TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Reassurance came back, whispered through shadow grained with the smoke of burned herbs, and the more acrid bite released by tobacco spiked with a tienelle infusion. 'The Betrayer appears to be in no hurry.'

  In fact, the seeress went on to explain, he had made ingenious use of Sulfin Evend's crude ward to evade infringing the Law of the Major Balance. Lysaer's Lord Commander had drawn the ring with intent to deflect an outside interference; Davien perforce had respected free will. The quartz sphere reflected his avian form, a gliding dark shuttlecock on the loom of the air. Each pass threaded spellcraft, knitting a clever veil of illusory affirmation that nothing untoward should transpire inside the rim of the circle.

  Outside, the Sorcerer could do as he liked, beyond concern that either Lysaer s'Ilessid or Sulfin Evend should perceive his industrious activity.

  'He's alighted on the outcrop above Earl Jieret,' the seeress gave dutiful report.

  The coral curve of Selidie's lips showed delicate satisfaction. She crossed the last cipher, set the rune of ending, then laid aside the wax stylus. Flushed by the sped pulse of excitement, she arranged a silver, lion-foot tripod just above the rim of her construct. Last, she unwrapped the amethyst Waystone.

  Its bared facets unleashed a flood of chill air, and the warning, charged scent of ozone. The bronze candlestand with its burning wick shot tangles of ruby reflection through the shadowy heart of the stone. Each movement reverent, the Prime settled the sphere in the wrought ring with its sigils of warding and guard. She fussed, bringing its central axis to alignment above the geometrical figures of binding restriction. She rotated the jewel widdershins in its cradle, testing and tuning its position by increments until she ascertained its optimum orientation.

  Lastly, she checked: the silk scarf sewn with the ninefold copper sigils of imprisonment lay within instant reach, tucked underneath her left sleeve cuff.

  The last steps were complete. Despite trained restraint, Selidie Prime shuddered to the raw thrill of anticipation. She embarked on a feat no Koriani Matriarch before her had ever dared to attempt. If she met success, within the next minutes, she would hold a Fellowship Sorcerer pinned under the power of the Great Waystone.

  'Stand ready to anchor me,' she bade the four wand-bearing seniors awaiting, their even breaths settled in preparedness.

  A final exhale, and Selidie engaged her own iron discipline. Her mind spiraled downward into deep calm. Eyes closed, she cupped her palms over the Waystone. The amethyst's cool surface became faintly clouded with moisture under her animal touch. Quiet settled, as though a sealed bubble surrounded her person through the eerie suspension as the jewel awoke to her presence.

  That stillness deceived, the velvet glove concealing the knife. As always, the jewel's awareness slammed active with no warning, a buzzing wasp storm of rage that lashed through every sensitized nerve. Selidie endured, her resistance passive. Fear, and bright agony ripped past without foothold as the Waystone's barbed spite spewed like a maelstrom through her mind.

  The flood tore at her, shrieking, a ferocious, seeking assault that pried to find foothold in weakness. Should the torrent breach even a pinhole flaw, or hook any chink of insecurity, Selidie would be lost. Her consciousness would drown in that roiling, mad spate, bound hostage along with many another matriarch who had failed the stone's testing before her.

  The jewel laid traps, offered false turnings and ambush; it lured and lulled, teasing her guard with illusory bouts of quiescence. As often as the Matriarch had threaded the maze, no passage was ever the same. Dewed with perspiration, she withstood blowl and blandishments, until the wave of the great amethyst's malice reached a crest. On the poised instant between flood and ebb, she threaded the precisely tuned sigils that suborned wild might into mastery.

  Peace descended, a bursting jolt of pure ecstasy that never failed to stun the mind for the space of a heartbeat. Selidie smiled, ceded a focus of clear power that would act on the breath of her whim.

  Her living palm wielded the poised axis of a force that could imprison the shade of a Fellowship Sorcerer. No talent on Athera could move to prevent her. Davien had betrayed his colleagues before. His seclusion within the caverns at Kewar had extended for centuries, a withdrawal so deep, his colleagues were unlikely to miss him. Selidie aligned the Great Waystone to the Prime's sigil of command, the symbol that held mastery over every initiate sworn to the Koriani Order. At her call, Elaira must answer. The Betrayer was discorporate, his sealed word a direct and binding attachment to his unshielded spirit. His promise to Elaira would hold him in linkage; and like the jessed raptor tied to a creance, the Matriarch could reel him in.

  Her figured square with its sigils of confinement had been well laid to receive him. Selidie's smile displayed perfect, white teeth. Ripe for the challenge, she addressed the seeress, 'Davien's still engaged? Excellent. He'll be taken unaware. For safety, the moment has come to disperse your spells of scrying.'

  Silk rustled across the hushed chamber as the seeress bent to her quartz sphere. Her raised hand overshadowed the scene it depicted, of the great golden eagle, landed in the soft snow beside the stilled form of Earl Jieret. Her traced cipher of release dispelled the connection. As the image faded, Davien's musing thought to Elaira bled through, a ghost's whisper carried across time and space as the contact dwindled, 'When this is over, you'll just have to trust me to safeguard the life of your prince . . .'

  The connection is severed,' the seeress confirmed.

  Selidie drew herself erect, then raised her right hand from the Waystone's chill surface. Eyes closed, her left palm still in contact, she extended her forefinger and traced the cipher of prime domination over the facet framed by her touch. The crystal responded. A spiraling wind of raised force filled the chamber, tuning the air like a soundless chord and lifting the hair at the nape to a clamor of instinctive warning.

  Spider still as she bided in wait for the gathering power to peak, Selidie savored the rapture of her unbridled anticipation.

  Once the Betrayer lay at the order's mercy, she could seize the Named imprint of his consciousness. Given that template, she could then craft the specialized sigil to rule him. His formidable power would become hers to milk. With Asandir absent, and Sethvir laid low, the Prime Matriarch would stand unopposed. She could unleash the old knowledge she guarded. Within the next minutes, she would claim the sure leverage to free the Koriani Order and lead mankind back into ascendancy.

  The Waystone reached resonance. Embraced by a pall of silvery light as its field of charged forces surrounded her, Selidie closed and sealed the last link that enabled the squared circle of entrapment. Then she spoke the name of Elaira three times over the prime sigil of command.

  The summons crossed the barriers of time and distance. Reaction was instantaneous: Elaira's spirit was netted in by main force from her far-off sojourn in Daon Ramon. Selidie sensed the moment of contact; felt the spelled directive cast its taut mesh over the enchantress and the Fellowship Sorcerer that folly had tied into partnership.

  The Great Waystone heated against Selidie's clasped hands. 'We have him!' she crowed as the sigil clamped down, its barbed hooks deeply set into her hapless quarry. 'May he well rue the day that his kind bound our sisterhood under the compact!'

  Without the bone and flesh of a body, Davian would have no foothold to anchor him at the instant of flux.

  The crystal's charged matrix served as ladder and gateway, spanning the axis of existence. Selidie kept watchful contact, light fingers tracing the pulse as her array of keyed spellcraft thundered to enable the threshold opened within. Inside the holding, split second of recall, she grazed against the full awareness of the Sorcerer's being. Davien's presence loomed vast, power chained into knotted complexity beyond mortal thinking to grasp. He was leashed might and lightning, dark unknown and gold light, a conscious pavane of moving energy, the essence of which strained away through her grasp like blown smoke.

  'No!' Stunned by the sense of his substance elud
ing her, Selidie cupped the Great Waystone in a convulsive grip. Already hot, the stone lit to burning, polarized in return by something that did not bleed away as Davien's awareness departed. Along with Elaira's oathbound spirit, the Prime detected a packaged bundle of energies. She could not tag its signature. Its presence was a puff of movement and air, an impression half-formed as a spell weave of runes caught up like a burr in the transfer.

  The Prime received warning, but no time to react. Before thought could respond and snap the connection, the fragment of malice the Betrayer delivered lodged inside the sealed well of her trap.

  The Waystone rang like a bell. The inbound vibration raised a standing wave that could not be damped at short notice, tuned as it was into phased resonance with the prime cipher of command. To force the calibration awry was no option. The interlocked currents would turn lethal with imbalance. Only through controlled care and a ritual sequence of steps could the power be bled off in harmless dispersal.

  White ice under pressure, Selidie stamped down rattled nerves. She could outface this crisis. Strong enough not to be hazed into panic, she uttered the first cantrip to discharge the prime cipher.

  Too late; already a silver jet of possibility erupted within the circled square. Then the tendril became manifest. Orange flame licked up the silver legs of the tripod and engulfed the Waystone still clasped between the Prime Matriarch's hands.

  Singed to blisters, she yanked back, then cursed the thoughtless speed of brute reflex.

  The lapsed contact had broken her rapport with the jewel. Cut off from access, she had lost her means to steer the amethyst's roused might to quiescence.

  Although the disbanding of the prime cipher had granted Elaira's spirit an immediate release from the summoning, the crafted lines of the construct to imprison a Sorcerer still glowed on the hardwood floor. The eightfold sigils of binding remained fully active, a ranging force laid down with all but indelible potency.

  Selidie cradled reddened hands to her breast, her curse a cracked note of frustration as she encompassed the scope of expanding dilemma. The Waystone's raised matrix was linked to the spells. She could not breach their warding from outside to quench the fire, which was real, a ridiculous crudity kept fueled by wax polish and blackening walnut parquet. To intervene would unleash the Waystone's raised field, inviting an uncontrolled backlash that would kill every enchantress caught within range. Nor was delay feasible. The flames nipped and crackled, hot enough to shatter the great amethyst. The jewel's loss was unthinkable, a blow that would cripple the order's best strength and destroy an irreplaceable reservoir of stored knowledge.

  'Dharkaron's Black Spear strike us all to perdition!' Selidie howled in black fury. The ignominious simplicity enraged her, that the Betrayer should have balked her bold play with no more than a commonplace firestorm. Not only was the Great Waystone at risk, but the building heat of the conflagration was melting the dark wax that defined the eight ciphers of containment. Another minute would see the wards breached from within, likely seeding a spiraling holocaust.

  Prime Selidie fell back upon crude expedient, and snatched the silk stitched with the ninefold sigils of imprisonment from her sleeve cuff. Cast the cloth over the Waystone, and its ties to the construct would be cut. The wards in the silk could withstand its raised power. Wrapped and pulled to safety, the stone could stay masked, the forces of backlash held in abeyance until the irritating threat of the fire spell was resolved.

  Driven frantic as she snapped the folds from the cloth, Selidie called instructions to the four seniors standing as anchors. 'Scribe a fresh circle! We're going to need a new set of wards laid down underlaid by the forces of water!' The construct would close a catchframe of containment and stay the spread of the flames. 'Act swiftly!'

  Within a scant second, the wax ciphers binding the original squared circle were going to puddle and give way, spilling who knew what chaos of Davien's to the caprice of the four winds and beyond.

  Selidie cast the unfurled cloth over the dark facets of the Waystone. The licking blaze snapped and ignited the hem, then flared up the gauze-thin silk. Selidie cried out as the sewn copper sigils liquefied in the heat. A searing rain of metallic droplets pattered over her wrists and hands. Scalded, she gasped out a whistling breath as the ephemeral cloth wisped to ash.

  'Maker preserve, we're in trouble now,' wailed one of the watching enchantresses.

  'Be silent!' Weeping tears for the setback, shaken with pain Selidie wrestled to center her distracted mind. Disaster beckoned. She had less than a heartbeat to act. No choice remained, no choice at all; she must surrender burned hands to the fire and reforge her snapped link with the Waystone.

  Once she harnessed the amethyst's matrix, she could wield its empowered focus. The construct for containment and Davien's sent spell could both be doused at one stroke.

  But she had to subdue the roused Waystone first. Already lashed into unbridled resonance, the jewel would strike with instantaneous force. Its assault would be unrelenting. Selidie would have no moment of preparation, no interlude of testing quiet in which to compose her riled nerves. Worse still, she must distance every distraction. The risk was unilateral. She could not divide her resources, even to set the most basic protection to safeguard her unshielded hands.

  While she battled the Waystone, the fire would burn her. In peril of her very survival, she must yield no thought to the horror, must stand unmoved by torment. Fail in rigid discipline, and the spite in the amethyst would claim her. Personal consciousness would be dragged under and shackled, a living imprisonment more final than Daelion Fatemaster's damnation.

  Too many of her predecessors had been lost in times past, never to see rescue or recovery.

  Not courageous at all, but ruled by the gauntlet of duty, Prime Selidie spread trembling, blistered fingers. She thrust her arms through the fire, screaming out her raw fear. Then, her dread vented, a hold like cold death clamped over her traumatized mind, the Prime Matriarch groped for the Waystone.

  Eyes closed, consumed by unflinching purpose, Selidie refused to acknowledge the stink of her own charring flesh. The actinic flare of outraged nerves reamed her through, then became stripped of meaning by the bared lash of her will. She held herself shuttered. Entombed in a bastion of self-imposed calm, all her focused resource pitched to wrestle the Waystone's ferocious peril, she blundered toward her objective. Her weeping skin made contact with a searing hiss. Now wedded to the amethyst's deadly, dark facets, she would either immolate herself, or wrest out an avenue of yielding surrender through which she could impose dominance.

  Crowded, battered, pummeled by the maelstrom of the stone's viciousness, she lost all thoughts but the one that secured her self-identity. Time lost cohesion. She could not stay the onslaught to know whether the wax sigils had melted, or if the squared circle had breached. All details became immaterial: whether her hands became crisped to the bone did not matter, or whether the Great amethyst would shear into cracks and shatter to fragments from heat stress.

  Nor dared she acknowledge the gibbering cries of lost primes, their ghost presence turbulent about her as they mocked, or gabbled their insane advice. Slaved consciousnesses, all, they were part of the Waystone's imprinted core, a storehouse of past wisdom and historical detritus, evolved into sentient malice.

  As crystal, the amethyst could not access itself; insatiably hungry, it craved to add Selidie's awareness to its purgatory of trapped spirits. Those assimilated human thoughts and emotions provided the enlivening seeds, enabling its matrix to evolve through interactive conception.

  Selidie resisted the siren cries. She deafened her being to the melting enticements that promised her pleasures unimaginable. She faced down the threats, arisen like dragon's teeth, that browbeat her resolve with vistas of limitless pain. She broke through the clamor of illusions insisting her autonomy had been broken in defeat.

  Obdurate, Selidie braced through the ordeal. Exposed, stripped naked by the shot arrows of a thousand
barbed energies, she held fast. Her stance must be strength, without desperation. Inner balance must prevail in the face of rank chaos, though earth itself should give way and crumble under her feet. She must not think, must not feel. Lose her grip on resolve, and the grinding mill of the Waystone's stewed rancor would sweep her under. She resisted as rock, hammered and smashed and pummeled by currents that wore at her reserve with the blind rage of a cataclysm.

  Damned faces streamed by, claiming to be mother, father, sister, or brother. Selidie kept her true memories wrapped silent, abjured all temptation to refute the snared spirits. To acknowledge them at all, even as impostors, was to trip and fall into a morass of hostile energies that would flay her. The Waystone's pack of captive spirits demanded, then howled. They tore with tooth and nail, hurling fragments of ancient spellcraft in their effort to wrest her spirit from its housing of breathing, warm flesh.

  More patient than the most cold-blooded predator, Selidie maintained her beleaguered pocket of calm. She resisted the falsehood, that the scope and force of the conflict had hurled her beyond time. Centuries, or mere seconds, the elapsed interval must not matter. If she succumbed to any small thread of distraction, she would become lost forever.

  Then the opening presented. Her inner sight picked up a split-second rift through the snarling legions of ghosts. Into that breach, she rammed the first sigil configured to rule the Great Waystone. One axis of four stood cleared of obstruction. Given that foothold, that abatement of ranged power, the Koriani Prime oriented her awareness within the dark heart of the sphere. Riding on spatial instinct and the hardened reserve of experience, she tapped into the amethyst's matrix, then lashed back, her will focused diamond, and her mastery unerring. As the other three sigils swept chaos before them, she achieved the stunning release. Unified peace descended as the crystal opened in limpid surrender.

  Her senses rushed back. Slapped blind and breathless by an onslaught of lacerating pain, Selidie maintained her trembling hold. She tapped the Waystone's tamed focus to steady herself, then forced open smoke-stinging eyes.