silk over the maw of the vat. Fire was her natural element. The lit ruby lines of her sigil of summoning clashed into ice, scalding up whistling steam. Thawed water exploded to roiling froth, then flattened, subservient to her bidding.
The enchantress laid her dire work onto the blank sheen of its surface. Eighth-rank initiation lent her powers an edge her less-accomplished sisters would envy. She knew the forbidden lore; the annals of chaos, where natural force could be spun in linked seals to cause harm. Sign and countersign paired, each rune and sigil enchained to dark purpose, Lirenda raised a field of charged air over the mirroring water. Her will reigned supreme inside that masked space, and there, she pronounced a Name the ritual three times in summoning. An image resolved, showing the blunt, weathered features of Jaelot’s veteran field captain.
An impatient man, sharpened with years to a deep-set, suspicious awareness, he handled his troops through exacting perception and a brusque, no-nonsense competence. A hard man to know, his trust was infallible. The barbed coils of a Koriani sigil of binding were going to require a specific opening to exploit.
Lirenda gave that hindrance no second thought. Like any born human, the man would have weakness. To an enchantress schooled in the high arts of observation, the seamed lines of the face formed a map of the captain’s innermost character. His secrets could be gleaned through devouring survey, from the measure of resilience that sustained his vitality, to his most stubborn virtues, and his hidden pockets of vice. Each facet of self became hers to entrain in the tailor-made geas to drive him.
A flick of wrought power upstepped the spell’s resonance. Lirenda surveyed the man’s unveiled aura with its chiaroscuro imprint of personality. She unraveled each shadow, the petty dishonesties and shortfalls shot like mean yarn through the bright strands of courage and dedication. The unseen cords of bound energy let her interpret the bonds held between family and kinfolk. She sorted each diverse thread, the lesser ties drawn in friendship, or in strength, or in bullying authority, and gained private insight into the men who comprised the captain’s command.
A half smile curved Lirenda’s lips. Before her, the loom upon which she would weave her curse upon Arithon’s destiny.
Quartz in hand, the enchantress entrained its spiraling axis as the focusing needle for her intent. She began stitching sigils and ciphers into the spell-summoned guard captain’s aura. Ideas would seed thoughts, which would spin urgent plans, until the creature she claimed as her cat’s-paw would rise and muster his troops, then press them to pursue the prey of her choosing.
Since Arithon’s safest line of retreat would lie in the realm of blue water, she arranged sharp prerogatives to send Jaelot’s troops to sweep the Eltair seacoast. North and south, they would quarter the flat ribbon of shoreline. Each smuggler’s cove and wooded haven would be combed by sharp-eyed patrols. Reserves would be called up for active duty. Seasoned divisions would work hand in glove with the headhunters’ league’s best skilled trackers. Lirenda laid her linked seals like tight slipknots, ensuring which steps would be taken. Dawn would see a trained pack of hounds and mastiffs, backed by two companies of veteran field troops, set upon Arithon’s back trail. Her victim would be driven due west, away from the bay, and into the Skyshiel uplands.
In winter, without resource, Rathain’s prince would be coursed by hardened men who clung to his heels like the damned. If he escaped them, if he had the tenacity and cunning to survive the blizzards that raked the cruel wilds, he would find no rest and no respite. Lirenda twined layers of interlaced spellcraft to assure that his enemies would stay unshaken. No longer men, but instruments tuned to her scouring need for revenge, they would dog Arithon’s trail past the limits of human endurance. They would press him through storm and ice and closed passes with the dauntless persistence of demons.
Against their harrying onslaught, Arithon would suffer exhaustion and frostbite and privation. Lirenda meshed her dark seals like linked chain. Black hatred ruled her. She would destroy his music. All the bright gifts of his s’Ffalenn heritage would be scoured away into mindless, animal instinct.
Until Jaelot’s troops perished, expended like candles, they would not flag in the grip of the geas Lirenda spun through their commanding captain. They would dance their last steps to the tune of her passion, that Arithon s’Ffalenn would draw his last breath in desolate solitude. Let him rot without trace, unrecognized and uncomforted, on the wretched ground ruled by his ancestors.
Lirenda traced the last seal of closure over the construct imprinted in the vat. Moved by the venom distilled in her heart, she whispered her ultimatum. ‘May you die alone, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. Let your accursed seed wither, and your line finish, heirless. May your feal clansmen fall to woe while your bones become stripped by the crows in the peaks of the Skyshiels.’
Winter Solstice Night 5670
Delirium
Two hundred twenty-five leagues west of Jaelot as the crow flew, the Fellowship Sorcerer who served Athera as Althain’s Warden lay stricken in his tower chamber. Stilled on his cot, tucked under the moth-frayed wool of the blankets he was always too harried to air, Sethvir lay like a wax effigy. His slack hands stayed crossed, his pixie-boned frame unmoved since the hour his colleague, Asandir, had laid him in repose before his pressured departure. Overtaken by crisis without precedent, Sethvir languished, his mind savaged by bursts of mental imagery, torn without order from the fragmented stream of his tie to the wounded earth.
While the magnetic lanes of the planet were skewed, the broad-ranging gift the departed Paravians had bestowed upon Althain’s Warden remained whipped by the roiled flux. His earth-sense stayed deranged, a wildfire that raged and burned like loose rope snapped through his slackened grasp. Sethvir wrestled through sick, spinning senses to snatch the barrage of images back into cohesion.
Fleeting bursts showed him glimpses of Jaelot’s armed guardsmen, riding head down against rising storm; in close haloes of candlelight, he saw Koriani seniors in purple robes and red-banded sleeves gathered in deep consultation. Lately given the news of the late Prime’s succession, they would not yet know that Morriel’s plot had upset the lane forces, a move aimed to cripple Fellowship resources and drive the first wedge through the compact.
Caught at the crux, while damaged wardspells came unraveled across Mirthlvain Swamp, and packs of venomous methspawn stirred in their roiling thousands, Sethvir fretted behind his sealed eyelids. Predatory fish and venomed serpents might prey upon innocent lives; yet worse perils threatened. The most troubling could not be seen or touched, but lurked beyond the airless void that hung between distant stars.
Racked by sharp worry, Sethvir forced his innermind through a swift survey of the barrier ward raised to warn against an invasion of free wraiths from the dead planet of Marak. Left unguarded, the grand interstices of the construct glowed soft blue in quiescence. Yet the calm bought him no reassurance. Sethvir had no source for his gnawing concern. The circling fear chafed him, that the more evolved body of the Mistwraith left cut off beyond Southgate might move in and prey on the vulnerable world while Fellowship resources were engaged elsewhere.
Other fragmentary views showed winter’s palette of snowfall and frost, and wild animals denned in hibernation. The events displayed no discernible hierarchy. The raging snarl of upset lane force had overstressed the tuned concentration Sethvir needed to refine broadscale vision, and sort the array of ongoing event that influenced the fate of Athera.
Since Morriel Prime’s insidious machinations to mask her irregular succession, his Warden’s perception had been whirled like a moth in a downdraft amid the spiraling disarray of the lane flux. Sethvir did not dissociate from the event, though he could have; too many guardian ward rings stood vulnerable to the effects of a magnetic imbalance. The most dangerous of these he held bound in check by direct, personal intervention. The drain of such effort bled his faculties without mercy, until tactile awareness of his body thinned to cobwebs. Moment to moment, he existed as a spark of naked will adrift on a scattered stream of imagery.
If a colleague now stood in support at his bedside, Sethvir held only the vague recognition that he was no longer alone. Words