Fugitive Prince Read online

  Ath’s adepts held to no doctrine and no creed. They kept their way clear, their channel to truth unclouded by the arrogance of moralizing fools, to misinterpret, or by the greedy who corrupted to exploit. The Paravians who had been their example were departed, and with them went the world’s pure connection to the miracle of the prime source.

  “We cannot let the knowledge we guard fall prey, first to dogma, then to power and politics. If your Fellowship would ask help,” the adept admonished, “then search again for the lost. Should the old races 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 pas
t. 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, then soared beyond, an unvanquished fist of white light: a lofty splendor of desperation and hope, shot through by the terrible defense wards wrought by the centaur mason who, for love of the land, had fitted each mortised joint in the walls, then spilled his own blood to bind the seals into permanency.

  Even Sethvir could not encompass Althain’s dire beauty without a half breath lost to awe. A disturbed scrape of claws issued from the mantel shelf, cut by a testy croak.

  “I won’t stay distracted,” Sethvir assured the raven. He steadied himself, then narrowed his mage-sense into controlled concentration. Slowly, delicately, he extended his tactile awareness into the aura of his colleague.

  Sethvir’s whole consciousness embraced that of Traithe. Prepared though he was, a sick rush of vertigo ripped his frame. He broke into a cold sweat; stifled his reflexive recoil though horror chased his skin like the clammy, sharp scrape of wet razors. Intent held him firm as his vision spun and drowned, sucked into the fearful, gapped chaos of a spirit whose vital energies had been sheared into permanent disarray.

  The effect was clean symmetry pulled tragically awry, a mistake frozen for posterity as a statue half-smelted in a bronze craftsman’s crucible might be quenched in disfigured solidity.

  By every lawful tenet of nature, the inviolate whole of Traithe’s inner spirit should have gleamed through the damage to his body. A self-aware being transcended mere flesh. On the contrary, the vibrational essence of Name held the changeless template by which a sorcerer’s own powers could restore full health and fitness. But outside the scope of Fellowship wisdom, one long past, calamitous encounter with Desh-thiere had snarled Traithe’s aura into discord. Unlike Kharadmon and Luhaine before him, he could not shape the crossing to earthplane existence as pure spirit. His awareness had been warped too far out of true, entrapped in its cage of crippled flesh.

  Sethvir shared the scope of that damage firsthand. The resonant structure of Traithe’s merry essence had been rucked to a madman’s tangle. Its bright weave showed odd rifts, as if packs of starved predators had ripped through tinseled lace with claws and ravening teeth.

  These, Sethvir must patch with his own resources. His colleague’s continuity of function must be stabilized to restore complete access to his talents. Braced for disorientation and mindless, tearing pain, Althain’s Warden dissolved his last veil of identity to shore up the wounded spirit that was Traithe.

  His mage-sight became shattered. Perception dissolved into crazyquilt fragments, welted in patternless blind spots. Althain’s Warden cried out. Unmanned by the handicap Traithe endured through the ongoing course of each day, Sethvir fought down raw fear. Imagination foundered. In grief, he felt humbled by his colleague’s brave struggle to hold fast to humor and sanity.

  The heart could but reel before the ultimate cruelty, that such suffering impairment might have no end and no cure. Against sheer despair, Sethvir raised a counterflux of power.

  The labor he shouldered was painstaking and delicate. No individualized pattern of his signature precisely matched those gaps riven wholesale through Traithe. The interface was clumsy, a rafted-together construct as unwieldy as trying to join hawsers with thread, or forcing mismatched fragments of porcelain to fuse into a water-tight vessel.

  Sethvir closed the last channel. He waited, sustained in pity and patience, while Traithe groped to assimilate, and talents repressed throughout five hundred years flexed from their cramped state of disuse. Lent a fleeting, murky access to the mage-sight once commanded in his own right, the lame Sorcerer made no demands, but waited while Sethvir engaged the next step.

  Althain’s Warden drew on memory. Without judgment, without prejudice, he shared the reflection of Lysaer’s spirit aura on the moment that Fellowship verdict had withdrawn the protection of the compact.

  Like some eerie, actinic embroidery spindled against velvet gloom, the recalled vision shimmered into visible light. In curves and angles and blazing, arced spirals, the individual vibrations which comprised Lysaer s’Ilessid lay exposed, the whole of his being excised from the shadow of dense substance for mage-schooled eyes to interpret.

  Sethvir held the facsimile static, while Traithe traced the steps of his colleagues’ decision in unconditional review. Predictable anomalies were sorted aside: here, the seal of Davien the Betrayer’s longevity, and there, in fixed imprint lent through maternal blood ties, the s’Ahelas line’s given gift of farsight. Traithe narrowed his study to encompass a transection of angles more jarring, that convoluted mesh of whorls and jags where the Mistwraith’s curse to destroy a half brother entangled the true lines of s’Ilessid justice. The instilled royal virtue no longer ran straight, but bent with insidious and chilling persistence into self-blinding misalignment.

  Mortal will could scarcely resist such a coil. Set to draw his independent opinion, Traithe could not overlook the surrounding lines carved by princely desire and intent.

  Lysaer had been cursed to kill his half brother. The tenets of royal inheritance led him to endorse that violence with a just cause. But nestled inside his ardent need to protect society, an uneasy conscience spun new threads of gnawing uncertainty.

  Delusion entered in: a magisterial spark of arrogance fueled by outraged duty. Lysaer clung to the vanity of his privileged royal upbringing. Where the coil of self-perception shaped the ideals of principle, obsession flowered, a hot, hazy spiral that corded through the aura like coils cast off a dropped spool.

  Sethvir shared the resonance of dismay through the link, as Traithe resolved his conclusion. Lysaer used his flaws to deafen his ears to harsh truth. A lordly, dark pride that brooked no humility before the misguided masses; a caring, honorable sovereign’s undoing, that measure of shame and stark horror. No other descendant of Halduin had lived to lead an innocent people to slaughter. That burdensome guilt crushed thought and will, and gave rise to a desperate denial. Lysaer refused outright to betray his s’Ilessid bloodline. He would not beg mercy and assign himself blame for thirty-seven thousand useless deaths.

  A penchant for self-sacrifice fueled that chord of victimized fury and reforged an unswerving purpose. In assurance as cool as a strand of steel filigree, Lysaer chose his next course. For the sake of those who died carrying his banner, he would forbear his born generosity of spirit and embark on a more grandiose campaign. Arithon must become more than a criminal beyond pardon, but the instrument of evil incarnate. For honor, for the sake of past losses and grief, the man who styled himself Prince of the Light would not break down and cry weakness.

  And so in that hour the composite of Lysaer’s aura showed his tragic, committed dedication. For the enslavement of Tysan’s clansmen and the salve of a glorified purpose, this scion of s’Ilessid shaped the course and direction of his fate. Desh-thiere’s curse might drive him to fight Arithon. Its pernicious hold might intensify and strengthen the brutality of each encounter. But like an addiction to euphoric drugs, its pull could not enslave every facet of self-will; nor had it the power to enforce heart or spirit to give impassioned collaboration with its drive to seed bloodshed and war.

  Hate was the province of the Mistwraith’s geas, not conceit or vengeance for vanity.

  Too aggrieved to stay silent, Sethvir said, ‘Had Lysaer’s human judgment or his gift of true justice stayed uncompromised, he might not have persisted in branding his half brother as evil.’

  But outside of conject
ure, choices still ended with fact. The damning omission which condemned the s’Ilessid prince was his prideful design not to bend.

  ‘Even so,’ Traithe admitted in ringing regret. ‘Our oath to uphold the compact leaves us no loophole to give Lysaer a reprieve.’

  Sethvir dismissed the s’Ilessid construct. Prepared to drop contact with his colleague’s faulted vision, he shivered, swept across by a violent burst of d´jà vu. Trained reflex responded. Practiced from his centuries of tracking the unsorted flux of the earth link, Sethvir tagged the triggering fragment of event. Then he rummaged through memory in pursuit of the happenstance which linked the uncanny association.

  The connection became manifest. Breath seized in his chest as the past took him back into the suffocating terror of attack. Once, for six hours he had been imprisoned in the sheer, slate walls of a warded flask. He had fled there in peril of his life, hunted down by a pack of nine free wraiths. These had been lured from the dead world of Marak through the Fellowship’s effort to learn of Desh-thiere’s origins. Threatened by possession, his countermove forced out of cornered desperation, Sethvir had fragmented and scattered his consciousness to deflect the force of the assault. Voracious in malice, the wraiths had closed in. For a nightmarish second, Althain’s Warden relived the torment, while malevolent spirits savaged his being like vivisection done with hot knives.

  In that darkest hour, while the wraiths had devoured those disparate bits of his spirit, Sethvir had experienced the paralyzing horror of a consciousness wormholed with gaps. Shocked to revelation, he perceived the probable cause of Traithe’s plight. In the hour of past crisis, Traithe had engaged grand conjury to unmake the spells which enabled the South Gate as a portal to cut off Desh-thiere’s invasion. As battle was joined, the collective mind of the Mistwraith may well have bid for possession.