Curse of the Mistwraith. Janny Wurts

       VI. ERDANE

      The walls of Erdane had been raised at the crossroads two ages before the uprising which threw down the high kings had bloodied its maze of narrow streets. Now, five centuries later, the city wore change like a tattered, overdressed prostitute. Guild flags and a mayor’s blazon fluttered over the Grand West Gate, built by Paravian hands of seamless, rose-veined quartz. The stone at street level was left pitted and scarred by siege-weapons, and greyed by the passage of uncounted generations of inhabitants. Had the sentries in the mayor’s guard been as vigilant as their counterparts in times past, they would have challenged the woman in the shepherd’s cloak who passed the gatehouse, hooded. Boots of sewn sealhide showed beneath her ankle-length skirts, but their soles were not made for walking. Her hands were calloused from the bridle-rein, and her eyes a clear and disturbing grey.

      But the captain of the watch barely glanced up from his dice game and the teenaged soldier who lounged on his javelin stayed absorbed by a whore, who paraded her bedizened attractions for the eyes of a loud-voiced drover.

      Elaira, Koriani enchantress and message-bearer for the Prime, entered Erdane unremarked between a wagon bearing three sows and the rumbling wheels of an aleseller’s dray. She was the first of her kind to pass the city gates for close to four hundred years and the only one to try without any sanction from her seniors. Had she been recognized for what she was, she would have been stripped and publicly burned after barely a pretence of a trial.

      Other women had suffered that sentence inside the past half-decade. If the mayor of Erdane suspected the charges against those accused were false, his conscience never bothered his sleep. What troubled his guildmasters and council to cold sweats was the fear that powers from the past might arise out of legend and claim vengeance. For unlike the commoners and the craftsmen, the Lord Elect of Erdane had access to archives that detailed a history of conspiracy and murder. To him, to his council and his general of armies, the sun was no myth, but a harbinger of sorcery and certain doom.

      Elaira was cognizant of the risks. She kept her knotworked hood pulled low over her forehead and took care not to pass between the flirtatious whore and her sources of male attention. When the ale dray pulled up precipitously to avoid a running urchin, the enchantress ducked out of the main thoroughfare. She hastened down streets of marble-fronted guild-halls, threaded across the artisans’ district, then turned through a moss-dark arch.

      The alley beyond was barely wider than a footpath. Fallen slates and rat-chewed ends of bone clogged the gutters. Seepage dripped in mournful counterpoint to the moss-crusted planks of half-rotted, open-air stairways; and from spell-charmed strips of tin nailed up to ward off iyats. Unlike many such talismans, these held true power to guard. Elaira could sense the faint resonance of their protections as she wound her way past ill-smelling puddles and locked shutters.

      This slum by the edicts of town law should never have managed to survive: it had no wineshops or pot-traders on the lower levels. Dirty children did not play in the gutters, and drunks did not snore off binges; whores sought no customers here, nor did headhunters with old campaign scars loiter between assignments to boast of kills. This was a street whose inhabitants Erdane’s mayor sorely wished to eradicate; except that in the teeming maze of the wall district, its location was most difficult to know. Wayfarers came seeking the archway and found themselves inexplicably side-tracked. They might blink and miss the entry, or be distracted by a noise or a thought; and before they had grasped they had missed something, they would have passed on by.

      For anyone untrained in spellcraft to pause here, even for a second, was to become lost in a mage-worked tangle of deception.

      Elaira found the stairwell with carved gryphons on the newels. This was the house; here. She had all but sold her jewel for directions. For the Koriani matron who had received the scrolls from the Prime had been garrulous enough to repeat rumour. If she was right, the mayor’s most persistent nightmare was already half-way realized: a Fellowship sorcerer and two old-blood princes were temporarily in residence within Erdane.

      Elaira mounted the alarmingly shaky stairway and paused on the landing at the top. With a shiver of sinful anticipation she knocked and asked for entry. ‘Is this the home of Enithen Tuer?’

      A muffled clang, then the ring of a bar being drawn back; the door cracked and a white-lashed milk-pale eye peered through. ‘Ath’s Avenger, it’s a witch,’ rasped a reedy, aged voice. ‘Girl, you’re very brave or just stupid.’

      Elaira tightened her grip on her cloak laces. ‘Probably stupid.’ She held back a nervous laugh. ‘Are you going to let me in?’

      The eye blinked. ‘I will. You may be sorry.’

      ‘I will be sorry.’ Elaira threw an unsettled glance over her shoulder; the alley remained empty, dimming rapidly in the falling dusk. Nobody watched from the rows of shuttered windows. Still, her proscribed visit would be noticed very fast if she tarried too long in the open. As the door creaked wider, Elaira stepped through in a rush that betrayed apprehension.

      A tiny, hunchbacked crone bounced backward out of her path. ’Yeesh. Came here without sanction, did you?’

      Elaira pushed back her hood. The room did not match the alley’s run-down squalor but was snug and comfortably furnished. Candles lit the enchantress’s face like a cameo against the purple-black silk of a second cloak concealed underneath the rougher wool. Inside, somewhat mussed by the muffling layers, coiled a braided knot of bronze hair. ‘Maybe I just want my fortune told.’

      The crone grunted. ‘Not you. And anyway, you don’t need a seer to tell your future’s just branched into darkness.’

      ‘Sithaer,’ Elaira sucked an unsteady breath. ‘So soon?’ She fumbled at the ties of her wraps and caught sight of two young men who watched her, interested, over a half-completed game of chess.

      Elaira’s eyes widened. They were here! And unmistakably royal, the bloodlines perpetuated over many generations still apparent as the nearer one rose to meet her. Light from the sconces edged pale s’Ilessid hair in shining gold. The prince possessed an elegance that went beyond his handsome face. His eyes were jewel-blue. He carried his well-knit frame with the dignity of a man schooled perfectly to listen, and a pride unselfconscious as breathing.

      ‘Lady, may I?’ he asked in courtly courtesy; and hands tanned dark by alien suns reached out and slipped the shepherd’s cloak from her shoulders.

      Unused to male solicitude, Elaira blushed and evaded his smile, and found her sight drawn to the other prince, whose black hair at first glance had caused him to blend into shadow.

      This one regarded her with eyes of s’Ffalenn green, and something else: the still, small shock of an awareness that recognized power. Elaira repressed stark surprise, while the s’Ilessid prince said something polite that her mind interpreted as background noise.

      Before she could recover the poise to apply her trained skills to draw intuitive deductions through observation, the seer, Enithen Tuer, caught her elbow. Crabbed hands spun her toward a doorway which opened to reveal the Fellowship sorcerer she had defied her order’s strictures to visit.

      Asandir proved taller than Elaira had expected from images garnered through lane-watch. Lean as toughened leather, he wore plain clothing with a bearing she had always before thought imperious. In person, she revised that to a stillness that brooked no wasted motion. His hands were still also, the straight, tapered fingers clean as bleached bone on the latch. The face beneath the trimmed silver hair was carved by years and experience to a fierce mapwork of lines. The eyes in their deep-set sockets regarded her with a serenity that unnerved and exposed.

      ‘What brought you here, Elaira of the Koriathain?’ said Asandir of the Fellowship of Seven.

      ‘She wasn’t sent,’ the seer interjected. A palsied nudge sent the enchantress forward toward the imposing figure in the doorway.

      ‘I see that.’ As if aware that the leashed