TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Restored to awareness, she crouched, bent and weeping over the charred wreckage of her hands. The fires beneath had somehow extinguished, a mystery she had no scrap of resource to pursue. From whatever source, the intervention had come too late to spare her from ruin. Blackened stubs of stripped bone, stuck with scorched meat and tendons, remained clamped with welded tenacity to the Waystone.

  The jewel was still hot. Smoke purled reeking wisps from the crabbed remnants of her fingers. Underneath, the heartcore of the jewel was uncracked; its facets still gleamed, the spiked core of the matrix glimmering with needles of poised force.

  Limp, all but broken, Selidie croaked the command to restore the grand focus to quiescence. As the jewel's powers ebbed, then finally deserted her, she shuddered under the assault of a pain beyond all rational endurance. Overset by reaction and visceral horror, Prime Selidie tore her flaking flesh free.

  She would have collapsed, had two ranking seniors not rushed forward and caught her. Their trembling grasp shored her up, a staunch presence bracing her shoulders.

  'Come,' someone said. 'Let us get you away.' Then, 'Just lean back and breathe. Asya's already gone to the sisterhouse. She's bringing a third-rank healer to help straightaway.'

  Selidie dragged in a coarse, moaning breath. Through a nightmare of agony, she struggled for speech: how had the fires of Davien's conjury extinguished? An inarticulate whimper rasped from her throat, weak as a newborn kitten's.

  The seeress used her crystal, tapped her gift of empathy, and road her Prime's balked intent. Her neutral voice answered and resolved burning need. 'The Betrayer included a limiting rune. His fire spell dispersed by itself.'

  Which meant, all along, there had been no danger. Amid greasy smoke and the scorched waste of her wardspell, Prime Selidie absorbed the cruel truth: that the squared circle would not have been breached; nor would the Great Waystone have cracked under stress. Had she held back, taken one cool moment to weigh risks, she could have escaped with no further harm than a few scalded blisters.

  'Oh, mercy, my hands,' she groaned through locked teeth. Her head lolled back, singed hair tumbled loose, as her attendants bore her up and assisted her tottering step. 'Burned to the bone, and for nothing.' She wanted to howl, that she had been wantonly crippled by tricks, the victim of her own cleverness.

  She understood Davien's promise with Elaira had been nothing more than fiendish bait all along.

  Like a headstrong, green fool, she had succumbed to assumption, and treated with the Betrayer as though he was an unshielded spirit.

  'You know what this means,' she gasped, excoriated by trapped rage and humiliation. Shocked, spinning on the verge of hysteria, she pulled up short, and cried out to the devastated sisters who tended her, 'What in the name of Ath's creation has this Fellowship meddler become?' It's a discorporate entity, Davien should not have possessed the means to evade her laid snare!

  'Hush,' soothed the seeress. 'Never mind. Keep you still.'

  Another initiate burst in with soaked towels. Solicitous hands eased the Prime down on a cushioned divan and started the tender task of wrapping the seared bones of her fingers. Soon after, Selidie lost her last wits to the pain.

  A dimmed voice of protest funneled to her through a roaring storm of torment. 'Mercy on her, can't this wait for a posset?'

  Then at last, someone kind forced a rag to her mouth and muffled her mindless screaming.

  * * *

  Back on Daon Ramon Barrens, naked to the skin, the Sorceref Davien rubbed his hands down the lean, muscled line of his flanks. Then, bothered by the nagging pull of a cramp, he clasped his immaculate, artist's fingers and stretched linked arms over his head. The flex of his lips held both sorrow and irony as he cast a glance eastward, and murmured, 'My dear, the lesson was harshly unpleasant, but needful. You will certainly think twice before you wield the power of your order, or poke prying hands into Fellowship business again.'

  Supremely untroubled by the blasting wind, or by the last wisping snowfall that dewed his pale skin and flecked spangling flakes amid tumbled, cinnabar hair, Davien closed his dark eyes.

  He dispatched a ranging thought to the east, and assured himself that Elaira's spirit had returned without harm to her body. She would waken shortly in the hostel near Eastwall, secure within the adept's sacred grove, and none the worse for her spiritwalk in Daon Ramon.

  Then, freed to attend to more pressing matters, the Sorcerer regarded the blanketed form of Earl Jieret, lashed wrist and ankle before him.

  Davien's knife-sharp brows gathered into a frown. He bent, his questing touch light as a ghost's, and ascertained the clan chieftain was unconscious. Pulse and breathing were regular. The caithdein's condition was stressed, his body dehydrated from blood loss, but in no threat of imminent collapse. Faultlessly gentle, the Betrayer turned the man's head. He straightened the snarled clan braid, then stroked the soot-streaked, snake locks of loosened hair from the chieftain's cheek and forehead. 'Brave one, take my promise, you won't suffer alone any longer.'

  Last, his formed will made manifest as an intricate tracery of light, the Sorcerer imprinted the cipher to summon Traithe's raven against the caithdein's stilled brow.

  He added a whispered blessing, then finished, 'Act wisely and well.'

  Davien straightened up. His flesh by now stung to a blush by the cold, he tipped back his head. The aquiline jut of his profile formed a stamped cameo against the black rock of the outcrop as a poised second passed. Then a soundless explosion of light ripped his male figure into formless static. The sparks winked and faded. In their place, an eagle shot upward, winging purposefully northward into the waning night.

  Behind, flurried in a backwash of winnowed snow, the raptor left the elegant, clear imprint of two naked human feet.

  Shortly there came a gyrating wind, which blurred their edges, then fully erased them.

  Late Winter 5670

  Second Dawn

  Winter's latest rank blizzard slowly wore itself out. Early daylight painted the cloud banks over Daon Ramon to a sea of raging vermilion. The muffled hills were loaf sugar beneath, veined black where the swift, open streamlets carved through the meandering seams of the gullies. For Braggen, holed up under the clotted boughs of a thicket with three blown-out horses on lead reins, the storm's ending increased the potential for lethal setback. He had been forced to pause in his flight with Prince Arithon since several hours before, as the heavy drifts piled too high.

  No horse could gallop, mired to the chest. Set to awkward flight, he could not risk becoming a slow-moving target for Etarra's crack teams of archers. While the blizzard tapered off, he had shivered in wait, hoping the lessening snowfall would mask his rucked trail, plain as a plowed furrow across the pristine curve of the swales. Braggen took stringent steps to evade chance discovery. He blindfolded the horses. Then he smeared their nostrils with a wintergreen salve and strapped on burlap nose bags to smother their keen sense of smell. Should mounted riders close in, he could ill afford the prompt of a whinny if his small herd called in challenge. The country was too riddled with headhunter trackers to countenance the exposure. If he chanced to be flushed, the prince in his charge would be doomed; even to inexperienced eyes, the drifts disclosed each sign of disturbance as cleanly as inked lines on a manuscript.

  The day brightened, affirming as fact that Braggen's restraint had been nothing but stark necessity.

  Beyond the screening lattice of caked branches, the stitched tracks of several mounted patrols scored the hillsides, basted with the zigzagged game trails of deer and the skipped prints of winter-furred hare. The clansman resigned himself. He had no choice but bide. At least the ditch where he sheltered was snagged in wild briar. The tangle formed a vicious bulwark of thorn, nearly impassable to a horse, and for a man, a snagging trap that invited scored flesh and ripped clothing.

  Braggen had needed spur and whip to drive his three animals through. That harsh foresight, and his hunter's instinct for weather, h
ad let him seek cover in time. The prints of his back trail lay well buried before the snow dwindled and the gusts backed down to a breeze.

  Through the inactive hours, the gruff clansman did what he could, shifting his gear onto the cream gelding and rubbing down the tired animal he had ridden. The horse bearing Arithon could not be relieved. The far ridge had sparkled with torches, before dawn. By now the Alliance scouts ranged out in force, the deep-winter silence marred by the occasional snatched fragments of their hailing shouts. Should a passing patrol flush him from cover, Braggen refused to be set on the run with his prince caught in the change between one mount and the next.

  For a mercy, the royal body wrapped in Jieret's bearskin was warm, if scarcely breathing. Now and again, Braggen bared the pale face, inanimate as death in repose. Not even an eyelash would flicker when he dripped melted snow to moisten the slack-jawed mouth. The blued eyelids stayed closed, and the unbandaged hand remained slack in the bindings that secured the scarred forearm against the horse's wet neck. The fine, sculptured bones and spare symmetry of each knuckle gave graphic testament to the disastrous confrontation that had so narrowly missed costing Earl Jieret his life. What liegeman could behold the startling grace of those fingers and not grasp the tragic truth: that this prince was not and never had been a man made for wielding the sword.

  'My liege, I am sorry,' Braggen whispered, though he harbored no fondness for sentiment. Yet even against his hardened sensibilities, he saw that Arithon s'Ffalenn should be nowhere near this brutal setting. The crime lay beyond words, that a bard of his stature had been born at the crux of a conflict. Such talent as his should have been cosseted in comfort, surrounded by gentle company. Throughout a long lifetime, this Masterbard should have shouldered no other burden than setting his matchless voice to the extraordinary gift of his music.

  Discomfited, Braggen coughed behind his wet glove. For a nerve-wracked moment, he faced away. Then, with bearded lips compressed to a dogged line, he checked the wounded right hand to make certain no stains had leaked through the dressing. Jieret's cautery had been thorough. The measure was holding despite rough usage and the desperate, jolting ride.

  'Give his Grace no sustenance,' the High Earl had told Braggen, though the instruction seemed queerly unnatural. That any creature could survive in suspension, apparently more dead than alive, made this charge an unsettling watch duty.

  Braggen folded those too-eloquent hands under the generous cover of the bearskin. A man of visceral emotion who had been molded to austerity by bitter experience, he ate his biscuit and jerked meat stubbornly facing the hills. Bare survival demanded his unswerving attention. He tried not to dwell on the royalty strapped to the back of the horse like a sackful of raider's booty.

  Late morning, a changed wind swept the sky to clear cobalt. Braggen aroused from a catnap with sun in his eyes, and cursed the untrustworthy weather. Risen temperature had already laddered the clumped ice on the branches to plinking, glass droplets. The snow silvered also, glazed to a crust where the shade fell. Even the slight thaw brought conditions from ugly to worse. By nightfall, the drifts would be armored with ice, an outright gift to a tracker since an old trail would seal with the freeze. The fluffy light snow and churned clods where horses breasted a fresh passage were going to become impossible to conceal.

  Braggen saw no alternative, had already faced the flat recognition that he could not remain tucked in hiding. Each passing hour let his enemies close in, among them Lysaer s'Ilessid. Only two days remained of the grace period that allowed Arithon's spirit to stay safely bound in the sword blade. If the Teir's'Ffalenn was not carried beyond range of Desh-thiere's curse before then, the disaster that followed would lie beyond all hope of mending. Braggen fretted, weighed his dearth of unlovely options, then committed his resource to the one that looked the most promising.

  The Alliance patrols combed the brush for clan fugitives. His best chance of upset lay in contrary action: he would not give them a skulking target.

  Committed to peril, Braggen waxed the string and bent his, yew longbow. While the sun slowly climbed the arc to the zenith and dipped past the high mark of noon, he subjected each one of his arrows to an exhaustive inspection. The ones with worn fletching and uneven shafts, he discarded. The rest, he punched into the snow in neat rows, the best ones ranked nearest to hand. An old hunter's trick, he slit a thread off the cuff of Arithon's silk shirt and snagged it to one of the branches. The streamer would act as a telltale to read every minor shift in the wind.

  He checked the blindfolded horses again and filled their nose bags with grain. Lastly, he waited. Not temperamental when his task involved raiding, he held his nerves vised to a serpent's cold patience. He stood his ground, stilled, with only the day's shadows moving.

  The next patrol happened by in the late afternoon, a half dozen of Etarra's elite troops whose field experience included the reiving habits of headhunters. As the curve of the hill steered their progress, Braggen could see bloodstains pinking the sweat on their horses' flanks. Each man's saddlecloth wore a fringework of scalps, the ripped hide raw red where some late victim's clan braid had been hacked off as a trophy.

  Nearer, the six came. Their course was going to pass the thicket quite closely. Braggen held fast, unafraid of detection. Around him, for clear yards on all sides, the drifted snow lay unbroken. The trampled passage of two earlier patrols crossed the slopes, right and left, an imprinted reassurance that nothing untoward had entered the vale since the scouts had made their last sweep.

  The men bearing in, their reins looped at a walk, had just survived a fresh skirmish. If their bullish senior officer looked bothered by saddle sores, his underlings were cocky, loudmouthed with high spirits and victory. They moved upwind as well; their horses were not going to be first to scent the bunched geldings masked in the thicket. The party drew nearer. Engrossed in a moment of jocular pantomime, they entrusted their mounts to pick their own footing. Predictably, their track skirted the far rim of the gully where the wind-razed dusting of snow offered easier passage for animals whose legs were scraped raw from punching through ice-crusted drifts.

  The late sunlight picked out detail with merciless clarity: of clotted swords jammed into scabbards, uncleaned, and saddle packs bulging with booty. Braggen recognized one of the braids, the seal brown one with the black-diamond snakeskin knotting the end as a tie. He had seen that marsh krait tanned by a young girl from Halwythwood as a gift to bring her sweetheart fair luck.

  She would grieve to learn that Dame Fortune had looked elsewhere this sad morning on Daon Ramon Barrens.

  His rage locked and barred behind cold-blooded purpose, Braggen firmed his grip on his bow. His movement stayed imperceptibly slow as he caught up the first, flawless arrow. He nocked the end to the string. Patient as a plaster-cast statue, he held. Coiled in a state of light, relaxed balance, he watched the oncoming riders whoop and boast, laughing as they described the favors they would claim from the ladies at home, once their purses jingled with bounty gold.

  Deadly silent, Braggen bent back his bow. As locked on his course as the draw of moon and sun, raising the unstoppable tide, he sighted his mark through the lattice of crusted branches. The steadfast word of apology he whispered was the same one accorded the deer he brought down for the stewpot. 'Forgive.'

  He released. His shaft took a rider in the middle of the pack at point-blank range through the throat.

  Another arrow; another shot, and the man behind tumbled from his saddle. The rear guard reined up in shouting surprise. A third arrow, released, slammed and folded the officer as he spun back to address the confusion.

  By then, the last man in line had belatedly noted the launching site of the bowfire.

  'There!' he screamed. 'In that thicket!' Flattened against his horse's neck, with a stout companion sharp at his heels, he charged downslope and drove his mount into the gulch.

  Ruled by nerveless experience, Braggen ignored them. His fourth arrow tracked the cool ve
teran on the bank who had kept his head in the crisis. No fool, that one jabbed spurs to his chestnut with intent to seek reinforcements. His good sense was hampered by his officer's mount, left riderless in his path. The beast wheeled and crow-hopped, both forefeet snagged in dropped reins.

  A disastrous, forced check on the part of the veteran; and Braggen's bow thwapped in release. The man fell, transfixed in the groin through the slit hem of his mail shirt.

  The other pair who had rushed to attack had dependably mired in the gully, their horses bucking the chest-deep drifts. Braggen had time to measure his shots. The trailing man was cut down, wounded, as his mare foundered, stumbling; the companion ahead clawed up the near bank under cover of his mount's neck, to be tossed forward at the shuddering pitch as the horse under him sharply missed stride. The animal went down hard, the shaft nestled into its seal-dark coat buried to the fletching behind the jaw. As its gurgling scream shattered the quiet, the rider kicked free of his stirrups. Trained in countless drills, he cast free, running; and tripped, both ankles noosed by Daon Ramon's vicious coils of briar.

  Sword out, pale with the awareness he sprawled at the mercy of the hidden clan marksman, he dropped flat and tried to kick free.

  His killed horse cost a small penalty. The blindfolded animals at Braggen's back now snorted and sidled in alarm. In jeopardy of being jostled if one broke a tether, the clansman slipped forward. At the verge of the thicket, he nocked his next arrow and took aim with exacting care.

  He wounded the last man, also. Again, on a fleeting word of apology, he shot and fully dispatched the expiring horse.

  Then, another shaft ready to draw, he waited. The two men he had deliberately crippled floundered and thrashed through the snow. Five horses, cast loose, circled and chuffed, and finally bunched up, facing the strange herd in the thicket. They snorted and tossed heads, the sharp smell of blood warring with herdbound curiosity.