answer a more urgent need, and the letter Lady Maenalle sent as well.’
The grievous implication hung through suspended quiet, that the six years of peace Arithon had bought since the massacre at Strakewood forest, that he had wrested from his fate by denying his half-brother any viable target to strike at, might be threatened well before any means lay at hand to challenge the Mistwraith’s fell binding.
Unless and until Kharadmon came back successful from his quest, the hands of the Fellowship remained tied.
Traithe jammed on his hat to mask trepidation.
Afflicted by more personal ties to the princes, Asandir pushed back his chair and strode out with a speed that shed draughts and snuffed the spent flicker of the candle.
Verrain could only clench his knuckles in cat fur, his throat closed against questions too fearful to ask, and his eyes flooded from what he hoped was flung smoke from the wick that glowed briefly and blinked out.
Disclosure
The irksome price of rushing passage across the continent by means of tapping a power lane was the wrenching disorientation that lingered after arrival. Restored to his tower in Atainia with trouble enough on his mind to threaten a thunderous headache, the Warden of Althain paced. Each step squelched across the scarlet carpet in his bedchamber, soaked since a squall had dumped rain through the casement left ajar in his absence. His thick, furry buskins wicked up the wet and added a smell like damp dog to the mustiness already in the room.
‘You know,’ a disembodied voice admonished in reedy bass, ‘there are quite a lot of books in this tower that are going to flock and mould if you don’t amend your poor housekeeping.’
Sethvir stopped short amid puddles and sundry furnishings burdened like a fair stall with clutter. ‘Luhaine? You wouldn’t leave the Koriani witches unguarded for the simple pleasure of berating me.’
The query raised a slow spin of air in one corner, which rocked a sagged wicker hamper crammed to bursting with cast-off socks. Several woolly toes lolled over the brim, unravelled beyond help of darning; but Sethvir’s drifty attentiveness reflected no shame for his negligence.
A moment passed in suspension.
Then, typically sulky, the elusive voice proffered reply. ‘After last night’s exertions, what need to guard? Just now, the Koriani Senior Circle lie tucked up in quilts, comatose as buds in a hard frost.’
Undaunted by Luhaine’s penchant for evasions in flowery language, Sethvir sighed. ‘Don’t say our ruse went for nothing. Asandir’s temper is touchy as if he’d swallowed pins, and though we needed our master spellbinder’s help for scrying dead methurien, Verrain need not have been aggrieved by what else transpired last night.’
‘Well, the choice of decoy was never my idea, if you care to recall!’ Disturbed draughts huffed across the chamber, riffling the pages of a dozen opened books. ‘And ruse? Dharkaron Avenger! What a blundering understatement.’
Since the Koriani had powered their rites at equinox from the fifth lane’s heightened energies, and Asandir at the appropriate moment had raised a facsimile of Arithon’s aura pattern in the tower above Meth Isle’s focus with all the force and subtlety of a thunderclap, the conclusion was shatteringly self evident. ‘Ath Creator could not. have stopped your projection from entangling the Koriani scrying to perdition,’ Luhaine snapped.
The Koriani probe cast out to seek the Shadow Master had been drawn to its match like a homing signal, and stuck there like nails in old oak. If their Senior Circle had been powerless to separate the energies in further search for the living man, the discorporate sorcerer’s testiness was just. The unavoidable sidebar had lent them unwise insight into Arithon’s character and potential. Predictably, the enchantresses had seized full advantage.
‘So, how much did they learn?’ Sethvir asked on a grainy note of laughter.
The request engaged a shadowy blur that defined itself into the corpulent image of the bodiless being he addressed. Robed in scholar’s grey belted at the waist with a doubled band of leather that buckled suspiciously like a harness girth, Luhaine stalked soundlessly forward. Frowning over full cheeks and a wheat-shock bristle of whiskers, he stabbed a stumpy finger in accusation. ‘Considering Dakar’s ploys in Jaelot? By rights his plague of fiends should have drawn Koriani interest like flies to dead meat to peddle talismans against that iyat bane. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate the enchantresses let that slip past.’
Sethvir raised bushy eyebrows.
The spirit who glided over the moist carpet seldom cursed, but his agitation showed signs of turning stormy. His rejoinder was not delivered in words, but in a cobbled scrap of memory hurled like a slap at his colleague.
For a second, Sethvir shared the tight and detailed vision of a wasted crone in violet veils bent over an ebon table. Around her like flesh-eating vultures in hoods the silky sheen of black grapes, a circle of women followed her interest as she said, ‘Ah, but his endowments are to be envied.’
The subject under discussion was a shimmering web of light captured by determined scrying: the life-print of Arithon s’Ffalenn as unveiled the past night over Meth Isle’s focus. As avidly as spiders might suck the juices from a trapped insect, the enchantresses analysed his attributes. They dissected the spiralled framework of his power, both latent and schooled: of a mage’s chained discipline and a shadow master’s wild talent linked through the blaze of a visionary mind. The cherished potential of his musician’s talents were picked out in all their ethereal shadings, a silver-lace braid wound through a will stamped in flesh like bright wire. Here, the beacon symmetry of s’Ahelas farvision tangled razor-point edges with the nettle and gossamer tendrils of undying s’Ffalenn compassion. There, the enchantresses read the sorrow and despair in the moment of Deshthiere’s conquest: Arithon’s self-awareness like the fixed sting of thorns, that hope and effort could buy him no better than failure.
Sethvir shrugged the burdensome image away with long-suffering patience. ‘The Koriani Prime and her First Senior learned nearly as much from a spying foray six years ago. Although Arithon’s personal Name pattern is now shared in common with the Prime Circle, Morriel is little more enlightened.’
Luhaine sniffed, his bodiless bulk passing without mishap between a side table stacked with gutted tea canisters and a clothes tree festooned with worn bridles. ‘Well, she certainly didn’t know that Arithon and Lysaer had drunk from the Five Centuries Fountain.’
Sethvir stilled. His eyes turned a dreamy, vacuous blue as he engaged direct power to sample the consternation bought on the heels of that revelation. When he found the Prime Circle scurrying in agitation like an ant hill pounded by a hailstorm, he chuckled outright. ‘The news should keep them busy for a little. Why trouble? The only ramification I can see beyond hysterics, is one especially deserving young initiate will gain a course of training she would otherwise be forbidden to merit.’
Luhaine’s lugubrious mood failed to brighten.
The Warden of Althain sighed. As if conceding some unseen point, he sat upon a cot he never slept in, folded veined hands on his knees, and absorbed himself in muttering a cantrip that would banish the damp from his rug. When the binding was complete and the musty smell dispersed along with the dregs of the water, he fidgeted gently and peered at the vortex that comprised his discorporate guest. ‘Luhaine?’
The portly apparition spun about in a noiseless whirl of grey. ‘You can’t say I haven’t witnessed more than my share of the Koriathain’s grand councils. They’ve fixed on the ironies of Arithon’s nature and see nothing beyond surface paradox. That, they’ve concluded, creates an explosive potential for instability. Once their Senior Circle divines the Shadow Master’s chosen course and location, they’re not going to allow him free will. He’s the last of his line, and Morriel’s ancient with spite. You know they’re very likely to launch on a quest to see him dead.’
Sethvir seemed to hold