Grand Conspiracy: Second Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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       Winter 5654

      Althain’s Warden

      The guard spells securing the grimward in Korias were a maze framed in paradox, a blaze of wild power channeled through ciphers that bridged both sides of the veil. Entangling coils wrought through time and space framed both bulwark and bias, a weaving of consummate delicacy that layered chaos through primal order like acid burns struck through taut parchment. The barrier carved an isolate pocket between the fabric of Athera’s solidity and the dire peril contained inside. No spells in existence were more deadly; nor did the Fellowship Sorcerers command better means to stay the unbinding currents of flux energies unleashed by the dreams of dead dragons.

      The juxtaposition of hours to months always made the last crossing a feat of unparalleled danger, even for a Sorcerer whose hand had renewed the bindings that laced those same ward rings to renewed stability. Flat weary, aching in shoulders and neck from the wear of unswerving concentration, Sethvir bent his head and whispered encouragement to Asandir’s long-suffering black horse.

      The stallion flicked back an ear; responded. His stride lengthened. He bore his rider through the dusty, stale air locked in stasis within the outer perimeter. Sethvir raised a hand marked red with cinder burns and traced the final string of seals in blue fire. Power surged through him, sure as aimed lightning, the discharge drawn into an exacting harmonic balance. His labor completed, the Sorcerer sensed the shimmering currents lock shut in the windless void. He sighed his relief. The grueling task of sealing the breached grimward had reached completion at long last.

      ‘We’re done here, little brother,’ he confided to the horse.

      The black stud shook his mane, gave a ringing stamp on the white-granite paving, and wheeled. The eerie song of charged forces slipped behind as his step carried through the outermost spell of concealment.

      Waiting on the far side was the damp, winter blast of a sleeting snowfall in Korias.

      Sethvir drew in a shuddering breath. Early dusk spread a pall over the land. Around him, the low, rolling ground was patched gray and white, rocks and lichens snatched bare where the gusts whined off the weathered hillcrests.

      Bone tired as he was, for a half second the Sorcerer sat the ebony stud’s back, confused. The sting of the storm on his face, the bite of cold air on bare knuckles seemed discomforts that belonged to another man’s body. Althain’s Warden blinked as though jostled into a dream. He watched, all but mesmerized, while his breath puffed plumes in the gathering darkness.

      Then even that fragmented awareness upended. His senses whirled away in kaleidoscopic chaos as the restored torrent of the earth link hurled his mind through a cataract of impressions.

      For a brief, helpless interval he swayed in the saddle, hands locked in black mane to stay upright. Visions rinsed his mind like actinic static, a deluge of disordered, random events spiked by the odd, recognizable fragment …

      He saw a royal birth in Havish laced through the mating of whales in the china blue reaches of South Sea. In a cedar-paneled room with red curtains, Duke Bransian of Alestron read a letter penned by his brother Mearn, his iron brows bristled to irritation. Black bears in Strakewood huddled deep in hibernation. An old tree dreamed of rage, and a snarl of stalled trade sent mounted couriers splashing through a rutted ford in Camris, led on by torchlight, and given right of way by their rippling sunwheel banner. A field mouse snatched kernels of corn from a granary, and a shepherd child in Araethura complained of a deep ache in the bones of his face. Southward, where windy rain fell, a brig with a white star carved on her counter cracked out full sail on command of a fair-haired female captain …

      For one moment, two, Sethvir’s mind pinwheeled, hazed through the gauntlet of images that came on as senseless bundles of color and noise. Then the innate mastery of his gift resurged. He recaptured those uncountable, disparate threads, deftly sorted their origins, and loomed them back into one web of exacting, immaculate order.

      Moon phase and tides reset his awareness. The grounding solidity of the earth lent him roots to withstand the vast void of the sky. Then the vista of storm-ridden landscape around him regained continuity and rebalanced his position to the cardinal points of direction. Restored to his venue as Althain’s Warden, Sethvir sat with closed eyes. In one snap-frozen second, he mapped the changed patterns of harmony and discord. Another fractional instant let him touch each of his distant colleagues with the informed assurance of his return.

      Asandir stood, hip deep in a snowdrift on the Plain of Araithe, retuning a damaged stone marker that smoothed a confluence of earth’s lane force; Traithe, on the storm-beaten strands of Lithmere, was completing the final ward in the chain forbidding landfall to slave-bearing galleys. Luhaine, an arrow of liberated joy, rode on a breeze that ranged southward out of Atainia. Kharadmon still stood on watch amid the sealed silence СКАЧАТЬ