool and a racked set of fire
tongs.
    'Blessed Ath,' Dakar wheezed on the breath bashed out of his lungs. 'I'm
coming!'

Mon~ents later, the sorcerers upstairs were disrupted by the solid thud of a
body against the ironbound door to their chamber. The latch rattled
sharply but did not unfasten; after an interval of fumbling and swear
words, Dakar burst in from the stairwell, his face beet-red under a tangled
nest of hair.
    'I came as fast as I could.' The Mad Prophet licked a bruised knuckle,
tugged at his rumpled tunic and glowered at Asandir. 'Your gift of a
nightmare was bad enough without setting stay-spells on the latch.'
    Sethvir clutched his tea mugs, innocuously intrigued, while the sorcerer
so addressed sat back in his seat, his smile gone and one silvered brow
tipped upward. 'How thoughtlessly quick you are with accusations.'
      Dakar yanked out a chair and dumped himself in a miffed heap. 'Or~ly
Kharadmon would have--' Suspicion congested his round features.
  'Greetings, Mad One,' said the discorporate sorcerer.
    Dakar shot straight, wildly searching, but his gaze surveyed the room
repeatedly without enlightenment. As the other sorcerers gave way to
amusement, his injury flattened to disgust.
    He announced scathingly to no one, 'If you're going to bait me, ghost,
you might be sporting and show me a visible target.'

2O8


    The spirit returned unbridled laughter and Dakar's eyes found focus at
last as the illusion that marked the sorcerer's presence became revealed to
him. 'You're beyond your depth, anyway, my prophet.' Kharadmon pulled
out a chair, carelessly sliding the seat through his thigh and a fold of green
cloak. Since tormenting Dakar was a favourite diversion, he might have
added more, but Sethvir broke in to ask after Luhaine.
    Kharadmon's eyes became veiled. 'On his way this moment.' Blandly, he
added, 'I always best him at travel, argument and cards.'
    As if whipped to instability by his words, the torches in the sconces by
the doorway streamed and flickered, and though no breeze had arisen to
partner the disturbance, one blinked out.
    'I protest that statement,' a bass voice said in reproof. A second
discorporate materialized alongside the table, this one wizened and bald, a
beard as broad as a waterfall fanned across his chest. His corpulent form
was robed in blue-grey. Apple-round cheeks were capped by brows peaked
in prim inquiry, and eyes sharp and black as an irascible scholar's trained
upon the elegantly seated image of Kharadmon. More than usually
petulant, the newcomer announced, 'Your claim is unfounded, unjust and
entirely unforgiven. We shall contest it later.'
    'Luhaine,' Sethvir interrupted, 'Could we dispense with tired rivalties
and get started?'
    The second of the disembodied sorcerers transferred his vexation to the
Warden of Althain. 'You asked to determine the impact of Desh-thiere's
Bane upon Athera. Might I know what's gone amiss?'
    Belatedly, Sethvir recalled his clutch of crockery; he deposited the lot
with a sigh on the last bit of uncluttered shelf, while Asandir leaned
forward, his robe lit indigo by the brazier. In careful phrases, and as much
for Dakar's sake, he described the backgrounds and personal attributes of
the princes from Dascen Elur whose shared talents comprised the heart of
the West Gate Prophecy. His words were received in grim quiet, even
Luhaine moved to silence as he summed up.
    'The powers the half-brothers command are unquestionably direct, and
evenly split. The risks are self-evident. Lysaer and Arithon are opposites in
character and upbringing. Both inherit the gifts of two royal lines, which
makes an uneasy legacy. Should their past heritage of feud become
renewed, the consequences could be ruinous. Since Dakar has been
troubled by precognizance to that effect, it seems wise to cast strands and
seek a clear course for the future.'
    Luhaine's image blinked out and reappeared, seated with fingers laced
on the tabletop across from Kharadmon. His assent followed, instantane-
ous and emphatic since elemental mastery of any sort was potentially
limitless. Set at odds, Lysaer and Arithon between them could wreak
havoc on a scale not seen since Davien the Betrayer roused the five
kingdoms to rebellion.
 Quiet as shadow, Traithe arose from his chair.

209


    'Cupboard underneath the Lanshire histories, third shelf,' Sethvir
murmured distractedly. He dissipated the spark of lane-force that burned
in the brazier. Asandir removed the bronze tripod, while Kharadmon
extinguished the other sconce. Unhindered by total darkness, Traithe
found the place designated and retrieved a square of black velvet, which he
shook out and spread across the table.
    Luhaine's brow creased as the cloth passed unimpeded through his
elbow. 'Has Dakar mastered the effects of tienelle yet?'
    The Mad Prophet rolled his eyes and groaned. 'I'd feel better after a
draught of deadly nightshade.' Then, on a plaintive note to Asandir, 'Is
seersweed truly necessary? Last night was awful enough. Today I don't feel
in the least like volunteering to ruin my health all over again.'
    The rare, high-altitude herb he wished to avoid at all costs. Valued for its
mind-expanding properties, tienelle's narcotic was also a poison that
caused cramps, headache and a sudden onset of dehydration that could end
in coma and death. Spellbinders were schooled to transmute its toxicity,
for need occasionally arose for them to perceive complexities beyond their
training to encompass.
    Asandir measured his apprentice with a calm that disallowed pity. 'Had
you not dropped a sword, once, to disrupt your native gift of prescience,
you would not be required to attend this session.'
    Dakar slammed his palms on the tabletop, his frustration damped to an
unsatisfying thump by the heavy velvet covering. 'Ath, you won't forget a
detail, not even once in a century.'
    'Under the north windowseat, in the coffer,' Sethvir interjected in
apparently idle afterthought.
    The Mad Prophet was not fooled. If Asandir's memory forgave nothing,
Sethvir knew the precise location of every unwanted item in Ath's
creation. Since Traithe would not trouble to fetch and carry for an
apprentice, and Kharadmon's whetted interest promised mischief, Dakar
heaved to his feet. Too lazy, or too obstinate to engage the self-discipline
for mageosight, he noisily smacked shins and knuckles in the dark and
searched out the herb stores for himself. He clumped back to his chair
clutching a stone pipe and a carved wooden canister, and busied himself
with a martyred sigh. Most pointedly, he ignored the Fellowship sorcerers
as they prepared for a ritual undertaken only at direst need.
    Power gathered in the hands of Asandir. Above the dark velvet he sp.un a
rod of energy, a glimmer like a line of veiled starlight. To this, he added a
second, then a third, each for the triad of mysteries that embodied Prime
Power and underlay all Athera's teeming life. Next he added twoscore
lesser lengths, to which Sethvir assigned Names in a Paravian ritual that
summoned the essence of the ruler, place, or power and stamped its
quickened current on the spell. The strands assumed identity and altered,
each according to assigned nature. The governor's council in Etarra
manifested as hurtfully bright, a hedge of scintillant angles; the trio for the

210


Paravian races interwove to the evocative beauty of lacework before fading
to a near subliminal glimmer; the spark that captured the collective spirit
of the clansfolk in their exile scribed an enduring sweep of arc. To cities,
human consciousness and natural forces were added individuals; and after
these, plants, animals and natural elements, until a geometric lattice
glimmered above the velvet backdrop, an entire world's interlinked
complexity recorded in precise proportion and line.
    The visionary mind of a Fellowship sorcerer could interpret such at a
glance. Where other methods of precognizance might sound only broad-
scale highlights, the strands were superlatively sensitive. Each would react
as its nature dictated, mapping even minute shifts of balance with pinpoint
accuracy. The futures that might spring from alternate sets of events could
be assessed instantaneously, even the least nuance made plain. To read the
analogue set down into pattern without laborious mathematical analysis,
Dakar packed his pipe with the notched, silver-grey leaves of tienelle. The
scent of the herb permeated the room, sharp, bitter and edged as a winter
wind.
    The pattern over the tabletop reached completion, shedding radiance
like summer moonlight over the faces of the surrounding sorcerers. Dakar
accepted a spark off the finger of a sardonically smiling Kharadmon to
ignite his pipe.
 'Commence,' Sethvir said softly.
    The Mad Prophet sucked hard on his pipe stem, filling his lungs with
aromatic smoke. Vertigo spun his awareness, followed by a kick akin to
adrenalin; his senses cartwheeled and slammed back into focus, enhanced
to painful sensitivity. His ears recorded sound with unnatural nuance and
his vision assumed a razor-edged clarity. The strands that reflected the
power balance of the living world lost their random shapes, became a
comprehensible whole. Configurations of lines and angles spread out like
tapestry, the fates of kingdoms intertwined with the births and deaths of
fieldmice.
    Yet across the rhythms of this grand design, disharmonies stood out like
botched tangles in string. Here lay a twist that told of a mayor's prejudice,
jealousy and greed; there, a warped line revealed a sapling stunted by the
unending mists of Desh-thiere. Where the shining braid of Paravian
presence had once enhanced the central axis of the prime vibration, Ath, a
channel of emptiness remained, like notes lost from a bar of flawless
counterpoint. Dakar wrestled to stem a flood of tears. Another pull from
the pipe and the tienelle honed sorrow into a blade that hartowed his heart.
His time sense blurred. Over the shining lines of Athera's present, he
sensed changes wrought over the ages, the strengthening of some aspects,
and the splitting, weakening, or dissolution of others. He suffered
knowledge of all pasts and possible futures in their thousands, until
awareness of Asandir's eyes upon him pierced through his strayed
concentration. His mind might soar through a spiralling flight of

211


enlightenment, but at a price. He must not neglect self-awareness. Even as
the drug freed his thoughts, its poisons ravaged his body. Death could
overtake him if he forgot to guard his physical health.
    The moment when the sorcerers raised power came as an icy chill that
flowed the length of Dakar's spine. The strands became suffused with
terrible light, as the Fellowship sought futureward and called forth the
events that might occur as a result of the works of two princes from Dascen
Elur.
    Desh-thiere's fall became manifest as an explosion of new lines of
power. Forests, fields and all of the natural landscape brightened to an
ascendence of recovered vigour. The politics of the trade-guilds whipped
into kinks of recoil, and a new axis sheared through their sundered town
councils: Lysaer, Dakar perceived in wide surprise. The s'Ilessid prince
would one day unite the towns, make war to claim all the wildlands for the
mayors, and subdue and finally eradicate the barbarian clans. Arithon's
part appeared, not in Rathain, but as a figure of self-contained elegance that
flowed from place to place, dedicated wholly to music. Yet the art he
created was framed by a backdrop of unprecedented persecution.
    The sorcerers' unadulterated dismay disrupted the flow of probability.
Dakar stole the moment to regroup, then scrambled to keep up as,
vehemently fast, the strands unreeled to a new sequence. The Fellowship
traced out the only alternative at hand to thwart that turn toward disaster:
let the Mistwraith's hold over sky and sun abide unbroken, while the
powers that offered its sole downfall, two princes' inherited gifts of Light
and Shadow became sundered by their hand to preserve the peace.
    Shocked through change by a rippling cascade of forecasts, the pattern
hardened. The motif that represented the Pararians dimmed to invisi-
bility, then vanished away into darkness.
    The spell froze. Stunned shock passed between the sorcerers; the impact
of their collective dismay threatened to stop Dakar's breath.
    The disappearance of the old races had been sorrow enough to endure:
the potential for their irrevocable extinction became as a tear in the fabric
of Ath's creation, an insupportable loss to any who had known their living
presence. Although Dakar had been just a boy when the last of the
creatures had vanished, childhood memories of one encounter had left him
marked for life. Tears ran unchecked down his face.
    That such shining beauty should pass beyond memory into leg,end
could not be borne. Distinct from his own experience, Dakar shared
poignant memories from the sorcerers; and the one that cut deepest was
that of the solstice dance under starlight in the vale of Caith-al-Caen. The
blighted patch of dark amid the strands, that had personified the penulti-
mate grace, warned of a harm beyond healing.
    'So much for allowing events to run their course, untouched,' snapped a
thought from Traithe across silence.
As one, the Fellowship sorcerers rallied crushed hopes. Devastated by

212


necessity, grimly wedded to purpose, they recast an alternative sequence
they had earlier hoped to avoid. The strands flickered, interlaced, clean
curves and sharp angles reformed to show a coronation at the trade city of
Etarra. Charged by the Fellowship to accept Rathain's crown, Arithon's
line bloomed into a jagged nexus of anguish, that peaked and peaked
repeatedly, yet endured; and still the axis of Lysaer's power roused the
townborn to war. A great schism tore the width of the continent, with
strife predominant. Yet the cipher that reflected Paravian survival glimm-
ered on wanly, preserved.
    Sethvir's observation cut between. 'Desh-thiere. The Mistwraith itself
lies at the root of this.' He need not belabour his frustration that the entity
inflicted upon Athera by the worlds beyond South Gate could not be
directly tracked: as a thing un-Named and foreign in origin, it had no
signature energy that could be set into the pattern. The strands could only
reflect its effects. As the sorcerers refocused their resolve, Traithe's face
showed a drawn look of anguish.
    Again the pattern flowed into change, with discord harrowing all order.
Futures in their myriad thousands described a legacy of battle and
bloodshed. Dakar stared at violence until his eyes burned, and
Kharadmon's image became partially transparent with negligence. The
strands flicked and interwove above the velvet, their motion unbroken but
for the split-second needed by the Fellowship to assess the impact of each
destiny. And still the patterns forecast war. The room grew stale with pipe
smoke. Beyond the window, night gave way to hazy dawn, while the
sorcerers pursued cascading trains of circumstance, unsatisfied. Their
persistence unveiled no solution. The strands unravelled over and over
into strife. Thwarted in their search for a peaceful expedient, the
Fellowship sought answer in the far-distant future. Despite the expanded
awareness of the tienelle, Dakar was left hopelessly behind.
    Midday washed the chamber in dull grey before the strands stilled,
freezing to a last blazing pattern that faded away like after-image. Sethvir
raised eyes reddened from smoke haze. Kharadmon's colouring was
dimmer and Luhaine had lost detail. No face present escaped the impact of
the quandary spelled out in the strands. Dakar tapped ash from his pipe
into the lid of the tienelle canister, and as though roused by the sound, the
Warden of Althain spoke.
    'Never in memory have the patterns converged so strongly to a path of
alternatives this narrow. We are forced to unpleasant choices.'
    The strands foretold, unequivocally, that Lysaer and Arithon would
oppose, with full and bitter consequences. To strip them of their inborn
powers as a deterrent in all cases yielded Desh-thiere's continued
dominance. That in itself promised changes in natural order, none of them
to the good; but to deny the vanished Paravians a retum to natural sunlight
was to take the role of executioner. Men might engender war and suffering,
but over the course of ages, even fanatical hatreds must fade. To act for

213


immediate peace was to seal the extinction of a mystery beyond mortal
means to restore.
    'If we only knew where they had fled, we might shelter them,' Traithe
said on a clear note of anguish.
    'Desh-thiere caused their disappearance from the continent,' Luhaine
pointed out. 'If the old races allow themselves to be found at all, the
Mistwraith's fall must come first.'
    The last avenue of debate became Arithon's royal inheritance. No longer
able to follow nuance, Dakar hunched in a stupor in his chair. His head was
beginning to pound and his stomach tightened with the first unpleasant
symptoms of tienelle withdrawal. Through a haze of mounting discom-
fort, he gathered the Fellowship inclined toward freeing Arithon from
obligation to Rathain's throne. If schism between the half-brothers must
occur, best the powers of sovereignty were not involved. Dakar lost the
thread of concentration. Words whirled in and out of his pain-laced
thoughts, unheeded. Hounded by rising nausea and dripping poisoned
sweat, he knew he should rise and find drinking water. His mouth was
bitter with the burnt taste of tienelle; his awareness rolled like a ship on
oily billows, jumbled and buffeted by after-visions. No mage in the
chamber was more surprised than he when the name of the outcast
sorcerer whose works had engendered the rebellion fell through his
thoughts like a stone. Davien.
    Dakar shoved straight as his gummy, clogged perception broke before a
cold wave of prescience and prophecy claimed his tongue. Though
churning sickness tugged at his gut, his words fell in solemn clarity on a
sudden, arrested silence.
    'Davien the Betrayer shall hear no reason, nor bow to the Law of the
Major Balance; neither shall the Fellowship be restored to Seven until the
Black Rose grows wild in the vales of Daon Ramon.'
    'Black Rose!' Sethvir shot upright, intent as a hunting falcon. 'But none
exists.'
    'There will be one,' Dakar gasped, slammed by a second precognizance
that blazed through him like lightning etched across darkness. 'The briar
will take root on the day that Arithon s'Ffalenn embraces kingship.'
    A dismayed round of glances;crossed the table; for the strands had not
deviated on one point: that if Arithon were left to free will, he would live
and die as a bard. Only under duress would he accept the sovereignty of
Rathain, and not even then with sincerity.
    'Arithon's freedom must be sacrificed,' Traithe said. 'The choice is a
foregone conclusion.'
    That moment, amid strained and unsettled apprehension shared be-
tween Fellowship sorcerers, Dakar gave way to the sickness brought on by
the tienelle. Doubled over with dry heaves, he all but tumbled from his
chair. By the time his spasms eased, he retained no memory of the

214


prophecy, and confronted by disappointment at every turn he managed a
dogged apology before illness rendered him speechless.
    Unlikeliest of benefactors, it was Kharadmon who moved to the Mad
Prophet's side and eased his suffering. As Asandir ushered his ailing
apprentice downstairs to bed, the remaining sorcerers grappled with the
new prophecy like starving dogs thrown a marrowbone. The judgement
and exile of Davien had been their most tragic expedient, and the
disappearance of their seventh colleague, Ciladis, in his search for the
Paravians had become their most mourned loss. The prophecy entangled
with Dakar's Black Rose offered the first tangible hope that the reverses
that had disrupted the Third Age might one day be righted.
    Traithe, least likely advocate of individual sacrifice, had spoken rightly.
Even without the fates of the two absent sorcerers thrown into jeopardy,
the loss of the old races could not be risked. By the time Asandir had
returned from seeing Dakar safely settled, several distasteful resolutions
had become final.
    For the sake of Paravian survival the princes who held Desh-thiere's
bane between them would use their gifts to restore sunlight, regardless of
the wars to follow; and Arithon would be crowned High King of Rathain at
the trade city of Etarra, to open the channel of probability that gave rise to
Dakar's Black Rose Prophecy.
    There remained only the task of setting safeguards, where such could be
done, to limit the scope of the damage. If Lysaer went on to claim
sovereignty in Tysan, he would act without Fellowship sanction. The
townsmen's loyalty he might win on his own, but that of the clans must be
held in reserve, leaving Tysan's steward, Maenalle, free to safeguard her
people as she could. And if the fabric of four realms was to be torn apart by
conflict, the fifth must be granted firm leadership.
    'The heir to Havish must be brought out of hiding,' said Sethvir. 'He will
need to be educated, for the day he comes of age, we must see him securely
on his throne.' In one of the kingdoms, at least, town factions and barbarian
clans would not be abandoned to disunity.
    Little else was exchanged in speech after that, as the sorcerers divided up
the tasks at hand. Bleak as the future might become, the land would not be
thrown wholesale to the bloodshed interlinked with Desh-thiere's defeat.
    The Fellowship concluded their conference well past mid-afternoon.
Kharadmon was first to depart, his wild laugh and ready smile fading
through the casement as he swept south on the desert breeze. Luhaine's
image dissolved in pursuit, a score left to settle concerning his colleague's
cavalier boasts.
    Traithe shoved to his feet. His limp pronounced by exhaustion, he
descended the stair to guard Dakar through tienelle withdrawal and to
offer Lysaer when he woke the hospitality due to a prince.
    Left alone with Asandir, Sethvir stood by the opened casement, his eyes
veiled in contemplation. The tea mugs he had belatedly arisen to recover

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stayed empty as he said, 'We have an immediate problem. The crown
jewels of Rathain.'
  Asandir sighed. 'I'd not forgotten.'
    The gems included in the heritage of past high kings had been cut by the
Paravian artisans of Imam Adaer, each one a power focus tuned to respond
to the descendants of their respective royal lines. But the master's training
given Arithon by Dascen Elur's mages already enabled his finer percep-
tions; augmented by the crown jewels' attributes, his gifts could potenti-
ally become unmanageable.
    The focusing properties of the stones would not be annulled by
cutting; future generations would need them, even had the artisans of
Imam Adaer not been long dead, their knowledge gone to dust in the
desecration brought by the Curse of Mearth. Sethvir and Asandir instead
sought a ward to conceal the stones' arcane nature from the s'Ffalenn
prince who must hold them for the duration of his reign.  The project took the remainder of the day.
    Dripping sweat, and tinged greenish by reflections thrown off an untidy
hoard of cut emeralds, the two sorcerers locked glances as they emerged
from combined trance.
    'Ath Creator,' the Warden of Althain murmured in disgruntled vehem-
ence. 'You realize the Teir's'Ffalenn and his confoundedly sensitive
perception has brought us one damnable fix?'
    Asandir raked silver hair from his temples. 'Today I don't need the
reminder. I only hope we set our safeguards deep enough.'
    Sethvir arose and scooped the gems into a battered coffer. 'Take no
chances. Set a geas to avert scrutiny when Arithon first sets hand to the
royal regalia. If I'm any judge, he'll notice the resonance of the wards.'
    'I had that hunch,' Asandir confessed. 'And I'm still concerned. The man
has little vanity. Emeralds by themselves won't impress him, and would
you want to try and convince him that his jewellery shouldn't be traded for
something inherently more practical.~'
    Sethvir laughed. 'I should have guessed, when we decided the latent
s'Ahelas talents should be trained, that Princess Dari's descendants might
cause us a fearful set of headaches. She argued the entire time I tutored her.'
The Warden of Althain planted the coffer with its irreplaceable contents
amid a clutter of unshelved books, then revived the dropped thread of
inquiry. 'I'd much rather brew tea, and challenge you to chess, than
persuade any s'Ffalenn prince against his natural inclinations.'

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Artifacts

Lysaer burrowed out of a comfortable muddle of bedclothes to find himself
in a chamber lamplit against the gloom of falling dusk. The air smelled of
sealing wax and parchment. Relieved to be free of open-air campsites and
barbarian hospitality, he took in the scholarly clutter of books and pens,
the scarlet carpet and the mismatched array of fine furnishings, and
decided the pallet where he lay must be inside Althain Tower. The room
was not deserted.
    By the settle sat a black-clad stranger, his hands busy with awl and
waxed thread, mending a broken bridle. A raven perched on his shoulder
swung its wedge-shaped head at Lysaer's movement, ruffled knife-edged
feathers and fixed the prince with a gaze of bead-bright intelligence. As
though given warning by a sentry, the man stopped stitching and looked
up.
 Lysaer's breath caught.
    The stranger's eyes might be soft brown, and his clipped hair silvered
with age, but the implacable stamp to his features and the profound
stillness about his presence unmistakably marked him as a Fellowship
sorcerer. 'You must be famished,' he opened kindly. 'My name is Traithe,
and in Sethvir's stead, I welcome you to Althain Tower.'
    Lysaer forced his fingers to release their cramped grip on the blankets.
'How long have I been here?'
    The raven cocked its head; Traithe knotted his last stitch like a farmwife
and nipped off the thread with his teeth. 'Since yesterday evening.' At
Lysaer's raised brows, he added blandly, 'You were very tired.'
    Discomfited by more than his saddle sores, Lysaer surveyed the form of
his half-brother, sprawled on the adjacent pallet in unprecedented and
oblivious sleep. Struck that Arithon's pose seemed less than restful- more
a jumble of limbs folded like knucklebones in a quilt -Lysaer turned away.

217


This once determined to keep the edge and not feel pressured to keep pace
with his half-brother's fast perceptions and trained awareness of mages, he
slipped clear of the covers and hooked his breeches and shirt from a nearby
chair. He dressed with princely unselfconsciousness, inured to the lack of
privacy imposed by the lifelong attentions of servants.
    The sorcerer in black was too tactful to seem curious in any case. He
moved like a swordsman bothered by old injuries as he pushed aside his
mending, shed his raven in an indignant flurry of wings onto the settle and
rose to build up the fire. As disturbed embers flared to sudden flame, Lysaer
glimpsed palms and wrists ridged with scars that would have left a lesser
man crippled.
    Unable to picture the scope of a calamity that could harm a Fellowship
sorcerer, the prince averted his glance and set about lacing his sleeve cuffs.
His awkwardness as always caused the ties to knot. Embarrassed that even
so simple an act as dressing could still make him ache for the comforts lost
with exile, he jerked at the snarl. Rather than succumb to expletives, he
wondered if any place existed in this Ath-forsaken land where there was
gaiety, laughter, and dancing in streets not guarded by sentries. He missed
the gentle company of women, and his betrothed left beyond Worldsend
most of all. Pride forbade the weakness of recriminations. Still, mastering
self-pity took all the effort of a difficult sword form, or the thorniest
problem of state ever assigned to his charge as royal heir.
    When the contrary laces were set straight, the prince had recovered his
poise. He looked up to find Traithe finished tending the fire. Still as
shadow, limned in that indefinable mystery that clung to spirits of power,
the sorcerer regarded him intently. His features were less chiselled than
marred by hard usage to wrinkles like cracks in fine crystal. Laugh-lines
remained, intertwined through others cut by sorrow. As if moved by
caprice, Traithe said, 'We're not all relentless taskmasters like Asandir,
you know.' He flipped the poker back on its hook with a playful flourish
and smiled.
  Startled to reckless impulse, Lysaer said, 'Prove that.'
    'I should have expected you'd ask.' Traithe turned back, shamefaced as a
dog called down for misconduct. 'The sorcerer to answer should be
Kharadmon. But he left this morning, feckless ghost that he is. As fool, I'd
make a sorry replacement.' Betrayed by a weariness that had not at first
been apparent, Traithe settled back into his chair. A snap of his fingers
invited the raven back to its accustomed perch on his shoulder where, ot~t
of habit, he raised a crooked knuckle and stroked its breast. 'We could
mend bridles,' he suggested hopefully. 'Enough worn ones are strewn
about, though Ath only knows where Sethvir collects them. Unless
Asandir or I happen by, the stables here shelter only mice.'
    Amazed at how smoothly he had been set at ease, Lysaer gave back the
smile he kept practiced for difficult ambassadors. 'I'm a poor hand with a
needle.'

218


    'Any man would be, who'd eaten nearly nothing for a day and a half.'
Traithe pushed back to his feet. He had the build and the balance of a
dancer, and the shuffling hesitation in his stride made harsh contrast as
he crossed to the doorway. 'Shall we see what Sethvir has bothered to
stock in his pantry?' He pushed the panel open, and the raven launched
off and flew ahead into the torchlit stairwell.

Lysaer set aside the unbuttered sweetroll he had long since lost interest
in eating. Across the narrow, cushioned cranny that Sethvir kept for a
supper nook, Traithe elbowed his own crumb-littered plate aside.
'You feel bothered that Arithon should still be asleep,' he surmised.
Unsettled enough without having the thoughts in his head voiced
outright, Lysaer flinched. His bread knife clashed against the china and
startled the raven on the sorcerer's shoulder to a flutried flap of wings.
While Traithe reached up to soothe it, Lysaer looked down and away,
anywhere but toward the whitened scars that criss-crossed the sorcerer's
knuckles. The nook might be cozy and the cutlery rich enough for a
king's boards, but the cruciform openings in the walls had originally been
cut as arrowslits. The drafts through the openings were icy, the view
beyond drab grey. Civilized, sunlit comforts heretofore taken for granted
seemed unreachable as marvels in a child's tale in this world of unending
mists and bleak minds schooled to mysteries.
    'We've been here since nightfall yesterday.' Princely manners showed a
hint of acid as Lysaer challenged, 'You don't find it strange that a man
should still be abed after twenty-four hours of rest?' Particularly one like
the Master who tended to recoil out of nerves from his blankets at every
two point shift in the wind.
    Traithe showed no break in affability as he hissed at the raven which
edged down his sleeve toward the table, its sidewards tipped eye greedily
fixed on the butter. Careful to turn his disfigurements from the prince's
angle of view, he shoved the candle stand between the bird and tempta-
tion. Through haloes of disturbed flamelight, he regarded the s'Ilessid
half-brother. 'Had Arithon been unwell, your concern would be shared by
the Fellowship.'
    The black-clad sorcerer volunteered nothing else; but his easy manner
invited questions.
    Lysaer gave rein to curiosity. 'Would you mind telling me what
happened?'
    Traithe shrugged. 'An outbreak of poisonous serpents in the kingdom
o~ Shand took a forceful show of sorcery to eradicate.'
    The last was understatement, Lysaer determined, since the mage's
expression was suddenly inscrutable as his raven's. Piqued to be left out
when momentous matters were afoot, he said, 'I might have liked to
help.'

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    'Your half-brother was used,' Traithe stated baldly. 'His power was
channelled from him like wine from a vessel of sacrifice. When he recovers
enough to reawaken, he'll retain no memory of the event.' Mindful of this
prince's staunch loyalty, the sorcerer added, 'Arithon volunteered, at the
outset.'
    The raven chose that moment to try a furtive sidle toward the butter.
Traithe batted it aside without ceremony. Through its outraged croak and
the breeze fanned up by its wing beats, he said, 'Has no one ever thought to
school you to understand your birth-given gift of light?'
    Touched on a life-long source of bitterness, Lysaer spoke fast to keep
from hitting something. 'No one considered it necessary.'
    The raven retreated to the top of the door jamb and alit on a gargoyle
crownpiece.
    'Ah.' Traithe set his chin on his fist. 'For a prince in direct line for a
crown, such judgement was probably sound. But you've been brought here
to battle a Mistwraith. That alters the outlook somewhat.'
    But Lysaer worried at his hurt with the persistence of an embedded
thom. 'Why did Asandir not suggest it?'
    Traithe chuckled. 'Did you think any one of us is omnipotent? Asandir
has Dakar for an apprentice. Teaching that scatterbrain anything would
frustrate the patience of bedrock.' The sorcerer pushed out of the
windowseat. 'I've an errand to complete in the storerooms. Perhaps you'd
care to come along?'
 Lysaer brightened and stood. 'I'd welcome the chance.'
    He trailed Traithe through the pantry, while at their backs, the raven
swooped to the tabletop, folded wings like a furtive scholar, and hopped on
the plates to scavenge crumbs.
    'Sethvir lets the butter go rancid in the larder, anyway,' Traithe confided
as he let himself into the stairwell. 'He thinks eating a bother, but run out
of tea and he's desolate.'
    Not eased to learn that mages seemed heir to human foibles, Lysaer
followed his host into the tower's lower levels. Even without arcane
perception, Althain's starkly plain construction and rough-cut granite
bespoke haste and stop-gap desperation.
    The air smelled of books, wet firewood and an indefinable tang left over
from spellcraft. Somewhere high above the wind jostled a shutter against
its pins. Lysaer found himself wondering whose feet had rubbed the edges
from these stairs, and the hands of which crowned rulers had polished the
axe-hewn oak rail. He had heard Asandir's reverence for the old races; yet
in this place, under low, vaulted roofbeams blackened by centuries of
torch-smoke, there lingered only a forlorn sense of ending. Any past
enshrined within Althain seemed faded to desolation and a haunting
resonance of perished hope.
    The mist beyond the arrowslits concealed the view that might indicate
the storey of the threshold where Traithe finally stopped. He unlatched a

220


 crude door and disappeared into total darkness. 'Use your gift to light your
 way,' he suggested to the prince who hesitated at his heels. 'Sethvir is
 haphazard about candles, always. I might need a moment to find one.'
     Self-conscious as he had not been while rising from bed stark naked,
 Lysaer engaged his powers. Not easily, and not without trepidation, he
 summoned a silvery spark; but if the sorcerer thought his method crude,
 no comment was given on the matter.
     The chamber revealed by the witch-light was larger than its doorway
 suggested. Timber racks lined walls that curved into shadow, crates piled
 in tiers picked out by the glint of hobnail studded leather or brass hasps.
 The stores reeked of oil and old dust, yet when the sorcerer touched flame
 to the torch in the wall sconce, the pitch-soaked rags caught and unveiled a
 clean-swept stone floor and shelving kept clear of cobwebs. The stores had
 been tended unstintingly, except for labels. Those bales and boxes that
 were catalogued bore crumbling tags marked in antique script that time
 had faded illegible.
     Traithe paused in the centre of the chamber, rapt in manner as his raven.
 'I doubt much has changed since the Paravians left.'
Intrigued beyond awkwardness, Lysaer said, 'What are we looking for?'
'Sethvir could have described which of the twenty odd coffers on the
third shelf by the north wall, at least.' Stirred from vexation, Traithe gave a
rueful smile. 'We're looking for rubies, and the circlet worn by the princes
of Havish in ceremonial affirmation of their rights of succession.'
    'You have a surviving heir?' Lysaer inquired, starved for information on
Athera's royal lines.
    'Tucked away in the hut of a hermit who dyes wool, yes.' Traithe sighed.
'The boy's just twelve, and about to leam there's more to life than bartering
for alum to colour fleeces.'
    Lysaer fingered an intricate pattern of vine leaves tooled into what
looked like a high-born lady's dower chest. 'Where do we start?'
    'Here, I think.' The sorcerer singled out two boxes and a crate stamped
with a hawk sigil that might in years past have been red. 'I would at least
expect to find the regalia of the kings of Havish in a chest with the royal
seal.'
    Lysaer offered his assistance and found himself handed the smaller crate.
As his hands closed over ancient wood, he shivered in anticipation. His
forebears had ruled a high kingdom: piqued by the thought that relics of his
own heritage might be cached here with the antiquities, Lysaer unlatched
heavy bronze catches that slid easily despite heavy dents from rough usage.
The Warden of Althain had not been lax in his care, for the hinges also
turned without a creak.
    The odour of leather and parchment immediately identified the con-
tents: document scrolls looped in musty ribbons, and books with illumin-
ated bindings and titles inscribed in the old tongue. The covers were not
jewelled or clasped with gold, but darkened and sculled with age. Regretful

221


the words between lay beyond his schooling, Lysaer fingered the pages in
fascination.
    'The packages we're looking for won't seem very interesting,' Traithe
said, his features eclipsed by the dome of the adjacent trunk. 'You'd best
check beneath those journals before you go any further.' Lysaer closed a rust flocked cover. 'What are these?'
    'Ancestral records that trace the line of the kings of Havish back to the
founder, Bwin Evoc s'Lornmein.' Yet if the sorcerer meant to elucidate, a
shuffling step and a carping voice interrupted from outside the doorway.
    'Did you have to set that raven loose to rampage through the butter?'
Green-faced and suffering what looked to be a punishing hangover, the
Mad Prophet traipsed into the storeroom.
    Traithe barely spared him a glance. 'I'm encouraged to see you've
recovered enough to have an appetite.'
    'I woke up because I was starving.' Dakar fumbled with the strap of his
belt, which was buckled but not tucked in its keepers, and immediately
resumed accusations. 'Sethvir's too lazy to stock much beyond plain tea.'
The Mad Prophet winced, abandoned the particulars of his clothing and
cradled his brow as the echoes of his own vehemence played havoc with his
sore head. 'And olives preserved in oil sit poorly on a queasy stomach.'
    Busy unfurling an object swathed in linen, Traithe was cheerfully
unsympathetic. 'That didn't keep you from eating them, I see.'
    Dakar clammed up rather than admit culpability. Neither did the misery
of his bellyache stop him from quartering the chamber, randomly fingering
the varied contents of the shelves. 'Sethvir chose like a ragpicker, when he
decided what should be salvaged.' A bored gesture encompassed a lumpish
bundle wrapped in leather tied with twine.
  'I wouldn't handle that,' Traithe warned, already too late.
    The Mad Prophet's meddlesome fingers triggered a burst of blue-violet
light. A crack shocked the air, capped by Dakar's yell of pain. He recoiled,
still howling, while the bundle he had disarranged rolled precipitately off
the shelf.
    It struck the floor with a note like sheared glass and another blinding
flash seared away the leather wrappings. Blinking through a veil of
afterimage and an acrid puff of ash, Lysaer saw a melon-sized violet jewel
bounce and roll across the flags. The facets blazed and fountained sparks at
each contact with the stone.
    'Fiends plague it!' Dakar licked smarting knuckles and turned a baleful
glare upon Traithe. 'That's the Waystone of the Koriathain!'
    'Obviously so.' Shadows swooped in the flamelight as the sorcerer
pushed aside his opened chest, leaned down and matter-of-factly fielded
the rolling crystal. The sparks died. No punitive sting met his touch.
    'Morriel would sell her virginity to know where that thing went!'
Mollified, Dakar added, 'She and her pack of witches have been searching
for centuries, and Sethvir's kept her Waystone here, hidden all this time?'

222


' Traithe
ou'd best

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light that spiked through its purple-black depths. 'Since nobody asked your
crude opinion, I shall tell you once: the Prime Enchantress had only to
inquire after the Waystone's location.' His eyes flicked up, piercingly
sharp. 'Naught but Mornel's stubborn pride kept the jewel at Althain.'
    But nuance was wasted upon Dakar, who loosed a boyish whistle. 'The
bitches will be hot, when they learn.'
    The prospect of a scandal none but a fool would precipitate spurred
Traithe to reproach. 'We would all be better served if you would go and ask
Sethvir for scrap leather that would do for replacement wrappings.'
    Too wily to cross a sorcerer who used that tone of voice, Dakar departed
grumbling obscenities. Left in the company of an undesirably curious
prince, Traithe made an end of the matter. 'The Waystone was mislaid
during the rebellion. As you observed, it is perilously warded. The Koriani
Senior Circle was negligent to leave so powerful a talisman unguarded.'
    Traithe did not add that the loss of their great focus had also curtailed the
order's propensity for interfering in affairs beyond their understanding.
Sethvir was unlikely to volunteer the Waystone's location to the Prime
Circle that craved its recovery. The Warden of Althain could be guileful as
Davien the Betrayer when he chose; never mind that he appeared as honest
as a clear glass of water.
    Traithe fixed Lysaer with a gaze impenetrable as ink. 'If you'll finish
unwrapping this bundle, I think you'll find what we came for.' He set aside
the Great Waystone and tossed across one of two items half-swaddled on
the lid of the trunk.
    Lysaer caught the packet and stripped off the final layers of linen to bare
a thin gold circlet, unornamented beyond a thready, age-worn line of runes.
The smaller item undone by Traithe proved to be a hexagonal tortoiseshell
box. Inside, nested in sheepskin, sparkled a matched collection of rubies.
    At least a dozen in number, the set was cut to a perfection beyond reach
of mortal artisans. The gems required no setting to impress; their depth of
colour glinted like live fire in the flare of the torch by the doorway. Lysaer
gasped, dazzled by the legacy that awaited the dyer's lad soon to be
unveiled as the crown prince of Havish.
    'The regalia was melted down for bounty gold,' Traithe remarked sadly.
For an instant he seemed less than wizard, and more a lame, very worn old
sword-captain lost in reminiscence of ill times. 'The desecration was a
great pity. But Telmandir was the first of the royal seats to be sacked and
set to the torch. Only the jewels and the king's youngest child could be
saved.'
    Lysaer noted the sorcerer's regret, but only distantly. Stark though the
circlet in his hands might be it was old; its nicks and dents bespoke modest
origins. Diminished to realize how very ancient were the high kingdoms of
Athera, and given sense of the wide span of generations the blood lines
hand-picked by the Fellowship must have ruled, Lysaer was moved to awe.

223


    The battered circlet of the Princes of Havish, and the rubies torn at need
from a regalia whose magnificence could only be imagined implied a
stability shattered wholesale; and sacrifice akin to the straits that had
caused the Paravians to build Althain Tower in the bleak hills of a
wilderness to safeguard an irreplaceable tradition. Lysaer felt humbled.
    His inheritance as s'Ilessid on Athera was vast in comparison to the tiny
island kingdom left behind on the world of his birth.
    The pomp, the wealth, every ceremonial pageantry that had seemed part
and parcel of kingship was abruptly rendered meaningless: he perceived
how narrow was his experience and how limited his vision. The presump-
tion shamed him, that he had dared to set judgement on the lives of the
Camris barbarians. Their plight must be better understood to be fairly
handled; a stricture that must start with rebuilding trust with his half-
brother. Brought to painful self-honesty, Lysaer realized that to do right by
the kingdom of Tysan, he must embrace a new concept of justice. The
tinker's workmanship in the old circlet and the uncanny loveliness of
Havish's crown jewels compelled a cold and difficult review of his mortal
strengths and talent.
    Lysaer returned the artifact to Traithe, gentled by diffidence he had
shown no one living. 'I'm thankful for your offer to school my gift of light.
But I see very clearly: a mage's training is not my course to pursue. My part
in confronting the Mistwraith is but the prelude to healing the rift between
townborn and clansman. The greater good of Tysan must demand my total
dedication.'
    Struck by the depths of sincerity that prompted this prince's
self-sacrifice, Traithe closed his hands, quenching the blood-fire of the
rubies. His sorrows as sorcerer compounded with fierce foreboding for the
future spelled out by the strands. Like the Great Waystone the Koriani
enchantresses ached to recover, the cache of sapphires that were the crown
jewels of Tysan must remain in Sethvir's trust at Althain. That this
gently-reared descendant of Tysan's kings, whose shining talent was
inspired rule, should one day through the Mistwraith's machination refute
the fine intentions that now moved his mind and heart seemed an
impossibly cruel twist of fate.

224


Harbingers

In the cold light of dawn, a dark horse with a black-clad rider canters south,
for Ghent in the kingdom of Havish; beneath the hunting bow and
traplines of a forester's trade, he bears a concealed set of rubies and a
circlet, while a raven swoops on a following breeze over his silver-banded
hat...

High above land, outside even the coiling fogs of Desh-thiere, the
discorporate sorcerer Kharadmon arrows east on the winds of high
altitude, his intent to measure and map the power base of the governor's
council of Etarra...

Too obdurately frugal to hurry, Luhaine drifts west into Camris, bearing
tidings and grave portents for Maenalle, Steward of Tysan...

225



X.  DAON RAMON BARRENS

For a confirmed hedonist and established late riser, Dakar climbed Althain
Tower's central stair in suspiciously buoyant spirits. Enjoying the early
hour without a hangover, he barged into the room where the half-brothers
slept with a clang of the bar, and a shove that swung the oaken door to a
thunderous boom against the stops.
 The racket rivalled the impact of a siege-engine.
    Accustomed to solicitude, courtly deference and a chamber valet
selected for quiet habits, Lysaer squinted through a hurtful flare of torch-
flame. He buried his face in his pillow, nettled enough to curse when rude
hands grasped his shoulder and shook him.
    The assault on his person ended with a raw hoot of laughter. Lysaer
faced around. He endured the ache until his eyes adjusted to the sudden
fullness of light and made out the form of his tormentor. Bent double and
gripping his belly as if he hurt, Dakar wore a shirt that needed washing, a
leather tunic ripped ragged at the hem and a plaid sash so sunfaded the
only recognizable colour was grey. The glare of princely displeasure left
his paroxysms unfazed.
    Lysaer propped himself on one elbow. Made aware as he flicked
back tangled hair that the view beyond the shutter was night black, he
said, 'I don't see any humour in being wakened before dawn by a
maniac. '
    Dakar sat on the adjacent cot. The frame gave a squeal of leather and
wood at the load, and the mattress canted. Its slumbering occupant slid
like a dropped puppet in the direction gravity dictated. Blocked from
tumbling to the floor by the planted bulk of Dakar, Arithon showed no sign
of awakening.
    'Well?' Lysaer fixed glacial eyes upon the Mad Prophet. 'Are you going to
share your joke?'

227


'Joke?' Dakar hiccuped and looked aggrieved. 'I made none. But I'll bet
you never used that many filthy words in one breath before.'
    'Meaning I forgot my manners.' Recovered enough to find tolerance,
Lysaer gave back a wicked grin. 'My reputation's hardly spoiled. You don't
look to me like a lady I need to impress.' Before Dakar could throw back
rejoinder, he added, 'Try that last move on the Master and see what sort of
words he uses.'
    'Oh?' Dakar twisted, reached out and pinched Arithon's cheek, but
failed to raise any response. Arithon never twitched an eyelid. Prosaically,
the Mad Prophet said, 'Won't be waking up this morning, not at all. Too
used up still, and better so. Asandir wants him napping.'
    Warned by a hint of recalcitrance that purpose underlay Dakar's remark,
Lysaer got up and reached for his breeches and shirt. 'We're leaving Althain
today?'
    'Tonight. The sun's not up yet.' All cow-eyed innocence, Dakar heaved
off the cot. He regarded his knuckles, still nicked with scabs since his
encounter with the door panel stuck shut by Kharadmon. 'We go within
the hour. But against any natural inclination, we won't be making passage
across Instrell Bay by boat. The sorcerers have decided we're in a rush.'
    Lysaer measured his shirt laces against each other to even them up for
tying. 'Why?'
    Transparently reluctant to answer, Dakar crooked a finger in an end of
his tangled beard and shrugged. 'Daelion Fatemaster himself couldn't
fathom ways of the Fellowship.' Impelled to neglected duty, he abandoned
his affectations and launched off toward a nearby chest and scooped up
Arithon's clothing. Onto the heap, he tossed boots, hose, cloak, and
belatedly, the sword Alithiel, which still lay naked against the table.
'Didn't this come with a scabbard?'
    Lysaer unhooked the Master's baldric, which hung in plain sight from a
chair back, and handed it over without comment.
    Still grumbling, Dakar shed his armload of garments onto Arithon's
chest. He then sheathed the blade, dumped that on top, and announced,
'Right now I've got other problems, like lugging your bastard brother down
five courses of stairs.'
    'Half-brother,' Lysaer corrected. Regarding the Mad Prophet's ministra-
tions askance, he retrieved his weapons and cloak from the armoire. 'I'm
not so befuddled I don't recall we're only four flights above ground level?
    Nonplussed, Dakar said, 'I can count properly when I'm sober. We aren't
leaving by the gate. Sethvir's got a third lane focus pattern in his dungeon,
and Asandir's of a mind to hurry.'
    By now acquainted with Athera's geography through Sethvir's collec-
tion of charts, Lysaer paused in the act of fastening his baldric: the distance
inferred was well over two hundred leagues, with a span of open water in
between. 'We're travelling on to Daon Ramon Barrens by sorcery?'
 Dakar smiled, mooncalf features all innocence. 'You're going to witness

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 wonders. That is, unless you get disoriented and lose your breakfast on
 the way. Personally, I find lane transfers across latitude nearly as dismal
 as sailing. But then my stomach tries to get seasick in a bathtub.' A last,
 hasty inspection showed nothing indispensable had been forgotten from
 his collection of Arithon's things; the Mad Prophet in prosaic efficiency
 rolled both Shadow Master and belongings up in the blankets he slept on.
     As Lysaer took station at the foot of the cot to help lift the inert body,
 Dakar confided, 'Our boy here's going to be mad as blazes when he finally
 does wake up.' A pause ensued as prophet and prince hefted their load and
 shuffled out of step around Sethvir's clutter toward the doorway. Dakar
 elbowed the panel aside, backed through and cheerfully began the
 descent. 'Angry as a rock-bashed snake.'
     'Maybe that has something to do with Asandir's sudden haste?' Lysaer
 suggested, hoping to pry loose explanation.
     'All of that.' Dakar grinned, perversely uninformative. 'Your half-
 brother's going to be furious.'
     Lysaer shifted grip on the blankets, which were an impractical way to
 handle a comatose body down a stairwell. Past the first landing, the draft
 swirled unpleasantly across his shoulders; and somewhere a loosened
 shutter grated sullenly in the wind. The steepness of the risers stalled
 conversation until something Dakar saw as he rounded the bend doused
 his overweening smugness.
    Caught on the uphill end of a precarious and unwieldy load, Lysaer
discovered in embarrassment that Sethvir stood on the landing, the
voluminous cuffs of his sleeves for once shaken clean of dust.
    Sight of the Teir's Ffalenn trussed in his bedclothes caused the Warden
of Althain to blink like an owl exposed to sunlight. 'I asked you to bring
him down,' he murmured in vague reproof. 'Did you have to bundle him
up like stolen goods in a carpet?'
    'Next time, you carry him,' the Mad Prophet retorted between
wheezes.
    Sethvir hurried ahead down the corridor, maroon robes flapping around
feet tucked hoseless into ridiculously oversized fur bushkins. His reply
trailed back with all the daft overtones of a hermit caught talking to
himself. 'Teirain's'Ffalenn are well able to right their own injustices, this
one better than most. He's Torbrand's descendant, after all, every inch of
him touchy. You're welcome to his revenge by yourself, fool Prophet.'
    To this Dakar spoke phrases that cast biological doubt upon Arithon's
already illegitimate ancestry. Sethvir gave back a blank glance and passed
ahead into darkness. Their course meandered, stopped, backtracked and
circled between ranks of Paravian statuary faintly visible as sparkles of
gold-weave and gemstones caught glancing torchlight from the stairwell.
Lysaer lost count of how many times he stubbed toes or whacked his
elbows and shins; the muscles of his arms and shoulders ached un-
mercifully. That his discomforts might have been staged as a lesson did not

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dawn, until the sorcerer paused and without any fumbling, hooked an inset
steel ring in the floor. A counterweighted trapdoor sprang open and raw
light flooded upward to show features as blithe as a pixie's. Lysaer recalled
with a snap of annoyance that mages saw perfectly in the dark.
    Sethvir's blue-green eyes held a twinkle. 'Go ahead. Asandir has the
horses waiting below.'
    'Horses!' Lysaer eyed the narrow stairwell that spiralled downward
toward a glow too steady to be lamplight. His skin crept, even as the
nuance of his gift confirmed the play of unnatural energies. 'How did he
ever get them down here?'
    Dismissing the question as irrelevant, Sethvir beckoned prince and
prophet and the unconscious bundle carried between them on ahead.
'Where you're going, you'll be glad not to walk.' He closed the trap door
after himself with barely a whisper of a creak.
    The air radiated a tang like a blacksmith's forge intermixed with the
charge of inbound storms. Lysaer checked, while behind him, Dakar
snarled in annoyance that princely fainthearted hesitation was going to
wind up tripping him.
    Lysaer sucked a quick breath and pressed ahead into burgeoning light.
Assured by now that the Fellowship's grand magics would not harm him,
his reluctance stemmed as much from indignity. Accustomed to respon-
sibility as a king's heir, he found the sorcerer's secretive authority deeply
irritating. Had he been apprised of their plans one step beyond the
immediate, or been granted some insight to their motivations, he might
have felt less unnerved. Traithe alone had addressed this need~ but the
black-garbed mage had ridden off to tutor the heir to Havish, and some
event since arrival at Althain had turned Asandir bleak as chipped granite.
    The stair ended. Circular and doorless as a vault, the deepest chamber
of Althain Tower was incised into seamless white marble. A floor of
polished onyx held eight leering gargoyle sconces arrayed on pedestals at
the compass points. No torches burned in their sockets; the light eman-
ated from a webwork of lines scribed across a wide, bowl-shaped
depression. The patterning shaped three concentric circles, edged in
Pararian runes and centred by an intricate, looping interlace that hurt the
eyes to follow. Asandir waited in the middle on a starburst formed by the
intersection of five axis, his shadow merged in the silhouette of a
massive, high-wheeled mason's dray. Dakar's paint mare was harnessed
between the shafts and the other mounts tied to the tailboards stamped
and blew in nervous snorts. The rap and clang of shod hooves raised no
echoes in that windowless, enclosed space, and for all that hellish glare
the air retained no warmth. The draft that wafted off the pattern was
charged with unnatural, arctic cold.
    Touched to spine-tingling uneasiness and soaked in icy sweat, Lysaer
shivered. He started at a touch on his shoulder and spun around to meet
the myopic, inquiring eyes of Sethvir.

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     'You're looking at a power focus, charged and enabled with the natural
 forces that flow in lines across the earth,' said the Warden of Althain in
 measured reassurance. 'The energies gathered here will allow Asandir to
 effect a direct transfer to the ruins west of Daon Ramon Barrens.'
     Lysaer shut his eyes against patterns that glared and sparked like
 fireworks against enigmatic black stone. Through an odd and unpleasant
 ringing in his ears, he heard Dakar's petulant interruption. 'Why not go
 straight to the focus at Ithamon?'
     $ethvir replied, unperturbed. 'For Arithon's sake, you'll travel overland
 from the focus at Caith-al-Caen.'
     'The Vale of Shadows!' As if the translation thrust home a violation of
 something sacred, Dakar cried, 'Why protect him?' He rounded in disgust
 on Sethvir. 'Arithon showed you how lightly he regards your commitment
 to Rathain. After his insolence at the summons, do you think he gives a
 damn for your solicitude ?'
    'Suppose with all his heart that he wished he did not ?' Sethvir interjected.
To Lysaer, who listened in confusion from the lip of the bottom stair, the
sorcerer added, 'The floor is solid, and certainly safe to step on.'
    The oblique shift in subject silenced Dakar. Since Arithon's dead weight
had long since tired his arms and shoulders, Lysaer proceeded forward. For
all his apprehension, the pattern's burning lines caused no sensation
beyond a queer tingle as he stepped over and around them. Dakar of
necessity straggled after, mutteriRg mutinous curses that attributed Ath's
angels to acts of scatological impossibility.  Still by the stair, Sethvir said nothing.
    Asandir was less restrained, when the pair with their burden slung
between them crossed the last circle of the focus. Eyes bright and ruthless
as sword steel flicked over blankets, belongings and the head that dangled
backward, black hair trailing within inches of the rune-scribed floor. 'Lay
the Teir's'Ffalenn behind the buckboard and see him comfortably
arranged. No reason this side of the Wheel can excuse the extra care you
should have taken to fix a litter.'
    'I'd sooner coddle a viper,' the Mad Prophet unwisely retorted. 'Why rush
to stir up disaster?'
    'Arithon gave his trust into your hands without terms the other night,'
Asandir snapped back. 'Is that how you thank him?' Low-voiced, he added
something else that made Dakar cringe like a kicked dog.
    Then the sorcerer's glance snapped to Lysaer, driving home a rebuke not
solely directed elsewhere. Stung for his lapse into pettiness, Lysaer hefted
Arithon into the dray. He attended his half-brother's needs with a servant's
humility, while around him the vault became preternaturally quiet. The
horses stopped sidling and stood glassy-eyed, their ears and tails hanging
limp. The pattern in the floor began to sing in a tone just outside of hearing
and the air gained a charge that lifted the hairs on their backs.
 'Get into the wagon and hold on,' Asandir commanded.

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    Dakar leaped the buckboard and scrambled to snatch up the reins. Lysaer
scrambled over the high sides behind the wheel, while the sorcerer strode
forward, grasped the paint's bridle, and positioned his feet precisely upon
the nexus of the focus.
    Sethvir called out in farewell and the vault burst asunder in an explosion
of unbearable blue light.
    Darkness ripped down hard after, relentless as the void between the Veil.
If Lysaer cried out, his ears recorded no sound. His senses overturned, as if
he, the rough wood he sat on, even the horses tied by their bridle reins
overturned in a gut-twisting series of somersaults. Too late he recalled
Dakar's flippant comment: but having no breakfast in him to lose, only bile
burned the back of his throat.
    Thrilled and frightened by the pull of forces beyond understanding, Lysaer
clung to fast-fraying shreds of self-control.
    Then a jolt slammed the boards beneath his body. Wind compressed from
his lungs and his stomach plummeted back into his middle in a wrench fit to
tear a gut. The unsprung dray hit earth with a crash that jarred the supplies in
the back, Arithon's limp form and everyone else's teeth with undivided
viciousness. Pebbles spanged out from under the iron- rimmed wheels, and
with an appalling creak and a clatter of hooves from panicked horses, the
vehicle lurched and rolled as natural order intended.
    Winter wind slashed through Lysaer's hair. He recovered a ratcheting
breath, discovered his eyes squeezed shut and his hands locked rigidly to the
side-boards. When he mastered the wits to risk a look, disbelief shocked him
like icewater. Tower, vault and pattern were wholly swept away. Through a
dissolving haze of blue sparks and an after-stink of ozone, he beheld a
changed landscape and mist silvered with new day. Under a brooding grey
sky, gusts raked through leathered brown grass, stripped trees and black,
striated rock that gouged through soil and dead briar. Lysaer felt dizzied, sick
and disoriented. He was still battling to reconcile his shaken nerves, when
the impossible solidity of the land, the rutted dirt lane the dray thundered
down and the flying clods gouged up by the horses, who raced ahead in stark
fear - everything preternaturally made real by the loosening coils of grand
magic - tilted hard sideways and overturned.
    'You're going to faint,' Asandir said with incisive clarity from a point
somewhere inside the wagon.
    Vertigo swallowed Lysaer's sight. He sensed no pain as his gold-thatched
head banged into a sack of iron cooking-pots, but heard only the clang of
impact melded with words made blurred through a distance of fading
awareness. 'Ath's mercy on you, prophet, for I'll show none if the s'Ilessid
heir falls out.'

The Paravians called the place Caith-al-Caen, Vale of Shadows, by the dawn
of the Second Age. Common usage corrupted the name of the ruin there to

232


Castlecain, though from a vantage halfway up a mist-cloaked hillside the
reason seemed obscured. The site never held any fortress. All that
remained of the clay and thatch croft where Cianor Sunlord had been born
were hummocks where orchards had stood. Yet as Asandir wound his way
over ground that once had held gardens of scented, flowering trees, his eyes
saw beyond bleak mist and sere landscape. If he looked with his mage's
vision, the shadows, the memories, that abiding resonance of mystery that
lingered wherever the old races had cherished the earth skeined like star-lit
thread through the cross-laced, dead canes of briar.
    Ballads held that a place beloved by unicorns never quite lost the aura of
their presence. At Caith-al-Caen, the adage held true; while Asandir strode
through weeds napped like velvet with dew, his peripheral vision and the
limits just beyond hearing entangled him in echoes of the past. Here, when
the splendours of the Second Age were yet young, the Riathan had gathered
each solstice to renew the earthpowers and to rejoice in the turn of the
seasons. The ecstasy in their music had marked the very soil, and now
wind itself mourned the loss. Even after a thousand years, the land
remained blessed with a grace that haunted. An energy coursed through
the soil that glorified life; even under Desh-thiere's curse, the hills each
spring put forth a knee-high carpet of flowers and rowan still thrust
through the bracken.
    Now, under winter's frosts, only the spirits lingered, ethereal as
shadings in silverpoint, their dance songless and silent. The sorcerer
walked, careful not to look too closely to either side. The memories of too
many friends watched his back with pity and reproach. Sorrow had scribed
too many creases around his eyes, and hope had eased too few.
    'Dael-Farenn, kingmaker!' lisped the wind as it curled through his hair.
'What have you done with your hope, your dreams, your joy? The dance is
not ended, not yet. For the song will renew with the sunlight.' Could
Asandir close his ears he would have; but the hearing of a mage went
beyond reliance on the flesh. The voices and the spirits dogged his
innermind, each step; he would answer their pleas, but at a cost that
anguished to contemplate.
    He crested the rise. Beyond spread the hollow where the Ilitharis
Paravians had first Named the winter stars. The place retained a serenity
that would abide through ages still to come, however much strife marred
the world. Informed of the Master's presence by a bright-edged spill of
lyranthe notes, Asandir stopped dead. His hands and his throat tightened.
As though touched by his sharp trepidation, the voices on the wind palled
to murmurs and the spirits swirled away, brilliance dimmed; while
through a perception that threatened to unman him, Asandir heard
Arithon play Maenalle's gift with a touch unfettered by bitterness.
    Arpeggios rippled and soared, linked by gracemotes that revealed, like
unfinished tapestry, the latent promise of the bard. Cut diamonds had less
clarity. The s'Ffalenn heir already possessed a skill that could pierce the

233


heart; offered freedom to pursue his desire, and given the right master, his
talent could be refined to a grace that held power to captivate.
    Woodenly, Asandir pressed forward. His deerhide soles grated over
stone, deliberate warning to the minstrel that solitude had been breached.
Arithon glanced over his shoulder, saw his visitor and smiled. The
reflexive, hairtrigger wariness that on prior occasions had hardened him
never arose. As if his licence to share the risks in quelling the meth-snakes
had triggered catharsis, the music flowed from him unchecked. By the
lyrical, ringing undertone, no Fellowship sorcerer could mistake that this
time the s'Ffalenn heir played to share unconditionally.
    Asandir fought his wish to turn away, to retrace his path to the valley
and leave Caith-al-Caen to the spirits and the bard; instead he steeled his
will and assimilated the hurtful whole: his mage's vision showed him the
colours of Arithon's aura shot through with absolute trust.
    The final steps toward the hollow became unbearably hard to com-
plete. Asandir managed, though the wear left by centuries of service
suddenly bore down on him and the wind pried his hair and clothing
like the tug of hostile hands. He reached the stone where Arithon sat
and regarded the mist and the shadows until the song reached its natural
end. When the last note faded into stillness, he settled at the Master's
side.
  'Why?' he asked softly, though in depth, he already knew.
    Arithon settled the lyranthe into the crook of his elbow and answered
the question's drift. 'I finally had proof that your promise of free will was
genuine.' Green eyes turned, but Asandir could no longer meet them.
Unperturbed, where in a more guarded moment he might justly have taken
alarm, Arithon continued. 'I challenged my right to self-destruction and
was shown an open door.' He paused, looked down and his hands opened.
'You'll forgive my cantankerous behaviour, I hope. I'm capable of better, as
you'll see.'
    Asandir masked a flinch, for the words the Master had chosen had
echoed those of another s'Ffalenn ancestor, caught in an equally untenable
position. And in the moment when memory and pity stole speech, Asandir
shared in fine-textured empathy the unshielded confidence of a friendship.
    The offering itself was a rarity for a man unaccustomed to companion-
ship: a lonely boy, raised in the company of elderly mages who had all
loved him at a distance. He had grown without a mother's affection~ but
hereditary compassion had turned him from resentment. He readily
forgave what he did not understand, and defined his joy through his
competence. Praise for his achievements kept him from discovering the
depths of his isolation, the cost of that misapprehension still yet to be
paid.
    The true friend, the caring lover, could absolve all hurt from the growth
that inevitably must be forced upon the grown man. The lesson might be
learned through care and happiness, that the self-worth Arithon instinc-

234


 tively sought in music was a separate thing from accomplishment - had
 Desh-thiere and a crown not hung between.
     Asandir hid bitterness. His own role disallowed mercy. Inwardly con-
 nected the Master might be, and strong as well, but along with his con-
 fidence came infinite power to wound. Asandir came close to recoil as
 another image touched his consciousness: a young girl's face, with shy,
 smiling lips, eyes like aventurine, and ash-brown hair caught up in braids.
 Arithon had wanted to kiss her but women confused him ; while walking in
 the hills to gather herbs they had spoken of music and poetry and then of
 things more personal. And trembling in his arms she had admitted that his
 powers, the given gift of Shadow he had laboured so long to master,
 frightened her. He had let her go, not knowing what to say.
     The girl's name had been Tennia, Asandir recalled from the clutter of past
 recollections he had probed after breaking the Curse of Mearth; the events
 themselves were not new, nor the regrets they had left marked in memory.
 The sorcerer's gall and surprise stemmed instead from distinction that now,
 his insight into Arithon's consciousness was openly given in trust.
     Asandir watched the winds comb the dry, frost-brittle grasses with bleak
 eyes. This time, in keenest irony, inherited s'Ffalenn compassion had set
 the reins into his grasp; s'Ahelas farsight offered the whip. His mage's
 perception recognized Arithon's inner fibre, and its naked vulnerability
 stirred him to grief sharp as outrage: for he could, he would, and he must,
 manipulate this prince into voluntary betrayal of everything he held dear.
    'This place,' Arithon said, interrupting Asandir's inward turmoil, 'it has a
quality, a feeling, as if the rocks, the soil, even the wind, are something more
than inanimate.'
    'Caith-al-Caen is aligned with an earth-lane,' the sorcerer replied in what
seemed measured calm; but a shiver flawed his composure. Mercy upon
you, he thought to the prince at his side; for Arithon had unwittingly invited
the opening the Fellowship in its desperate need required. Over the whisper
of wind and through the multiple levels of his mage's awareness, Asandir
chose his words. 'Here, in the past, the old races danced at the turn of each
season to deflect the earth's forces into latitudinal channels to enrich the
surrounding land. So were all of Athera's twelve lanes once interconnected
in a lattice to nourish all life. The resonance that shaped the ward lingers
still.'
    Self-control prevailed: a voice could be compelled to sound conversa-
tional, though anguished self-revulsion stormed beneath; for the first strand
of the snare would be spun, here and now, of the purest thing left to this
world: the beauty and wild grace impressed upon Caith-al-Caen by the
dance of the Riathan Paravians. 'I can show you, if you like.'
    It did not help to know that the ultimate course of the world depended
upon this deception, as Arithon straightened in surprise. His eyes lit with
pleasure, and a longing that was entirely spontaneous tipped up the corners
of his mouth. 'I would be honoured.'

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    Somehow Asandir unlocked numbed fingers. He reached down, picked
up a lichened bit of stone and said, 'Give me your hands.' He offered his
own, palm upward, the pebble cradled like the mythical seed of temptation
in the left one.
    Arithon laid his lyranthe aside. A gust fanned his hair and the coarse
linen of his sleeves as he reached to engage his grip. Warm hands were
given into the sorcerer's cool ones. As if air itself were abrasive to his skin,
Asandir accepted the touch.
    He guided Arithon's fingers to cup the fragment of stone, then moulded
his own over the top. 'You were taught to clear and centre your mind. Do
that. But this time, include our bit of stone as if it were part of your flesh
and leave me an open channel.'
    Unaware of impending destiny, Arithon closed his eyes. Without
looking, Asandir could sense the change as he underwent the necessary
preparation and the clamour of inward consciousness settled to listening
stillness. As a shepherd might lead his best lamb to slaughter, the sorcerer
threaded his awareness into the fragment of stone, hooked the residual
glimmer of Paravian magic and set it free, to pour through Arithon's
unshielded spirit and weave its undying line of melody.
    The effect at first was subtle, little more than a sensation of warming
from the stone, followed by a tingle of nerves akin to a rush of exuberance.
Arithon underwent a moment of quivering, inward realignment, as if a
chord had been struck in harmonic resonance with his being. Asandir felt
the ripple of reaction course through the flesh under his grip: he removed
his hands and watched, aggrieved and silent.
  Arithon opened his eyes to the vision of unicorns dancing.
    The statues of Riathan enshrined at Althain Tower might reflect an
artist's proportion and line. But perfection carved in cold marble could
never capture motion, nor the lightness and flight of cloven hooves, nor the
lift of tails and manes more fine than spun silk; not the spiralled twist of
horns that shimmered with an energy visible to mages, nor the soaring,
heart-searing sweetness of song that underlay the sigh of the wind. Caith-
al-Caen rang with a purity of tone just beyond grasp of the mind.
     Arithon dropped the bit of stone, helplessly overwhelmed. He sank to
 his knees before the cranny where he had sheltered. Assaulted by a rapture
 beyond hope, the half-glimpsed promise of limitless light, he laughed
 aloud and then trembled. His eyes filled with tears and overflowed.
 'Blessed Ath,' he managed finally, his words wrung to harshness by awe. 'I
 never guessed. Yet the beauty in the sword should have warned me.'
     Asandir regarded the lyrical pavane of the spirit forms, mute. Their
 image held power to captivate, surely; but the palliative brought only
 hunger, akin to the cravings of delirium. These illusions were just poor,
 starved shadows, an imprint like after-image left by creatures whose
 existence transcended mortality. The reality made pearls seem as sand. For
 one who had beheld the wisdom in a unicorn's depthless eyes, for any who

236


 had once experienced the current of undefiled exultation that abided in
 their presence, the ghosts scribed here by trace resonance exposed only
 wretched emptiness. Asandir wept also, but for loss beyond words to
 encompass and for a future set into motion that must not now be undone.
     Cut by regret and infinite pity, he bent also and gathered Arithon's
 shivering shoulders into the embrace a parent might show to a child about
 to be orphaned. 'You can block the visions at will by sealing off your inner
 sight.'
     Arithon twisted against the sorcerer's hold, his face all puzzled delight.
 'Why ever should I want to?'
    Asandir released his grip as though burned. Too choked to breathe, far
less speak, he whirled away and strode off. Almighty Ath, the irony
wounded, endlessly, and straight to the heart. For Arithon would wish
very shortly that he had never owned mage-sight, nor been attuned to the
resonance of Paravian mystery.
    The spirits that haunted Caith-al-Caen were as pale glimmers, their
measure a dance of celebration incanted and renewed through countless
turns of seasons. Here the Paravian singers had transmuted only joy. The
vibrations imbued within the ruins of the traditional s'Ffalenn seat of
power, Ithamon, where the Fellowship proposed to see Desh-thiere's
stranglehold over sky and sunlight broken, were not at all the same.
    Amid foundations shattered by the uprising and the bones of unburied
dead, the four towers raised by the Paravians still stood, their wards
pristine and still radiant. The contrast between their enduring, virginal
harmony and the tormented backlash of magics unleashed by the fall of the
King's Tower that coiled like a wraith through the wreckage was a
thousand times more poignant than the haunting of Caith-al-Caen, and
stark with the blood and tragedy of displaced lives and dreams.
    Arithon might shut such clamour out, but at the cost of his bardic
inspiration; and the compassion that was permanently ingrained in every
scion of the s'Ffalenn line would disallow any such voluntary deafness.
    Irony within irony, Asandir knew, as his feet stumbled in unabashed
haste and his clothing hooked on the briars. The king for Rathain would be
bought in false guilt against every dedicated principle of the Fellowship
whose first task was to foster enlightenment. For the prince now entranced
by the unicorn spirits lacked the hardened self-wisdom to stand down
Ithamon's past. He was too young, too strong and too much the puppet of
pity to perceive that responsibilities were always self-imposed.
    On fostering that lie, Athera's need depended; and on a tender innocence
paired like a curse with resilience enough not to flee.

The road across Daon Ramon Barrens was barely more than a dirt-track,
half overgrown and winding between hills raked by winds that never
seemed to quiet. Tired of the whisper and rattle of dead bracken, of the

237


incessant tug and snap at his cloak hem and hair perpetually whipped into
tangles, Lysaer kept good spirits, buoyed by certainty that the interval of
being adrift without kingdom or purpose would end after conquest of
Desh-thiere.
    Never mind that, league on league, the landscape was unremittingly
deserted and bare; that winter rains soaked his clothing and blankets, and
Dakar's invective worsened since the morning he woke up with iyats in his
boots, and Asandir once again had to rescue him from the energy sprites'
bedevilment. No other diversions arose through weary days of travel, for
their route took them far from even the most isolated initiate's hostel:
tinkers, traders and caravans did not travel the old road to Ithamon. As if
the way itself, with its lichened markers and rolling, briar-grown hills was
haunted, not even the ruins of farm hamlets or villages remained to remind
of a prosperous past.
    'That's because there were none,' Asandir confided over the jingle of
harness and the booming grind of the dray's wheels over bare scarps of stone.
The rain had stopped at midday and water puddled silver in the hollows.
'Daon Ramon in the old tongue means "golden hills". The place was the
province of the Riathan Paravians and unicorns require no dwellings.'
    Unwilling to let the sorcerer lapse into the forbidding silence that had
gripped him since Althain Tower, Lysaer gestured toward the hillsides
with their cover of bracken and thorn. 'It seems hard to picture this place as
fertile and green.'
    'It was, and beautifully so.' Asandir urged his mount over a gully where
the road had washed out and the slates lay jammed like old bones in a spongy
bed of moss. His silver-grey eyes seemed to pierce the mantle of mist and
peer far into distance. 'All that you see was a grassland, rich with herbs and
wildflowers. Winters were short and mild. But that changed, after the
rebellion. Townsmen believed the magic of the Paravians could not abide in
a land without water. They went to astonishing lengths to assuage their
fears. The governor's council of Etarra funded a force of mercenaries to dam
the Severnir. A great canal was cut through the Skyshiel Mountains to divert
the river at its source. The current flows east, now, and empties into Eltair
Bay.'
    'That seems a mighty effort to base on a superstition,' Lysaer com-
mented.
    Asandir rode on in troubled silence. Then he said, 'So long as these hills
remain a desert, no Paravian would return to dwell here. So you see, the
townsmen's intent was suited after all.'
    The damp weather held and night fell early. By then, Asandir's party
made camp in a grotto formed by a jutting outcrop of cracked boulders. The
only bit that stayed dry was the nook where the fire burned and Dakar
crouched there, roasting rabbits that Arithon and Lysaer had snared before
dusk. Asandir knew where to find herbs, and beside the odours of wet earth
and damp horses, the air carried the savoury smell of stew.

238


    Lysaer huddled between the slow drip of a natural spring and a falling
spray of run-off, shirtless, his cloak tossed across his shoulders. With a
needle and thread borrowed from the supply-pack, he was immersed in
determined effort to mend a tear where a briar had torn his sleeve.
Attendant on his progress was the Mad Prophet, in rare high humour at the
prospect of a meal of fresh meat.
    'You're making that thing into ruffles better suited to a tavern doxie,'
Dakar said in unasked-for criticism.
    Embarrassed by his ineptness when he had been surrounded by women
at their embroidery all his life, Lysaer managed a laugh. 'If the ruffles keep
out the cold, I don't care.'
    Dakar sampled the contents of his supper pot, licked the spoon, and
resumed stirring. 'Don't jerk the stitches so tight. Everybody knows you're
irritated.'
    At a loss for subtle rejoinder, Lysaer welcomed the intrusion when
Arithon stirred from the shadows and insinuated himself in the fray.
    'Don't gloat,' the Master advised the Mad Prophet. 'Princes don't freely
choose to keep their clothes until they rot in rags off their backs.'
    Laid open to insult by his threadbare and weather-faded plaid, Dakar
subsided to a glower. To his half-brother, Arithon added, 'If you don't mind
wearing what looks like a sail-maker's patch, there's a better way to fix
that.'
    Lysaer surrendered needle and linen with a gratitude that unfailingly
melted hearts. 'These clothes would hardly impress anyone before they
were torn.' To Dakar he added quietly, 'The s'Ffalenn bastard's made a fool
of you again. You promised a scathing show of temper after Althain Tower.
Now I'm left to wonder which of you is the more devious: Arithon, for an
act that would fool a saint, or you, for a lying diversion to escape getting
dressed down for rudeness.'
    Dakar's ebullience died. Rather than admit to his own baffiement at
Arithon's contrary manner, he hunkered down by his cooking-pot like a
disgruntled broody hen. 'Wait,' he muttered morosely to the fair-haired
and smiling prince. 'Just wait till we get to Ithamon.'

After five days' journey the hills of Daon Ramon lost their rocky crowns
and became clothed and gentled by heather. Valleys that until now had
been channelled with dried gullies and stunted stands of scrub-oak
smoothed over into vales half hidden in fog. If the view had once been
beautiful, Desh-thiere rendered everything bleak; the winds that never
stilled gained the bitten edge of frost. For league upon league there seemed
no living thing but grey-coated deer, rabbits furred in winter-white and the
lonely, dissonant calls of hawks that sailed like shadows through the mist
in search of prey.
 The horses grew lean and tough, nourished more by the grain carried in

239


by wagon than on the rank brown grass. Lysaer wearied of venison but was
careful to keep the fact from his half-brother, who spent as many hours
hunting as playing upon his lyranthe. As always fed up with abstinence,
Dakar seized upon every opening to bemoan the dearth of beer.
 Asandir kept his own counsel, forbidding as northfacing rock.
    The closer the party drew to the heartland of Daon Ramon, the less the
sorcerer bothered to chastise his spellbinder for whining. Well warned that
such silence boded trouble, Lysaer noticed the moment when the Mad
Prophet abandoned complaint. More sensitive than before to nuance, he
watched for any circumstance that might find the Shadow Master
discomfited.
    But snow fell and the days passed in anticlimax. Arithon did not oblige
Dakar's expectations and grow darkly moody. He asked companionable
questions of Asandir and spent hours regarding ice-scabbed trees, stunted
brush and the white-clothed shoulders of the hills as though his mage-
trained sight showed him wonders.
    'The Riathan Paravians,' Dakar whispered, upon Lysaer's puzzled
inquiry. 'Unicorns ran in these hills and bore young in the meadows here.
The mystery of their presence lingers, even now.'
    Wide*eyed, sceptical, Lysaer peered through dripping bangs. An unsea-
son~l thaw had softened the trail to muck and slush seeped rivulets of wet
down slopes like rucked old burlap. As far as the mist would allow, nothing
met his gaze but bleak landscape that lacked the redeeming comfort of a
single man-made structure.
    Perched on the dray's hard buckboard, Dakar slapped the reins over the
paint's steaming back and jogged her abreast of the chestnut gelding.
Swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks, a derisive grin splitting his beard,
he called over the rumble of rolling wheels, 'Don't try to look with your
eyes - use your feelings.'
    'To find what?' Lysaer shrugged to vent frustration. 'Every morning I
wake up as though eyes are on my back, watching me, and each night I step
away from the campfire, I get chills that have nothing to do with the cold.
This place is unpleasantly deserted, as far as I can tell.'
    'That's the point.' Dakar puffed up his cheeks and looked smug. 'Asandir
and Arithon might appreciate what's missing from this Ath-forsaken
wasteland, but I suspect like me you'd rather be in a crowded tavern
knocking back mugs of spiced ale.'
    Although Lysaer did not precisely share Dakar's sentiment, he would
have welcomed any human presence to allay the aching, hollow some-
thing that tugged at his nerves like pain. At each bend in the road, behind
every storm-stunted bush, he seemed to see the lady he was to have
married, her eyes liquid with tears, and her hands held out in entreaty. He
remembered how her auburn hair had blown in the sea-breeze off South
Isle and echoes of her lost laughter ached his heart. No noble dedication to
purpose could ease his longing for home in this wilderness. His suffering

240


stayed silent out of pride; and until the Mad Prophet had spoken, he had
not guessed that his depression might arise from a source outside himself.
    At noon riders and wagon paused for a cold meal beside a spring whose
waters rose bubbling through a cleft in milk quartz rocks. Snow rendered
the site grey on white, slashed by the arched-over stems of dead briars.
    Sent down to the pebbled edge of the pool to refill water flasks, Arithon
returned whitely shaken. 'You might have warned me,' he lashed at
Asandir in tones dragged fiat by upset.
    The sorcerer did not answer but accepted the dripping flasks to stow
back into the wagon. Then he turned eyes as chilly as the weather upon the
s'Ilessid prince who watched the exchange. 'A centaur was beset during the
rebellion and pulled down here. Moss does not grow where his blood
spilled. The sunchildren sang a lament to commemorate his passage and
the words and the melody still ring upon the wind, to any with sensitivity
enough to listen.'
    Stung by what felt like rebuke, Lysaer straightened in affront, then
doubled over with a gasp, robbed of his royal dignity by an elbow in the ribs
from the Mad Prophet. Finished graining the horses, Dakar thrust himself
headlong between sorcerer and s'Ilessid with oat chaff bristling from his
hood.
  'What was that for?' Lysaer demanded, outraged.
     'To quiet your foolish tongue, prince.' As Asandir turned away about his
 business the Mad Prophet winked sidelong in conspiracy. 'For a sorcerer
 this place is hurtful to walk past, let alone stop and linger.'
     'That Fellowship mage has feelings?' Lysaer shot back, his eyes
 following Asandir's hands as they laced and jerked tight the lashings that
 secured the oiled canvas over the supplies in the wagon bed.
     Dakar picked a seed-head from his sleeve and looked thoughtful. 'My
 ever-so-powerful master is doing his best at this moment to keep from
 weeping outright.'
     'You say.' A billow of mist rolled past, rendering horses, men and dray as
 featureless as silhouette. Lysaer raised his eyebrows.
     'Well,' the Mad Prophet amended. 'I've lived with Asandir for centuries,
 my friend. I know this place bothers him, and I'd wager one thing further.
 Hc stopped here on purpose, to use its effect as a weapon. If you think I'm
 lying, look at your half-brother.'
  The prince forgot pique and did so.
     Still dead pale, his eyebrows snarled into a frown, Arithon had
 remounted his dun mare. He hunched against the wind as if he were
 wounded and bleeding and tears traced silver down his face.
     Embarrassed as if caught eavesdropping, Lysaer spun back to face Dakar.
 'Why don't you feel anything? Why don't I?'
     The Mad Prophet clawed back an untidy lock of hair. Cold had reddened
 the tip of his nose and his eyes looked unwarrantedly bloodshot; yet a
 dignified majesty cloaked him all the same as he said, 'Do you want to?'

241


    The question hit hard. Driven to see into himself with uncanny deptl:
and clarity, struck naked before his own judgement, Lysaer perceived thai
the confusion that had harried him since exile held a core of ugly truth. Nc
longer did the glamour of noble purpose veil fact: that his brave resolve tc
Traithe in Althain's storeroom had been rooted in vanity and pride. He ha~
renounced a difficult path of study and vowed instead to redress the wrong,~
of a kingdom for his own personal glory. As though revolted by a foul taste,
Lysaer sucked in a fast breath. He could hope his self-disgust was no~
exposed on his face, but Dakar regarded him strangely.
    'Do you feel nothing?' The Mad Prophet slapped the straw from his cloak
with sudden, biting sharpness. 'I'd venture not. I'd say this place move~,
you as deeply as the rest of us.'
    Lysaer looked back, unflinching. However this spirit-cursed place
afflicted others, his ingrained sense of fairness forced honesty. 'My true
heart stayed behind in Port Royal, I see, with my love, and my family, anc
my people. If that is a failing, it's at least no more than human. The
problems that beset this land are not mine. Yet I will do my best to hel[
right them.'
    The prince's conviction was so far at odds with the future forecast by the
strands that Dakar shied back, baffled. To cover his foreboding, he
clambered back behind the dray's buckboard and sorted his tangled loops,
of rein. 'Ath in his mercy, but I could use a flagon of dark beer and a fire.'
    'That makes two of us, friend.' Lysaer remounted his chestnut gelding
unsure whether the lingering traces of Paravian tragedy or the unendingl5
dreary landscape caused him to hurt as if the chill cut his flesh to th~
marrow.
    At Asandir's word, wagon and riders pressed onward through ar
afternoon that wept cold drizzle. Now the trail wound like tattered ribbor
between Daon Ramon's vales and downs, intermittently flanked by ston~
markers capped with lichens and moss. No trees grew, only bracken ant
tasselled grasses beaten down by wind and early storms. Dirtied ice la3
scabbed in the hollows. Braced in his saddle against the cold, and resignec
to yet another sleepless night on soaked ground, Lysaer did not realize thei~
destination lay in sight until, rounding the crest of a hill, Arithon gaspet
and yanked his dun mare to a halt in the roadway.
    She danced a piaffe at his roughness, her hooves clanging loudly on slate
Jostled in his saddle as his own mount bunched in reaction, Lysaer lookec
ahead.
    Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, cit~
of legend and seat of the high kings of Rathain.
    The sight was one to stop the breath, even through the fog of Desh.
thiere. No previous feature of landscape could prepare the traveller for th~
broad sweep of valley, slashed across by a rock-strewn scar of dry riverbed
At one time walls of rose-grey stone had arisen from the banks, but wha~
remained lay torn to wreckage.

(>"';' "'.'ffcJ -re./.~d /'It' ,)dg' ['113 lll~11'C' 1tt1(i' regarded the site where his

3)3


  Landslides left less ruin.
     The greensward beyond was overrun with briar, what had been orchards,
 gardens and tourney fields now choked by weed and bitter-root vine. A
 second wall had bounded the inner edge of the common. Embraced within
 gapped, half-gutted watchkeeps, the tumbled shells of townhouses clung
 to the hillside's ever steepening pitch. Dismembered foundations marked
 off a tangle of narrow lanes and briar-ridden courtyards. As if a mighty
 army had once razed the buildings stone from stone with battering rams,
 the craftsmen's cottages, market stalls and merchants' mansions all lay
 jumbled in chaos. Gabled roofs had caved inward, beams rotted away in the
 sunless damp of Desh-thiere. A scatter of fallen slates in what may have
 been a market court reflected the rain like coins thrown out for a beggar.
    The devastation of the lower tiers was total, a memorial to unbridled
violence. Yet as if moved by some powerful unseen force, the viewer found
his sight drawn upward, where, slightly north of centre, the native granite
of the earth sheered up through soil and rock into a near-vertical outcrop.
The triangular summit on the clifftop was encased by embrasures of
seamless, blue-black granite. Inside, an unkempt eyrie of broken walls and
spires marked the site of the inner citadel, the castle where generations of
Paravians, and after them, the s'Ffalenn high kings, had held court.
 There the eye hung captive, unable to draw away.
    Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendour, of artistry spoiled by war in a
cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different
from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward
through the mist, tall, straight, perfect. The incongruity of their wholeness
against the surrounding wreckage was a dichotomy fit to maim the soul:
for their lines were harmony distilled into form, and strength beyond reach
of time's attrition.
    The rain still fell relentlessly into soggy earth; the wind keened and
stung like a dulled skive in a cobblet's shop. No one noticed. Even the
horses seemed strangely content to be stopped in their tracks in the
roadway. The sordid, everyday miseries of winter and weather lost
meaning. Into that suspended silence, Asandir began to speak.
    'Ithamon was raised by Paravians in the First Age of Athera. The outer
walls were levelled twice, by Seardluin, hostile creatures native to this
world that by the Second Age had been battled to extinction. The old races
abandoned the city then, for its purpose as a fortress had been fulfilled. The
lower tiers stayed in ruins until the dawn of the present age, when men
rebuilt the double walls upon the remains. The third tier wall left standing
and the four surviving keeps were part of the original city. Built by the
centaurs, refined by sunchildren, they were name-bound and warded by
the unicoms.'
    'Don't say any more!' Arithon cut across, his bard's voice queerly
strangled. 'I beg you, don't!' Bloodlessly pale, his hands clenched and
shaking on the rein, he sat his mare and regarded the site where his

243


ancestors had ruled as if he were held chained and in thrall. 'Please,' he
finished in a whisper.
    But Asandir might as well not have heard. 'The Paravian towers have
withstood three ages of strife, eighteen thousand years of history. Mortal
men have called them the Sun Towers, or Compass Points, for their
alignment and their dizzying height, but the ancients who laid their
stones had separate names for each. The white one with the alabaster
combing is Alathwyr, and its strength is Wisdom. The east, the black one,
is endurance, which represents the Paravian concept of Honour. The
south, of rose quartz, is Grace, and the last, of green jasper symbolic of
renewal, is Kieling, Compassion. When civilization has abandoned any of
these qualities, its respective tower will fail, for the power that binds
their structure is the force of each virtue, renewed. "Ithamon" means
Five Spires in the old tongue, and once this was so. Daelthain, the King's
Tower, for Justice, originally crowned the highest knoll in the city. That
one cracked on the day his Royal Grace, Marin Eliathe, was murdered in
his hall by an assassin. The last of it crumbled during the rebellion. Now
just the foundation remains.'
    Asandir's speech ended, leaving the moan of the lonely wind to fill the
emptiness. Lysaer discovered he must have been gripping his saddle too
hard for some time.
    Arithon looked tortured to his very core. Struck blind and deaf by the
chord of Pararian mystery first tuned to his awareness in Caith-al-Caen,
he had wheeled his mare in the roadway to confront Asandir. A betrayal
too fresh to have sparked resentment tautened the planes of his face, and
his voice was gravel as he said, 'Ath's own mercy, how am I to suffer
this?'
    The sorcerer sat his black stallion with the straight-backed formality of
Daelion, Master of Fate. 'I will answer when you ask out of care, Prince of
Rathain.'
    Arithon recoiled in a high flush of fury. 'No need to answer at all,
sorcerer. Everywhere I turn, it seems I get saddled with sand-kingdoms.
Well, pity has toru out my heart far and long before this. I bear the ache
already like a bad scar.'
    Explosively murderous, he drove his heels into the mare. Her nerves
frayed into a white-rimmed roll of eyes and she reared. Arithon gave rein,
kicked her again and screamed what sounded like an obscenity ripped
through by tears. His hands jabbed at the reins, and his mount clattered
around in the roadway and shot blindly forward at a gallop.
    Horse and rider thundered across the crumbling span that bridged the
dry course of the Severnir at reckless speed and vanished into the ruin.
    Dakar said something bitten under his breath and the paint mare
stamped. Shaken by his half-brother's savagery and pricked by cross-
currents he lacked the background to grasp, Lysaer spun to confront the
sorcerer. 'Why did you push him?'

244



    His mildness shaped by grief, Asandir said, 'This city has weathered
seven major tragedies and three ages of history. So much dust to you
perhaps, but to those of us who have borne witness it means wisdom
painfully gained, paid for by men who bled and died, and Paravians who
weathered mortal failings time and again until the rifts in their world grew
too wide to endure. Shall all that has been go wasted because Arithon
dislikes responsibility? Athera's civilizations struggle on the brink of
imbalance with Desh-thiere's coming defeat. A restoration of just rule
must follow. The reinstated prince who subdues Etarra must descend from
the old kings if he is to close the rift between townsman and clan
barbarian.' The sorcerer finished in baldfaced regret. 'Put simply, Axithon's
recalcitrance is a luxury the times can ill afford.'
  'You've made an enemy of him,' Lysaer observed coldly.
    'Merciful maker, I would that were all I had done!' Closer to giving way
to anguish than any mortal man had ever seen him, Asandir shook out his
reins. He pressed his black stallion ahead against the rain and did not speak
or look back the whole way through an afternoon of ascent through the
ruins.
    They found Arithon standing beside his horse within the broken circle
that marked the old foundation of the King's Tower. His face was hard set,
and his temper brittle as iced-over current.
    By now recovered from the outburst upon the riverbank, Asandir
addressed him, whipdash curt. 'We shall camp in a tower. They are sound,
comfortable and dry. Which shall it be, my prince?'
 'Kieling,' Arithon said, determinedly blithe and uncaring. 'Compassion.'

245


Caithdein

The vast stone hall at the west outpost in Camris held only a solitary
figure, but the fire had been built high in expectation of a momentous
event. Wax candles burned in sconces and candelabra and still, deep
shadow darkened the corners. Winter had settled in. Winds moaned across
the mountainside without and drafts rippled the Cildorn tapestries, even
the largest ones by the hearth. Slim and straight in her chair of state on the
dais and clad formally in Tysan's gold-bordered tabard over her traditional
black, Maenalle s'Gannley, Steward of Tysan fingered the gilt-tipped pen
handed down through twenty generations to sign kingdom documents.
The ornamental plume, though replaced at measured intervals, showed
the ravages of last season's moths; yet the nib in its cloisonne barrel
remained sharp and unworn. Since the fall of the last crowned sovereign
official word passed between clan chiefs by spoken courier, or not at all, for
parchment could fall into the hands of townsmen if the messenger chanced
to be captured.
    Maenalle smoothed the feather's tattered fibres, her sharp-planed face
taut with excitement. In the absence of written record she wondered
whether tonight was the first time since the desecration of the royal seat at
Avenor that all of Tysan's clanlords would be gathered beneath one roof.
She smiled fiercely, savouring the news she would deliver, that a true-born
heir had returned through West Gate to claim the high king's throne.
    Elder Tashan was giddy as a boy with anticipation and young Maien was
unable to contain nervous jitters for fear he might be clumsy and spill the
wine; this after he had waited upon his prince without mishap. No scout
from the west outpost had breathed a word of the royal arrival; Maenalle
held cocky pride in them for that. Her announcement would completely
surprise lords who had journeyed long, inconvenient distances through
hostile country at her summons.

246




    A sudden, preternatural stillness gripped the chamber; as if the insati-
able mountain gales had forgotten to gust, or fire ceased for an instant to
flicker.
    Possessed of a scout's reflexes, Maenalle stiffened a heartbeat ahead of
the logic that warned of something amiss. A second later, and without
the fanfare of breezes carried in from far places affected by Kharadmon,
the discorporate sorcerer Luhaine flicked into existence. His image was
robed austerely as a scholar and posed with round face furrowed in
concern as he gazed up at Maenalle in the high seat. 'Lady, I bring tidings.'
    The Steward of Tysan felt her carefree mood evaporate. She regarded
her visitor, aware never more than this moment that Fellowship sorcerers
did not pay visits for trivial reasons. Luhaine by preference was a recluse:
his last appearance in Camris had been in her grandfather's time. 'Tell me
quickly,' she said, afraid of the worst and anxious most of all to recover
her shattered solitude.
    Luhaine returned a shake of his head. His heavy robes were not stirred
by the drafts and his eyes followed hers, aggrieved. 'I cannot. Wards must
be set first, in precaution.'
    Maenalle shot to her feet. 'Wards? Here?' Affronted that the vigilance
of her scouts might be questioned, she gripped the heirloom pen with a
fierceness that threatened to snap the quill. 'Whatever fort'
    A palm downward gesture from the sorcerer negated the implied insult.
'Necessary, Caithdein of Tysan.' His image flicked out but a strange,
weighted feel to the air evinced his continued presence and industry.
Maenalle snatched the interval to recover herself and sit down. Since
impatience only fuelled her uneasiness, she laid the antique pen safely
aside. But the wait turned out to be short. The flames in the sconces
flared with sudden, hurtful brilliance and ozone sharpened the smell of
oiled wood and hot wax. Then Luhaine's image reappeared, round-
shouldered and contrite, in the centre of a subliminal corona of light that
extended over himself, and the shield-hung perimeter of the dais.
    By then, the steward had guessed why arcane protections might be
called for. 'Koriani,' she surmised, her annoyance a shade less acid. 'But
why fear the enchantresses? This outpost is between power lanes, and
their watchers see little in these mountains.'
    'Morriel has set a circle of seniors to scrying.' Luhaine's image poised
birdlike, as if on the edge of sudden flight. 'Perhaps she searches once
again for the lost Waystone.' His frown deepened. 'Worse and more likely,
one of her seers caught wind of the future the Fellowship read in the
strands.'
    Pricked by a ripple of chills, Maenalle tugged her tabard tighter around
her shoulders. 'What have you come here to tell me, sorcerer?'
    Luhaine's deep eyes turned frosty. 'Dire portents, lady. After the
Mistwraith's conquest will come war. Lysaer s'Ilessid will cast his lot
with townsmen, to the detriment of the loyal clans.'

247


    Maenalle's hands recoiled into fists and fine linen crumpled unheeded as
she shoved her weight forward in her chair. 'Why?' Her voice came out a
tortured whisper. 'Our own prince will betray us?'
    Never had the sorcerer regretted his status as a disembodied spirit more
than now; his mild face twisted in anguish akin to Maenalle's own, that he
could not soften the impact of his words with the warmth of a comforting
touch. 'Cathdein, 'he murmured in compassion, 'I cannot help. The Seven
cast strands. We see the evil that will set s'Ilessid prince against s'Ffalenn
will be prompted by the Mistwraith. But how such schism will come to
pass is beyond our powers to know.'
    Thindipped, tight-jawed and fighting tears, Maenalle stared ahead
without seeing. 'I thought that was not possible.'
    'Yes, and paradoxically, no.' Perpetually prepared with a lecture,
Luhaine qualified. 'Desh-thiere's nature is opaque to us. We have no
insight into it as a cause, but only can read its effects since, from origins
outside of Athera, it lacks Name to embody its essence. The Riathan
Paravians quite wisely would not encompass its energies for interpreta-
tion. Traithe did, at need, when he sealed South Gate against the invasion.
But the greater portion of his faculties withered in the process. Whatever
enormity he discovered concerning the Mistwraith that besets this world,
he is left unable to say.'
    Silent, saddened, Maenalle pondered this revelation. 'Then our princes
are your only recourse against Desh-thiere?'
    Luhaine made as though to pace, stopped himself wasting effort for the
sake of appearance and equally sparsely answered. 'Events have forced us
to choose between certain war and restoration of sunlight.'
    Blanched now as sun-whitened ivory, Maenalle stirred and sat back. 'No
choice at all,' she allowed. Dwarfed by the grand chair of state, she laced
fine-boned fingers on the table edge, restored to her usual dry irony.
    Luhaine bowed to honour her courage. 'My colleagues felt you should
know at once that Lysaer shall not be sanctioned for inheritance. Yet you
must not lose heart. There will be royal heirs, in time, that are not twined
in Desh-thiere's moil of ills. Until then, you must be more than the
shadow behind the throne tradition dictates. Whatever comes, Tysan's
heritage must continue to be preserved for those generations yet unborn.'
    Very straight and fragile, Maenalle inclined her head. 'Rest assured, and
tell your colleagues. The clans of Tysan shall endure.'
    'I never doubted.' In better times, Luhaine's image might have smiled.
'Only handle this confidence with great care. The Koriani witches must
not hear of this break in the succession beforetime. From the moment
sunlight is restored to the continent, the balance of events becomes
precarious. Every action, every word, will carry weight. The interval is
most vulnerable to dangerous, even horrifying digressions.'
    Whatever the strands had foretold imprinted wary trepidation upon a
sorcerer renowned for staid propriety.

248


    Unable to conceive of a blight worse than war and the loss of Tysan's
prince to the cause of townsmen, Maenalle returned an assurance that rang
shallow as banality to her ears. Cold to the heart she watched as Luhaine's
image dissolved away into air. For a long while afterward, she stared into
the space his presence had occupied. She did not worry at first which words
she would find to deliver ill-tidings to the clanlords who would assemble
within the hour; instead she agonized over what she would tell her young
grandson, Maien.
    Since the elegant, blond prince had left the outpost, the boy had spent his
every waking minute in earnest emulation of the man's faultless manners
and royal poise.
    'Damn his s'Ilessid Grace to the darkest torments of Sithaer!' Maenalle
cried at last in an anguish that echoed and re-echoed off the tapestried
walls. 'More than the child's poor heart will be broken!'

249


The chamber that had served as solar to the ladies of the old earl's court
smelled of dried lavender still, and of the birch logs that burned in the
grate. Yet where the room in bygone years had been bright with light and
laughter, now the shadows lay deepest in the lover's nooks. Curtains of
dense felt sealed out the drafts and also any dayFight let in by ceiling-high
arched windows. Draperies veiled the lion-head cornices and the paintings
of nymphs and dolphins, flaking now from damp and mildew. Only the
rose, gold and grey marble that patterned the floor in geometrics remained
visible to remind of a gentler past before the Koriani Prime Enchantress
had chosen the site for her day-quarters.
    Morriel eschewed the comfort of carpets. Candles she counted a dis-
traction from her meditation. Austere as new-forged steel, she
straightened from the unupholstered alcove she preferred for contempla-
tion, her head raised in expectation. A tap sounded at the door. The
Prime gave a self-satisfied nod, the diamond pins netting her coiffure
fire-points in the dimness as she commanded, 'Allow the First Senior to
enter.'
    The nearer of two page-boys hastened from the corner and unbarred the
door.
    Lirenda swept past as though the liveried child were furniture. She
curtseyed with a brisk swirl of silk, alert for the twitch of Morriel's hand
that allowed her permission to rise. Exhilaration flushed her cheeks as she
shed her cloak with its ribbons of rank sewn in bands at hood and hem. As
the remaining boy took her garment, she dared a direct glance at her
superior. 'It has begun.'
    'Show me.' Spider-still amid the arranged iolds oi her skirts, Morriel
closed lightless black eyes. For a space the chamber held little for sound
and movement beyond the crackle of flames in the hearth. The page

250


Scryers

The chamber that had served as solar to the ladies of the old earl's court
smelled of dried lavender still, and of the birch logs that burned in the
grate. Yet where the room in bygone years had been bright with light and
laughter, now the shadows lay deepest in the lover's nooks. Curtains of
dense felt sealed out the drafts and also any daylight let in by ceiling-high
arched windows. Draperies veiled the lion-head cornices and the paintings
of nymphs and dolphins, flaking now from damp and mildew. Only the
rose, gold and grey marble that patterned the floor in geometrics remained
visible to remind of a gentler past before the Koriani Prime Enchantress
had chosen the site for her day-quarters.
    Morriel eschewed the comfort of carpets. Candles she counted a dis-
traction from her meditation. Austere as new-forged steel, she
straightened from the unupholstered alcove she preferred for contempla-
tion, her head raised in expectation. A tap sounded at the door. The
Prime gave a self-satisfied nod, the diamond pins netting her coiffure
fire-points in the dimness as she commanded, 'Allow the First Senior to
enter.'
    The nearer of two page-boys hastened from the corner and unbarred the
door.
    Lirenda swept past as though the liveried child were furniture. She
curtseyed with a brisk swirl of silk, alert for the twitch of Morriel's hand
that allowed her permission to rise. Exhilaration flushed her cheeks as she
shed her cloak with its ribbons of rank sewn in bands at hood and hem. As
the remaining boy took her garment, she dared a direct glance at her
superior. 'It has begun.'
    'Show me.' Spider-still amid the arranged folds of her skirts, Morriel
closed lightless black eyes. For a space the chamber held little for sound
and movement beyond the crackle of flames in the hearth. The page

250


avoided clumsy noise as he set the latch on the armoire door and crept back
to his place.
    Lirenda cupped the crystal strong from a chain at her throat, dampened
her thoughts and dropped her inner barriers to permit her superior free
access. Power flowed like current from mind to mind, focused to frame
recall of two images gathered through lane-watch...

Half a world away, across an expanse of ocean, sudden sunlight lances
through a tear in streaming mist and shatters into sparkles against the
wavecrests. Ancient enough to have living memories of the natural world
before Desh-thiere's conquest, Morriel did not gasp aloud. As if the vision
were empty of wonder, she pressed on workmanlike, to a later view of
moonrise over an island fortress whose roofless keeps notch an indigo
sky...

'Corith,' Lirenda identified, breaking trance in the solar of the old earl's
palace. 'In the isles of Min Pierens to the west.'
    Morriel checked the interruption with a raised finger. 'I see as much.' On
an edge of sharpness, she said, 'Our fifth lane watcher has reported an
increased concentration of the mist overhanging the site of Ithamon?'
    'Exactly.' The First Enchantress pressed eagerly to conclusion. 'The
Fellowship's royal prot~g~s must have set Desh-thiere's hold under siege
from there. Why else should its grip loosen elsewhere?'
    Morriel disregarded the insolence. Three weeks had passed since the
princes with Asandir had taken up residence in ruined Ithamon: here came
first proof of their doings there. With the last attempted scryings on their
activities an unmitigated failure, that the Mistwraith should now show
signs of .weakening offered exciting developments. But to rejoice over
supposition would be blindness akin to folly. 'I suggest our duty lies in
knowing how the princes who are responsible come by their powers.'
Morriel's brow furrowed in speculation. 'After all, they accomplish a feat
their Fellowship benefactors cannot duplicate.'
    Lirenda's eyes brightened. 'You suggest we try another scrying into
Asandir's affairs at Ithamon?'
    A cracked laugh issued from the alcove. 'The idea suits you, does it?' For
an interval Morriel stared into distance. 'It pleases me to try.' A snap of dry
fingers called a page to attend her. 'Fetch the chest that contains the focus
jewel of Skyron. Be quick.'
    Unremarked by a glance from either enchantress, the boy bowed and let
himself out. As his nervous footsteps dwindled down the corridor, Morriel
stroked her chin with a fingernail. 'I would tap the fifth lane and trace the
eddies created by the events at Ithamon, yes. But subtlety is needed. Our

251


efforts must blend with the pulse of the land itself, until chance affords us
opening and Asandir leaves the princes' presence.'
    'But they work from one of the Compass Point Towers,' Lirenda
objected. 'What source of ours can breach Paravian safeguards?'
    The old Prime's look sparked daggers. 'A defeatist attitude ill becomes
your office.'
 Lirenda inclined her head. 'I stand corrected before my better.'
    Morriel made a moue of disgust. 'Don't be a hypocrite.' In a shift of
weight that eddied the scents of herbs and moth poison upon the air, she
folded crabbed hands in her lap. 'For all your diligence, your ambitions
overstep your knowledge.'
    The chamber abruptly seemed chilly as a tomb. Disadvantaged by her
posture of obeisance, Lirenda stifled irritation. The Prime was apt to be
querulous when the weather ached her bones; and only the foolish bridled
at truth in her presence. Lirenda held herself in submission until her senior
at length relented.
    'Were you not keen to replace me, you would be of worthless character.
But if it is envy of the Fellowship's power that drives your desire to humble
Asandir, beware. You will earn yourself the misstep such weakness
deserves. You may rise.' Rings flashed as Morriel motioned for her First
Enchantress to be seated on the footstool by the hearth.
    The chamber offered no other chair; the pages, as they waited, knelt on
bare floor. But Lirenda suffered the inconvenience; wedded to supremacy
the Prime might be, but her mind was quick and devious.
    Across a quiet dense with the scent of lavender, the aged crone tartly
qualified, 'We shall defeat the Paravian wards by simplicity, First Enchant-
ress. Our weapon shall be compassion.'
    Lirenda tautened to eagerness. 'Arithon chose the tower Kieling,' she
mused unthinkingly aloud.
    'Precisely.' Rather than take umbrage at the lapse, Morriel continued,
'The Teir's'Ffalenn unknowingly ceded us opening, since initiate Elaira's
escapade at Erdane. The enquiry we made concerning her misconduct in
the Ravens' hayloft has left us a faultless imprint of innocent, uncondi-
tional love.'
    There lay the clue Lirenda had overlooked, and in honesty would never
have thought to examine. She cursed her shortsightedness, as logic
unfolded the method's diabolical symmetry. Asandir could not stand
watch every hour that his princes fought the Mistwraith. Overawed as
Fellowship mages were wont to be over any and all things Paravian, he
would expect Kieling's wards to shield out unwanted scryers in those
intervals while he minded his other affairs. The richest innuendo of all was
that his princes should have been untouchably secure; and so they would
be, except for anomaly.
    'Kieling's defences will detect no threat if our probe is masked behind
our record of Elaira's care for Arithon. We will win through,' Morriel

252


concluded, her lips pursed, her eyes hooded and her hands still as claws in
her lap. 'So long as we observe only, and make no move to interfere.'
    All along, Morriel had anticipated the advantage that Elaira's misplaced
feelings might provide. The admiration Lirenda gave her Prime was
enraptured and pitiless as a predator stalking to kill; for the stakes of this
hunt were as deadly. Envy could not colour fact: that the Fellowship of
Seven had held ascendancy over affairs on the continent for far and away
too long.
    'Yes,' Morriel said in uncanny response to pure thought. 'It suits me to
try their authority. This time. When you've finished acting dumbstruck,
we may start.'
    A flush touched Lirenda's cheeks, for the page-boy had returned from his
errand. He stood before her, fairfaced and formal as an icon, the iron-bound
box that held the focus crystal of $kyron offered in trembling hands.
    'Lead the probe,' came Morriel's nettled instruction. 'This is your test, if
you think yourself fit to succeed me.'
    Excitement overrode Lirenda's distaste for the role she had been
commanded to execute. She accepted the coffer, keyed the release of the
wards and lifted the crystal that lay like an ice shard inside. Tawny eyes
fixed on the jewel, she stilled her inner consciousness until the room and
its shadows fell away, swallowed by the stone's pellucid depths.
    Her awareness settled. Poised in tranquillity that allowed the creation
all possibility and none, her selfhood encompassed paradox. Lirenda
became the spark to seed holocaust, and the ice to quench all heat. She was
light that could sear away sight, or darkness of a depth to crack rock: hers
was the oblivion of the Veil between the void, perfect peace or ultimate
stagnation. She was nothing, all things, every pitch and vibration that
formed the warp and weft of Ath's Creation.
    The Skyton focus framed her into a discipline that banished personal
opinion. And yet, controlled as she was, demanding of excellence as her
ambition required, she had to fight not to shudder as the Prime joined the
link and connected her through the matrix to the crystal's reservoir of
stored energies. Elaira's trial record was drawn forth and a set of personal
emotions over-rode Lirenda's selfhood with an intimacy as stifling as
suffocation.
    Unable to speak or escape, she could only feel. The sensation forced
upon her became a turbulence that transported - to a cheerless cellar in a
fire-scarred inn where Elaira had lived through early childhood. In a raw
and cruel detail, Lirenda experienced the misery of a hovel shared with
beggars, and scabby, disease-ridden prostitutes...

Shivering in noxious rags and the sour, shedding leathers of spoiled furs,
she remembered wakeful nights spent listening to the wet, tearing coughs
of the old man who looked after her as he lay wasting of lung-sickness.

253


Friends were all the wealth a child of the streets might possess. Food,
shelter and belongings could be wrested away; as an orphan, disciple of
thieves, Elaira well knew how easily. But love and good memories could
outlast misfortune, even death.
    Until the hour her fledgling talents had led her into straits with the
town constable, who sold her into Morvain for rearing in Koriani
fosterage, Elaira had made her life rich with caring.

Entangled in the Skyron link, Lirenda felt the mannered austerity she had
cultivated as a rich man's daughter give way before simpler joys that lured
her toward destruction like a siren's song. Wrenched awry by distaste, she
forced her violated senses not to pull back and break trance. Her burning
ambition to gain a prime's ultimate power and knowledge lent her
strength. She embraced disillusion, accepted the forge-fire of emotion that
comprised Elaira's nature for her own, as Morriel and the demands of the
scrying into Kieling Tower required.
    The matriarch's prompt reached her across a haze of distance. 'Nicely
done. Be ready. I shall tie into the lane-force now.'
    Morriel's praise reaffirmed concentration. Though prepared for a shift in
perspective, the touch of the fifth lane's powers did not kindle as Lirenda
expected. Trapped in Elaira's persona, she experienced as the girl would
have done, a sensation as wretchedly unpleasant as a drenching
cloudburst. Fighting abhorrence and instinct, Lirenda endured this shock-
ing, alien perspective of a spirit attuned to spellcraft through water, when
she herself was all fire, unalterably opposed. She must not falter, nor even
flinch in disgust, even as self-identity became immolated by Elaira's
unruly passions.
    As trance discipline reduced the fifth lane's energies to a shimmering
play of static, Lirenda drifted, embraced by the high, sweet vibration of
earthforce. Since Morriel manipulated the scrying, her First Senior's
altered consciousness could not track the flow of time. The next sensation
Lirenda experienced was a view of translucent blue twilight over snow-
clad hills.
    The merlons of an embrasure jutted upward in silhouette; illuminated
by what she first took for torchflame, three figures clustered in a semi-
circle. Two stood, while the other crouched with hands tucked under the
elbows held pressed to his sides. By dint of clothing concocted from what
looked like frayed layers of rags, Elaira's awareness identified the stout
person of Dakar the Mad Prophet. The light proved not to be flame, but a
spark that seemed fuelled by nothing beyond empty air.
    Presented with a view of dark cloaks and hoods harried close by wind to
hide the faces inside, Lirenda by herself could not differentiate between the
royal half-brothers. Elaira's more exacting perception discerned at once
that one figure was taller. A twist of blond hair flicked loose by a gust

254


established and dismissed him as s'Ilessid. Fixed at once on the smaller
man, the imprinted pattern that comprised Elaira's subjective reaction
was swept by an ungodly thrill.
    Framed by magelight and a backdrop of louring fog that imposed false
dusk upon the scene, Arithon raised his head and looked around. Re-
cognition suffused his glance as if he could sense the Koriani contact
bridged through from Camris by crystal.
    As acting surrogate for Elaira, Lirenda felt scorched by that gaze. But
the rapport that would have quickened her sister initiate to excitement
only tantalized the First Enchantress as elusively as the receding edge of a
dream. She shivered. As if touched to recoil by empathy, the s'Ffalenn
prince on the parapet frowned. He tossed back his hood in sudden tension
as a man might measure an opponent. Through a space while the winds
whipped his dark locks into tangles, his hand flicked a gesture to Dakar.
Captivated by the movement's instinctive grace, and spontaneously
struck by stray recall, Lirenda shared a past memory- of those very same
fingers plucking straw from her hair with a tenderness impossible to
forget.
    Morriel's voice jabbed through the diversion in a whiplash tone of
command: 'Do not get involved, First Enchantress!'
    Lirenda struggled to bridle Elaira's fascination as Arithon knelt before
Dakar.
    Whispered words passed between them. Then the Mad Prophet's face
rearranged in pure deviltry. 'You'd never dare.'
    A lift of Arithon's chin gave challenge as he rose back to his feet. 'Ah,
but I would.' Beneath laughter, his voice held a dissonance like mallet-
struck iron. Were Lirenda in control, she would immediately have sev-
ered contact; but Elaira's entrancement hampered judgement. The scry-
ing enchantress dwelt a second too long and Arithon s'Ffalenn seized his
opening.
    He called to Lysaer, who raised his hands. For a heartbeat, the half-
brothers centred a gathering vortex of pent power. Then light speared
skyward, virulent as summer lightning. The hollow, booming report of
heat-stressed air thundered outward over ruined Ithamon. Lirenda saw
the Mistwraith boil clear with a howling clap of wind, to be razed aside by
shadow that iced its yapours into a spindrift fall of new snow.
    Then, impossibly, Koriani safe-wards crumpled, and the concatenation
of reaction surged past shields and into the Skyton focus. Lirenda was
tossed physically head over heels. She had no chance to feel bruises. A
second surge erupted from Lysaer's clenched hands, followed by another
and another, until her eyes were dazzled sightless and hearing was
stunned by rolling waves of sound. The link between the earl's court and
Ithamon buckled into pinwheeling chaos as the lane connection surged
into backlash.
 Lirenda barely felt the jerk as the Skyron crystal was wrested from her

255


grip. Her awareness of Kieling Tower shattered and Elaira's persona
ripped away, shocking body and mind beyond reach of coherent sensa-
tion. Lirenda never felt the cyclone of turbulence that scoured Morriel's
chamber. Cushions exploded like confetti and chests tumbled; the rose
and grey marble flooring erupted into a thousand eggshell cracks that
showered sharpened fragments through the hangings. Daylight sliced in
through rent felt and Lirenda came back to herself. She lay unable to
move, winded, befuddled and half blind from the after-image of multiple
bolts of pure light.
    'Ath, most merciful Ath,' her own voice cried across confusion, the
envy in her heart unmasked. 'They hold command of elemental mastery,
both of them.'
    Through drumrolls of fading thunder and a headache that blossomed
like a sta. rburst, Lirenda heard Morriel's shrill outburst. 'Imbecile! Fool!'
    A dry palm cracked her cheek. The sting to her flesh and her dignity
negated any lingering afterdmage of Elaira's tender sympathies.
    Limp as rags on the floor, the First Enchantress recovered her rightful
sense of outrage. Her vision swam back into focus, marred by embarras-
sing tears. Through their blur and the wan light that seeped through
slashed drapes, she beheld a chamber that looked to have suffered the
brunt of an earthquake. Wreckage lay everywhere. The page-boys
crouched beneath the tumbled splinters of the armoire, holding each
other and shaking.
 Lirenda could not have eased their terror, even had she been of a mind
tO.
    Morriel Prime towered over her, lividly displeased, the Skyton focus
clutched in her claw-like grasp. 'Were you blind and witless not to see?
The s'Ffalenn bastard's been trained to power! However else could he
and Dakar have collaborated to upset our scrying? Mischief and misery!
What unconscionable recklessness prompted the Fellowship to loose this
abomination upon our world?'
    Lirenda propped herself upright, then pressed scratched and bleeding
fingers to her pounding temples. She felt hollow as a drum and strangely
reft: the banished intensity of Elaira's susceptibilities left her drab and
spiritless in spaces she had never known existed. She distanced such
discomfort in a show of self-righteous propriety. 'Elaira may have known
of the Fellowship's intent beforetime. That would account for her stub-
bornness throughout our probe into her escapade in Erdane.'
    But Morriel's priorities were wholly concerned with the future.
'Recall the girl! Do it now! For pity us all, we're going to need analysis
of both these princes' characters. If there's any hope of setting a
counterbalance to the trouble they're bound to create, Elaira must find
us an opening.'
    First Enchantress Lirenda arose, bowed stiffly to the Prime, then
departed to fulfil her directive. Joylessly intent, she took no pleasure in

256


the miracle revealed by the scrying: that the princes promised by prophecy
did battle against Desh-thiere from Kieling Tower.
    In the remotest reaches of Athera, the Mistwraith no longer ruled the
sky. Sunlight touched earth and ocean for the first time in five long
centuries.

257


Triad

In Erdane, drowsing in her chair over knitting, the seer Enithen Tuer snaps
awake with a cry, or dreams have shown her stars and moon against a
backdrop of indigo darkness...

Caught treed like a monkey in an orchard where she prunes dead growth,
Elaira stiffens as Lirenda's arcane summons slices her awareness like a
whip; that Morriel should demand her presence on the heels of last
seasoh's disgrace means trouble, she knows, and she curses in language
that draws grins from the boy wards who gather her cuttings up for
firewood...

On a faraway isle, amid waters never charted, a unicorn stands sentinel as
Desh-thiere's mists part; and yet she does not dance for joy under the
lucent sky- a horn-toss of inquiry displays her puzzlement as tree-filtered
sunshine glances across a cave mouth and a weakened shimmer of ward-
light fades back to quiescence without rousing the sorcerer sealed under
sleep spells within...

258


XI.

DESH-THIERE

In Daon Ramon's heartland, atop the battlements of the tower Kieling, the
ongoing battle to reduce the Mistwraith suffered an unscheduled interrup-
tion as rapport between the royal half-brothers frayed away into nothing.
Lysaer broke concentration with a quizzical expression. His hands fell
slack, and the last surge of energy he held poised to send a light bolt
skyward dissipated as a harmless dance of sparks. He snapped a tangle of
hair from his eyes and said irritably, 'Will one of you please share the fun?'
No one answered.
    Dakar remained curled on his knees, doubled helpless in a fit of laughter.
Arithon seemed no more capable, close as he was to choking as he stifled
an explosive whoop in the crumpled cloth of his cloak. Neither Shadow
Master nor prophet recovered sobriety, even when Asandir emerged at a
run from the stairwell. His brows were drawn down at an angle that should
have been forbidding, had his eyes not held a glint of amused sympathy.
    'I heard,' he addressed without preamble. 'Sethvir informed me from
Althain that you two have upset the Koriani Prime and her First Senior.
Tell me what prank you pulled, and quickly, since we may now anticipate
a round of angry repercussions.'
    Although Arithon was quickest to rally, Dakar answered, through tears
and outbursts of chuckles that he manfully strangled back to wheezes.
'Damned witches tried meddling.' He mopped streaming eyes, slapped his
knees, and started again. 'Morriel sought another scrying on the princes,
through Lirenda and the Skyton focus. It was too obvious-' Here
speech failed and the Mad Prophet relapsed into a paralysing spasm of
hiccups.
    The sorcerer shifted hopefully to Arithon. 'So you hooked into the
Koriani scrying, and allowed their matrix to absorb the energies you had
gathered against Desh-thiere?'

259


Wiser to his limits than Dakar, the Master of Shadow simply nodded.
'Ath!' Lysaer interrupted, mortified by his half-brother's baldfaced
confession. 'You redirected our gifts at the enchantresses? You reckless
fool! Somebody could have been killed!'
    Arithon raised hands in denial, still grinning. 'Not likely. The ladies had
wards up. Nobody got hurt. Only curtains were shredded, and a lot of old
stonework went flying to bits where their shields couldn't dampen the
counterforce.'
    'Dakar!' cracked the sorcerer across the schoolboyish mood of jubila-
tion. 'Tell me now! However did the Koriani Prime gain foothold to scry
across Kieling's wards?'
    The Mad Prophet shot straight as if smacked. 'I haven't a clue. Ask your
prince.'
    Arithon's exuberance vanished, his mien abruptly blank and implacable
as a wall. The strained relations between himself and Asandir returned
suddenly and in force, and knowing any query the Fellowship might pose
would get rebuffed, the sorcerer abandoned further questions.
    His mage-sight offered means to find clear answers. Not even the murk
of Desh-thiere could dim the abrupt unshielding of his will as he
scrutinized the Master's taut stance. The effect was as merciless to the
victim as a field surgery performed with cut glass. Out of stubborn, irate
pride, Arithon neither flinched nor hid his face. This despite the shame
that even to an uninvolved witness, the feelings bared to view were
revealingly personal. Watching avidly, Dakar sweated outright; Lysaer
found himself discomforted to the point where honour compelled him to
avert his eyes rather than witness a violation of his half-brother's privacy.
    But neither sorcerer nor Master of Shadow had notice to spare for any
onlookers, locked as they were in the absolute intimacy of their conflict.
    'Compassion,' the sorcerer mused at length, his tone as apparently
casual as a man counting facts on his fingers. 'The Riathan Pararians set
their wards in perfect surety. They never mistake false evidence, for
theirs is the perception of Ath Creator. Kieling Tower may admit no
force except unconditional love-' Asandir broke off, his face abruptly
drained colourless. 'The lady enchantress in the hayloft at the Ravens,'
he surmised, a spike to his tone that caused Lysaer to shiver where he
stood.
    Now Arithon did speak, his antagonism barely held in check. 'The Prime
used her. Elaira herself was absent, and had neither knowledge nor
consent. Now say to me, and mean it, that her thieving pair of seniors
didn't deserve the come-uppance they got.'
    Confused by a name he could not place, Lysaer watched Asandir weigh
the comment, then allow its ferocity to pass. The look he trained upon
Arithon held entreaty cornmingled with pity. 'You must never, ever in
your life allow Elaira to indulge in her feelings where you are concerned.
Her care is real enough, and generous; but to acknowledge her in any way

260


,aidfaced
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unnaturally opposed to human nature.'
    'And yours is not?' Arithon spun on his heel and braced his hands on
Kieling's embrasure. The mist that streamed past strung droplets in his
hair, but the rigidity of his shoulders had nothing to do with its chill. 'If I'm
to be made a crowned puppet to drag this wasteland out of darkness, I'd
hardly entangle a lady along with me.'
    'See you don't,' Asandir snapped back. 'Where Elaira is concerned, I shall
hold you to your word of honour, Prince of Rathain.'
    Arithon drew a slow breath, then spun back with the brightest of smiles.
'You'll hold me to nothing against my will, sorcerer. Elaira is secure from
my attentions, most certainly, since I'd die before I'd give your Fellowship
even one chance of getting an heir.'
    At this, Asandir released a bright laugh. 'Five centuries is a very long
abstinence, my prince. And if you want me to think that you hold the
enchantress in light regard, you'll need better subterfuge than lying.'
'Touch~,' Dakar murmured from the sidelines. His quip was ignored.
For an instant Arithon looked murderous. Then his green eyes went
wide, and he spoke with a candour meant only for the sorcerer. 'What
caused you to abandon the resolve you made to me after Maenalle's
banquet in Camris?'
    The promise of the free will that he was persistently being hounded to
abandon stayed unspoken through the gust that raked the battlements.
    Already pale, Asandir turned death-white. For the first time Dakar could
recall, the sorcerer looked as if he wanted to retreat. He answered instead,
though he suffered for it. 'You shared for yourself the echo of the mystery
that gentles the vales at Caith-al-Caen. Could you bear to see what
originated that resonance fade forever from this world? If prescience
revealed such a thing might happen, could you stand aside and take no
action in prevention?'
    'Oh, Ath! Not that!' Arithon gripped the parapet as if warded stonework
might steady a universe that rocked under his feet. 'Do you say that my
kingship over Rathain is connected to recovery of the Paravians?'
    'More and worse.' Dakar could not resist his chance for vindication.
'Refuse your crown and you seal their final disappearance.'
 Asandir stayed silent; but the sorrow in his gaze denied nothing.
    'Truth or lies!' Arithon exclaimed, suddenly savage. 'The needs of this
land are killing me, do you understand?'
    The desperation to his stance caused Dakar regret for his outburst.
Lysaer wished passionately to be anywhere else in Athera, but pity locked
his limbs against movement.
    Asandir stared down and appeared to ponder his boots, which were wet
and caught with brown bits of gorse from his walk upon the hills of Daon
Ramon. 'Even so, Teir's'Ffalenn.' His gentleness held an implacability that
damned as he added, 'I had to choose. Now so must you.'

261


    'Merciful maker, you call murder a choice?' Arithon's anguish rejected
sympathy, enough that none dared to stay him as he spun away toward the
stairwell.
    Dakar shuffled his feet through the poisoned, abrasive stillness that
remained. 'I'm surprised you held him to that,' he challenged, brash
enough to fly in the face of the sorcerer's brittle mood.
    But it was Lysaer this time who provoked. 'Less than the truth would not
bind him, is that it.~'
    Asandir stirred as if from contemplation of a topic that held ugliness
personified. 'Truth is like a gem with many facets - reflection and illusion
from every outward angle.' His damp hair blew in the wind, and his hands
hung helpless as he finished, 'The one unsplintered view can only be found
from within.'
    Against all natural inclination the sorcerer chose not to correct Lysaer's
misapprehension. Truth by itself would not condemn the Paravians to
extinction, as Arithon had so harshly presumed; but their exile might
indeed become permanent, for by the uncompromising Law of the Major
Balance, the old races were not any man's concern unless he embraced
them for his own. Truth, Asandir reflected sadly, was the one principle in
existence that could release the musician from blood-ties to kingly
heritage; but the barbs of the trap first closed in Caith-al-Caen had set full
well and deeply.
    No comfort could be gained, that Arithon was physically absent
throughout the struggle as his personal desires warred and lost to the
burden of guilt-induced duty. Asandir sensed to the second when the
Shadow Master's aspect became set. Brooding stillness claimed the
sorcerer as his mage-sight stung him with awareness: for he saw the thread
of probability that held all of a gifted man's contentment fray away into
nothing. The moment passed, and the chance died, that Arithon could
become the bard the strands had forepromised at Althain, a musician
cherished across the continent for his generosity and warmth of percep-
tion. The legacy of a beloved master singer, whose equal had not been seen
since 1shian, for need had been cancelled out. In his place walked a prince
whose competence would come to be feared, and whose gifts would be
whetted by adversity to a cruelly focused edge.
Arithon would not now refuse the crown that waited at Etarra.
Consolation was nonexistent; through embittered years to come, the
Fellowship must hope the man whose dream they had spoiled might
become reconciled to the fate he had been coerced to undertake. Paravian
survival might be bought with restoration of sunlight and war; but that the
old races could be returned in joy to the continent, and the Fellowship be
restored back to Seven was by no means certain. The particulars of Dakar's
Black Rose Prophecy remained in question still.
    Asandir shivered in an icy blast of wind. He tugged his cloak closer to his
shoulders and discovered himself alone on the battlements of Kieling.

262


Lysaer and Dakar had abandoned him to solitude, and to the depthless
mist that sheathed a glowering twilight sky. The Paravian towers seemed
to brood through the gloom, lightlessly and empty and dark.

Elsewhere in Ithamon's ruins, Arithon perched on the curve of a fallen
corbel, his lyranthe rested silent on his knee. He had chosen his vantage
site at random. The littered courtyard before him in prosperous years had
served the merchants who supplied broadcloth to the tailors. Those slates
not scabbed over with grit and moss showed wheel scars from the drays
that had carried imported velvets and brocades from weavers in Cildorn
and Narms. But Arithon gave that past no thought where he sat, his
hands clasped limp on his soundboard, and his eyes pinched closed in
frustration.
 His every nerve end was raw.
    Music, which had always been his first solace, this day came to him
soured. He could not play. Each time he set fingers to strings, the
perception that inspired his art left him defenceless against the insatiable
whirl of spirit life imbued within ruined Ithamon. Ancestors winnowed
past his innermind, calling his name and imploring. Those whose ends
had come untimely in the upheaval of the rebellion troubled him less
than others born of an earlier era, when Paravians had inhabited the
surrounding hills, and diversion of the Severnir's waters had not rendered
all the land barren. Spirits whose passage through time had left no regrets
to sigh in descant between the winter winds; these had touched rock and
soil and the weathered remains of fine carving with resounding vibrations
of content. Their fragile, lost chord of celebration hurt an uncrowned
prince the most, for in the absence of heritage and inhabitants, their song
cried out for restoration of the city that lay splintered in ruin.
    Hounded to sadness by misfortune that he alone was empowered to
redress, Arithon sighed. He should have chosen a sword to accompany his
mood in this place, not the instrument he cradled in a silence that
painfully accused. Stubbornness held him rooted. He would deaden his
ear and strike notes that were feelingless, even false, before he opened
himself to sorrows that had utterly reft his peace.
A fool he was, to have disdained Asandir's warning in Caith-al-Caen!
Mage-taught wisdom reproached him: any gift of power was two-edged.
The awareness of Paravian beauty he had accepted in blithe carelessness
now chafed him like a thousand raw sores. But to do without, to close off
that channel of inner vision, was to render himself pitiful, to blind
himself to hope, and what he now recognized for the shining, enduring
truth that set the spirit outside time and mortal decay.
    Sooner would he bind himself to the misery promised by the crown of
Rathain. Ties of kingship, after all, were only temporary. Death would
free him, at the end.

263


    Dusk blurred the pewter edges of broken stone. Light bled out of the
mist, leaving murk as dense as musty felt. Arithon hunched against the
chill, his arms crossed over Elshian's superlative lyranthe, unaware. If he
heard the step that approached, he dismissed it along with the spirit forms
that plucked incessantly at the conscience he held closed and barred
against them; and others, more sinister, that reached as if to tear his living
flesh.
    'Blessed Ath, here's twice I mistook you for a statue!' Lysaer called
through the muffling layers of the scarf he had wound at his neck. The
temperature had dropped since afternoon, and the air smelled of snow.
'You must be freezing.'
    Arithon opened his eyes and saw that full night had fallen. He changed
grip on his lyranthe, discovered his fingers were numb and flipped down
his cuffs to shelter his knuckles from the tireless bite of the wind. A
musician's instincts to preserve the hands from the elements died hard.
    'Move over, will you?' Lysaer demanded of the half-brother who
appeared to have forgotten him. 'I'd like to sit down.'
    Arithon inclined his head in belated greeting. He shifted aside, his tunic
snagging on edges of chipped fretwork. As he braced his shoulder against
the broken door post at his back, a gust sang through the lyranthe's exposed
strings.
    Unsettled by the mournful ring of harmonics and by the close-bound air
of desolation, Lysaer crowded in and attempted without success to settle
comfortably. 'You pick the most miserable sites for your brooding. Is it
perversity, or a masochistic effort to drive away unwanted company?'
    Arithon faintly smiled. 'Probably both.' He did not ask what brought his
half-brother out into a dismal winter night when Dakar had slaughtered
the ewe bought away from a migrant herder. A savoury mutton stew was
sure to be bubbling over the fire in Kieling's lower ward room, where,
uncommon to stone buildings anywhere else, draughts did not chill a
man's blood.
    Unsurprised to be offered no opening, Lysaer picked at the lichens rooted
deep in old carving and said, 'I wanted to ask. Did you notice this place is
haunted?'
 Arithon loosed a bark of sharp laughter. 'Did I notice?'
    Lysaer stayed his impulse to draw away. He might not share' his half-
brother's inclinations, to set music before the needs of kingdom and
people, but he had sworn to try to understand. Since Asandir had done little
by way of kindness to compensate for unwanted burdens, Arithon's pique
was forgivable, if not entirely just.
    His eyes on the grain of the marble revealed under his fretful touch,
Lysaer tried a fresh approach. 'I don't have a mage's sensitivity. Where you
and Asandir see mysteries, I find only broken stone that fills me with an
unmanly urge to weep.' He gestured toward the interlace his hands had
cleared of debris. 'Except for the remains of their artistry, the Paravians to

264


me are just a name, and the wistful feeling that's left of a dream after
waking.'
    A sidelong glance showed Arithon's manner still inclined toward
abstraction.
    Reluctantly aware he must reveal himself to establish rapport, Lysaer
pressed on. 'I think of home, and am not comforted. Somehow I sense
that Amroth would disappoint me if I were to find my way back. As if
this place held a truth that taunts and eludes me.'
    Arithon turned his head. He was listening with no trace of his earlier,
corrosive sarcasm.
    Yet the captured quiet of the Master's attention became no more
reassuring; a mage's mystery backed his calm, indefinably poised, and
though it might not overtly threaten, it observed in ruthless detail.
Lysaer put aside his fear of seeming foolish and forced himself to
continue. 'The haunting I speak of is not at all the same. I notice it
when we are outside the protection of the tower. It seems to grow
stronger, more suffocating, the longer we battle the Mistwraith. I
wanted to know if you felt anything similar. Do you think the sensation
could be connected? With Desh-thiere, that is, not Ithamon.'
    Now Arithon shivered once, violently, as though his prolonged
exposure to the cold all at once caught up with him. His reply came dry
in the darkness. 'Why not ask Asandir?'
 Lysaer held to patience. 'I did.'
 Arithon only closed his eyes.
    The s'Ilessid prince had no choice but to sustain the conversation by
himself. 'Our sorcerer contacted Sethvir immediately. The Fellowship
sensed nothing amiss, and Dakar was too busy butchering sheep to have
an opinion.'
    Somewhere downslope in the ruins, a fox barked. A field mouse
restled through dry grass seeking seeds, and the mist coiled close,
despite the wind. Arithon unfolded from his huddle, set his lyranthe
carefully by his ankle and rubbed at his temples, disturbed.
    Lysaer knew relief, that after Sethvir and Asandir had drawn blanks,
the Master did not dismiss his concern as groundless fancy.
    In fact, Arithon's disquiet was all personal. To open his mage's per-
ception and sound for whatever uneasy presence had troubled Lysaer
was to invite laceration from within. The very timing was a curse. The
fullness of Ithamon's spirit legacy was too painful to be sorted, so
soon after Asandir's revelation concerning the old races' survival.
Paravian wards did indeed dampen the sting from Ithamon's hauntings;
yet since Kieling's protections were framed of compassion, and Arithon
took hurt from his exposure, he had never thought to look deeper. Not
once had he paused to question whether something else inherently
harmful might have sourced the grace of the wards' surcease. Now that
Lysaer had spoken, he berated himself for carelessness. Repeatedly the

265


Rauven mages had stressed that assumptions were the weakness of the
learned.
    'Asandir and Sethvir found nothing, you say.' The statement mused
upon fact, and did not ask for answer.
    Unsettled by the moist cling of Desh-thiere, Lysaer stopped worrying at
the old carving. 'You feel it, too,' he accused.
    Arithon shook his head, emphatic. 'Just now, I feel nothing. By choice,
you understand. If I were to open myself, allow even a chink through my
defences, I'd be helpless and probably crying.' He sighed, slapped his hands
into his lap, and tilted his crown back into the stone that braced up his
spine. 'Did you by chance bring a handkerchief?'
    'My valet always carried mine for me,' Lysaer apologized. He shrugged in
wry humour. 'Will my shoulder do for a substitute?'
    The offer was friendly and genuine; also painful as a slap to a man who
wished no ties at this moment to anyone outside himself. Pressured to
reflexive antagonism, Arithon curbed his angst. A threat that might stem
from Desh-thiere was too dangerous a development to be sidelined for
personal hurt; never mind that his half-brother lacked perception to
understand that he did not care at any cost to drop his inner barriers to use
mage-sight in this place.
    When nothing moved beyond Arithon's clothing in the ceaseless sweep
of the wind, Lysaer said, 'You need not act on my word alone.'
    Arithon cut off protestations. 'On the contrary. Given your nature, only
a fool would ignore your worry. This begs to be seen to at once.'
    Now Lysaer shot upright in dismay. 'Here? This minute?' It was night,
and stingingly cold, never mind that the ruins themselves were unnerving
in the extreme.
    Clammy and chill, the mist had closed down like a shroud. Objects a half
stride away were invisible and the air smelled of damp decay.
    The s'Ilessid prince tried humour to shake off a rising uneasiness. 'I
always supposed you were crazy. Should I be amazed that you want to
freeze your balls to marbles in a ghost hunt.~'
    Arithon's hand shot out and clamped l~is half-brother's wrist. 'Don't
speak.' He reached down and recovered his lyranthe with a haste that
caused Lysaer alarm.
    Amid the dark ruins, the wind had suddenly dropped. Their perch on the
corbel abruptly and for no sane reason seemed precarious. Lysaer resisted a
near to overpowering urge to grab for the weapon he had stupidly left
behind in the tower. He stifled his need to ask what was wrong, while his
half-brother poised, stone still and apparently listening.
    The mist held their surroundings pent in gloom. Hearing recorded only
an eerie quiet that, under scrutiny, became suspect. No owls called. The
mouse in the grass had frozen or fled in fear, and the very air seemed to have
gone scentless, the frosty edge of snow and pending storm dissipated into
cold that had no character.

266


    Arithon's grip tightened on his half-brother. Just on the point of
speaking, the tension that held him seemed to snap. He shot without
words to his feet, dragging his half-brother after him. As if something he
alone could perceive gave pursuit from the depths of the ruins, he pitched
into a run. Lysaer was jerked headlong into flight across the courtyard and
onward into a cross alley. Broken walls slapped back echoes of their
footfalls and shadows closed over them like ink. A fallen oak barred their
exit; Arithon bashed through like a hunted animal, unmindful of the
scrape of bare branches as he turned his shoulder to spare his lyranthe.
Unsure why they should be fleeing, and perversely suspicious that he
might have been spooked by a prank, Lysaer asked to slow down before
their dash through the ruins wound up ripping good clothes. But his breath
came too fast for speech, and the hold on his wrist hauled him onward.
 A moment later, he lost inclination to argue.
    Though the breeze had utterly died, on their backtrail, the limbs of the
downed tree rustled: someone or something was following.
    'If I made a mistake, I just compounded a second one,' Arithon said,
making Lysaer start. 'I should have removed our conversation to one of the
warded towers.'
    'What mistake?' Apprehension drove Lysaer to interpret past mage-
trained obtuseness. 'Our talk was noticed? Do you guess that some aspect
of Desh-thiere is alive?'
    'More than that.' Arithon tugged him to the left, past the pit of a caved in
cellar. 'This mist we've been given to subdue could be an intelligent entity,
and hostile.'
 Alarmed, Lysaer said, 'Asandir didn't know?'
    They turned down a thoroughfare slippery with mossed over stone, and
laced with weeds and briar. Bits of what may have been pottery skittered
and chinked underfoot. Perturbed, absorbed and strangely, invisibly
harried as they hacked through hummocks of ivy and tripped uphill toward
Kieling Tower, Arithon gasped back, 'Likely not.' Given time, he might
have qualified, but a clear and sudden jab of energy against defences he had
never let down urged him to cry out a warning. 'Call light from your gift,
now ! '
 For retreat was no longer an option.
    Whatever invisible entity had attracted Lysaer's notice had flanked
them and circled their position. Arithon slammed to a halt, jerking his
half-brother to him. He spun in a half-turn, his shoulder set to Lysaer's as
he fought to dredge up wards laced of shadow and what magery he had
learned from Rauven.
    On faith, Lysaer matched his efforts. Brilliance speared outward,
dissolving darkness in a magnesium glare of white heat. Crackled into
turbulence by conflicting fields of shadow, close-bound coils of mist
recoiled with a shriek of steam. Over the hiss, the prince said, 'What's
happening? Are we under attack?'

267


    'I fear so.' Encumbered by his instrument, Arithon sidestepped, jostling
Lysaer through a portal and into a weed-choked yard.
    'Do you know, from what?' Outside the thin blue ring that glimmered in
manifestation of his half-brother's hastily wrought ward, Lysaer could see
little beyond mist and cracked stone and darkness. He brightened his gift.
Light picked out the ragged brick of a forge chimney, and a quenching
trough blackened with moss. Lysaer banged his hip as he scraped past. He
tripped and recovered his footing in time not to stumble over the
sharpening wheel that lay canted before a rust-flaked stockpile of scrap.
    Arithon came back with a curse. 'We face nothing friendly. Beyond that,
I won't probe. It's spirit-formed, and unravelling my defences as fast as I
can maintain them. I'm not about to drop barriers to see what seeks to get
in.' He ripped off his cloak, tearing clasps, and wrapped up his precious
lyranthe. Regret marked his face in the flash and dazzle of wardlight as he
stooped and abandoned his instrument on the flagstone. 'I'd hate to fall and
see her break.'
    Distressed that his half-brother should abandon his most priceless
possession, Lysaer asked, 'Where are you taking us?'
    'Here. The armourer's.' Arithon veered toward a pitted anvil, visible in
silhouette against the corona thrown off by his protections. 'If Desh-
thiere's aspects are an earthforce, iron may help turn them back.'
    But the explanation fell on deaf ears. Lysaer was lost to response. The
scintillant hedge of light he had raised to drive back the mist snapped out at
the next step. Darkness returned, impenetrable and without a sound raised
in warning the s'Ilessid prince crumpled at the knees.
    Iron did nothing to divert the advance of whatever bleak force moved
against them.
    Aware too late that his primary wards were ineffective, Arithon grabbed
his half-brother's clothing to break his fall. Through a fast fading glimmer
of failed spell-craft, he perceived a ghostly circle of faces. They closed in,
leering with bloodthirsty ferocity. Sweat-drenched with fear, Arittion
caught a fleeting impression: their image was wrought of seething mist
and their strength was that of a multitude.
    These were no part of Ithamon's troubled spirits, but something separate
and wholly evil.
    Unbalanced by Lysaer's sagging weight and frightened to outcry by the
suffocating sense of closing danger, Arithon let go his mage-formed barrier
and lashed out in a fury of shadow.
 Night became blackness distilled.
    The ever-narrowing band of hostile entities winnowed into a dusting of
new snow, the mist that clothed their form pared away. Their essence of
ferocity stayed untouched. A probe lanced Arithon's mind. He screamed,
repulsed, his knuckles spasreed tight in his half-brother's cloak. Lysaer
was dead weight, unconscious, injured, or worse. Just how the attacking
Mistwraith had pierced through arcane protections to strike could not be

268


figured. In moments, Arithon saw his own reserves would crumple. He
would be helpless as his half-brother.
    Horrified and desperate that not even shadow brought protection, the
Master found himself cornered without remedy against an aspect whose
resources dwarfed his awareness.
    In denial of acknowledged human frailty, he strove to fashion another
barrier-ward. Counter-forces ate at his efforts like a school of feeding
sharks. His guard-spells were chopped up piecemeal, his concentration too
slow to recoup. Only freak luck had spared him, the protective inner block
he had initially raised to distance the haunting of Ithamon's ruins. That
shield of itself was under siege, then giving way before an onslaught as
relentless as the tides.
    Arithon gritted his teeth. He grasped after.fraying concentration,
panting in the throes of an effort that taxed him like physical pain. Still, the
entity streamed past. It cut against his awareness with the pressure of a
dull knife driven by the weight of all the world. As he tried and failed again
to grapple the disembodied beings that pressed him, he at last knew the
scope of the enemy.
    The Mistwraith was more than just aware. It was intelligent and bent on
retaliation against the princes who were its sure bane. But how it had
hidden its multiply faceted nature, even from the Fellowship of Seven,
Arithon lacked resource to determine. Battered to the bitter edge of
consciousness by an assault his skills could never stem, he staggered.
 Light flashed.
    Harsh, searing glare rinsed away the dark. Running footsteps sounded
over the wind-rush of foundering senses, and a shout echoed through
Ithamon's ruins.
    Beaten to his knees in wet moss, Arithon ripped out a reply. His cry
brought help. A ward circle slashed into existence with a fountainhead of
purple-white sparks. Hands caught his shoulders in support and Asandir's
voice said, 'Let go. Dakar has hold of Lysaer.'
    Awash in dizziness, shocked off balance by the proximity of forces
beyond imagining, Arithon loosed his grip. 'Desh-thiere,' he gasped out.
'It's self-aware. More dangerous than any of us guessed.'
    'Let me turn my shields against it,' said the sorcerer. No longer leashed,
his power radiated from him until the air in his presence blazed light, a
flash and dazzle of force too piercing for fleshly endurance. Vibrations of
palpable current caused inert rock to ring with shared resonance until the
earth itself sang in answer. Arithon braced against shock from the contact
as Asandir towed him to his feet.
    But the sorcerer's touch stayed surprisingly human and warm until the
moment sensation itself became cancelled by the annihilating surge of the
ward fields. Asandir's protections unfurled around beleaguered flesh like a
deluge of rays from a beacon. Arithon felt the invading pressure against his
innermind relent with a soundless howl of rage.

269


 Disparity remained, a sting in the mind that raised puzzlement.
    For Desh-thiere was not repulsed. It did not conjoin in conflict with
Asandir's bared might, but with disorienting and baffling speed, seemed to
fade beyond the pale of dimensional awareness.
    The repercussions of this anomaly blurred as Arithon collapsed against
the sorcerer's shoulder.
 There came no respite even then.
    Harsh fingers siezed his arm, spun him remorselessly around. He was
aware of steel-grey eyes and Asandir's implacable will boring into his
consciousness with the directness of an awl piercing cloth. He had no
reflex left to flinch. 'I'm all right,' he managed to convey, through the
roaring cyclone of ward-force.
    'We'll see,' Asandir replied. To Dakar he added, 'Drag Lysaer, or carry
him. But we must get back to Kieling as quickly as we may.'
    'Lysaer?' Arithon asked weakly. He felt sick. The ground seemed to
twist and buckle under his feet.
 Asandir's response came back clipped. 'Alive. Can you walk?'
    The Master took a step and stumbled. Hands caught him up before he
fell, cruel in their hurry to keep him moving. He managed to find his
balance before the sorcerer lost patience and lifted him, but he remem-
bered little of the journey back through Ithamon's twisted lanes to the
safety of the upper citadel.

Arithon's next impression was sight of the interlaced carving inside the
double arches of Kieling Tower's lower entry. The runes seemed reversed
and upsidedown, an angle of view that disoriented him until he realized:
Asandir had needed to carry him after all. He had a raging headache. The
searing brilliance of mage-light that had sourced the sorcerer's protections
had gone, rendered unnecessary by the ringing, subliminal vibration that
marked the bounds of Paravian wards. A quietude as abiding as the'heart-
rock of the earth enfolded around the party in Asandir's protection. The calm brought surcease, but no ease of mind.
     The near to cataclysmic forces the sorcerer had raised against attack
remained stamped indelibly into memory. Awe remained.
    It was one thing to sense past shielded resonance to the potential of a
Fellowship mage; quite another, to experience such potency unveiled in
the close-pressed immediacy of action. Flame from the wall sconces
showed Asandir's face, etched into the planes of his bones by passage of the
powers channelled through him. That a spirit of such vast resource should
still be walking, clothed in humanity and flesh, defied comprehension.
And yet the mage was himself. His expression reflected no grand depths,
but only self-recrimination as he turned his head and saw Arithon had
recovered awareness.

270


'My prince, I'm sorry.' This admission played no part in the conflict that,
only hours before, had sealed a prince to an unwanted destiny.
    Disarmed, even shamed by the affection in Asandir's concern, Arithon
evaded the personal. 'How did you know Lysaer and I needed rescue?'
    Driven off by banality, the poignancy of the moment fled. Asandir said, 'I
was given warning. The wards in your sword, Alithiel, came active and all
but set fire to your clothes chest.' The sorcerer helped Arithon to a chair by
the hearth, tossed him a blanket, then moved briskly to assist Dakar with
Lysaer, who was unconscious still, and pale as a carving in wax.
    Kieling Tower's wardroom no longer held the bleakness of an edifice
standing whole amid a ruin. Its worn plank floor was made cheerful by a
spread of Narms carpet, hauled from Afthain Tower in the dray.
Asandir's books lay piled near a wrought brass candlestand on an ebony
inlaid table. Four chairs, without cushions, had been salvaged from a
dusty upper chamber. In the pot over the flames, stew still bubbled as
though all in the world were yet ordinary. Burrowed in blankets and
handed a mug of bitter tea, Arithon lay settled and still, content to let
the resonance of the Pararian defences permeate his awareness. He drew
in the smell of cedar from the delicate, patterned panels that adorned
the wardroom walls. To mage-trained eyes, the interlaced carvings of
vines and animals sang with vibrant inner resonance. Whatever Parav-
fan artisans had done the reliefs had instilled true vision in the work. To
behold them was to share an echoed reflection of the great mystery that
endowed the land with life. Slowly, the chill that had invaded the inner
tissues of Arithon's body flowed away into warmth. He released a last
violent shudder. As if called by that movement from across the room,
Asandir arose, leaving Dakar to watch the s'Ilessid prince, who was
sleeping, perhaps under spell.
    A second later, the sorcerer knelt at Arithon's side in concern. 'You look
steadier. Can you tell me what happened?'
    Haggard as though he had stepped intact out of nightmare, Arithon
considered the muddled impressions that remained. 'You saved our lives
and didn't see.~'
    The sorcerer rested slack hands on his knees and stared aside into the
fire. The play of bronze-gold light deepened the creases around his mouth
and other finer lines that afrowed from the corners of his eyes. 'I know you
were assaulted by a manifestation of Desh-thiere. I'm not clear why, or
how. Even Sethvir was fooled into belief the creature wasn't sentient.' If
the admission humbled him, it did not show; his gaze remained lucent as
sun-flecked crystal beneath the jut of his frown.
    Arithon closed his eyes, hands that had not stopped shaking clamped
hard on his tea mug. 'You were looking for an entity that had just one
aspect?' he suggested, for the moment no prince, but a mage sharing
thoughts with a colleague.
 Across a chamber whose unearthly symmetry was made squalid by the

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smell of mutton grease, Dakar stowed his bulk by the settle, surprised. 'But
there's no living spirit in existence that a Fellowship mage cannot track!'
    Arithon fractionally shook his head. Desh-thiere had proved the
exception: a thing wrought of who knew what malice, in the sealed-off
worlds beyond South Gate.
    Asandir maintained a charged stillness. As if perplexed by a twist in a
puzzle, he only appeared detached as he said, 'Whatever the Name of the
Mistwraith, it maimed Traithe's continuity of function. Are you telling
me the creature has spirit, and that it encompasses more than one being?'
    'Try thousands,' Arithon whispered. He opened his eyes. 'Too many to
number separately, and all of them bound captive in hatred. Our efforts
with light and shadow here have been systematically reducing the mist
and the area that confines them, nothing else.'
    'Ath's eternal mercy,' was all the sorcerer said. Yet as a shifting log in the
fireplace fanned a spurt of flame, shadows shrank to show alarm on a face
seldom given to uncertainties.
    'But that can't be possible,' Dakar interjected. 'If it were, how could
Desh-thiere's vapours cross Kieling's wards at will?'
    'Easily,' Arithon murmured, unnerved also, but applying himself to the
problem through habit and years of self-discipline. 'The mist is no more
than a boundary wrought of dampness. The entities I encountered move
within it, self-contained. Paravian defences bar them entrance, but not the
fog that imprisons their essence.'
    Asandir did not contradict the Master's supposition. At some point his
awareness had faded from the room, diffused outward into a net that
expanded over the ruins.
    Arithon was seer enough to catch impressions in resonance. Under his
grandfather's tutelage at Rauven, he had studied the close-woven rela-
tionships that conjoined all worldly things. As he had traced the paths of
his teacher's meditations into the nature of such interconnectedness, so he
followed Asandir's scrying now. Yet where the Rauven mages had known
how to feel out the paths of the air, to read in advance the wind-spun flight
of dry leaves; how to sense warmth amid mist-chilled trees and recognize a
bird asleep with head tucked under wing; how to link with the weighty
turn of the earth, the limning of frost crystals on grasses raked dry by the
season, the perception of a Fellowship sorcerer saw deeper.
    Fully aware of Arithon's attentivehess, Asandir hid nothing. And like
the unfolding of a painted fan, or a span of fine-spun tapestry shown whole
to a blind man through miracle, Arithon saw familiar natural forms
wreathed about with the silver-point etchings of their energy paths. The
sheer depth of vision overwhelmed him.
    Asandir did not see stone, but the crystalline lattices that matrixed its
substance, and beyond that to the delicate, ribbondike glimmers that
were the underpinnings of all being, that stabilized vibration into matter.
More, as a man might know his most treasured possessions, the sorcerer

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recognized everything he scried, not according to type, but in Name, that
unique understanding of every object's individuality. He held the signature
of each plant, from the seed that had thrown up its first sprout, to the days of
sunlight and storms that marked its growth, to the twigs and every turned
leaf ever shed by the grown tree. One oak he would know from every other
oak, living or decayed or unsown, on the basis of just one glance. Stresses,
disease or the robustness of perfect health were delineated plainly to his eye.
He knew frost crystals, not as frozen water, but as single and separate
patterns in all of their myriad billions. Their Names were as visible to him as
signatures. He knew the pebbles of the dry water course, each and every one
by touch, and the tangles of bundled energies that signified each grain of
sand. The detail, the sheer magnitude of caring such depth of perspective
demanded, dwarfed the watching spirit.
    Arithon found himself weeping. Not only for himself, and the deadness of
his senses, but for the beauty of common weeds, and the unendurable
complexity of the shed husk of a beetle's wing. He saw again, through finer
eyes, the resonance of Paravian presence, and saw also that the coarseness in
a clod of horse dung was held into balance by the same singing bands of pure
energy. In Asandir's pass across the ruins of Ithamon, Arithon realized just
how shallow was his own knowledge, and how inadequate. In punishing
clarity, he understood the scope of just what he had abandoned when he had
left Rauven, and yielded himself to another will, another fate, another
calling; now, most bitterly, the loss would repeat arid compound, as he
assumed a second unwanted crown.
    Then Asandir closed down his field of concentration. Released from that
terrible mirror of truth that embodied a Fellowship mage's awareness,
Arithon came back to himself and recalled the dangers that had prompted
the search.
    For all its awesome depth, the scrying disappointed. Tumbled stonework
had harboured nothing untoward, only the mindless tenacity of lichens
living dormant under the mantle of winter night. The sorcerer had unreeled
his probe past the city's edge, across untold miles of Daon Ramon's heart-
land, but no sign had he encountered anywhere of those aspects of Desh-
thiere that had launched attack with such startling virulence.
    No movement could be found but the flight of night-hunting owls; no
death beyond the grass roots grazed by hares; no sound but the play of wind
through dry brush. The Mistwraith's fog was just that- mist coiled cold in
the hollows, lifelessly damp and inert.
    Asandir snapped off the last of his vision in a curtness born of frustration. 'I
cannot find it.' His voice held a scraped edge of pain, not for humiliation that
his resource seemed short for the task, but for failure and heartsore apology,
that the Fellowship's oversight had imperilled two princes whose safety
was his charge to secure.
    'But how can that be?' Dakar cried, his hands too cramped to pick up the
spoon to stir the stewpot.

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