idleness.
Four days later, engrossed in a target shoot against Jaelot’s second captain of archers, the Masterbard’s apprentice Medlir poised at the butts in the practice yard to tally the score of his arrows.
An off-duty guardsman hailed him from the gate across the field. ‘Hey, minstrel! Did you hear? That fat man your master must play to redeem was let off his term of forced labour!’
Wrapped in a faded dun cloak, lashed about the ankles by the wind-crumpled stands of spring grass that had finally pushed through the mud, Medlir flicked back his hood. Eyes as changeably flecked as the lichen tinged wall behind his shoulder widened under up-turned brows. ‘You speak of Dakar? What’s to hear?’
His shooting companions clustered around, sand pig-gins empty, their shafts still jammed in straw targets. The silver they stood to lose if the count was completed left them amiably open to diversion.
Now able to laugh at the afternoon’s pestering annoyance, the guard just off watch in the dungeons strode over, his conical helm tucked beneath his arm. ‘Fool bailiff had to release him. No choice. Besides being crazy, the fat man’s a breathing, walking lure for stray fiends. Brings them on like a lodestone draws iron, and not a blighted talisman in the city seems to hold power for protection.’ Arrived at the butts, and soldier enough to count and weigh odds at a glance, he slapped Medlir on the shoulder. ‘You’re winning? With that? Against longbows?’
‘I was.’ The minstrel gave a crooked smile. Long, supple fingers unstrung the horn recurve, then surrendered the weapon to a page boy for return to common stores in the armoury. ‘You didn’t tell Dakar the name of the inn where we’re quartering?’
The guardsman’s brisk humour turned wicked. ‘The city dungeon won’t keep him. Who’s left? I hope you’ve got patience for waking up with your bootlaces snarled into knots.’
‘Well, I don’t.’ Energetically merry, Medlir laughed.
He kept to himself the piquant truth that a masterbard’s art included chords arranged in particular harmonic resonance to repel fiends. Halliron had forbidden his apprentice to perform any music in public; for himself, the old man avowed to make no appearance until the moment he was compelled by the terms of the judiciary’s bargain. If Jaelot was pestilent with iyats due to Dakar’s incarceration, the Masterbard and his singer in training would retreat to their attic and share rich appreciation of the havoc.
Spirit Tracks
Touched across distance by a prompt from the Warden in Althain Tower, a raven flaps and rouses a Fellowship mage, who ignores the stiffness of old wounds to arise, don his threadbare black cloak, and journey eastward across Radmoore Downs toward the spell-guarded stronghold on the edge of the dread mires of Mirthlvain …
In western lands, the same call is heard and declined by another spirit mage who stands watch over an enclave of enchantresses; in particular one initiate with dark auburn hair and a guarded heart, entrapped in the web of greater intrigue that surrounds the Master of Shadow …
Far removed from Athera’s spinning orb and the sphere of Sethvir’s provenance, the discorporate awareness of a sorcerer departs from a world bound in ice and shackled under brooding bands of fog; and as his conscious presence arrows on through the emptiness that freezes the space between stars, he fears the next place he seeks to unlock the Mistwraith’s secrets may prove as lifelessly desolate as the last …
Some days after the clanborn courier had taken leave of his tower eyrie, Sethvir, Warden of Althain laid out a fresh square of parchment. With one elbow braced against a tome on celestial mechanics whose listed orbs and planetary bodies lay nowhere near his present world of inhabitancy, he pondered; his hands out of fussy habit trimmed pen nibs the way a duellist might whet fine steel. Then, his left hand curled around a tea mug, the sorcerer penned out the message Tysan’s lady steward had asked him to send on to Arithon s’Ffalenn. Moved by purposeful afterthought, he added an inventory that filled twelve close-spaced pages. The items he catalogued had been on Maenalle’s mind, too lengthy for a courier to memorize. Willing servant to her intent, Sethvir let the breeze dry the ink. Then he rummaged through a cupboard, salvaged a battered seal from a tin full of oddments, and secured the document under the device of the ancient princes of Camris, from whom the lady traced descent.
The waning night beyond the casements was the eve of the vernal equinox, by custom a time for the Fellowship sorcerers to gather in convocation.
Althain’s Warden tucked the finished letter into a satchel already packed for the occasion and descended to his equally cluttered living quarters. There he replaced his threadbare robe with another only slightly less ink-stained. Outside, the sky lightened to dusky pearl. Bright-eyed despite not having slept for several days, Sethvir continued down the stairwell.
No cressets brightened the black iron wall sconces. The commemorative statues of Paravians housed on Althain’s ground floor wore a gloom only fitfully broken as the gleam that leaked through the arrowloops jinked across gold braid and trappings.
Sethvir required no torch to see his way past the ranks of marble unicorns; the homed majesty of centaurs that loomed above his head; the waist-high maple pedestals that elevated the diminutive bronzes of Sun Children. If concern for the future burdened his thoughts, here, the past weighed unquiet as well. Through mage-sense, Sethvir felt the vibrational echoes left by the steps of former visitors. In winnowed air currents like moving chiaroscuro, he could trace the tides of old magics, ones wrought by Paravians in subliminal harmonics; and others more recent, of Fellowship craft, that feathered the skin like a tonic. Surrounding all, enduring as bedrock, lurked the guardspells that sealed Althain Tower from the world and its troubles outside.
The sorcerer bypassed the gold-chased panels, built to mask the massive, geared chains and windlass that worked the tower’s grand portal. His satchel slung like a knapsack, he knelt by an inset trapdoor and paused, apparently overcome by reverie; in fact, his mind sharpened in search and coursed outward, beyond Athera’s cloud layer and into deep vacuum through which the stars drifted like lamps.
But the far distant spirit of the colleague who journeyed to study the Mistwraith’s origin returned no response; nor had for an uneasy score of months.
With Lysaer extending his influence into Tysan, the peace could scarcely last. Time to reclaim the cursed princes from the Mistwraith’s geas was growing sorrowfully short.
Raked by a shiver, Sethvir aroused, recalled to those troubles close at hand. A ring-pull lifted to his touch; defence wards dissolved and the heavy stone rose to a stir of moving counterweights. The chamber’s miasma of aged cedar and wool gave way to the draught that welled up, spiked like a storm-breeze with ozone. A stair shaft cut downward into cold dark, limned like dust on ebony by the silver-blue glimmer of the power focus set into the dungeon below.
Sethvir secured the trapdoor behind him and descended. Daybreak was nigh, its song plain to read in the soft, bursting static of the earth lane’s magnetic signature. Althain’s Warden stepped off the landing. He crossed a concave depression paved with lightless black onyx, then the focus itself, of concentric circles over-scribed in Paravian runes, mapped out in pearlescent phosphor. Tingled by the unshielded play of elemental forces, he positioned himself at the pattern’s centre. His feet rested on the apex of a looping star interlace that met in a nexus of five lines.
He
