‘Red roses, then,’ Kharadmon amended, careful to comb his tonal range free of upset. Up and down the length of Sethvir’s aura, his refined perceptions measured the patchworked, golden flares where the adepts had spun careful nets of fine energy to bridge areas rubbed thin by exhaustion. With the compassionate delicacy of a master surgeon, Kharadmon applied the keen edge of his humor to refire the dulled lines leached by pain. ‘Some decrepit old layabouts will try anything to lure sweet-tempered ladies to dote on them.’
Sethvir wheezed a puffed breath, too weakened for full-throated laughter. ‘Your incorrigible presence is welcome at Althain; however, the fact you’ve been called here when I’m unwell means the news is the black side of dire.’
‘The star wards went active? I’d already guessed.’ Kharadmon settled by the bedside, a revolving nexus of chill that nettled the candle to streamered smoke. ‘What can you tell me?’
‘Not much.’ Sethvir twitched an irritable hand under the smothering bedclothes. ‘I saw the guard glyphs flare red in first warning. We’ve got wraiths on the move out of Marak.
How many, how far off, and what danger they pose lie beyond my stretched resource to answer.’
Kharadmon flicked into a wind devil’s spin. ‘The adepts haven’t said?’
Sethvir managed a fractional shake of his head. ‘If they know, they won’t venture discussion. They can’t intervene, regardless.’
Better than any, Kharadmon understood the implacable stance held by the white-robed adepts: the wraiths were no less part of Ath’s grand creation. Even if their aberrant nature arose out of mankind’s meddling, the Brotherhood by nature embraced no conflict. ‘All the thorny sorts of problem fall to our Fellowship to contain, and just as well. Given nothing to do, you’d have Luhaine’s confounded lectures bothering your ears day and night.’
Before Althain’s Warden could answer that jibe, the discorporate Sorcerer whirled aloft. ‘Don’t fret. I’m already going.’
‘There’s no one else I could call on to send,’ Sethvir whispered in depleted apology. Two images followed, ragged as ink stains on parchment. If their fuzzed edges were unlike the Warden’s usual crisp sendings, their self-contained messages nonetheless carried the impacting force of slung rock: of Asandir mending an unstabilized grimward, and of Luhaine, tied down, holding the torn bindings that secured Desh-thiere’s prison at Rockfell.
‘Well, that’s a fitting assignment for a boring, fat windbag.’ Kharadmon laughed. ‘Dour old rocks are the only wise beings who can bear his prolonged company without snapping.’
‘He would say the same for your feckless badgering,’ Sethvir said, his rejoinder a near-soundless breath.
‘Then loose wraiths should suit my style of venom quite well.’ Kharadmon shot straight up through the ceiling, his last words a shriek left imprinted on the whipped drafts. ‘No apologies needed. Marak’s damned spirits were my chosen quarrel long before Morriel Prime cast her lot amid the sharp teeth of ill fortune.’
Let out through a minuscule gap in the eaves too small for a nesting spider, Kharadmon sheared aloft. His haste burned a wake of stressed energies. A rolling boom of thunder ruptured the quiet over the Bittern’s ribbed sands as the speed of his flight outstripped sound. He passed through the rarefied gases of the upper atmosphere, leaving a snag of whipped eddies in the jet stream winds of high altitude. His back trail showed a comet tail flare of split matter, excited to fugitive luminosity.
Then the icy dark of the void closed about him. Athera receded to a jewel-toned orb, whorled with the feathery tracks of the storms that spiraled above lapis oceans. Ahead, a spun webwork of silver-point light, spread the linked seals of the star ward. The sullen spark of ruby that had snagged in disharmony across Sethvir’s broadscale awareness nestled amid the coils of spun power: the telltale guard spell strung across time and space, its watch rune aglow to provide advance warning of trouble arisen from Marak.
Kharadmon felt the chill, that the threat posed by this transmigration of wraiths might forerun the most dire peril of them all. He aligned his course for the beacon which signaled the cause of that distant unrest.
Once there, he held no illusion; the work he must shoulder lacked safeguards. No margin existed for slipped concentration, or the misstep of chance-met error. His peril embraced threat of widespread destruction, with Athera’s frail balance and intricate life drawn into jeopardy with him. Enveloped by the hostile cold of deep vacuum, alone with the whisper-thin chime of the stars, Kharadmon drew himself inward. Seeking camouflage like the chameleon, he collapsed the fields of his being in stages and settled into a stillness as seamless as the quiet before Ath’s creation.
The Sorcerer dissolved his very self. His presence bled into the fabric of space. At one with vast forces that abided, unseen, in the sensory illusion of emptiness, he stripped out his personal identity. Pared down to the quiescent spark of blank will, he poised, the mantle of unbridled wisdom and power smoothed into total passivity. Then, only then, he extended his inquiry into the shimmering red cipher Marak’s wraiths had aroused.
The self-contained vortex of energies sucked him in. Ripped out of space-time, hurled past the annihilating fringes of chaos into the blank-glass calm that encompassed unborn possibility, Kharadmon resisted the suffocating urge to rebuild the templates of Name and character. Consumed, scoured blank as darkness itself, he became the transparent lens, a circle of focus aligned to observe without casting a ripple of distortion.
Kharadmon traced the cipher’s root source back to Marak. Chilled to a patience that eschewed all activity, he recorded the foray of twelve questing wraiths, stirred to leave the voracious pack of their fellows. Without doubt, the disharmony of Morriel’s meddling had whetted their predator’s appetite. The resonance of that upset had predictably escaped the blanket of Athera’s magnetic field through the distressed consciousness of the trees, a signal spun out like a carrier wave along the defunct path of a homing spell wrought at past need by the Fellowship.
Wraiths sensed even subtle shifts in vibration. Wedded to hatred, they savored the taste of human malice and conflict. Any breath of upheaval piqued their raw needs like the scent of freshly spilled blood. Tugged by their insatiable drive to consume, they left Marak and groped down the tenuous thread through deep space, beckoned on by faint promise of a world lush with teeming life. Other wraiths trailed in the wake of their brethren, this second wave pressured on by a rivalry that clawed tooth and nail for survival.
Kharadmon saw at once that the ongoing exodus would not dwindle into attrition. The wraiths in the lead sensed the horde crowding their heels. They would scarcely turn back, to be slashed and torn in a rage of psychic aggression. Their fellows would attack at the first sign of weakness, or the apparent uncertainty of retreat.
Gently, slowly, Kharadmon withdrew his awareness from the spelled cipher of warning. Freed at long last to react to his findings, he battled a wave of stark fear. No safe means existed to deter those wraiths strung down the back trail of spent spells. Once those pioneers sampled life on Athera, whether they encountered defenseless prey or the drawn lines of vigorous defense, their bloodlust would rise in earnest. Their frenzy would swiftly draw rampant thousands, excited by starveling need and the prospect of unconquered territory. Nor was Athera’s hampered Fellowship equipped to handle an invasion with the requisite, seamless subtlety.
Alone in the icy void between stars, Kharadmon faced implacable fact. Resolution of the crisis at hand demanded no less than the diligent work of two Sorcerers: one to mask Marak, blindsiding the massed entities still seething at large on the wasted planet. Only then could the inbound wraiths be reeled in and contained, each spirit laboriously winnowed separate and Named, then restored to its shattered identity.
Nor would the next likely option bear weight, that a masterbard’s talent might be pressed to assist. Arithon s’Ffalenn was already set in grave jeopardy. If his flight to reach sanctuary at Ithamon succeeded, if the ancient protections there let him stand down Desh-thiere’s