Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

Luhaine was left at flustered odds for rejoinder, Sethvir twisted in his seat to face the turbid patch of air inside his library. A pixie’s bright smile flexed his lips. ‘Welcome home to Althain Tower, Kharadmon.’

      A riffle like a snort crossed the chamber. ‘I daresay you won’t think so when you see what’s tagged a ride on my coattails.’ The Sorcerer just arrived resumed in flippant phrasing at odds with his predicament. ‘I hate to be the bore to wreck the party, but don’t be startled if the earth wards you’ve set fail to stand up under trial.’

      Urgency pressed him too closely to share the premise behind his bleak forecast. In a fiery flourish of seals, Kharadmon configured an unfamiliar chain of runes and safeguards. These meshed into the primary protections already laid over the tower to receive the hate-driven entities he had battled and failed to outrun.

      ‘As a last resort, the wraiths dislike the stink of sulphur,’ he finished off in crisp haste.

      Ever intolerant of his colleague’s provocations, Luhaine retuned the balance of a sigil the sudden change had tipped awry. ‘I suggest we don’t allow the wretched creatures any liberty to need tactics of such flimsy desperation.’

      ‘Luhaine! From you, an enchanting understatement!’ Kharadmon’s quick turn around the chamber masked a trepidation like vibrations struck off tempered steel. For should the wraiths which trailed him across the deeps of space escape Fellowship confinement here at Althain, they would gain access to all of Athera. Set loose, their potential for havoc could unleash horrors beyond all imagining.

      After all, they were an unfettered aspect drawn here from the original body of the Mistwraith, an entity created from a misguided meddling with the Law of the Major Balance. Its works had driven the Paravians to vanish in despair; in defeat, its dire vengeance had twisted the lives of two princes.

      While Luhaine’s ghost churned through brown thoughts over Kharadmon’s tasteless humour, the wards crisscrossing the darkened sky outside flared active with a scream of raw light. Sethvir shouted a binding cantrip, then gave way to alarm as Kharadmon’s hunch was borne through. A burst hurtled down like a meteor storm, in angry red arcs curdling holes through every ward and guard he and Luhaine had shaped from roused earthforce.

      ‘Ath’s infinite pity!’ Althain’s Warden cried, his fingers wrung through his beard.

      ‘No,’ Kharadmon interjected, his insouciance torn away by exhaustion that verged on impairment. ‘These wraiths won’t fall on the defenceless countryside. Not yet. They’ll besiege us here first. Incentive will draw them. They desire to steal knowledge from our Fellowship. We’ll be under attack, and if any one of us falls as a victim, there will be no limit to our sorrow.’ His warning fell into a dread stillness, since he alone could gauge the threat now descending upon Althain Tower.

      ‘Don’t try to close with them. Don’t let them grapple,’ he added in hurried, last caution. ‘Their bent is possession. They can slip traps through time. The best chance we have is to keep out of reach, use this tower’s primary defences for containment, then try to snare the creatures in ring wards.’

      The mirror-loop spells to entrap a hostile consciousness back into itself were a simple enough undertaking, provided a mage knew the aura pattern of the spirit appointed for restraint. To Luhaine’s high-browed flick of inquiry, Kharadmon showed tart disgust. Td hardly have needed to flee the fell creatures if I’d held command of their Names.’

      And then the wraiths were upon them in a swirling, unseen tide of spite. They poured through the casements to winnow the unshielded spark in the brazier, and cause Sethvir’s scattered tomes to clap shut like trap jaws on bent pages and loose sheaves of quill pens.

      Through the last battle to confine Desh-thiere, Paravian defence wards alone had been impervious to the wraiths’ aberrant nature. Even as Asandir had once done in desperation atop another beleaguered tower nine years past, Luhaine fired a charge through a spell net held ready. A power more ancient than any sorcerer’s tenancy surged in response to his need. A deep-throated rumble shook the old stonework as the wards over Althain slammed fast.

      The pack of free wraiths bent in hate against the Fellowship were now sealed inside Sethvir’s library.

      If Kharadmon had resisted their malevolence alone through an exhaustive toll of years, he was now left too worn from his trials to offer much fight to help stay them. Bare hope must suffice that the Paravian safeguards laid within the tower’s walls would prove as potent against these invaders as the wards once reconfigured against Desh-thiere.

      Yet in this hour of trial, the attacking entities inhabited no body spun from mist. These free wraiths held no fleshly tie to life, nor were they subject to any physical law. They could not be lured through illusions framed to malign or confuse the senses. Not being fogbound, no gifted command of light and shadow would suffice to turn them at bay. Lent the knife-edged awareness that no power in the land might contain these fell creatures should they slip Althain’s wards and escape, three Sorcerers stewed inside with them had no option at all but to try and evade their deadly grasp. They must seek to subdue and enchain them without falling prey to possession.

      The peril was extreme and the risk beyond thought, for should they fail to contain this threat here and now, the very depths of their knowledge and craft would be turned against the land their Fellowship was sworn and charged to guard.

      To surface appearance, there seemed no present enemy to fight. Limned in sheeting flares thrown off by the disrupted fields in the tower wards, the metal clasps of books bit corners of reflection through the gloom. The third lane spark in the brazier recovered its steady blue to cast harsh illumination over the massive black table with its scrawled chalk ciphers and its empty chairs left arrayed at jutted angles. As unkempt as the caches upon his fusty aumbries, Sethvir stood poised, his hair and beard raked up into tufts and his fingers interlaced beneath the threadbare shine of his cuffs. His gaze sieved the air to pick out sign of the hostile motes of consciousness which lurked in the crannies and the shelves.

      Unlike his spirit-formed colleagues, he was hampered, his perception tied to mortal senses. The earth link that enabled him to track simultaneous world events out of half trance was no help in a direct encounter. Its use slowed his reflexes. Unlike his discorporate colleagues, he could not see behind to guard his back. To the refined sensitivity of his mage-sight, the wraiths would show as spirit light, brighter if they moved or tried to exert their influence over anything alive. Were they stilled or stalking, poised beyond his peripheral vision, he must rely on hearing, for their auras would be traceless through the air. Yet eyes had to blink; fleshly senses fell prey to fatigue.

      And the danger was present and closing.

      ‘Beware,’ warned Luhaine. ‘I count nine hostile vortices.’

      Engrossed in the throes of tuned awareness, Sethvir made them out with more difficulty. Twined amid the jumble of his possessions, the faint, coiling currents of the wraiths seemed sketched against the dimness like strayed dust motes, stroked to clinging eddies by weak static. Ephemeral as they seemed, translucent as the steam wisps off his tea mugs, he was not fooled. The broadened span of his perception could detect their unrest, hazed in vibrations of hatred. These entities cast their essence in the forms of leering faces, yawling mouths, in glass-clear, skeletal fingers that plucked and clawed and pricked like jabbing needles in quest of the barest chink in his defences.

      ‘Sethvir, don’t let them flank you.’ Thin drawn under stress as the wraiths themselves, Luhaine stood guard by the library door, his stance set opposite Kharadmon’s. For with frightful intent in those first, passing minutes, the victim the wraiths had chosen was the Warden of Althain himself.

      Of them all, Sethvir alone owned the talent for splitting his mind into multiple awareness. He was Althain’s Warden, the earth’s tried link, and through him flowed all events to influence the fate of Athera. Were the wraiths to possess him, they could access at will any aspect they chose within the world. They would grasp the last particular concerning the ward-bound fragments of the Mistwraith held captive in Rockfell Pit, even the means to key their freedom.