Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Arithon ignored the bite of steel at his throat. ‘Four princes entered this wasteland by another gate, one the records claim may be active still. Look east for a ruined city…Mearth. Beyond lies the gate. Beware of Mearth. The records mention a curse…overwhelmed the inhabitants. Something evil may remain…‘ Arithon’s words unravelled into a bubbling cough. Blood darkened the sand beneath his cheek. His forearm pressed hard to his side, he resumed at a dogged whisper. ‘You’ve a chance at life. Don’t waste it.’

Though armoured to resist any plea for the life under his sword, the prince prickled with sudden chills: what if, all along, he had misjudged? What if, unlike every s’Ffalenn before him, this bastard’s intentions were genuine ? Lysaer’s hand hesitated on the sword while his thoughts sank and tangled in a morass of unwanted complications. One question begged outright for answer. Why had Arithon not knifed him straightaway as he emerged, drugged and helpless from the Gate ?

‘You used sorcery against me,’ Lysaer accused, and started at the sound of his own voice. The aftershock of fury left him dizzied, ill, and he had not intended to speak aloud.

The Master’s features crumpled with the remorse of a man pressured beyond pride. Lysaer averted his face. But Arithon’s answer pursued and pierced his heart.

‘Would anything else have stiffened your will enough to endure that first night of hardship? You gave me nothing to work with but hatred. ’

The statement held brutal truth. Lysaer lightened his pressure on the sword. ‘Why risk yourself to spare me? I despise you beyond life.’

The prince waited for answer. Smoke-dark steel shimmered in his hand, distorted like smelter’s scrap through the heat waves. If another of Arithon’s whims prompted the silence, he would die for his insolence. Nettled, Lysaer bent, only to find his victim unconscious. Trapped in a maze of tortuous complexity, the prince studied the sword. Let the blade fall, and s’Ffalenn wiles would bait him no further. Yet the weapon itself balked an execution’s simplicity; exquisitely balanced, the tempered edges designed to end life instead offered testimony on Arithon’s behalf.

The armourers of Dascen Elur had never forged the sword’s equal, though many tried. Legend claimed the blade carried by the s’Ffalenn heirs had been brought from another world. Confronted by perfection, and by an inhuman harmony of function and design, for the first time Lysaer admitted the possibility the ancestors of s’Ffalenn and s’Ilessid might have originated beyond Worldsend. Arithon might have told the truth.

He might equally have lied. Lysaer could never forget the Master’s performance before Amroth’s council, his own life the gambit for whatever deeper purpose he had inveigled to arrange. The same tactic might be used again; yet logic faltered, gutted by uncertainty. Torn between hatred of s’Ffalenn and distrust of his own motives, Lysaer realized that Arithon’s actions would never be fathomed through guesswork. Honour did not act on ambiguity. Piqued by a flat flare of anger, he flung the sword away.

Steel flashed in a spinning arc and impaled itself with a thump in the fisherman’s cloak. Lysaer glowered down at the limp form of his half-brother. ‘Let the desert be your judge,’ he said harshly. Aroused by the blistering fall of sunlight on his head, he left to collect half of the supplies.

Yet beneath the ruined cloak, irony waited with one final blow: the sword had sliced through the last of the waterflasks. Sand had swiftly absorbed the contents. Barely a damp spot remained. Lysaer struck earth with his knuckles. Horror knotted his belly, and Arithon’s words returned to mock him: ‘ What do you know of hardship ?’ And, more recently, ‘ You’ve a chance at life. Don’t waste it… ’ The sword pointed like a finger of accusation. Lysaer blocked the sight with his hands, but his mind betrayed and countered with the vision of a half-brother lying sprawled in pitiless sunlight, the marks of injustice on his throat.

Guilt drove Lysaer to his feet. Shadow mimed his steps like a drunk as he fled toward empty hills, and tears of sweat streaked his face. The sun scourged his body and his vision blurred in shimmering vistas of mirage.

‘The wasteland will avenge you, bastard,’ said Lysaer, unaware the heat had driven him at last to delirium.

Arithon woke to the silence of empty desert. Blood pooled in his mouth, and the effort of each breath roused a tearing stab of agony in his chest. A short distance away the heaped folds of the cloak covered the remains of the camp he had shared with his half-brother. Lysaer had gone.

Arithon closed his eyes. Relief settled over his weary, pain-racked mind. Taxed to the edge of strength, he knew he could not walk. His sorcerer’s awareness revealed one lung collapsed and drowned in fluid. But at least in his misery he no longer bore the burden of responsibility for his half-brother’s life. Lysaer would survive to find the second gate; there was one small victory amid a host of failures.

The Master swallowed, felt the unpleasant tug of the scab which crusted his throat. He held no resentment at the end. Ath only knew how close he came to butchering a kinsman’s flesh with the same blade that symbolized his sworn oath of peace. Cautiously, Arithon rolled onto his stomach. Movement roused a flame of torment as broken bones sawed into flesh. His breath bubbled through clotted passages, threatened by a fresh rush of bleeding. The Master felt his consciousness waver and dim. A violent cough broke from his chest and awareness reeled before an onslaught of fragmenting pain.

Slowly, patiently, Arithon recovered control. Before long, the Wheel would turn, bringing an end to all suffering. Yet he did not intend that fate should overtake him in the open. Death would not claim him without the grace of a final struggle. Backing his resolve with a sorcerer’s self-will, Arithon dragged himself across the sand toward the fisherman’s cloak.

Blood ran freely from nose and mouth by the time he arrived at his goal. He reached out with blistered fingers, caught the edge of the wool and pulled to cover his sunburned limbs. As the cloak slid aside, his eyes caught on a smoky ribbon of steel. Cloth slipped from nerveless fingers; Arithon saw his own sword cast point first through the slashed leather of the water flask.

A gasp ripped through the fluid in his chest. Angry tears dashed the sword’s brilliance to fragments as he faced the ugly conclusion that Lysaer had rejected survival. Why ? The Master rested his cheek on dusty sand. Had guilt induced such an act ? He would probably never know.

But the result rendered futile everything he had ever done. Arithon rebelled against the finality of defeat. Tormented by memory of the lyranthe abandoned at Rauven, he could not escape the picture of fourteen silver-wound strings all tarnished and cobwebbed with disuse. His hopes had gone silent as his music. There stood the true measure of his worth, wasted now, for failure and death under an alien sun.

Arithon closed his eyes, shutting out the desert’s raw light. His control slipped. Images ran wild in his mind, vivid, direct and mercilessly accusing. The high mage appeared first. Statue straight in his hooded robe of judgement, the patriarch of Rauven held Avar’s sword on the palms of his upraised hands. The blade dripped red.

‘The blood is my own,’ Arithon replied, his voice a pleading echo in the halls of his delirium.

The high mage said nothing. His cowl framed an expression sad with reproach as he glanced downward. At his feet lay a corpse clad in the tattered blue and gold of Amroth.

Arithon cried out in anguished protest. ‘I didn’t kill him!’