rock: of Asandir mending an unstabilized grimward, and of Luhaine, tied down, holding the torn bindings that secured Desh-thiere’s prison at Rockfell.
‘Well, that’s a fitting assignment for a boring, fat windbag.’ Kharadmon laughed. ‘Dour old rocks are the only wise beings who can bear his prolonged company without snapping.’
‘He would say the same for your feckless badgering,’ Sethvir said, his rejoinder a near-soundless breath.
‘Then loose wraiths should suit my style of venom quite well.’ Kharadmon shot straight up through the ceiling, his last words a shriek left imprinted on the whipped drafts. ‘No apologies needed. Marak’s damned spirits were my chosen quarrel long before Morriel Prime cast her lot amid the sharp teeth of ill fortune.’
Let out through a minuscule gap in the eaves too small for a nesting spider, Kharadmon sheared aloft. His haste burned a wake of stressed energies. A rolling boom of thunder ruptured the quiet over the Bittern’s ribbed sands as the speed of his flight outstripped sound. He passed through the rarefied gases of the upper atmosphere, leaving a snag of whipped eddies in the jet stream winds of high altitude. His back trail showed a comet tail flare of split matter, excited to fugitive luminosity.
Then the icy dark of the void closed about him. Athera receded to a jewel-toned orb, whorled with the feathery tracks of the storms that spiraled above lapis oceans. Ahead, a spun webwork of silver-point light, spread the linked seals of the star ward. The sullen spark of ruby that had snagged in disharmony across Sethvir’s broadscale awareness nestled amid the coils of spun power: the telltale guard spell strung across time and space, its watch rune aglow to provide advance warning of trouble arisen from Marak.
Kharadmon felt the chill, that the threat posed by this transmigration of wraiths might forerun the most dire peril of them all. He aligned his course for the beacon which signaled the cause of that distant unrest.
Once there, he held no illusion; the work he must shoulder lacked safeguards. No margin existed for slipped concentration, or the misstep of chance-met error. His peril embraced threat of widespread destruction, with Athera’s frail balance and intricate life drawn into jeopardy with him. Enveloped by the hostile cold of deep vacuum, alone with the whisper-thin chime of the stars, Kharadmon drew himself inward. Seeking camouflage like the chameleon, he collapsed the fields of his being in stages and settled into a stillness as seamless as the quiet before Ath’s creation.
The Sorcerer dissolved his very self. His presence bled into the fabric of space. At one with vast forces that abided, unseen, in the sensory illusion of emptiness, he stripped out his personal identity. Pared down to the quiescent spark of blank will, he poised, the mantle of unbridled wisdom and power smoothed into total passivity. Then, only then, he extended his inquiry into the shimmering red cipher Marak’s wraiths had aroused.
The self-contained vortex of energies sucked him in. Ripped out of space-time, hurled past the annihilating fringes of chaos into the blank-glass calm that encompassed unborn possibility, Kharadmon resisted the suffocating urge to rebuild the templates of Name and character. Consumed, scoured blank as darkness itself, he became the transparent lens, a circle of focus aligned to observe without casting a ripple of distortion.
Kharadmon traced the cipher’s root source back to Marak. Chilled to a patience that eschewed all activity, he recorded the foray of twelve questing wraiths, stirred to leave the voracious pack of their fellows. Without doubt, the disharmony of Morriel’s meddling had whetted their predator’s appetite. The resonance of that upset had predictably escaped the blanket of Athera’s magnetic field through the distressed consciousness of the trees, a signal spun out like a carrier wave along the defunct path of a homing spell wrought at past need by the Fellowship.
Wraiths sensed even subtle shifts in vibration. Wedded to hatred, they savored the taste of human malice and conflict. Any breath of upheaval piqued their raw needs like the scent of freshly spilled blood. Tugged by their insatiable drive to consume, they left Marak and groped down the tenuous thread through deep space, beckoned on by faint promise of a world lush with teeming life. Other wraiths trailed in the wake of their brethren, this second wave pressured on by a rivalry that clawed tooth and nail for survival.
Kharadmon saw at once that the ongoing exodus would not dwindle into attrition. The wraiths in the lead sensed the horde crowding their heels. They would scarcely turn back, to be slashed and torn in a rage of psychic aggression. Their fellows would attack at the first sign of weakness, or the apparent uncertainty of retreat.
Gently, slowly, Kharadmon withdrew his awareness from the spelled cipher of warning. Freed at long last to react to his findings, he battled a wave of stark fear. No safe means existed to deter those wraiths strung down the back trail of spent spells. Once those pioneers sampled life on Athera, whether they encountered defenseless prey or the drawn lines of vigorous defense, their bloodlust would rise in earnest. Their frenzy would swiftly draw rampant thousands, excited by starveling need and the prospect of unconquered territory. Nor was Athera’s hampered Fellowship equipped to handle an invasion with the requisite, seamless subtlety.
Alone in the icy void between stars, Kharadmon faced implacable fact. Resolution of the crisis at hand demanded no less than the diligent work of two Sorcerers: one to mask Marak, blindsiding the massed entities still seething at large on the wasted planet. Only then could the inbound wraiths be reeled in and contained, each spirit laboriously winnowed separate and Named, then restored to its shattered identity.
Nor would the next likely option bear weight, that a masterbard’s talent might be pressed to assist. Arithon s’Ffalenn was already set in grave jeopardy. If his flight to reach sanctuary at Ithamon succeeded, if the ancient protections there let him stand down Desh-thiere’s curse, too many unknown factors must still be put to the extreme test. Yet Kharadmon foresaw a dearth of alternatives. Paravian wards were already proved to restrain invading wraiths. In theory, a masterbard’s trained gift of empathy could sound out and define the identity of misaligned spirits. Through Arithon’s matured talents, the keyed tones of compassion could open the means to rename Marak’s wraiths and restore their lost human awareness.
Yet until the s’Ffalenn prince achieved safety, and unless Luhaine received the vital assistance to attend the damaged protections at Rockfell, Kharadmon could do nothing more than engage a stopgap measure to buy time.
At least he had thoroughly tested the method to meet today’s raw necessity. That knowledge granted no comfort as the Sorcerer launched past the interlaced construct of wards that stood sentinel for Athera. His journey dispatched him on a spiraling course through the chartless deeps of the void. He must first intercept the wraiths’ course, then deploy spells to delay them, blind them, deflect their track into intricate, stalled circles. Start to finish, with no slack for error, his work must be wrought with seamless finesse. His adversaries must never suspect their straight course had been deliberately tangled. Nor could the waylaid pack of wraiths be permitted the opening to sense the bold power that arranged their manipulation.
Kharadmon had suffered pursuit once before. Evasion had required help from Sethvir and Luhaine, their paired strengths backed by the mighty defenses laid into Althain Tower. All three Sorcerers had barely survived the ordeal with their faculties free of possession.
Nor were the stakes this time one whit less threatening. Kharadmon grasped the terrible crux. At all costs, his memories and his knowledge of arcane practice must be guarded. He must not fall to the wraiths’ obsessed drive to absorb conquered victims in assimilation.
Winter 5670
Trackers
The hour before dawn, the brick guardhouse in Jaelot held a stew of relentless activity. The clangor of metal as men sorted arms reechoed through shouted orders, and the tangle of raised voices, arguing. Just arrived on the threshold, his old man’s quaver overwhelmed by the rush and commotion, the Lord Mayor of the city stood irate. Arms crossed on his chest, and both feet wrapped in flannel to cushion his limping gout, he howled at the browbeaten coachman who took the place of his usual, effete manservant. ‘I