TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (8 page)

Star Wards

The discorporate Sorcerer, Kharadmon, was no spirit to wallow in setbacks. Reemerged from the labor of refounding the stressed chord of the sixth lane, he arrowed west on the winds of high altitude, his intent to resume the interrupted assistance he still owed the Guardian of Mirthlvain.

He arrived with his spiked style of humor intact. The prospect of labor in a bog infested with the vicious aberrations spawned by Methuri left his sarcasm honed to an edge most cheerfully pitched to flay skin. 'If I owned the keys to Dharkaron's vengeance,' he announced, downstepped through multiple octaves of vibration to condense as a current of feisty awareness above the agate focus at Methisle, 'I'd wish all the iyats in creation would bedevil Morriel's corpse. The mess she contrived to throw kinks in our work seems far too unnervingly calculated.'

'You may not have weathered the worst, yet.' His feathered blond hair lit jonquil by the ragged flame of a rushlight, Verrain stepped from the shadowed stone niche where he had stood vigil throughout the night. 'Sethvir's just sent you an urgent summons.'

'Well, blow him a kiss.' Kharadmon puffed on an irritated gust across the chamber. 'He's aware I'm much too busy.'

The flicked draft doused the rushlight. Verrain uttered a spell cantrip, and the rekindled flame showed a face drawn taut and unsmiling.

The spinning, chill nexus that was Kharadmon stalled with a snap that shocked frost over the dank walls of the chamber. 'Not about the fourth lane? I was aware Traithe needed relief.'

Verrain wrapped his muck-splashed brown cloak closer to his lanky frame. 'Ath's Brotherhood already dispatched an adept from Forthmark to help Traithe. She won't have to trek across Vastmark on foot. There's a mackerel boat tied up at Ithish with a fishing crew willing to sail her. A friend of the Reiyaj seeress arranged it.'

'The blind lizard still lives at one hundred and ten?' Kharadmon laughed. 'I'm amazed her brains haven't boiled, all those years she's spent staring sunward.'

'A daughter apparently inherited her talents, and chose to maintain her tradition.' The rushlight popped, shooting a shower of sparks. Verrain flicked off the lit embers, the scabs on his hands where marsh creatures had bitten silver-stitched by the gleam of old scars. 'Things are not well at Althain.' His black eyes swung back, concerned, toward the restless air where Kharadmon's presence hovered. 'Sethvir scarcely managed the strength to recall you. His word was delivered by the north wind.'

While the mire's pervasive, sulfurous drafts whirled off the discorporate Sorcerer still poised in a tight spin above him, Mirthlvain's guardian shrugged and addressed the concern left unspoken between them. 'Yes. The remedial spells you set for the barrier walls are going to decay over time. The flaw's not disastrous. We'll have until the spring spawning to mend them. The harsh winter's my ally. Only the mudpots need watching while the swamp's sheeted in ice.'

Which words were a half-truth to gloss over dilemma, as very well Kharadmon knew. 'I'm gone, then,' he cracked on a gusty departure. But under the space he had occupied, his classic last word: he left a green sprig of briar replete with a perfect, red raspberry.

Verrain completed a stalker's step forward, laughed, and ingested the jibe. His generous, wide mouth still dimpled with mirth, he turned from the focus and retrieved the worn ash staff left leaning against the arched doorway. At least, he reflected in grim practicality as he climbed the stairwell to resume his rapt watch over the creatures that slithered in Mirthlvain's bogs, Morriel's grand upset had ensured the thaws would come late.

* * *

Kharadmon soon shared the sorrow firsthand, that all was not right with Sethvir. He breezed into the northern latitude of Atainia and found every casement in Althain Tower's library latched tight against the onslaught of winter. The precedent jarred; always before this the Warden left one window ajar to welcome the caprice of the seasonal winds.

A transparent presence in the washed, citrine light dawning over the Bittern Desert, Kharadmon applied for entry through Shehane Althain's wardings. Where his colleague, Luhaine, would have sheared through dense stone, he preferred dialogue with air, and slipped like a thief through one of the arrow slits cut into the turret over the gate arch. Within the defenses, dour granite welcomed him. He was ushered through the matrix of ancient stone toward Sethvir's personal quarters. There, shocked surprise nearly felled him. All the clutter had been rearranged. Old bridles and snagged socks were nowhere in evidence. Every broken old artifact, each garnered stone oddity, even to the shells of land turtles and the cracked tea mugs filled with dropped feathers; every cache of Sethvir's curios had been reordered to unprecedented neatness.

Across an expanse of wine-colored carpet, a wizened little stranger in an adept's snowy robes sat on the carved stool by the hearth. His gnome-clever fingers were busy restitching the last torn strap of a horse harness.

As the poured chill of the discorporate spirit fanned past him, he glanced up and blinked mild eyes. 'Kharadmon, I presume?'

'Well, iyats don't stalk here without invitation,' said the Fellowship Sorcerer just arrived. His whirlwind review flicked the candleflames into a sputtering, pinwheel flutter. 'Were you the one who tamed raw chaos to order? If so, don't be surprised when Luhaine faints out of bliss. He's badgered Sethvir for his sloppy housekeeping for thousands of years and gained himself no satisfaction.'

'I had the help of two sisters,' the adept admitted, embarrassed. The dimpled delight of his grin burst and vanished as he gestured toward the wicker hampers piled beneath the carved dragon legs of the writing desk. 'We had to tidy up. No one could tell us where Althain's Warden had stashed his herbals for healing.' Tactfully gentle, the brother inclined his bald head toward the door of the adjoining chamber. 'You'll find Sethvir tucked in his bed. The sisters attend to his comfort.'

'I'm grateful,' Kharadmon said, heartfelt, then blazed an unswerving line of retreat to reach his overtaxed colleague.

The room beyond was kindly lit by a beeswax candle set on the sill by the casement. Its softened glow toned maple furnishings in honey and gold, and nicked glimmers off the battered bronze studs of the clothes chests. The air held the false freshness of a well-kept hospice, the perfume of lavender, sage, and sweetgrass underlaid by the bite of astringent teas, and a decoction of wintergreen for sore joints. Sethvir reclined on a mound of down pillows, his thin shoulders wrapped in a goathair blanket. His beard and his hair had been combed out like lamb's fleece, bleached and carded for spinning. The sisters who had gifted that painstaking care sat one on each side, mantled in the white robes of Ath's service, bound at the hems by metallic ciphers stitched into patterns of blessing and ward.

They arose on awareness of Kharadmon's entry, bowed their heads in greeting, then swept out to allow him his privacy.

'Should I have brought you spring lilies for a death bier?' the discorporate mage needled in opening.

Behind his closed lids, Sethvir was not sleeping. A comer of his mouth lifted in bleak humor, though his hands did not stir, and the eyes that flicked open were vacant as aqua glass. 'If you're going to ask flowers to bloom out of season, they prefer honesty to speculation. I'm only earth-blind to the fourth lane, now, and its branch meridians affect but one grimward.'

'Red roses, then,' Kharadmon amended, careful to comb his tonal range free of upset. Up and down the length of Sethvir's aura, his refined perceptions measured the patchworked, golden flares where the adepts had spun careful nets of fine energy to bridge areas rubbed thin by exhaustion. With the compassionate delicacy of a master surgeon, Kharadmon applied the keen edge of his humor to refire the dulled lines leached by pain. 'Some decrepit old layabouts will try anything to lure sweet-tempered ladies to dote on them.'

Sethvir wheezed a puffed breath, too weakened for full
-
throated laughter. 'Your incorrigible presence is welcome at Althain; however, the fact you've been called here when I'm unwell means the news is the black side of dire.'

'The star wards went active? I'd already guessed.' Kharadmon settled by the bedside, a revolving nexus of chill that nettled the candle to streamered smoke. 'What can you tell me?'

'Not much.' Sethvir twitched an irritable hand under the smothering bedclothes. 'I saw the guard glyphs flare red in first warning. We've got wraiths on the move out of Marak. How many, how far off, and what danger they pose lie beyond my stretched resource to answer.'

Kharadmon flicked into a wind devil's spin. 'The adepts haven't said?'

Sethvir managed a fractional shake of his head. 'If they know,
t
hey won't venture discussion. They can't intervene, regardless.'

Better than any, Kharadmon understood the implacable stance held by the white-robed adepts: the wraiths were no less part of Ath's grand creation. Even if their aberrant nature arose out of mankind's meddling, the Brotherhood by nature embraced
n
o conflict. 'All the thorny sorts of problem fall to our Fellowship to contain, and just as well. Given nothing to do, you'd have Luhaine's confounded lectures bothering your ears day and night.'

Before Althain's Warden could answer that jibe, the discorporate Sorcerer whirled aloft. 'Don't fret. I'm already going.'

'
There's no one else I could call on to send,' Sethvir whispered in depleted apology. Two images followed, ragged as ink stains on parchment. If their fuzzed edges were unlike the Warden's usual crisp sendings, their self-contained messages nonetheless carried the impacting force of slung 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
p
ower: 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.