Fugitive Prince (18 page)

Even Sethvir could not encompass Althain’s dire beauty without a half breath lost to awe. A disturbed scrape of claws issued from the mantel shelf, cut by a testy croak.

“I won’t stay distracted,” Sethvir assured the raven. He steadied himself, then narrowed his mage-sense into controlled concentration. Slowly, delicately, he extended his tactile awareness into the aura of his colleague.

Sethvir’s whole consciousness embraced that of Traithe. Prepared though he was, a sick rush of vertigo ripped his frame. He broke into a cold sweat; stifled his reflexive recoil though horror chased his skin like the clammy, sharp scrape of wet razors. Intent held him firm as his vision spun and drowned, sucked into the fearful, gapped chaos of a spirit whose vital energies had been sheared into permanent disarray.

The effect was clean symmetry pulled tragically awry, a mistake frozen for posterity as a statue half-smelted in a bronze craftsman’s crucible might be quenched in disfigured solidity.

By every lawful tenet of nature, the inviolate whole of Traithe’s inner spirit should have gleamed through the damage to his body. A self-aware being transcended mere flesh. On the contrary, the vibrational essence of Name held the changeless template by which a sorcerer’s own powers could restore full health and fitness. But outside the scope of Fellowship wisdom, one long past, calamitous encounter with Desh-thiere had snarled Traithe’s aura into discord. Unlike Kharadmon and Luhaine before him, he could not shape the crossing to earthplane existence as pure spirit. His awareness had been warped too far out of true, entrapped in its cage of crippled flesh.

Sethvir shared the scope of that damage firsthand. The resonant structure of Traithe’s merry essence had been rucked to a madman’s tangle. Its bright weave showed odd rifts, as if packs of starved predators had ripped through tinseled lace with claws and ravening teeth.

These, Sethvir must patch with his own resources. His colleague’s continuity of function must be stabilized to restore complete access to his talents. Braced for disorientation and mindless, tearing pain, Althain’s Warden dissolved his last veil of identity to shore up the wounded spirit that was Traithe.

His mage-sight became shattered. Perception dissolved into crazyquilt fragments, welted in patternless blind spots. Althain’s Warden cried out. Unmanned by the handicap Traithe endured through the ongoing course of each day, Sethvir fought down raw fear. Imagination foundered. In grief, he felt humbled by his colleague’s brave struggle to hold fast to humor and sanity.

The heart could but reel before the ultimate cruelty, that such suffering impairment might have no end and no cure. Against sheer despair, Sethvir raised a counterflux of power.

The labor he shouldered was painstaking and delicate. No individualized pattern of his signature precisely matched those gaps riven wholesale through Traithe. The interface was clumsy, a rafted-together construct as unwieldy as trying to join hawsers with thread, or forcing mismatched fragments of porcelain to fuse into a water-tight vessel.

Sethvir closed the last channel. He waited, sustained in pity and patience, while Traithe groped to assimilate, and talents repressed throughout five hundred years flexed from their cramped state of disuse. Lent a fleeting, murky access to the mage-sight once commanded
in his own right, the lame Sorcerer made no demands, but waited while Sethvir engaged the next step.

Althain’s Warden drew on memory. Without judgment, without prejudice, he shared the reflection of Lysaer’s spirit aura on the moment that Fellowship verdict had withdrawn the protection of the compact.

Like some eerie, actinic embroidery spindled against velvet gloom, the recalled vision shimmered into visible light. In curves and angles and blazing, arced spirals, the individual vibrations which comprised Lysaer s’Ilessid lay exposed, the whole of his being excised from the shadow of dense substance for mage-schooled eyes to interpret.

Sethvir held the facsimile static, while Traithe traced the steps of his colleagues’ decision in unconditional review. Predictable anomalies were sorted aside: here, the seal of Davien the Betrayer’s longevity, and there, in fixed imprint lent through maternal blood ties, the s’Ahelas line’s given gift of farsight. Traithe narrowed his study to encompass a transection of angles more jarring, that convoluted mesh of whorls and jags where the Mistwraith’s curse to destroy a half brother entangled the true lines of s’Ilessid justice. The instilled royal virtue no longer ran straight, but bent with insidious and chilling persistence into self-blinding misalignment.

Mortal will could scarcely resist such a coil. Set to draw his independent opinion, Traithe could not overlook the surrounding lines carved by princely desire and intent.

Lysaer had been cursed to kill his half brother. The tenets of royal inheritance led him to endorse that violence with a just cause. But nestled inside his ardent need to protect society, an uneasy conscience spun new threads of gnawing uncertainty.

Delusion entered in: a magisterial spark of arrogance fueled by outraged duty. Lysaer clung to the vanity of his privileged royal upbringing. Where the coil of self-perception shaped the ideals of principle, obsession flowered, a hot, hazy spiral that corded through the aura like coils cast off a dropped spool.

Sethvir shared the resonance of dismay through the link, as Traithe resolved his conclusion. Lysaer used his flaws to deafen his ears to harsh truth. A lordly, dark pride that brooked no humility before the misguided masses; a caring, honorable sovereign’s undoing, that measure of shame and stark horror. No other descendant of Halduin had lived to lead an innocent people to slaughter. That burdensome guilt crushed thought and will, and gave rise to a desperate denial. Lysaer refused outright to betray his s’Ilessid bloodline. He
would not
beg mercy and assign himself blame for thirty-seven thousand useless deaths.

A penchant for self-sacrifice fueled that chord of victimized fury and reforged an unswerving purpose. In assurance as cool as a strand of steel filigree, Lysaer chose his next course. For the sake of those who died carrying his banner, he would forbear his born generosity of spirit and embark on a more grandiose campaign. Arithon must become more than a criminal beyond pardon, but the instrument of evil incarnate. For honor, for the sake of past losses and grief, the man who styled himself Prince of the Light would not break down and cry weakness.

And so in that hour the composite of Lysaer’s aura showed his tragic, committed dedication. For the enslavement of Tysan’s clansmen and the salve of a glorified purpose, this scion of s’Ilessid shaped the course and direction of his fate. Desh-thiere’s curse might drive him to fight Arithon. Its pernicious hold might intensify and strengthen the brutality of each encounter. But like an addiction to euphoric drugs, its pull could not enslave every facet of self-will; nor had it the power to enforce heart or spirit to give impassioned collaboration with its drive to seed bloodshed and war.

Hate was the province of the Mistwraith’s geas, not conceit or vengeance for vanity.

Too aggrieved to stay silent, Sethvir said,
‘Had Lysaer’s human judgment or his gift of true justice stayed uncompromised, he might not have persisted in branding his half brother as evil.’

But outside of conjecture, choices still ended with fact. The damning omission which condemned the s’Ilessid prince was his prideful design not to bend.

‘Even so,’
Traithe admitted in ringing regret.
‘Our oath to uphold the compact leaves us no loophole to give Lysaer a reprieve.’

Sethvir dismissed the s’Ilessid construct. Prepared to drop contact with his colleague’s faulted vision, he shivered, swept across by a violent burst of d´jà vu. Trained reflex responded. Practiced from his centuries of tracking the unsorted flux of the earth link, Sethvir tagged the triggering fragment of event. Then he rummaged through memory in pursuit of the happenstance which linked the uncanny association.

The connection became manifest. Breath seized in his chest as the past took him back into the suffocating terror of attack.
Once, for six hours he had been imprisoned in the sheer, slate walls of a warded flask. He had fled there in peril of his life, hunted down by a pack of nine free wraiths.
These had been lured from the dead world of Marak through the Fellowship’s effort to learn of Desh-thiere’s origins. Threatened by possession, his countermove forced out of cornered desperation, Sethvir had fragmented and scattered his consciousness to deflect the force of the assault. Voracious in malice, the wraiths had closed in. For a nightmarish second, Althain’s Warden relived the torment, while malevolent spirits savaged his being like vivisection done with hot knives.

In that darkest hour, while the wraiths had devoured those disparate bits of his spirit, Sethvir had experienced the paralyzing horror of a consciousness wormholed with gaps. Shocked to revelation, he perceived the probable cause of Traithe’s plight. In the hour of past crisis, Traithe had engaged grand conjury to unmake the spells which enabled the South Gate as a portal to cut off Desh-thiere’s invasion. As battle was joined, the collective mind of the Mistwraith may well have bid for possession.

Traithe had lost memory. Repeated scryings to reconstruct the event had exposed only surface images. But there
had
been a spell unleashed that appeared to recoil in backlash upon its creator. Through logic and theory, Sethvir knew Traithe’s act had not been any miscast conjury.

On purpose, a sorcerer beset beyond hope might shear off tainted portions of his being. For the mage-trained, the perils of possession and conquest were too terrible a risk to set loose on the world at large.

Worse, far worse, if such maiming defense had not immolated those truncated fragments. Laced still in shared contact, Sethvir masked dismay. Those severed shreds of Traithe’s consciousness might well still exist.
If they had survived the cautery of conflict, they would live in the clutch of the wraiths which devoured them. That lost essence of self could be nowhere else but mewed up under the deranging vibrations of the wards over Rockfell Pit.
The chance was too real, that Traithe’s hope of healing lay imprisoned with the Mistwraith’s stew of warped spirits.

The Warden of Althain snapped his fine band of rapport. Cast free of Traithe’s blinkered awareness, he shivered. The ordinary dark of the King’s Chamber enfolded him, its brimstone tang of spent carbon commingling with the faded fragrance of the herbs that kept moths from spoiling the heraldic banners. Sweat drenched him. A bone-deep dread compounded his earlier heartache.

He scarcely dared move, lest Traithe be led to sense something amiss and begin a distressed round of questions.

“Get some rest,” Sethvir urged, amazed that his voice should still
function. He managed no more. The devastating scope of his findings overcame him, and pity closed his throat like poured lead.

While Traithe relieved the ache of his scars in sleep on a cot in the wardroom, the other four Fellowship Sorcerers in residence gathered in the cushioned nook off the pantry.

The unwelcome impact of Sethvir’s discovery had spun into brittle silence.

Asandir’s charcoal eyebrows met above his hawk nose. Seated at a deal table grayed with old rings left by flowerpots, he plowed the last crumbs from an oatcake into mazes of meaningless lines. In the window seat opposite, feet tucked up on a tapestry stool leaking horse-hair stuffing in tufts, Althain’s Warden peered into the dregs of a much chipped earthenware pot. A mug turned for a sunchild’s proportions sat clasped between his knobby knees. Sethvir found nothing useful to say. The tracks between soggy clumpings of tea leaves held no remedy to heal Traithe’s affliction.

“How often ignorance stings less than knowledge,” Asandir said at last.

By then, a wintery aquamarine dusk tinted the room’s makeshift casement. Hoarfrost tendriled the bottle-thick rondels, crudely set into leading and mortar to seal the aperture of an arrow loop. Failing light glinted on the diamond inset in some forgotten aristocrat’s fancy table knife. The bone handle had yellowed, and a blade lapsed to tarnish wore butter in undignified smears. Nearby, a tin spoon stuck upright in the bubbled glass jar of a farmwife’s elderberry jam.

A current of cold out of phase with the season prowled the rim of the table. “What does dung do in a byre but get deeper?” remarked Kharadmon’s drifting presence.

To stall his rank flippancy, Luhaine spoke from the niche between the rococo cupboards of the larder. “If Traithe’s chance of healing is linked with the quandary of Desh-thiere’s damned wraiths, in horrid fact, we’re left with a dearth of alternatives.”

“Just the sort of crux in a chess game to drive logicians and theorists to fits.” Kharadmon crossed the window in a puff of miffed agitation. “We might be advised to set calming wards to safeguard your sanity as precaution.”

“How belated,” Luhaine retorted. “I’d sooner go mad from your incessant, childish inanities!”

Kharadmon blew back a raspberry. “Leave things to you, we’d hear you pontificate ‘til the fish in the sea become fossils.”

Long since inured to old spats between shades, Asandir twiddled
crumbs, and Sethvir pondered tea leaves, each one immersed in perturbed quiet. None cared to broach the difficult quandary, that Traithe’s tragic predicament made the cursed princes’ lives all the more indispensable. Their elemental mastery of shadows and light could be needed to sort through the Mistwraith’s damned entities. The outlook on that future stayed unremittingly grim, with Arithon half-deranged by the pinch of s’Ffalenn conscience, and named as a hunted criminal; and Lysaer s’Ilessid poised to launch holy war under threat of Paravian judgment.

Traithe’s raven fluffed obsidian feathers from the keystone over the doorway, while Luhaine intoned arch opinion. “There could be a benefit to this day’s bad work. A reprieve might arise out of darkness, if Lysaer’s aberration of prime law would draw the Paravians out of hiding to denounce him.”

“No grace remains for discussion in any case.” Sethvir raised his nose from the dregs of his tea mug, his mood diffused into vagary. “We’ve got company. Morriel Prime’s just arrived at the gates to demand our immediate audience.”