against the table, then slid unconscious into a rumpled heap of robes. His sunken cheek lay pillowed in his beard and hair, entangled as a mass of washed fleeces.
‘Ath, the grand idiot!’ Luhaine cried on a shocked snap of breeze. ‘He’s split his consciousness and fused each part into the shards of the rock!’
But the tactic had succeeded. Already the wraiths were diverted, divided and quartering every square inch of floor to retrieve the prize within the pebble’s sundered pieces. Each one of these contained, like a puzzle, a scrap of Sethvir’s awareness. Entirely without fight, the entities could have stolen his emptied flesh. But since access to the earth link was their coveted aim, the body was a useless container to them without the Warden’s talents and spirit. In the predictable arrogance of wraith forms, they spurned the physical housing and pressed in greed to gather and conquer each disparate bit of the Sorcerer’s essence.
‘Will you whine, or will you stand strong?’ Kharadmon exhorted. For the wraiths would possess what they recovered from the stone shards. The only help for Sethvir now lay in two colleagues’ readiness to back his desperate ploy.
Nine hostile entities and a thousand slivers of stone to seek out; the spirits prowled the flagstones, searching hungrily, spinning like unspooled thread between the chair legs and through the dust-clogged mesh of old spiderwebs spanning the feet of the cupboards. Their trackless passage breathed draughts across Sethvir’s slackened knuckles and combed through every moth-hole in his sleeves.
Eyeless, senseless, lured on by the singing glints of spirit light that formed the sundered slivers of their prey, the wraiths were doubly guided in their hunt by the pewter dance of energies which framed the prosaic signature of river stone. They skimmed like gleaners on a threshing floor and claimed their offered prize.
Too late, they sensed the hook and trap the Warden had set in his subtlety, which tied the broken pebble with its whole twin, thrown to rest inside Luhaine’s container. When Sethvir called on that binding and knit the flung fragments of his awareness back into one cohesive whole, the wraiths were pulled with him. Attached, all nine, to a split portion of himself, but not yet allowed full possession to inflict total mastery over him, they found themselves upended and sucked without volition to home with their victim’s conscious will. The spell-forged link to the second pebble, where the Sorcerer now fled, drew the entities to follow in blind compulsion through the neck of the slate flask.
Their collective cry seemed to harrow the air and shiver the books on the shelves.
‘Now!’ Kharadmon’s shout melded with Luhaine’s response. Incandescent spells bathed the cylinder on the table, searing its outline seamless white.
Tired as he was, worn to a shadow of his strength, Kharadmon etched the first seal over the wraiths to imprison them.
‘Let be,’ Luhaine chided. ‘Would you waste yourself to a mute shade?’ Since Kharadmon was ever the sort to spurn sense, he balanced his energies and joined in.
Night mist beyond the casements blazed like spilled oil to the out-flood of light from sparked power. The raised aura of Fellowship spellcraft flung off a mighty corona until the chamber keened in shared tension, and the slates in the floor hummed in stressed resonance to the flux of tempered force.
With time the lights died, leaving the lane-spark in the brazier a needle of blue light in velvet darkness. Draught through the opened shutters stirred through a faint stench of sulphur, tainted with ozone and an ashy miasma of singed dust. The wraiths’ prison rested on the dimpled slab of the tabletop, an obsidian cylinder that tapped and pinged through the stresses of natural cooling.
On the floor, wax still, limp flesh devoid of spirit, Sethvir’s body sprawled in the blood-dark puddle of his robes. The white curve of his lashes never flickered. He did not dream; his breathing was shallow and imperceptibly slow, except to the eyes of another mage.
Across heavy silence, through sorrowful, shared awareness and a stillness that presaged false peace, two discorporate Fellowship Sorcerers steeled themselves to wait. They exchanged no speech. Their fear loomed wide as sky itself. For although the wraiths lay safely contained, the spirit of their colleague was trapped also.
Inside the flask, alone against nine, Sethvir now battled for his life.
‘We cannot abandon him in there,’ Luhaine said at last in a slow, careful phrase of masked pain.
Kharadmon swirled from his place by the casement, to his colleague’s sight a moiled patch of shade that wore spirit light in flecks like fogged stars. ‘No, we can’t. The wraiths will devour his identity.’ A sigh of breeze raised frost on the book spines as he roved in restless currents through the chamber. ‘That’s what became of the people who inhabited the worlds beyond South Gate. The same tragedy would have repeated itself here, had Traithe not spared us all by checking Desh-thiere’s invasion at the outset.’
Had Luhaine still worn flesh, he would have swallowed back the coppery taste of fear. ‘You’re saying the fell mists held intent to enslave our whole world?’
‘They still could,’ Kharadmon pronounced in bleak fact. ‘Were its two sundered portions ever to be rejoined, there’s no doubt left of its strength. All Athera would be laid to waste.’ He need not repeat that the beacon spell set on the solstice had seeded the opening to admit just such a horrid possibility. Forewarned at the time of the danger, he had unwound the spell sent to call him, even exposed himself to attack in the doing. But the clean, fine signature of Fellowship power could not fully be erased without imprint.
A tracery leading back to the spell’s point of origin would linger for several centuries to be tracked. The stakes of the nightmare had widened. Now the wraiths confined at Rockfell Peak were just the bitter edge of a greater peril.
But for now future worries must defer to the weight of present crisis. Inside the sealed flask the battle still raged. Mage-sight could cross the ward boundaries to trace Sethvir’s tactics as he twisted and zigzagged like a hunted hare through the maze of the river pebble’s structure. Attached to him were the wraiths, striving ever to complete their possession.
To aid him, the two colleagues left free must build spells of frightful complexity.
In partnered concentration, they embraced the contours that comprised the black flagon, then softened the bonding of its structure. The wailing resonance of the wraiths inside dragged at the Sorcerers’ focus and struck hurtful harmonics through their auras. They stood fast. Of necessity, they ignored even the rending awareness of Sethvir’s tortured flight. In care, with infinite patience, they crooned a litany to the river pebble and coaxed its solid, round contour to meld its structure with that of the flask.
Like a teardrop in a puddle, the grained bit of granite ceded its separate nature to pool into the obsidian’s denser matrix. Kharadmon and Luhaine paused in slack silence, their rivalry stilled into listening. If luck held and Sethvir had not weakened, he could have preserved his tie to inanimate stone and followed the river pebble’s transmutation. The way had been opened for him to fly in retreat. He could attempt to sieve his beleaguered consciousness through the guard spells borrowed from Althain’s grand warding that Luhaine had affixed in the flask. The conjury itself was a welded amalgamation of Paravian magics and his own wary knitting of defences. Theory held that the pattern of the Warden’s spirit Name should be recognized, mazed as it was with the stamp of the Ilitharis Paravians’ own blessing. The great centaurs themselves had ceded the earth link to Sethvir’s care in the hour when the last of their race had abandoned their post at Althain Tower.
But fear and guessed odds made small
