The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

cradled the master spellbinder’s hands within his own tepid palms. ‘Tonight, we’re not sounding the future.’ Fallen into shadow as Asandir made a spell to darken the glow of the fire, the Warden looked oddly wizened; momentarily no sorcerer at all, but an old man rubbed spiritless and thin by a lifetime’s uncountable sorrows. ‘You weren’t told earlier. But the Mistwraith’s curse that sets Lysaer and Arithon into conflict is far worse than a geas of fixation. The knowledge which might shed light on their condition lies two ages back in the past.’

      A creeping shudder harrowed Verrain’s nerves. ‘You wish to tune the strands to examine the methuri that created the abominations here at Mirthlvain?’

      ‘Desh-thiere’s binding over the princes is not far removed from the corruptions effected by the hate-wraiths.’ Asandir folded his lean length and sat with his usual economy of movement. ‘Both arose from the meddling of spirit entities. Both were imprinted into living flesh, with bonds of compulsion that can’t be undone without losing the victim in death.’

      As Sethvir’s touch slipped away, Verrain flicked open the little tin, his dimples erased by trepidation as he cleaned and packed the stubby pipe. The biting smell of the tienelle enveloped him, fierce enough to make him cough. Just how a strand casting could be ranged across time, he desperately wished not to learn.

      Sethvir unkindly answered his thought all the same. Time’s riddle is only opaque to those senses attuned through the flesh.’

      Verrain’s horrified start shot the canister lid in a clanging arc to the floor. ‘Ath forfend! Can’t we ask Luhaine to handle this?’

      But already Asandir had slipped beyond hearing. His tall, dark-robed form lay slumped across the table, his cheek cradled on folded arms. His flesh was a vessel emptied of spirit, with Traithe already set in anguished silence by his shoulder to stand ward and guard.

      The plain fact could not be forgotten, that just such a perilous scrying had stripped Kharadmon to discorporate status. Verrain snapped a flame off a finger tip that trembled and ignited the herb in his pipe. As drug-laden smoke twined in ghostly step to the dance of some aimless air current, he called on six centuries of discipline to wrest his uncertainty aside. Then he drew on the stem and gasped as the tienelle’s drug whirled through his senses like wildfire.

      Vertigo upended him in a savage, exhilarant rush. There followed a glass-sharp awareness that scoured his dross of flesh, until the stillness of the room compressed his ears like cotton and his eyesight gained hurtful clarity. The lofty, crystalline expansion of awareness overturned him like a plunge from great height. He clung to his chair in desperation to stay anchored, while around him the floor lost its semblance of solidity. Changed perception showed him the layers of dizzy energies that bound its cool stone into matter.

      Verrain fought to master the reeling hyperbole that savaged him. As Sethvir’s expectancy jabbed through his trance, he recalled his place and purpose: for the knowledge to redeem Athera’s cursed princes, Asandir now twisted the flow of time. The thread of his existence hung poised in suspension on the threshold between life and death.

      The spellfield the sorcerer laid out above the black cloth on the tabletop had limits; its influence encompassed little more than the span of one cubic yard. But the resonance where its edges grazed up against the present raised a whine past the limit of hearing, and a flesh-stripping ache that made human bone marrow shiver and jump like kicked mercury. Hazed by indescribable discomfort, his blond hair strung limp with sweat, Verrain cobbled a grip on his frayed consciousness and spun out three filaments of light.

      Sethvir raised power and spoke. An answering resonance of mage-force tingled outward as his words parted drug-heightened senses like razors, touched the strands hanging poised against darkness, and set over them a signature that gave Name.

      Ruled in parallel with the life-currents that endowed Ath’s creation, the filaments quickened, interleaved into patterns the trained mind could unriddle at a glance. Verrain called forth another strand, and another, while through some unseen linkage with the time-pocket carved out by Asandir, Sethvir spoke Names upon them that recreated constructs of this stone, and that mud-pool, then seeded them with plants, insects, salamanders and trees in their individual; teeming thousands. Here lay like pen strokes the growth and death of moss. There, in skeined interlace, the play of breezes through reed beds, ringed with black water scribed by stitched curves that marked the life-dance of fishes. In glowing, intricate splendour against a dark like layered velvet, a mile square portion of Mirthlvain’s mire became replicated in a linear analogue of patterns.

      Transfixed by awe, and a harmony that wrung him breathless, Verrain wept as he realized: the bogland he viewed was still governed by nature. The creatures there had yet to be enslaved, corrupted and cross-bred to birth the monstrous perversions induced by the hate-wraiths’ possession.

      Softly out of shadow, Sethvir said, ‘Commence.’

      Verrain felt the hair stir at his nape as channelled power sparked through the strands.

      A pent sense of danger prevailed, like the quaver of a note too long sustained, or the chill of sharp steel masked in cloth. Now, any misplayed distinction between the quick force of life and the raw burn of elemental energy might sunder the time-ward’s fragile balance and rip Asandirs spirit from flesh. Verrain trembled in his battle to keep the herb’s explosive prescience tied in to geometric augury as Sethvir alone called forth the final strand, then shaped it to the Name of the methuri.

      The matrix mapped an origin Verrain had studied only in ancient text: here, in spikes and jagged angles, he experienced the leaked bit of storm charge that had displaced half-formed beings from the thought-shaped, nether-realm of drake-dreams. In twists and snagged knotwork, he saw anomalies that to this world were half demon, half monster, change vibration and emerge to rampage and slay. The original methurien were creatures deranged by pain, animate consciousness torn into breathing life from an existence of shadowy apparition. Their bodily deaths on Paravian weapons had served only to release their twisted essence as free wraiths.

      His centuries of handling the cross-bred abominations left behind as their legacy could not prepare Mirthlvain’s Guardian for the concentrated, driving hatred the methuri had embodied. Needled breathless by passions bent and whetted for destruction, Verrain felt his consciousness twist to escape. The drugs in the tienelle gave no quarter, but held his awareness channelled open through the shivering flinch of full contact.

      ‘Steady. Hold steady,’ Sethvir cautioned.

      Verrain’s fingernails split under the force of his grip on the table as the first wraith ensnared a live victim. The moment of its possession was terrible to witness: clean-edged lines that delineated a mouse unique unto itself in Ath’s creation flickered and spiked into a chaotic jumble that, even two ages later, seemed to shock the night air with scream upon scream of torment. Verrain stung as though every nerve in his body had been sieved out and scorched in hot acid.

      Locked into step with the strands’ unfolding sequence, he watched the signature pattern of the mouse blur, coil, then fix in a flare of cold fire into something wholly wrong, in mind and matter remoulded to a parasitic hybrid that was irrationally, unthinkably other. What moved and breathed in the heart of the strands’ reflection was a thing outside the Major Balance, the warp and weft of its birthright wrenched contrary to natural law.

      Revolted to spasms of dry nausea, the spellbinder clamped hands to his lips until the blood felt squeezed from his fingers. He compelled himself to abide as Sethvir broadened his study: and snakes, insects, otters and frogs all suffered possession in turn. The moment of change in each case was sliced free of time and dissected; line for line, contortion for mauled contortion, the maligned detail of the hate-wraiths’ workings wrung out in white pain from their victims. Life-force itself became impressed and internally warped until only the husk of the body remained, to spawn its altered, aberrant offspring. The warped things birthed from such breedings in turn became subservient to the whim of the host.

      Drenched in a cold sweat, Verrain tracked Sethvir’s analysis of the past as methuri abominations insinuated a