return, Lysaer’s claim of divinity cannot do other than fail.”
“We have sent Arithon,” Sethvir said. Nothing more.
Those words should have been arrows, to strike so quick to the heart. “I am humbled,” the adept gasped. Tears broke her voice, and trembling reflections sparked over the thread patterns at her collar and cuffs. “Because of your sacrifice, Ath preserve, yet again, for the endurance of your Fellowship, the light of our grace may live on.”
Sethvir’s fingers, reclasped to hers, became reassurance and comfort.
Whatever deep worry he hedged to keep hidden, her standing to pressure him was forfeit.
Serenity undone, the adept quit the landing. Her retreat down the stairwell raised pattering, small echoes, no tribute at all to the sorrows enshrined in the granite walls of this sanctuary. The vast, shifting shadows offered no refuge. Nor did the Warden of Althain’s piercing watch ever leave her. His thin, fragile shoulders in their formal maroon robes stayed unbowed, in full command of a desperate history. To one who might hazard the whole scope of that burden, naught was left but to ache. Words were no match for such courage and generosity, that in unequivocating competence assumed Lysaer’s dark tangle in her Brotherhood’s stead.
Again, the Fellowship chose to brave every fissure of torn continuity that human works brought to the world.
Worst of all, the decision to champion her Brotherhood’s seclusion was not blind. Sethvir fully recognized the perilous potential posed by s’Ilessid folly. He knew too well how events might grow to jeopardize all that his Fellowship had become in their labor on Athera’s behalf. Risk and sacrifice, the Sorcerer grasped every possible ramification. No warning could serve; stewardship of the compact might test yet again the peace of mind he and his colleagues had earned amidst the strife of two Ages.
They would shoulder this coil, atop the dread quandaries already ceded to their care by the past flight of the Paravians. Tears made an ungrateful gift for such courage; pity fell short as a eulogy.
While the adept sought her peace in the comfort of solitude, Sethvir left his post on the third-floor landing. Circling thoughts left him frayed as a scrap of old rag hammered and wrung by a storm tide. His Fellowship no longer held the Brotherhood’s view, that the disappearance of the Paravians posed Athera’s greatest setback. That belief had been violently undone a year past, when Kharadmon’s foray to the sealed worlds beyond South Gate had unmasked the darker face of Desh-thiere.
Weighed down by the terrifying scope of those facts, Sethvir reentered the King’s Chamber.
There, settled into a solitary vigil, Traithe sat unmoving, his fingers with their bands of old scar tissue knotted beneath his cleft chin. His cut gray hair brushed his collar like tarnish as he roused to the clank of the door latch. He tracked his colleague’s passage through coffeedark eyes, while ghost silent, Althain’s Warden recrossed the carpet and pinched beeswax candles one by one.
“You did not broach our problem with the wraiths still at large upon Marak,” he surmised.
“No.” The acrid bite of singed string spindled through the musk of hot wax, and the room’s ingrained fragrance of citrus-oiled wood. For each light extinguished, one shadow died also; like overlaid oil stains, those remaining capered in pantomime about Sethvir’s feet. “If the Brotherhood won’t open their hostels to help thwart Lysaer’s proselytizing in Athera, they would scarcely face damnation on the scale we’ve encountered for lost spirits entrapped on a gate world.”
“You don’t fault them?” Traithe said, prodded out of the pragmatism he brandished like armor against his own measure of despair.
Sethvir’s fleeting smile masked inward distress, that any Fellowship colleague ever required to beg reassurance. Years might pass, but the ongoing tragedy of Traithe’s impairment never for a day ceased to sting. “The adepts aren’t wrong in their stance.” No more than the Paravians had been to abandon man’s conflict since the hour clean sunlight was vanquished. “I could ask, but not argue. Desh-thiere’s works have ever been ours to unravel.”
Wings rustled. The raven swaggered the length of the mantel, head tipped askance and one sequin eye fixed on the Sorcerers.
“I hear, little brother,” Sethvir murmured, his regard centered still upon Traithe. In the dimmed majesty of the King’s Chamber, he waited, the grip of his patience like the earth wisdom contained in old stone.
For a colleague left crippled since the hour of the Mistwraith’s forced entry, courage came slowly to define an event too recent and raw to assimilate. “I can’t doubt our stern judgment was needed,” Traithe broached at length. “But, Ath show us mercy, I need to ask. How much of Lysaer’s acts arise from Desh-thiere’s accursed instigation, and how much, out of wayward self-will?”
Sethvir moved. The last branch of lit candles spoked his step in wheeling shadows. “Do you wish me to show you the aura?” He stopped again, waited, while the casement panes rattled to the outside barrage of north winds.
“Yes.” Traithe shivered, straightened, laid his hands on the table. The fingers would not flex fully straight; the elegant, long bones that onetime were clean as a dancer’s lay twisted and ravaged by old burns. His formless apprehension poisoned the pause. Half the given talent to set shackles on the Mistwraith lay tied through today’s condemned prince and his inborn power to shape light. “I would know what we face for the future.”
The issue went beyond the corruption of an ancient royal line. Desh-thiere’s threat had increased. The step which cast Lysaer outside of the compact opened yet another pitfall to bring the last plunge to disaster.
Althain’s Warden extinguished the last bank of candles. He recrossed the carpet, soft footed, and rested his palms on Traithe’s shoulders. His touch in the darkness came feathered and dry as the chance-met brush of a moth’s wing. Instantaneous awareness crossed that slight contact and seized his mind like dull pain. He knew as his own the harrowing weariness wrung through the flesh beneath his hands. “Let me carry this,” he murmured.
“Take my permission, and gladly at that.” Traithe raised a crooked grin, the humor forced through his iron bravado an unvanquished bent for lightheartedness. “You always did like to run things, never mind your crafty knack for making everyone believe that somebody else was in charge.”
Sethvir laughed. “I could wish this particular trouble sat elsewhere. Then we could chat over honey and scones, and brew up a nice pot of tea.”
He started his work in one seamless second, his bodily senses discarded for the sharp, trained awareness of mage-sight. The chamber around him transformed to that altered plane of perception. Simple objects unveiled themselves in complexity, the weavings of Name and history revealed. The pile of the carpet showed its humble beginning as wool on the backs of jostling sheep; then shadowed in overlay, each dye in its coloring, brewed from plantstuffs and crushed insects and urine; and underlying the weave like the tap of ghost fingers, the thump of the looms dragging warp threads through weft in the hands of chattering craftswomen. The pale shafts of candles bespoke honeyed summer days and the bustling industry of bees. Mere flecks of dust adrift on the air gained the lordly, bright splendor of stars. Metal for latches, and the bronze of wrought ornament whispered of dark beginnings in the earth, then shrilled to the bright heat of smelting.
At will, Sethvir could sound solid matter for its nuance. His mastery could sort through its light-dance to the bundled spin of energy which held the imprint of events long past. The ebony tabletop would still house the echo of the commitment that Halduin s’Ilessid had accepted, in signature and seal and blood oath, when he swore to uphold Tysan’s royal charter. The old stone kept vibrations of earlier times, when the flutes of the Athlien Paravians had led the joy of spring larks, and the winds past the casements had thundered to the mating calls of great dragons. Years and change like layers stamped in sediment, through the centuries comprising three Ages, the structure of Althain Tower itself speared its indelible imprint. Its bleak stone crossed time’s arc in fired loops. Its guard pattern bridged every facet of existence,