LITMIR.BIZ

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see.” Morriel raked up a disdainful cough. “The nature of an inanimate earth and its resistance to change weighs more than our Waystone’s potential to spare cities with children and families from the misfortunes of storm or disaster?” She stabbed a stiff finger from beneath her layered fortress of blankets. “Condemn yourself, Sorcerer, by those answers already given.”

      The tallow dip flared, streamed by an affronted swirl of draft. But whichever discorporate Sorcerer roused up for rebuttal bowed before Asandir’s prior claim to defense. “Lady Morriel, where are your grounds for dispute? Athera’s land and natural resource were never placed at humanity’s disposal.”

      “Which point is moot, since your precious Paravians have left their ancestral ground.” Morriel jabbed home her point. “Will you endorse bloodshed just to hold your lofty place as guardians of their abandoned heritage? While you mourn for vanished unicorns, our cities slide further into violence. Your Teir’s’Ffalenn is too perilous a presence to leave at large in the world. I see you’re not blind to the flaws in his nature. If your Fellowship won’t act to curb his lethal cleverness, our order must. Lysaer’s rule offers selfless governance, a fair concern for the needs of society. The obsessions the Mistwraith has driven him to embrace will fade without fuel if Arithon is removed as his target. I find no justification whatsoever for restraint. How should any one life be worth the thirty thousand left dead at Vastmark?”

      “Because we are not speaking for one individual, but of the survival of all life on Athera,” Kharadmon snapped with blistering irony.

      “That is the root of our quandary,” Asandir admitted.

      The clipped note to his speech arrested Morriel’s tirade. She narrowed seamed eyes and read closer, disturbed by the precedence that Luhaine permitted his rival’s remark to stand unchallenged. Through the coarse, ruddy flare of the tallow dip, past the vicious play of static thrown off by the unshielded Waystone, she at last interpreted Asandir’s stark patience for the stillness of a desperate uncertainty.

      “What have you done?” she whispered point-blank. Then in knifing accusation, “How is our world set at risk?”

      “The peril is not new, but an ongoing extension of the trouble begun when man first created the aberrated mists of Desh-thiere.” Asandir sat forward. “If I may?” He caught up the Waystone in long fingers, impervious, as though it possessed no more hazardous an aura than a chunk of unwarded glass.

      The Prime Enchantress bridled. Convinced he had the effrontery to mock her by degrading her grand focus as a scrying stone, she gathered herself to revile him. Yet he did nothing but pass the jewel back across the table.

      “Your jewel sets off a disturbing dissonance,” he temporized as he ceded its cold weight into her protective grasp. “Better we ease the distraction before the next subject is explored.”

      Morriel Prime tugged a silk shawl from her knees and veiled the sullen glimmer of the Waystone. She felt disgruntled, manipulated, and pricked by the awareness that Asandir’s gently innocuous request urged dismissal of her complaint. She would not be side-tracked from her mission. Nor would she be lulled by the informal nature of Sethvir’s bachelor hospitality. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. Placed firmly on guard, she must anticipate their ploys, even as they offered diversions that led off on tangents.

      “Are the wards on Rockfell Pit gone unstable?” She settled the Waystone in the hollow of her lap and waited in rankling patience.

      “Those defenses are secure,” Kharadmon assured from his overhead vantage above the door arch. “But Desh-thiere was divided upon its entry to Athera. The greater concentration of its fog was turned away, as we have unsettling proof. The uncontained portion cut off on the gate world of Marak is anything but a dead entity.”

      Lapped like a mummy in quilts and thick shadows, her reed voice stripped to suspicion, Morriel said carefully, “Dead or not, those wraiths should have no thread of connection to exploit. Unless you’ve contrived some harebrained scheme to restore the old portal to Athera?”

      “Ath forfend, never that!” Sethvir interjected, then submerged once again in his voiceless communion with Iyan. An inimical pause seized the chamber, strung out on the hiss of the tallow dip. Asandir turned his hand palm down on bare wood to thwart a visible urge to strike a fist. “This is properly Kharadmon’s story,” he said in quick discomfort.

      Luhaine withheld all opinion, nor did he interrupt as the nexus of his discorporate rival drifted down to settle amid the used-up spread of light supper.

      “The tale plays more like nightmare,” the Fellowship’s most incorrigible prankster confessed in chilling sobriety. Over the untidied jetsam of dishes and a tea mug abandoned brimful, Kharadmon dropped the too casual comment that he had accomplished a crossing between stars.

      “I went to Marak with intent to find knowledge to break the Mistwraith’s geas of enmity over the princes. Why look astonished?” He chuckled for the joy of provocation. “Come now, Morriel, were your Koriani spies so inept? Did you actually think we would abandon the half brothers to the affliction of a cursed fate?”

      The Prime Enchantress fixed his invisible presence with disdain as inscrutable as a sphinx.

      “Well, madam, don’t rush to lend us due grace with an apology.” A miniature, self-contained wind devil, Kharadmon swept a tempest of crumbs into gyrating circles around the teapot. “I shan’t lend false hope. I found no reprieve.”

      On Marak, where cities had once crisscrossed the continents with glimmering strings of lights, he had encountered a dead waste of freezing winds and ice. No people survived. There, the truncated mists of Desh-thiere brooded still, redoubled in malice, and haunted now by far worse than the original matrix of bound entities that had launched past invasion of Athera.

      Kharadmon minced no words. “The fogs still enveloping Marak have inducted the spirits of every slain human victim.” His whirling exhibition of crumbs crashed and scattered, released as he swirled on to traverse the casement. “The whole world is a stew of trapped entities, suspended in active consciousness, and driven mad by unrequited hatred.”

      The tallow dip fluttered and jerked. The Sorcerer’s unsettled movement stalked on, to raise the odd shiver from Iyan, who cast a sharp, startled glance past his shoulder.

      “Never mind,” Sethvir soothed in daft unconcern for the fact the Prime’s newest servant was deaf. “Yon shade means no harm.”

      While Iyan settled and resumed his absorbed, silent dialogue between the silver knife and the jam spoon, a crystalline pause filled the chamber. The moaning winter wind buffeted the tower and sheared all the warmth from the air.

      “I was attacked,” said Kharadmon at unpleasant length, “beset and pursued almost beyond recourse.”

      Morriel absorbed this, her lips pinched into a bloodless crease, and the frown lines like pleats on her forehead. For a Fellowship mage to admit to near helplessness shook her to driving unease. This recount was no ploy drummed up as diversion to upset pursuit of her purpose. She measured implications as the grim tale unfolded, of an unexplained silence, then the beacon signal sent off by worried colleagues to guide an errant Sorcerer safely home.

      “We believed Kharadmon was disoriented, even lost.” Asandir made a small, strangled gesture of frustration, then explained how the sorceries he and Sethvir had raised on summer solstice had been ground-tied through the land’s living trees. Last came the harrowing corollary, given in hammered, steady speech. “Until every trunk, seed, and sapling alive completes its allotted span of years, a faint signature trace of that homing spell will linger. We can’t dismiss the risk. These loose wraiths upon Marak might find means to track such a resonance. If they should cross the vast deeps between stars, the mists that embody them would sublimate away. Arrived here as free wraiths, they would strike for possession and wreak death and destruction such as this world has never seen.”

      “But surely they would perish outside their containment of mists,” Morriel said.

      “These

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