The Curse of the Mistwraith (89 page)

Through the irreproachable pith of the living tree, Arithon twined his spell. Like the buds, the leaves, the branches, all groping outward for new growth, he spun the fine tendrils of his wards away from the trunk, that any defender who used its bulk to shield his back would be spared. But any attacker facing inward would find his eyes drawn and subtly captured, while his thoughts slowed to syrup, then to the languid drip of sap.

A human mind ensnared in the consciousness of a tree will sleep, immersed in slow dreams that measure time in stately rhythms, of clean sun and silvered snow and seasons that slide one into another like the rain-kissed drift of autumn leaves.

Which meant, Arithon knew, that any Deshan still standing would slaughter his victims in the half-second their reflexes dragged and the hand on driving blade faltered. Unlike the Etarrans entrapped by the shadow maze in the adjacent valley, these townsmen were given no reprieve. Mastery of their fate was reft from them, with no offered moment of free will in which they could choose to turn aside.

Against a powerful temptation to shelter with them in sunwashed oblivion, Arithon disentwined his consciousness from the tree’s green awareness. He opened his eyes too soon. The part of him still paired to heart-sap and earth peace ripped away into noise and the blood-reek of animal carnage. Below him, the beech roots were mulched over with dead men, their wide open eyes still dreaming, imprinted with sky caught reflections of bark and boughs and leaves.

Arithon retched, then forced a tight grip on raw nerves. He clasped the branch in sweated hands and through guilt and revulsion, took charge of the fruits of his conjury.

Madreigh was down and wounded, Jieret at his shoulder with Alithiel bloodied in his hand. Two clansmen, both injured, were still on their feet, while outside the canopy of the beech tree, enemies crumpled to their knees, lost to mind and awareness. Beyond these, more headhunters checked in fear of the bane that had invisibly struck down their fellows. Outrage would soon overcome their apprehension and drive them to vigorous retaliation.

‘Don’t face inward, don’t look at the tree,’ Arithon instructed the surviving clansmen. He then asked numb limbs to move, and proved shaking hands could still grip. Somehow he swung to the ground. Hands tried to steady him as he swayed. He pushed them impatiently away. ‘Don’t trust what you’re going to see. The reinforcements will all be mine.’ He caught his sticky blade from Jieret’s grasp. ‘Just run, and don’t for any reason turn back.’ To the boy’s alarmed look, he added quickly, ‘I’ll be with you. Go.’

He punctuated his instruction with a light slap on Jieret’s shoulder. Then, leaning on Alithiel to keep balance, he knelt, bent his head and spun illusion.

Even depleted as he was, his inborn gift would always answer. Now he was alone and the risks were to himself, he dared risk shadow in limited countermeasure. Darkness flowed freely to his use as water might beat from a cataract. And as he had done another night in Steiven’s supply tent, he bent conjury into the shape and form of warriors.

They emerged from brush and thicket with weapons gleaming, and bows nocked with broadheads in their hands. If their faces lacked character, if their step was inhumanly silent, discrepancy was covered by the scream and clash of fighting that echoed from the grottos by Tal Quorin. Since the appearance of reinforcing clansmen befitted a strategy to cover the flight of three fugitives, any headhunters not turned by the sleep-snare were scarcely minded to pause in analytical study. Caught inside arrow range when Arithon’s shadow-men knelt and pulled recurves, most wisely, Pesquil’s men who still had wits and footing broke and dived under cover.

Their panicked haste might have amused, had the arrows when they arced not been made up of fancy and desperation.

Arithon stirred, looked up, and tried to muster resource to rise and continue after Jieret. He managed neither. His miscalculation was not surprising, after the strictures he had broken. Before the foot and the knee that failed his will lay Madreigh, a tear in his chest that welled scarlet over his buckskins at each gasp.

‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He sat. Stupid with weakness, he met the eyes of the man, which stayed lucid through a suffering that should have eclipsed recognition.

‘My liege.’ Madreigh drew a scraping breath. ‘Go on. After the boy. You’re oathbound.’

A scathing truth; one Arithon understood he had to answer for. Except he was drained to his dregs from misused expenditure of magecraft. Since he could not immediately master himself, he did as he wished and snatched up Madreigh’s wrist. In a whisper that seemed the utterance of a ghost he said, ‘I also took oath for Rathain and look, you die for it.’

Beyond speech, Madreigh looked at him.

Arithon spread the clansman’s limp fingers and pressed them, already chilled, against the bole of the beech tree. He closed his own hands over the top. Then with a gesture that lanced blackness and sparks through his mind, he wrenched back the fast-fading glimmer of his spellcraft and let it flow like a mercy-stroke over the clansman’s consciousness.

Sleep took Madreigh’s tortured frame. His face under its grit and grey hair gentled, all sorrows eased into the sundrenched serenity of ancient trees.

Empty with remorse, Arithon opened his fingers. Half-tranced from exhaustion he regarded his circle of quiet dead, clad in leather and blood; or wearing city broadcloth and chain mail pinched with weedstalks and dirt. The only censure for the mage-trained, he sadly found, was adherence to truth and self-discipline. No mind with vision was exempt; creation and destruction were one thread. One could not weave with Ath’s energies without holding in equal measure the means to unstring and unravel.

The blood had left his head. He understood if he tried to move, he would only fall down spectacularly. Oblivious to the shouting and the battering scream of killing steel, he cupped his chin and surrendered to the shudders that racked him. He had acted outside of greed or self-interest, had to the letter of obligation fulfilled his bound oath to the Deshans. Duty did not cleanly excuse which lives should be abandoned to loss, or which should be taken to spare others: Steiven’s clansmen, last survivors of savage persecution, or Pesquil’s headhunters, still heated from their spree of unlicensed rapine and slaughter. No answer satisfied. No law insisted that justice stay partnered by mercy.

The day’s transgressions abraded against s’Ffalenn conscience like the endless pound of sea waves tearing bleak granite into sand. Through a fog that forgot to track time, Arithon noticed the rhythmic well of fluid from Madreigh’s chest had slowed or stopped. Whether this was death’s doing or the endurance of sap laid deep for long winter, he had no strength to examine.

He managed to recover his sword, and after that, his footing, before the disorientation that distanced him bled away and snapped his bemused chain of thought. His senses reclaimed the immediate. The belling clang of battle had now overtaken and surrounded him and arrows sleeted past in flat arcs that gouged up trails of rotted leaves.

Not shadows, this time. The beech tree was solid at his hip. None too steady, Arithon backed against it. Though reawakened to his needs and obligations, his mind stayed bewildered and unruly. Disjointed details skittered across his awareness: that the sun had lowered; that copper leaves in red light trembled as if dipped in blood; that the brawling and the noise were distracting because they were caused by fighters, not shadows dressed up as illusion. Clansman and headhunter and dishevelled knots of city garrison were engaged in annihilation as ferocious as a scrap between mastiffs.

Caolle had not sent reinforcements. The clansmen Arithon recognized were Steiven’s division and they battled to a purpose that was anything other than haphazard. For their wives, their children, for their sons sadly slaughtered by the riverside, they were vengeance-bent on killing headhunters.

Though it cost them their last breathing clansmen, Pesquil’s league would not live to leave Strakewood to cash in their loved ones’ scalps for bounties.

Waste upon waste, Arithon thought, brought to sharp focus by anger. As Rathain’s sworn sovereign, he would stop them, separate them, ensure that Jieret had a legacy left to grow for.

Careful only not to tread on fallen bodies, Arithon launched himself into the skirmish that ringed the trees, knotting and twisting through undergrowth and hummock, the lightning flicker of swordstroke and mail like thrown silver against falling gloom. He engaged the first headhunter to rush him, inspired beyond weariness by necessity. He fought, parried, killed in rhythmic reflex, all the while searching the mêlée for sight of just one of Steiven’s officers. Given assistance, he held half-formed plans of using magecraft to stage some diversion that locked combatants might be separated. He would control the berserk clansmen, bully them, or fell them wholesale with sleep-spells if he must. Though as his stressed muscles stung with the force of a parry, he recognized the last was pure folly. His earlier unbinding had left damage, and he was lucky to stay on his feet.

‘Arithon! My liege!’

The call came from his right, toward the downslope that devolved toward the grottos. The Master of Shadow beat off an attacker and spun. The patter and hiss of sporadic bowfire creased the air and snatched through veilings of low foliage. Through a drift of cut leaves and air dusky with steep shafts of sunlight, Arithon searched but never found who had shouted.

His gaze caught instead on a clustered squad of headhunters led by a pockscarred man in muddy mail; then another, tall, straight, of elegant carriage in a ripped blue surcoat, gold-blazoned and bright as his hair.

Lysaer.

They saw each other the same instant.

Arithon felt the breath leave his chest as if impelled by a blow. Then Desh-thiere’s curse eclipsed reason. He was running, the air at his neck prickling his raised hair like the charge of an incoming storm. Sword upheld, lips peeled back in atavistic hatred, he closed to take his half-brother without heed for what lay between.

A baleful flash brightened the trees. Lysaer, as curse-bound as he, had called on his given gift of light.

Arithon expelled a ragged laugh. They were matched. No bolt, no fire, no conflagration lay past reach of his shadows to curb. Strakewood could burn, or be frozen sere as barren waste, and supporters and armies would be winnowed like chaff in the holocaust. The end would pair Lysaer and himself across the bared length of steel blades, with no living man to intervene.

Lysaer raised his right hand and the headhunters around him fanned out.

Savouring eagerness, Arithon slowed. He felt someone grasp at his shoulder, heard shouting like noise in his ears. Owned by the curse, he shook off restraint, then backhanded whoever had interfered.

When the light-bolt cracked from Lysaer’s fist, he let it come, a snapping whip of lightning that parted the wood like a scream. Through its glare, Arithon saw the men around Lysaer kneel and raise white-limned weapons to their shoulders. Crossbows, he realized in undimmed exultation.

Arithon toyed with them, used mage-schooled finesse to twist shadow with a subtlety his enemy could never match. The headhunters who aimed were struck blind to a degree that negated they had ever walked sighted.

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.