Janny Wurts - Curse of the Mistwraith

‘There are more of them, and not far off,’ Dakar said in an odd and unusual briskness.

That moment a shrill whistle split the mist overhead. The sound was eerie, rich and complex with harmonics that seemed to tantalize the edge of understanding. Other whistles answered, echoing from a gallery of unseen cliffs. A huge, shadowy form shot above the roadway and the acrid breeze of its passage set every horse in the company trembling outright in fear.

‘Now, Arithon,’ Asandir said quietly. ‘Give yourself space and draw your steel.’

The dun mare surged forward the instant her rider gave rein. Arithon set his back against her and curbed her hot impulse to bolt; but the mare was too wild to settle. She skittered sideways, carved an angry pirouette by the overturned hulk of a wagon and bucked. One rebellious hind hoof banged against the wreck and a welter of clothgoods spilled loose from the torn canvas cover. The edges of the bolts were singed and horribly spattered with blood. The sudden movement and the smells of death and burned silks caused the mare to rip into a rear.

‘Arithon!’ shouted Asandir. ‘The sword!’

His cry was cut by a screeling bellow from the mist directly above. The sound reverberated with stinging incalculable fury that wounded the ears with subsonics. The dun mare arched higher, striking the air with her forelegs. There she swayed, ears flattened and tail clamped to her croup in taut panic. Arithon pressed into her neck and soothed with hands and voice to coax her down.

That moment, while horse and rider struggled vulnerably to regain balance, the Khadrim stooped to the attack.

It descended in a rush of furled wings, a bolt of killing black streamlined from the dagger-claws of fang and talon. It arced down as a spear might fall, red-eyed and fork-tailed, and purely bent on murder. Arithon glanced up. Through the mare’s streaming mane, he saw the nightmare in its earthward rush to take him.

‘The sword!’ screamed Asandir. Violet light flashed as he raised his hands to shape wizardry.

The Khadrim saw the spell, snapped out wings broad as sails and sliced into a bank. Before the sorcerer could strike it from the sky its neck curved back, blackly scaled and sinuous as a venomous snake. For an instant the monster’s red eyes turned unwinking on the man and the horse standing separate. Then the armoured jaws opened and a torrent of fire spat forth.

Flame roared in a crackling whirlwind and entirely engulfed the dun mare. Her rider became an indistinct silhouette, then a shadow lost utterly in the heart of the conflagration.

The Khadrim clashed closed its jaws. Hot, seared air dispersed in a coil of oily black smoke, fanned away under the wingbeat of the terrible creature as it swooped and shot back aloft.

On the roadway, within a seared circle of carbon, Arithon sat his quivering, mane-singed mare, untouched and cursing in annoyance.

Felirin screamed out a stupefied blasphemy.

The Khadrim doubled back in mid-air and roared its frustrated rage; while Arithon freed a fist from the reins and finally set hand to his sword.

The dark blade slipped from the scabbard with a sweet, cold ring. From the instant the tip cleared the guard-loop, Arithon was touched by a haunting sensation like song, like loss, like a peal of perfect harmony set vibrating upon the air. His ears rang to a timbre so pure his heart flinched; and the sword in his hands came alive. Light ripped along the silvered lines of inlay, blindingly intense, a shimmer like harmony distilled to an exultation of universal creation.

The Khadrim shrieked in pain. Like some great, broken child’s kite tossed in the grip of a gale, it flung sideways and crashed with a threshing flurry of wings against the mountainside. The forked tail lashed up rocks, hurled stunted bits of vegetation downslope in a rattling fall of flung gravel. Then its struggles ceased, and it wilted to final stillness, a black-scaled, hideous monstrosity couched in a bed of bloodied snow.

For a moment longer, the sword in Arithon’s hand flashed through a silver glare of spells. Then the phenomenon faded to a glimmer and died away. The Master of Shadow stared at plain black steel chased with patterns that no longer appeared familiar. There were tears in his eyes, dripping unheeded down his cheeks.

None of the wisdom at Rauven had approached this. Arithon had been awed by the forces held in check within Asandir; for all the sorcerer’s perfectly-schooled strength, his powers seemed a brute statement compared with the energies laid down in perfect stillness in a span of tempered steel. Arithon had known magework but never had he touched a force that left him feeling bereft, as if the world where he stood had grown coarser, more drab, somehow clumsy and lacking in a manner that defeated reason. Arithon stared at the blade in his hand and felt lacerated for no reason under sky he could name.

‘The Khadrim have gone,’ Asandir called; and the wounding stillness was broken. ‘You may sheath your weapon.’

‘Dharkaron, avenging angel,’ Felirin swore in falsetto. ‘Who is that man, to pass unscathed through living flame, and what in Sithaer made that sword?’

Asandir turned bland eyes upon the much-shaken minstrel. ‘He is Arithon, Master of Shadows, and if you’ll help raise a cairn over the unfortunate dead from your caravan, I’ll give you explanation for the sword.’

Dakar the Mad Prophet raised a hand and touched the shoulder of Arithon’s utterly crestfallen half-brother. In a voice of conspiratorial conciliation he said, ‘Lysaer, don’t feel slighted. Your moment will come in due time.’

The five riders bound for Camris suffered no second attack by Khadrim, though for safety’s sake through several of the narrower defiles, Asandir asked Arithon to ride with his sword unsheathed in his hand. The blade evinced no glow of warning, and then the pass fell behind. The pitch of the road became less rugged and the jagged crags rounded to hills. At twilight the company made camp in a cave on the far slopes of Tornir Peaks.

The shelter was often used by summer caravans, and passing generations of wagoneers had built in some comforts over time. Benches of split logs surrounded a rock-lined fire-pit and a crude stand of fencing had been erected beneath the underhang of a natural outcrop. In places, moss-grown remnants of stone walls showed where sheds and an earlier inn had been levelled in some forgotten past conflict. Once the horses were unsaddled, and Dakar sent off to gather wood, Asandir crouched down with kindling and chips and began clearing away the ashes left by last season’s travellers. He gestured through the failing light as Lysaer knelt to help. ‘If the mist were to lift off the valley you could see lights from here, wayside inns on the plain of Karmak. The roads of north Korias might have gone wild, but the trade-routes from Atainia cross Camris. The lands are better travelled there, and on the east shore ships still ply the bay.’

Lysaer stared out into gathering darkness but his eyes saw only mist. Descended from an island culture, he could not imagine the vast spread of continent described by the sorcerer’s words. ‘It must have been hard, seeing your civilization shrink to a shadow of its former greatness. ’

Asandir paused, his hands quiet on his knees. His eyes turned piercing into distance. ‘Harder than you know, young s’Ilessid: But the sun will shine over us again.’

Felirin and Arithon entered, adding the smells of healing herbs and wet leaves to the dusky scent of dry charcoal. The wound on the grey stallion’s neck had been washed and cared for. The bard carried a handsome, silver-bossed saddle, his own, recovered that day from the corpse of his former palfrey. Asandir had retained a replacement set of reins, but the rest of the wagons and goods they had burned, lest unwitting passersby linger for salvage and tempt the Khadrim to further massacre.