Janny Wurts - Warhost of Vastmark

And the danger was present and closing.

‘Beware,’ warned Luhaine. ‘I count nine hostile vortices.’

Engrossed in the throes of tuned awareness, Sethvir made them out with more difficulty. Twined amid the jumble of his possessions, the faint, coiling currents of the wraiths seemed sketched against the dimness like strayed dust motes, stroked to clinging eddies by weak static. Ephemeral as they seemed, translucent as the steam wisps off his tea mugs, he was not fooled. The broadened span of his perception could detect their unrest, hazed in vibrations of hatred. These entities cast their essence in the forms of leering faces, yawling mouths, in glass-clear, skeletal fingers that plucked and clawed and pricked like jabbing needles in quest of the barest chink in his defences.

‘Sethvir, don’t let them flank you.’ Thin drawn under stress as the wraiths themselves, Luhaine stood guard by the library door, his stance set opposite Kharadmon’s. For with frightful intent in those first, passing minutes, the victim the wraiths had chosen was the Warden of Althain himself.

Of them all, Sethvir alone owned the talent for splitting his mind into multiple awareness. He was Althain’s Warden, the earth’s tried link, and through him flowed all events to influence the fate of Athera. Were the wraiths to possess him, they could access at will any aspect they chose within the world. They would grasp the last particular concerning the ward-bound fragments of the Mistwraith held captive in Rockfell Pit, even the means to key their freedom.

Sethvir pushed back the shabby maroon velvet of his cuffs. He hooked his stub of chalk from the table rim, then spoke a word in sharp, staccato syllables that snagged the wild force of the elements. The clear air before him turned brittle and hard, sheer as a pane of sheet ice. Onto that enspelled, glassine surface, he scribed a fresh line of ciphers. Each rune as written flared into lines of fire. While the wraiths roiled back, gnashing silent teeth and flailing clawed fists, and fleering fanged snarls at the punitive pinch of bristled energy, the Warden of Althain murmured a litany of unbinding.

Spell-cast air reclaimed its natural state with a cry like rending crystal. The construct traced out in chalk lines stayed adrift, fanned and winnowed on the draughts as burning oil might ride on a water current. To reach Sethvir, the hostile entities must cross through them, or else try to permeate the spell-tempered stone that formed the wall at his back.

One moment the wraiths coiled in an agitated swirl of frustration. Then they vanished.

Sethvir shouted. Behind his ward of spelled air, he shrank a step, cornered by the table, while around him, a roiled press like heat waves off brick, the spirit forms attacked.

‘They’ve breached his defences across time!’ cried Luhaine.

But Kharadmon was forewarned. His counterstrike sheeted around Sethvir’s body. The wraiths frothed in thrashing retreat. Above their heaving moil, a rune blazed, then dissolved to spread a stench like rotten eggs over the space they inhabited.

‘Sulphur,’ said Kharadmon. ‘It’s bought us a handful of seconds.’

‘I shouldn’t act smug,’ Luhaine huffed. ‘Such stopgap measures build no measure of permanence, but only waste what remains of your strength.’ Self-righteously immersed, he undertook to build a vessel of confinement in the prior style used against Desh-thiere.

‘What use to build jars?’ Kharadmon stabbed back in rejoinder. ‘We can scarcely sweep these beings into captivity if we can’t force them back in retreat.’

The quandary held far-reaching implications since a free wraith without Name could not be grappled. These had already defied the Wheel’s passage into natural death. To destroy the unclothed spirit was to unweave a strand of Ath’s creation, a misuse of grand conjury and a direct intervention against the prime vibration that no Fellowship tenet could sanction. The Sorcerers were committed to harm no being, nor to unbind or inhibit any spark of self-awareness, even at the cost of their very lives.

While the entities seethed to renew their assault, Luhaine conjoined his spirit essence in painstaking care with the seals spread across the surface of the tabletop. A moment passed as he asked free consent from the stone. Then curtains of sparks fountained around the bronze tripod of the brazier. In a torrent of force borrowed from the third lane, the discorporate Sorcerer melted the dark rock and reshaped its gold magma to form a canister.

His work singed the air into stinging, dry wind. Unbound sheets of parchment thrashed in scraping distress across the floor to catch on the chair legs and hang on the carved Khadrim that formed the table’s massive pedestal. The wraiths winnowed through like floss caught in current, bent once again on Althain’s Warden. Their caustic contempt rang in dissonance against mage-tuned awareness. Prolonged years of battle against Kharadmon had taught these enemies too well. They understood the limitations of their prey: provoke how they might, twist life as they would, no Fellowship mage would spurn Ath’s trust and the Law of the Major Balance to fling spells of unmaking against them.

The Sorcerers who protected Athera were guardians. Their strength of constraint could be used against them as a weapon to breach their steadfast self-command and turn moral force into weakness.

Whether the powers Sethvir could have raised on a thought to negate any threat to his autonomy tormented him to temptation, none could know as the wraiths closed upon him. He watched their advance with pale. narrowed eyes, his wiry shoulders bowed as if the drag of his robes bore him down. The ink stains showed stark against knuckles bleached and gnarled as stranded driftwood. In a move that looked like a vagary of nerves, he exchanged his chalk stick for two dusty bits of river stone, plucked in haste from the clutter by the windowsill.

‘Don’t try a field charge to corner them.’ Bled from the effort of his own defences, Kharadmon’s voice was a wisp of its usual rich timbre. ‘That sort of energy feeds them.’

‘I saw,’ Sethvir said. His empty hand gripped the table edge. The wraiths fanned about him, less substantial than half-glimpsed puffs of spent smoke. Before their poised menace, he seemed a wizened grandfather, reduced by senility to threatening thrown pebbles to halt the rise of a flood.

‘There’s another way to draw them,’ Sethvir offered. ‘Above anything they want to seize control of my gifts.’

Luhaine responded in fraught fear, ‘Don’t try. You cannot think to risk baiting them!’

But the Warden already chanted a musical phrase in Paravian. The pebbles radiated a kindly warmth through his palm, then chimed back a note of assurance. His binding immediately paired them one to another in tuned resonance.

In the instant the wraiths closed, Sethvir cast the first stone into the obsidian cylinder Luhaine had fashioned from the table slab. The second he pitched to the floor. His throw held no apparent force; yet the river rock struck and shattered into a thousand tiny fragments. These scattered as though life and will lent them impetus to lodge in every cranny of the library.

The same moment, Sethvir’s knees gave way. He slumped 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.