Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Some screamed and threw down their weapons. The rest fired a barrage of wild shots. Quarrels whined through a rising bloom of incandescence.

Arithon laughed and let the fire of Lysaer’s own making char the bolts to oblivion. Then he cancelled the force ranged against him with a veil of neat shadow, even as he once had deflected the fires of a Khadrim’s fell attack. He barely cared that he trembled in a backlash of overstressed nerves, but revelled in his powers to smother all light to oblivion.

The earth shook to a thunderous report. Throughout, straight-shouldered and animated by the geas that enslaved him, Arithon withheld any countermeasure. His quickest satisfaction lay with steel, and holding Alithiel poised, he waited untouched at the apex of a singed swath of carbon.

‘Will you fight?’ he called to Lysaer, derisive. ‘Or will you stand out of reach and play at fireworks just to waste time and show off?’

‘Defiler!’ Lysaer screamed back. His handsome face twisted. Cuts and bruises made his expression seem deranged. ‘Weaver of darkness and despoiler of children, your crimes have renounced claim to honour!’

Unsmiling, Arithon took a step. As the distance narrowed and panicked headhunters scrambled from his path, he noted that Lysaer looked peaked. The left arm beneath its muddied velvets was bandaged and strapped as though injured. A wolfish thrill shot through him, that the enemy before him was disadvantaged. Arithon said, ‘That’s your blade? Did you really think reverse runes could charm my death?’ He flourished Alithiel, inviting, ‘Find out. Come fight.’

‘Why cross blades with a bastard?’ Contempt in his bearing, a mirrored obsession in his eyes, Lysaer shot his hand aloft again.

Sensitized to air that flowed over his skin, Arithon felt the ingathering of force Lysaer drew to call light. This effort would be more than a killing bolt, as devastating as any formerly pitched to carve the Mistwraith into submission. Shadow could still shield him, but the broad trees of Strakewood would burn. Clansmen and game would crisp in a burst of wildfire, and earth itself would char to slag.

Mage-taught instincts clamoured in warning and alarm, but against the overpowering ascendance of Desh-thiere’s curse, any stir of uneasiness lost voice. Arithon advanced. His whole being resonated hatred, his oath to Rathain just meaningless words, the rasp of dry wind and dead intent. So long as Lysaer was before him, he had eyes only for his enemy. Like a puppet pulled on wires he would close with the blond nemesis leagued against him. Over parched ground or quick, their swords would cross until one of them died, and whatever impediments were swept aside beforehand became simple sacrifice to ensure this.

The air seemed to sing in its stillness. The chasing on Alithiel’s dark blade appeared bodilessly inscribed on the gloom. Since the sword was now pointed with the grain of ill geas and enmity, its Paravian star-spell stayed mute. More nerve worn than the curse would permit him to acknowledge, Arithon slipped without volition into mage sight. His vision recorded the interlocked litanies of leaves, of branches, of men partnered in useless struggle on the fringes, embodied even while killing in the light-dance that founded all life. The soil beneath his step shimmered with the mysteries of rebirth, and even these lost their power to redeem him.

The drive of Desh-thiere’s curse overwhelmed all.

At the palm of Lysaer’s raised hand, light burned and then glared, and then erupted to a core of hot brilliance. The nexus swelled, fountained, raged into coruscation that ravaged the forest with backdrafts. Lysaer by now stood isolate, his headhunter allies driven back by the gathering fury of his assault.

Opposite him, a wind-whipped silhouette with a hand lightly gripped to a sword’s hilt, Arithon faced him in challenge. Unarmoured, clad in the same spattered deerhides as any of Steiven’s scouts, he seemed a figure diminished; until, half-seen through lashed tangles of black hair, an expression bent his lips that held no regret but only derisive impatience.

The flaring brilliance lit the s’Ffalenn features to inescapable clarity. The detached assurance, the sheer nerveless arrogance on that face slapped back remembrance of the manipulation that had undone Amroth’s king and councilmen. Swept by a countersurge of antipathy, Lysaer shrieked his ultimatum. ‘By Ath, you unprincipled bastard, your wiles shall cause no more damage. This time, not counting for cost, the justice of my people will be served!’

If such justice was wholly subverted by the workings of Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer endorsed usage with consent. He screamed and surrendered to his passion, and something inside him snapped. That instant he hurled his bolt.

Arithon surged to meet the attack. Gripped by queer exultation, still wakened to mage-sight, he perceived with a lucidity that damned that the curse had overmastered his half-brother. Lysaer’s offensive had erased the bounds of sanity and self-preservation. As at Mearth, when a crossing through a world-gate had been snatched beyond grasp by adversity, the s’Ilessid prince now channelled the whole of his being through the destructive aspects of his gift.

The light of his own making would martyr him. Strakewood with its armies and its clansmen would be immolated at a stroke. Whether Arithon could shield himself in shadow became a point most gloriously moot. Desh-thiere’s purpose would be served.

At least one of the half-brothers that comprised its bane would be expunged from the face of Athera.

Arithon howled at the irony. Swept to madness by the wraiths’ savage triumph, he flung wide his arms, taunting the light to come take him, to lock with his shadows and let his enemy be destroyed in one fiery burst of self sacrifice.

In that moment of consumed self-control, that ecstatic certainty of victory, Arithon felt his sword arm caught and his hip blunder into something moving. Enraged, shoved off balance, he squinted through a blooming flare of incandescence. Whoever had meddled would die for it.

‘Your Grace of Rathain, we are oathsworn!’ cried a boy in shrill-voiced terror. ‘I came back as you asked, to keep you apart from your half-brother.’

A blood oath bound and sworn by a mage set its ties to the living spirit.

‘Sithaer, Jieret! ’ Arithon shouted, his cry split from him as the exultation of Desh-thiere’s vengeance became flawed by his pact with Steiven’s son. The unholy pleasures of the instant transformed to torment as enslaved consciousness and true will became torn between opposite masters. Then the irony, of crippling proportion: that any shadow spun to save the boy must also spare the s’Ilessid prince from the forge-fires of the curse’s conniving.

Anguished between personal care and the lure of the curse’s directive, tainted by the seductive truth, that to forswear s’Ffalenn conscience and leave Jieret betrayed would buy Lysaer’s death and final freedom, Arithon wrenched his will into alignment against Desh-thiere’s geas.

For ill or for folly, the paradox would be permitted to renew itself; Lysaer had no training to understand or control how Desh-thiere’s meddling had twisted him. Assured of his righteousness, avowed to bring justice, he would use his survival to labour until this day’s atrocities were repeated. That colossal futility made a mockery of will, that perhaps reprieve came too late. One victim’s lamed effort at compassion might buy only failure at the end.

A split second shy of annihilation, Arithon jerked Jieret inside the arc of a sword-blade dropped sidewards to guard.

The ache of exhaustion, the sucking drain against resources long overstrained seemed to founder his mind and his reflexes. Obdurate, Arithon fought. He called, commanded and savaged from his gift demands that edged the impossible. The curse pulled and hampered him. He wrestled its treacherous crosscurrents while his shadows flared and snapped. Darkness arose like a howling gale, unleashed to run rampant across torrents of unchained light. The air itself seemed to scream in white agony as the gifts of two half-brothers collided.