Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ