The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

raven clipped him a peck on the ear, he looked up, his brown eyes dark with affront. ‘Yes,’ he snapped as though to an unwanted inquiry. ‘My scars ache today. But since meeting was called for at Mirthlvain, I presume we save our strengths for something more pressing than small healing.’

      Above a twist of frosty hair the raven had tousled, Asandir and Sethvir locked glances. Had Traithe still possessed his full faculties, no one need say that Mirthlvain’s ills were quiescent.

      ‘Actually,’ the Warden of Althain admitted, ‘this is the closest active focus to Alestron, where one of us needs to pay a visit. A copy of Magyre’s papers has apparently survived and fallen into the hands of the duke’s scholars.’

      ‘Black powder again?’ asked Verrain, arrived with a stalker’s silence to settle on Traithe’s other side. He had shed his frieze cloak. Lank blond hair tied by velvet ribbons feathered through the ruffles of a dandy’s collar several centuries out of fashion.

      Sethvir sighed. ‘The very same old tired story.’ He looked askance at Asandir, who had forgotten to pass on the scones. ‘It’s scarcely on your way, but you’ll need to visit the city before going north to Rockfell to check on the Mistwraith’s confinement.’

      Then, mindful the cruellest of Traithe’s distress would not stem from old injuries, Sethvir tucked his hands in his sleeve cuffs. Carefully, aloud, he said, ‘No, I have yet to hear word.’

      His inference was to Kharadmon, their discorporate colleague dispatched across the gulf to resurvey the paired worlds left severed by the closure of South Gate. There, for a purpose beyond comprehension, the abomination wrought of mists and trapped human spirits first became amalgamated into the Mistwraith that endangered Athera.

      Worries abounded. The icy, lifeless void between stars was inhospitable, even to the bodiless spirit; worse, the alienated worlds presumably harboured the wraith’s greater portion, still at large and potently malevolent. The calamity that resulted from the creature’s confinement here had unveiled frightening truths: for the mist’s bound spirits were intelligent, able to wrest the key to grand conjury from another mind trained to mastery. They had even proved capable of movement and planning across the threshold of time.

      Best of any, the Fellowship sorcerers understood the ugly details. The curse they undertook to unravel to reconcile two princes was daunting in scope, and ranged about with perils that lay outside of all augury.

      Kharadmon’s journey had been launched at unmentionable risk. If he suffered mishap and failed to return, far more than the hope of the royal heirs’ reconciliation would be lost. The Fellowship itself might never be restored to its original circle of seven sorcerers.

      Amid bitter silence, and stalked by the interest of three cats, the raven spread glossy primaries and dived in to peck at the scones. Traithe beat it back to a flurry of wings, snatched the butter crock away, then hissed until the bird retreated to fluff indignant feathers on his chair back. Since mention of one discorporate colleague brought the other to mind, he said, ‘Luhaine has no plans to join us?’

      ‘Sadly not.’ Sethvir rescued a scone the bird had mauled and dipped up a creamy scoop of butter. ‘The Koriani witches have renewed their efforts to find Arithon.’ He bit down and chewed with absent relish. ‘For equinox, they’ve planned a grand scrying. A circle of twenty-one seniors, to be matrixed through the Skyron crystal. Luhaine’s needed to try and scatter their energies everywhere else but toward Jaelot, a touchy task. We’d rather his influence wasn’t noticed.’

      ‘Jaelot?’ Verrain’s expostulation re-echoed off the vaults of the ceiling. ‘That cesspit of snobbery and bad taste? Why Jaelot?’

      Asandir sighed, the broad line of his shoulders looking tired. ‘The affair involves an exploit of Dakar’s that’s too idiotic to mention. But to redeem the Mad Prophet’s foolishness, Halliron is confined there till solstice. His apprentice naturally won’t leave him.’ The sorcerer hooked his chin on steepled fingers, not needing to add that a stay of such length left Arithon’s identity as Medlir vulnerable, and not just to auguries done on the balance point of equinox. Since the secret of the Shadow Master’s alias was the fragile linchpin that frustrated the directive of Desh-thiere’s curse, Luhaine was bound to be misleading enchantresses for some while yet to come.

      ‘Well,’ murmured Traithe in dry conclusion. ‘This isn’t so much a convocation as a gossip list of our weaknesses.’

      ‘From which we can certainly spare a moment for minor healing,’ Sethvir interjected with a glance of prankish triumph toward his colleague. ‘For the task that lies ahead of us tonight, we can’t do without your sense of humour.’

      A flick of amusement rekindled the laugh lines at the corners of Traithe’s spaniel eyes. ‘What’s amiss that’s any worse than the monsters mewed up in these mires?’

      Turned blankly vague, Sethvir fiddled pastry crumbs out of the folds of his cuffs. ‘The Koriani Council’s pursuit of Arithon s’Ffalenn. But let that bide for a little.’

      His wistful glance toward the cauldron moved Verrain to arise and fetch mugs, and steep a pot of bracing tea.

      When eventide dimmed the Mirthlvain marshes, the peepings and shrills, the skreels and the croaks of its nocturnal denizens racketed across the shallows of Methlas Lake. The mists had not yet arisen, to lure out the will o’ the wisps and the seeping flares of the marshlights. Unquiet waters lay black as a facet of obsidian, stippled by the light-prints of stars, and one anomaly: a thread of reflection sculled on the shore’s dying currents, cast out into darkness by a firelit casement high up in Meth Isle fortress.

      There, around the stone table in a hall dimmed to cavernous shadow, three Fellowship sorcerers hunched in conference. They concluded their survey of far-reaching responsibilities, for they alone had been left as guardians of Athera’s ancient mysteries since the old races’ inexplicable disappearance. Wards of protection that confined creatures dangerous in malice had been checked over world gates and preserves. As always, defences had weakened; four months of difficult travels lay ahead for Traithe and Asandir. The demands on them both were relentless, with their discorporate colleagues committed elsewhere. Of two other sorcerers outside tonight’s active circle, none spoke: the shade of Davien the Betrayer remained banished in seclusion since the hour of the high kings’ fall; Ciladis the Lost, still gone beyond reach, on his failed quest to find the Paravians.

      The sole augury that forecast the Seven’s reunity, the last hope to accomplish the old races’ return: all remained jeopardized by the Mistwraith’s curse, and two princes shackled into enmity. Brought at last to that point, and the reason for gathering at Meth Isle, Sethvir peered into his empty mug. The tea leaves scummed in the dregs deceptively appeared to absorb him, while his eyes mapped the sonorous currents of the earth, and the fine, singing tracks of distant stars. ‘It is time.’

      Gaunt and silent, Asandir arose. He collected the used crockery, Verrain’s chipped pot with its sprung wicker handle, and the moth-eaten quills filched from the library. With hands that moved much more freely, Traithe rolled up a marked map. He slipped the parchment into its case and across the cleared table, spread the black cloth of his cloak.

      Sethvir stooped by his chair to rummage something from his satchel. While the cats piled next to Verrain’s ankles scampered off, and the one in his lap stretched and left, the Guardian of Mirthlvain out of habit used mage-sense to tag the cause of their unrest. But this time no aberrated creature from the swamps had strayed inside to be hunted. Verrain’s query touched the edge of a cold ward, a boundary field laid down to contain a flux of refined vibration. He realized, alarmed, that the Fellowship meant to cast strands. The augury they could wring out of still air and power would be exactingly accurate, and undertaken only at grave need. More disturbing still, the Warden of Althain straightened up and offered him a tin canister and stone pipe.

      Verrain need not unseal the container. The pungency that seeped from the dried herb inside charged his senses with dreadful remembrance of its poisons. Shaken, he said quickly, ‘I shouldn’t need tienelle to follow the progression of a strand