traces of unclean acts. In the free wilds of Camris, his sight showed him spilled water, paned over with crystalline ice and the sick, phosphor haze of spent blood magic…
The extreme sensitivity of Sethvir’s earth-sense traced down that wisped remnant of energy.
‘Lysaer,’ he gasped in a tortured whisper. Unbidden vision expanded the connection. He beheld the fair coloring and chisel-cut face of the s’Ilessid prince. But the clean symmetry of Lysaer’s features appeared subtly recast, hardened to the blind fervor of the Mistwraith’s curse, which drove his headlong quest to destroy his half brother, Arithon.
‘… without doubt,’ Luhaine was saying in reassurance. ‘The s’Ilessid is still in Camris. From there, he can scarcely pose a direct threat to his half brother on the east coast of Rathain.’
But that balance would change. Sethvir’s earth-sense bore witness. Cloaked under darkness, Lysaer s’Ilessid mounted a cream charger. His urgent, clipped speech exhorted an elite party of officers to ride eastward during the night.
The man named Divine Prince by Tysan’s misled masses planned to cross the Camris plain to the coast, then make rendezvous with a fast galley. Once over the narrow inlet to Atainia, he would rejoin the road to Instrell Bay and board a trader bound for Rathain as early as the next fortnight.
‘We are called to serve!’ Arms raised in impassioned appeal, the Prince of the Light addressed his veteran officers. ‘I have received visions! Evil moves abroad as we speak! The Spinner of Darkness has returned to the continent. In Jaelot, innocent people have already suffered and died, victimized by his sorceries. I am charged by the Light to stand in defense. Ride with me! Lend your swords to bring down this minion of darkness, and be blessed in name for all time!’
‘The Prince of the Light goes to muster his eastern allies,’ Sethvir gasped, the words blurred into his caught breath, too faint to be understood. Against a blazing maelstrom of imagery foretelling blood and disaster, he cried tortured warning against the haze of raised voices around him. ‘Master of Shadow… endangered…’
‘Hush! Listen, the Warden speaks!’ Cloth rustled nearby. The drafts sang of indistinct movement.
Sethvir wrestled the crazy quilt cataract of images that battered his mind beyond reason. ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid knows…’ He rammed his thoughts stable, framed intent like stamped crystal, and at last, transferred the gist of his desperate message.
While Sethvir sank back, Luhaine’s staid presence assumed the task of explaining. ‘Yes, we have news, an ill turn for the worse. The Mistwraith’s curse does not rest while we’re burdened. Lysaer s’Ilessid has discovered his s’Ffalenn half brother has dared to return to the continent. He’ll muster for war on false grounds and religion. Yes, winter blizzards will slow him. But the pack of fanatics who have cast him as savior have resorted to unclean practice and dark augury. Word of the Shadow Master’s presence will be sent on ahead. Sethvir foresees armed troops assembled in Darkling. Etarra has mustered for years against this hour. The field commander there will set seasoned troops on the march, well prepared for rough country and cold weather. They may not move fast, but they’ll be relentless once they know Arithon’s position. Until the s’Ffalenn prince escapes back to sea, his life is going to stay vulnerable.’
A second voice questioned; Luhaine settled into exhaustive lecturing, but Sethvir lost the thread as his cognizance faded back into the tangling resurgence of imagery…
In the wooded foothills of Tornir Peaks, an escaped pack of Khadrim flew on bat-leather wings, keening their shrill song of bloodlust. They circled a trade caravan bound for Karfael, stooped in attack, and shredded the drover’s campsite. Armed guards died in flames. The screams of ripped horses and disemboweled men blended into the predators’ whistles of quavering dissonance.
Sethvir sensed the bleak pain of the dying. Beyond sorrow, he curbed his flash-point anger that the clean-cut, new wards Asandir had just raised to hold the renegade packs in confinement had been utterly destroyed in the cascading flux of the lane imbalance. Morriel Prime had succeeded too well; the Fellowship was caught too desperately shorthanded to dispatch trained help to intervene.
A second scene flowered: this one farther south, couched amid the ocher-brick towers of Lysaer’s restored capital of Avenor. There, the subtle, secretive man appointed as High Priest of the Light sat awake and brooding by candlelight. In black jealousy, he pondered the name bandied in taprooms and wineshops across the city. In place of Lysaer, Divine Prince, the land’s folk praised young Prince Kevor, whose bravery at the untried age of fourteen had quelled last night’s pending riots. Fell portents had sheared across the clear sky, an ominous harbinger of evil to come at the hand of the Master of Shadow. Yet Avenor’s unnerved people did not hail the Light, but instead drew their heart from the mortal courage displayed by the young heir apparent…
Sethvir had no chance to pursue the implications sprung from that startling twist. The unformed premonition of danger dispersed like blown smoke as his view of the high priest’s sanctum whirled away. Shifted sight showed a herd of dun deer, startled from grazing the ice-rimmed hummocks of the Salt Fens due north of Earle. The does turned raised heads, while a foam-flecked black stud thundered by, its rider charged to spell-driven haste. Upon his broad shoulders, the most perilous threat unleashed by the old Prime’s plotting…
The Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, raced toward the grimward which confined the unquiet dreams of the ghost of the king drake, Eckracken. The torn guard spells he spurred at a gallop to mend leached at Sethvir’s consciousness, a burning imbalance that frayed through ordered thought with the tenacity of flung acid.
Until Asandir arrived at the site and effected full-scale intervention, the tenuous grip of the Warden’s stretched resources became all that stemmed those pent powers of chaos. He had held the line firm since the deranged lane force had snarled in backlash. The stopgap spells maintained at long distance throbbed to Sethvir’s heartbeat, draining his core reserves of vitality. Each minute, passing, bled more strength from him. His competent grasp on his earth-sense ebbed, while the unchecked spate of images plunged his cognizant vision into frenetic disorder.
The Warden of Althain could scarcely harness the flow. His consciousness rode the slipstream of impressions like a leaf unmoored in a gale. All his last strength was engrossed in the ties, faint but ever-present, that cast lines of spelled force like webs of wrought light across the flawed seals of not one, but six additional grimwards. Eleven others he watched, wary, alert for the first, crumbling trace of attrition. The stakes were unforgiving if his vigil should fail. Just one broached grimward would upend the world’s order. The wild resonance of drake-dream would unleash tangling chaos and unravel the ties that bound matter.
Asandir could claim neither rest nor respite until he had tested and repaired the seals binding each grimward under Fellowship guardianship.
Another flaw in the rings holding Eckracken’s haunt spat a leaked burst of static. Sethvir sensed the discharge as a pinprick of pain snagged through the whole cloth of awareness. Sensation flowered at once into vision, of a sere, winter bog, windswept under the clouded night sky. Something more than mere wind ruffled through the dry banks of the reedbeds. Sethvir knew dismay. His earth-sense scanned those contrary riffles and detected a small swarm of iyats, energy sprites native to Athera that fed upon elemental energies. To mage-sight, the creatures appeared as a mad gyre of sparks, winnowed and whirled by the insatiable hungers that drove them. They normally fed on the natural forces found in falling water, tides, and the changing dynamics of weather. Yet the tuned spirals of refined spellcraft offered more powerful fare, and inevitably lured them like magnets. Their voracious appetites were already piqued by the interference signature of the ward forces, wobbling on the brink of release. If the iyats reached the site of the grimward ahead of Asandir, they would cluster and sate themselves on the emissions let off by the lane-damaged ward rings. Like a yanked loop of knit, their feeding frenzy would unravel firm barriers