Janny Wurts - The Ships of Merior

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 closed his eyes, gripped his satchel and waited.

Outside the tower, sunrise touched light through the mists.

A flux of wild energy crested along the lane, and the focus in the cellar floor responded, crackling to incandescent white. The moment sang into a chord of suspension, laced about with dire powers.

Then the dawn sun-surge peaked and passed. The rune circles shimmered to quiescence, and the Warden of Althain was gone. Air displaced by his departure eddied over gargoyle cornices and sighed to final stillness through attrition.

Relocated three hundred and eighty leagues to the southeast, Sethvir opened his eyes. Through a lingering shudder of reaction, he sucked in a breath dank as fog off a retting pond with the taint of mildew and mould. He wrinkled his nose. ‘I’d forgotten how Meth Isle smelled.’

‘That’s possible?’ His host, the master spellbinder Verrain, stood in straight quiet like a cat-tail, furled against the damp in a mud-splashed, brown frieze cloak. ‘I wasn’t sure, I’ve been here so long.’ Full lips that once had wrung sighs from Daenfal’s fairest maidens crooked in humourless irony. ‘Welcome to the bogs of Mirthlvain.’

Sethvir gave his spinning senses a moment more to settle, then stepped off the lichened patterns of a lane focus centuries older than the one at Althain Tower. Gilded with flickers from the rushlight by the doorway, he gripped the wrists of the apprentice mage, who had stood guard over the dread spawn of Mirthlvain for more years than any soul deserved.

‘You have tea?’ asked the Fellowship sorcerer.

His anxious note caused Verrain to grin. ‘My cupboards are stocked.’ He led off up a brick stair, hollowed by moisture and footfalls. ‘The others await you above.’

The pair climbed in darkness alive with the tick and splash of condensation. From some bleak chamber down a corridor, a caged thing chittered and screeled; the echoes cut at the nerves, caused the hair of warmblooded listeners to prickle and stab erect.