TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Only an act of impeccable timing might disarm such ruthless dedication.

  The riders were now a long bowshot away. Jieret could discern faces, bearded chins tucked into wool mufflers. He could count weapons. Some carried short bows tucked into scabbards hung from the horns of their saddles. Others preferred lightweight lances, or bludgeons to brain fleeing quarry from a gallop. Jieret had seen every ugly way to die, written into the flesh of kinsmen and friends cut down for the claim of town bounties. Clammy sweat slicked his shirt to his skin. Any crack archer who handled a horn recurve might spot him for an exposed target. Jieret hunkered down with his back to the hillcrest, trusting thin cover and stillness to hide him. He held his ground, locked in stonecast patience, while the gaps in the gusts brought the jingle of mail and the snorts of the enemy horses.

  Nor did his selected prey stay elusive: the gold-sewn, light figure set at the troop's forefront shone through the drab brush like white flame.

  In arrogant disregard for the savage terrain; a bald-faced declaration that eschewed every sensible tactic, Lysaer s'Ilessid rode resplendent in glittering gold braid, spurs and bullion trappings huffed to a brilliant, high polish. The effrontery mocked. His palace courtier's dress offered the open invitation to make his sunwheel surcoat a target. Cut the head off the snake, and the coiled hatreds that drove Alliance policy would lose their coordinated purpose. Arithon of Rathain would be set free, with Desh-thiere's curse deprived of its focus.

  Even without the conflicts of mage-sight, Jieret would not have succumbed. Clan marksmen from Tysan had been first to learn that the Divine Prince could raise light in protection against mortal arrows. Today's blinding opulence offered the brazen invitation to display such invincible power.

  Jieret laid bow and arrow within easy reach, well aware the success of his effort now hinged on the powers of grand conjury.

  He must act by rote, steered step by step by his trust in Arithon's trained knowledge. Any unforeseen departure, no matter how slight, could unbind the plan laid to spare the prince and Rathain's clan survivors. Jieret picked up the quartz shard and scratched out, one by one, the innermost circle of figures. He sensed energies like pressure, grazing his skin. Small winds licked heat at his fingers. Though aware of the vortex of unseen movement turning inside the marked space, he lacked understanding of the forces he handled. For the strike prearranged to deflect Desh-thiere's curse, the delicate strictures of check and balance had been instilled into formula. The steps framed a summons of appeal to the elements, a linked chain of command dangerously harnessed to the quickened awareness of powers so raw, their rising punched Jieret's gut like a fist.

  Vertigo raked him, tinged by nausea. His ears seemed to crackle with subliminal sound, as though strayed pulses of charge played over his aura. He felt saturated. Like the slosh of a bucket brimful of stirred liquid, the primal potential of unformed event threatened to shatter his inner balance.

  More terrified of that strangeness than of straightforward death by enemy steel, Jieret laid his petition to engage the winds into the central ciphers. He asked a permission, then observed the startling wonder of his need, granted. A flare of fine light flowed in from the scribed mark at east, and spread subtle fire throughout the hoop of laid runes. The experience raised a shudder of gooseflesh. Jieret resisted the seductive pull of an awe that whirled him to distraction. Within a thickening glue of poised forces, he invoked Prince Arithon's Name. Then he asked the power of wind to conjoin with his plea and become catalyst in defense of Daon Ramon.

  A gust flicked his cheek, sharp affirmation his appeal had drawn a response. One last step, and the ending rune of release would engage the finished construct; the dire coil that Arithon's trained mind had conceived, and which now relied on his caithdein's talents as cat's-paw to enact into manifestation.

  There, Jieret languished, doused in a cold sweat. He could not avoid one last, fatal glance to gauge the pace of the advance riders. They were close enough, now, that line of sight could pick out their individual preferences: the jaunty set to this man's chin, and the wry laugh of another who joked to chaff at a disgruntled companion.

  Jieret caught back his breath in wringing dismay. At the cusp of the moment, he could not shake the horror of the act his given word must commit. He could not dissemble, or evade the harsh truth, that the horsemen were sadly misguided. Despite hatred and prejudice, they were no less a part of the splendor of Ath's creation. They had mothers and daughters and brothers and wives, just as the forest-bred war band who fled from their weapons of slaughter. The fine difference, that clanblood could treat with Paravians, scarcely justified the violent rending of life.

  In the wholeness of mage-sight, a man was a man, no matter the choices that shaped his beliefs or his origins.

  Teir's'Valerient though he was, sworn to a blood-bonded legacy, Jieret found himself utterly unable to seal the spell's final closure. The forces of deception and death hanging poised offended all life, not just these victims who marched under Lysaer's sunwheel banner.

  A stunned second passed, followed by another. A fleeting few moments, and the opening would pass to enact the sole course of strategy. Jieret cursed through locked teeth. Necessity demanded. Lives stood at risk. Even the certainty of Prince Arithon's death failed to sting him back to conviction. His grip on the quartz shard went nerveless and numb.

  The memory resurged and stabbed through like vengeance, that once, he had drawn the black sword Alithiel and compelled his liege to complete an equally untenable strategy. Unmanned by horror, Arithon had pleaded; and for the ugly charge of an oath to guard his liege's given integrity, Jieret had used the sword's power and broken him.

  Now, when the drive of Desh-thiere's curse threatened more innocent lives, no implacable hand bearing the threat of spelled steel pricked at the caithdein's back. Jieret stood alone. Against stripping doubt, he had only Arithon's trust, the sworn covenant of a mage-bond, and shared love of a measure to humble. The clan chieftain knelt, his head rested on his slack forearms. Unable to master himself, he could not recoup his sapped will, even to raise his strung bow. He coughed back bitter tears. The shame rocked his core, and past record seemed inconceivable: that his prince had owned the magnanimous heart to forgive him for forcing his unwilling hand to an act of slaughter and mayhem. When, to avert a disastrous war, the fleet brought to bear Lysaer's war host to Merior had been charred to ruin on the waves of Minderl Bay.

  'Move, call out, touch a weapon, and you die!' cracked a voice in townborn accents.

  Jieret started. He suppressed the raw reflex to rise, just barely. Instinct had been accurate. He had been watched. At the corner of his vision, he picked out the whipcord-lean captain sighting him over the glint of a spanned steel quarrel. The man had dark hair and eyes like chipped ice. The commander's badge stitched to his shoulder seemed merited. Jieret must defer to the ruthless, cool poise in the hands that aimed the cocked crossbow.

  'Stand up. Very slowly.' No fear in that order; only competence that made retribution a certainty.

  Acute peril shattered Jieret's deadlocked indecision. Finality faced him. If he crossed the Wheel, cut down by a quarrel, his fall must seal Arithon's death. Pulse racing as panic threatened to darken the pitched sensitivity of his mage-sight, the Earl of the North bent his head. No need to feign the shock of defeat as he tightened his hold on the quartz shard. His shaking limbs would not let him stand upright. All options were forfeit but one. Jieret inscribed the Paravian cipher for ending and closed the inner, spelled circle. Then, as though pleading for Dharkaron's deliverance from the enemy holding him cornered, he whispered the last words of release.

  'Stand up, I said!' barked the townborn commander. 'Or lie there stone dead with my steel through your neck. You won't gain by delay. Your henchmen can't save you. My trackers made certain before I closed in. You're alone, Red-beard, and bound for your overdue reckoning at the hand of the Blessed Prince.'

  Jieret sealed the incantation. He lifted his h
ead. Turning his body in feigned surrender, he masked the critical, trailing finger that snagged off the loose twist of silk. The acorn imbued as the Teir's'Ffalenn's fetch rolled free of its protective covering. The cleared charge of its presence keyed the spelled circle active. The kick of connection as bound force locked with catalyst flared through Jieret's body, a brief, leaching burn of meshed energies.

  The man bearing the crossbow stiffened. Perhaps rankled by an unsettled shift in the breeze, or a hint of latent talent, he somehow marked the shocked, lucid moment as the elements aligned before cataclysm.

  Earl Jieret stood erect, a weaponless target. Blind instinct screamed warning: his harmless appearance would not disarm the adversary now primed to kill him. Through a howling force like a vast, indrawn breath, and the cry of raised mysteries, mage-sensed, he provoked, 'Have Lysaer take my personal reckoning, instead.'

  The crossbow twanged in release. Timed to the same second, the ritually laid circles relinquished the amplified signature of Arithon's Named presence to be winnowed on the random play of the winds.

  Light answered.

  Not the gentled fires of raised spellcraft, but the annihilating blaze of Desh-thiere's curse unleashed in ferocious hatred;

  Already set on hair-trigger edge, Lysaer s'Ilessid lashed out with his gift on the surge of animal reflex.

  The coruscation ripped through the winter air like forge-heated steel plunged screaming into white ice. The bolts struck too closely spaced to assimilate. Rattled by the drumroll concussion, shaken bone from bone by the booming reports as the hills rocked and slammed under punishment, Jieret scarcely knew whether the crossbolt ripped over his head, or if wood, feather, and forge-sharpened steel had been reduced by instantaneous immolation.

  For that moment, Lysaer's fury consumed all the world. His howling screams meshed with the shriek of hurled balefire. Spurred by the illusion, driven wild by the surety that his half brother's being surrounded him, the Blessed Prince gave vent to the full range of his powers. Again and again, the bright levin bolts rained down. The teasing winds bearing their illusion whirled and parted, unmoved by the turmoil as he extended himself to obliterate his nemesis in a murderous fit of possessed hatred.

  The blasts seared across Daon Ramon's seamed hilltops. Jieret towered, knocked flat by their unleashed violence. Though the protection of the elements raised to guard point within the outermost ring of his circle spared his life, he could not dissociate from the killing shock to the land.

  Snow sheared into steam. Brush and briar torched in conflagration. While the concussive reports slammed and battered the ground, ancient bedrock exploded and burst. Fragments kicked aloft, smelted to run lava that fused into teardrop nuggets of black slag. The grip of Desh-thiere's curse subjugated its victim with a force that canceled all mercy. More than once, Jieret had borne witness to horror: he had seen the last trace of humanity extinguished from Arithon's eyes.

  Lysaer was all the more sorrowfully vulnerable, lacking the course of arduous self-discipline Rauven's mages had instilled in his half brother. The s'Ilessid prince had no resource to grapple the twisted obsession that drove him. That pitiless consequence Arithon had foreseen, and turned to his hand as a weapon. His knowledge and Jieret's fresh talent had been conjoined to raise fiendishly inventive devastation. 'The sense of my presence will prod from all sides, an irresistible provocation. Desh-thiere's geas will triumph at a stroke. Lysaer will lose all reason. He might well be pressed to expend himself until he drops from exhaustion.' The massive assault did not recognize limits. The rage stirred to life by the windblown essence of the fetch kept up its jabbing aggravation, invoking the cursed mind to still more desperate response. Lysaer went mad. Trusted friends assumed the appearance of foes. No matter how loyal, the neat ranks of Alliance horses and men were shown no grace of reprieve. The light razed their brave ranks at a stroke. Jieret coughed on blown smoke. His stomach clenched from the stench of charred meat.

  'Ath show them mercy!' he ground out through a flattening spasm of nausea.

  Yet no piercing regret could ever reverse the consequence of his action. On all sides, the land raged in wildfire, stitched through by sheet lightning and levin bolts. Narms's headhunter company was already consumed. Memory and flesh, their corpses were winnowed to carbon and ash, lost before they could draw breath and scream.

  More mercifully dead than the raped clanswomen and girls, once burned alive in Deshir; yet peace did not come. The last bolt whiplashed the sultry sky. Its harsh, slapping echoes rolled over the hills blasted to waste and black char, and then faded. Stillness returned, more dreadfully empty than the stunned quiet after an earthquake. Jieret propped himself on one elbow. For the sake of the incised black arrow that waited, he dared to survey the vista left by his handiwork.

  A lone fleck, pristine white against ravaged landscape, Lysaer crouched, undone. At some point, he must have dismounted. Collapsed on his knees in dangerous proximity to the skittering hooves of his charger, he still clutched his reins out of habit. The gold sunwheel emblazoned on the breast of his mantle invited the arrow that would finish him.

  Jieret swallowed. The merest thought of drawing his bow stitched his gut into wrenching distress.

  The remorse in the hunched s'Ilessid shoulders was too human, the fair face laid bare by revulsion that damned with too honed an edge of stark truth. Despite the past cruelties embedded within the campaigns launched at Tal Quorin and Vastmark; regardless of proof, that Lysaer's brilliant statesmanship could effortlessly reclothe ugly facts in self-righteous lies, the caithdein of Rathain could not evade his own callous manipulation. The s'Ilessid gift of justice and Desh-thiere's warped curse had become his ready tools to cast his own drama of purging destruction.

  Even for Rathain, the price came too high. The leveling unity exposed by his mage-sight unstrung the illusion of vengeance.

  Amid blighting drifts of smoke and whipped ash, through the actinic flares left scored by each light bolt's aftershock, Jieret beheld the wisped haze of spirit light ripped out by the trauma as each victim perished. Like a lingering malady, he tasted the acid despair of every man's unfulfilled dreams. He ached for their grief, crying their wordless woe for the beloved families the Alliance crusade of false justice had left abandoned and fatherless.

  His throat knotted, Jieret called on the force of bare will and closed his hand on the strung bow. His integrity as caithdein was the lynchpin for a kingdom, in a strategy that must not fail. If he folded to shame, these deaths would become but the first wave of casualties in an unraveling chain of disaster. Compassion for life could not exonerate him. He guarded the very threshold of hope, a short step from the act that would free his crown sovereign from the perils of Desh-thiere's vengeance. One stroke would secure Prince Arithon's safety, and unshackle a future that relied on restored charter law.

  Jieret reached in resolve. He touched the black arrow, and cried out, jerked back by the burn of his own hatred. The energy coiled like unclean filth into the steel of the broadhead. He saw rage and cruelty: long years of unreleased grief for his mother and sisters, slowly twisted into a whispering poison. The taint stained the fiber of feather and twine, a man's dark domination of innocent wood, whose place in Ath's order served no cause and no purpose beyond an abiding peace without word for suffering bloodshed.

  The dichotomy snapped him. Convulsed in a silenced, agonized sob, Jieret abandoned the arrow. He could no more have wielded the bow in his hand than he could have knifed his own child.

  No moment could yield a more wretched exposure as the muffled clank of a crossbow's cranked ratchet sawed through drifted smoke and stunned quiet.

  Jieret flung himself prostrate. Tear blinded, near helpless, he realized his enemy must have sheltered beneath the rock rim of the hillcrest. He lay flat, pulse racing. Torn nerves and outraged senses still stressed him to gasping vertigo. He could not grip his sword. One attempt, and his gut seized to cramps at the barest touch of forged steel. Ripped prostrate by
gagging spasms of nausea, he realized muscle and nerve would not harken to the bald-faced demands of survival. Defenseless as a babe before the thundering chord that called him to rejoin Ath's unity, Jieret wept for his daughter and wife. His tears fell as bitter for the prince yet to pay the fatal cost of his weakness.

  'Brother, forgive me,' he whispered in shame.

  For answer, a loose rock scraped at his back. The shriek of steel cable as the crossbow released tore through the blameless song of the breeze. Jieret accepted the hammering whap as the bolt ripped into his shoulder. Smashed facedown on chill stone, the let flood of his bleeding a tortured echo struck through the weave of the lane flux, he found the grounding spike of raw pain an almost welcome relief.

  He coughed, spitting gravel. Dizziness raked him in beating, black waves. Through ebbing senses, he heard his enemy's footsteps stumble upon his array of scribed runes and spelled circles.

  'Don't cross the line,' Jieret warned, eyes pinched shut against the spasm of agony that wrenched him to shuddering paralysis. 'Enough killing's done.'

  But the sunwheel officer's stunned exclamation overrode his whispered protest. 'Light save us all! You're no clan fugitive, but Shadow's damned henchman, and a sorcerer!'

  'Don't cross the circle,' Jieret begged. If he would die a failure, let him not go with more spell-wrought deaths on his conscience.

  'I'll do more than cross.' his enemy snapped back. 'I'll erase every unclean line of your works, and destroy the fell seed of your conjury.'

  Movement; a grate of kicked gravel, then an eddy of breeze acrid with carbon brushed across Jieret's exposed cheek. Then mage-sight exploded in a shower of sparks as the armed townsman scuffed out the first line, with the command for a ritual cleansing. 'Avert!'