by Janny Wurts
Elaira shared each labored increment of his progress. The empathic link showed the stark determination that forged beset thoughts into focus. Step by step, under siege by Desh-thiere's curse, Arithon scaled the inhospitable face of the mountain. His beloved observed each missed foothold, breath bated through each perilous traverse, over ledges moss rotten and frost cracked. The mulled cider set at her elbow cooled off, untouched, beside currant bread barely nibbled. The adept who returned to collect the small tray knew her will, and scattered the stale crusts for the birds.
In time, the guiding flight of the eagle curved into a lazy circle. The peak where it took station reared up into mist, a jagged shoulder of stone too grizzled and stark to offer a high pass for egress. Cloud cover lidded the summit above, and late afternoon limned the shrouded slope in lusterless gloom and flat lead. The drizzle now slackened, an ominous sign, as the fickle south wind backed and threatened to blow once again from the north.
Wringing worry crushed hope. Elaira whispered helpless endearments over the wheeling scene in the quartz sphere. She fought to contain her crippling doubt, that would only serve Arithon disheartenment. Yet the fickle equinox weather was worsening. Nightfall in the heights was going to bring punishing cold.
Stripped of jacket and cloak, Arithon knew he faced death by exposure. He carried no provisions. His hunting bow had been lost underneath his dead horse, leaving no weapons but dagger and sword. Though the trapper's pouch with tinder and flint remained strung from the strap at his shoulder, the rock crannies grew no fuel but gorse. No comfort could be wrested from that lonely place, even if he eluded the half brother closing steadily from behind.
Elaira heard the shrill cry echoing up from the defile as the Etarran advance scouts encountered the jettisoned saddle and bridle. Her pulse raced, overturned by raw fright as Arithon reacted to the unkind moment of discovery. He knew he posed a defenseless target, exposed on a slope with no cover.
By main strength, he banished the pressures of fear. Without looking, he kept climbing, every shred of his faculties applied to maintain forward progress up the cliff face. He drove himself, even as enemies answered the hail of the scout and gave chase with redoubled zeal. Elaira shut her eyes, unable to stem the graphic flood of her dread, or Arithon's raised pitch of desperation.
He rejected bad odds, that the townborn light horsemen were many to his one, or that the ledges he inched up hold by creeping hold could be scaled at speed, given the advantage of numbers and highly skilled training. Elaira clamped the quartz sphere between paralyzed hands. Her worry distilled into needling anguish, she saw Arithon discard the logical tactic, to haze his back trail under shadow.
'Beloved, why not?' Strain rushed her dizzy as she plumbed the linked contact to fathom behavior that seemed incomprehensible.
Yet Arithon's mind had become a closed vault, his concentration too narrowed. Nothing emerged but his pinpoint intent to keep climbing despite all impediment. His headlong sprint drove him heedlessly upward. Such profligate effort must break him down with exhaustion inside a matter of moments.
Elaira, who knew him, felt her damp skin rise to gooseflesh. 'Beloved, where are you going in such haste?'
For of course, the eagle had granted him purposeful guidance. Yet where, in this vista of untenanted stone, could a hunted spirit look for refuge or sanctuary? Then logic leaped one drastic step further. That first, reaming chill shot panic down to the bone.
'Arithon, no!' For in the high Mathorns, one dread place existed where Davien the Betrayer had formerly drawn a crowned s'Ffalenn forebear. Where Lysaer's avid troops might indeed fear to tread, since the site held a maze of dire spellcraft, inextricably linked to old legends of terror and death.
Elaira cradled the quartz sphere over her heart, ripped into white-knuckled tension. Ath's blinding glory, how could she send warning! To spare Arithon one fate was to leave him as victim to the Etarrans' black hatred and the insanity of Desh-thiere's curse. Act to intervene, and she would invoke the binding obligation of a Koriani oath of debt. The jaws of the quandary were closing too fast, if any safe option existed.
'Dharkaron forfend!' Elaira started to rise, prepared to risk an appeal to Ath's adepts to beg for wise counsel. Too late; the eagle unfolded dark wings. Its brief, gliding flight set it down on the incongruous, carved stone of a newel post set on the side of the mountain. The gray-on-gray image unveiled by the scrying showed the parting of the mist, then the stair of cut marble, fashioned by the eerie precision of a Sorcerer who owned an artisan's genius for masterworked spells. Patterns of knotwork were incised on the blocks that marked the odd, angled landings.
Elaira understood her beloved had been led to the threshold of peril already. 'Mercy, Arithon, no! Not the passage into Kewar Tunnel!'
He could not hear. The scried link was passive, restricted to remote observation. Yet if the quartz would not transmit her cry of dismay, the shared bond of empathy first forged through healing obeyed no such limit. Her explosive distress would flow straight to his heart, a stab of jagged emotion that could only tear him apart.
Arithon looked up, green eyes wide. As though she stood in his path, crying censure, he braced himself in mid-climb. 'Elaira?' His speech was lucid, despite breathing torn by exertion. The quartz sphere transmitted his astringent concern with excruciating clarity. 'Beloved, my heart, you fear for me? I ache for your hurt. Yet I would shoulder the unknown danger here.' As her surge of response reached out and touched him, he turned whitened features away. 'Yes, I will take that choice! This before giving myself over to Lysaer, and the blind hatred of Desh-thiere's curse.'
Upslope, the eagle screamed an agitated warning. Arithon snapped back his lapsed concentration; heard the whine crease the air at his back. War-trained instinct took over. He flattened against the breast of the slope, wary enough to recognize the sound of an inbound arrow. The shaft fell short. Its rattling clatter tumbled down the ledge he had scaled scarcely seconds before. Arithon hurled himself onward. His clawing flight upward abandoned all rules, and every small care for his safety. Whipped on by sharp worry, he had to realize one of the bowman's companions might pull a stronger weapon; or another archer might supplant the first, armed with steel quarrels and crossbow.
The base of the staircase nestled above a vertical rock escarpment. No man who set foot there arrived by mistake. Arithon began the laborious last yards of ascent, clinging to the face like a spider. More arrows shrieked into the slope right and left of him, arc shots launched at extreme range. They would wound readily enough, even kill if he suffered an unlucky hit. Arithon grimaced. The taxed muscles in his forearm screamed under strain as he stretched for a handhold over his head. The troops swarming up from below by now realized his flight up sheer rock held the hope of a saving destination. More arrows sleeted in, through an officer's shouting. Then the sound he most dreaded: misted air carried the measured ratchet of a crossbow, cocking. The enemy longbowmen did not let up, but pressed the limits of skill and loosed off more ragged volleys.
Arithon scaled rock, forced to take ruthless risks, his stamina and judgment fast failing. The misstep, the slipped hold he could not afford might as easily dispatch him to a plunging fall down the mountain.
'By Torbrand's name, no!' An end bought by mishap would make ungrateful repayment for Jieret's life, and a clan war band more than half-decimated; would adulterate the desperate murders Braggen had been forced to commit in the name of his prince's survival. For Caolle's sake also, and the sworn oath of debt owed to the Fellowship Sorcerers, Arithon drove his taxed flesh beyond mercy, while Elaira wept for his suffering.
The scried image spared her no small detail. For each creeping foot won from that last rock face, the demands of exertion cost him. His old sword wound reopened. Blood stained the grimed wrap that remained of Jieret's careful dressing. The thin air of high altitude became as a knife in the lungs, until Arithon's head swam and reeled. Spoiled balance bought mistakes. Once, he slid backward, saved by the jut of
a stone and one hand. No time to recoup from that narrow escape; lost footage must be won back, while the wasp hum of arrows invited distraction, and the angry smack of the first crossbolt hammered flying chips from the granite. Too close; fragments of stone pelted into his cheek.
Arithon shut his eyes. Reduced to driven flight, he dragged himself upward, and tried to shut out the ratcheting clank, as the weapon was spanned by the marksman.
The next bolt bit into the crevice above him. Arithon's clipped expletive collided with the sawn gasp of Elaira's intaken breath. A sharp marksman's next shot might easily take the Prince of Rathain through the back.
The danger did not escape him. Arithon scrabbled, jammed his toe in a crack, and shoved upward on faith and main strength. The thrust let him catch the lowest carved riser, but only with his left-hand fingertips. A fraught moment, he dangled in helpless extension, while his legs kicked and scraped against icy stone, vainly seeking fresh purchase. Like vengeance unleashed, the next crossbolt howled in. Arithon had no secure footing to move. Need drove him to try, a mistake. His cramped fingers started slipping off the smoothed edge of worked stone.
The bolt struck, too close. It pierced through the grimed rag of his sleeve and rebounded, snagged by the flange of its broadhead.
His instinctive recoil cost the last of his balance. Arithon screamed in wordless rage. With the last, fierce scrap of will he possessed, he hurled flesh and bone beyond limits and thrust his legs straight. Off a fugitive toehold wrung from straight friction, he snapped out his right arm and clawed upward.
He hooked the lip of the stair, just barely. Through a gasping interval, he hauled himself up the rough rock. Weathered granite resisted each inch, dragged at his clothing and scoured his flesh. Exhaustion racked him to snarling pain. Arithon forced one forearm and elbow onto the stair, then the other, crossed over the first. Shaking, he clung by his shoulders and chin, then levered his torso until his cheek pressed against the smoothed marble riser. There he dropped, spent. His pumping breaths whistling in graceless gasps, and his feet dangled limp down the precipice.
'Move, oh Ath, move!' Elaira exhorted.
For the next crossbolt hissed on a deadly trajectory, straight for Arithon's exposed nape.
'No!' Her anguished scream rang out, simultaneous with the wakened explosion of Kewar's outermost guardspell, as the inbound quarrel crossed the perimeter.
The quartz crystal in her cramped hands flared stark white. Elaira recoiled, caught short of dropping the sphere, while the newel posts flanking the base of the stair burned and blazed, unfurling a shimmering net of grand conjury. The eagle launched out of that raised conflagration. Its form vanished away into howling light as the shot projectile flared up like so much caught lint. Steel and wood immolated to a burst of sparks just shy of a lethal impact.
'Father and mother of demons!' Dazzled half-blind, Elaira squinted through the starburst of flash-marked vision. The sphere in her hands seemed a ball of white fire, and Arithon s'Ffalenn was not saved. Until he finished hauling himself across Davien's secured threshold, his back was still unprotected.
Sound warned him, perhaps. As the sheeting flare of the wards flickered out, the scried image cleared to show Arithon clawing himself up, wrist and knee. By the time he finally folded his body against the lowest of Davien's carved risers, Elaira blotted away streaming tears. The stairway ahead seemed defeatingly steep. Scarcely master of himself, her beloved lay beaten prostrate, while the frantic shouts of his Etarran pursuit re-echoed off the stone ramparts.
'Save us all! There's true sorcery afoot! Somebody! You, yes, take one man and fly! Carry word back to the Prince of the Light! Tell him we need reinforcements!' A clatter, as the frightened messengers departed. The distress catalyzed by the eruption of spellcraft was swiftly marshaled by an officer, whose hardened veterans resumed hot pursuit.
The eagle had flown, leaving Arithon to shape his fate by free choice. Elaira battered back her outright terror, striving to recall scraps of riddle and lore concerning Davien's errant creation. Certainly its history of harrowing peril did not leap to the eye. The uncanny stair zigzagged up the rock face, laid from smoothed marble, and incised with black patterns of knotwork. Circles and angles laced into themselves, with no warning marks or carved runes. The Betrayer's works were subtlety itself. If the spells of outer guard would not admit arrows, the flesh-and-blood consciousness of a man must be permitted full rein in accord with the Law of the Major Balance.
Enemies, even Lysaer, might follow at will. No power would stop them from engaging their quarry. Short of the upper portal leading into the mountain, they could still kill hand to hand, or subdue the Master of Shadow by main force and drag him back as their bound captive.
Arithon must realize he had to reassemble the raw grit to arise and resume his flight upward.
Yet the punishing effort he required to compel weary sinews to contract, and command balance, and bear weight, caused Elaira's staunch courage to falter. She looked away, tear-blind, unable to withstand the cruel cost of necessity. Like a man whipped, or a terror-struck animal, Arithon s'Ffalenn reached his feet. He ripped off his sleeve to divest the encumbering quarrel. Then, in drunken, stumbling steps, took flight the only way possible: up the carved risers of Davien the Betrayer's bewitched stairway.
Behind him, the troop of dismounted Etarrans grappled their way up the cliff face. Well fed, determined, and drilled to seamless teamwork, they swarmed up the same ledges that had left their enemy half-killed. A testing pause at the newel posts soon reassured them that no sorceries would disbar their passage.
Running, the lead scouts pounded up the stairway, hard at Arithon's heels.
He heard them. The wet slap of boot soles chipped echoes off the misted scarps of bare rock. Ripe oaths and the sour jingle of mail, and the metallic scrape of drawn weapons warned of his narrowing lead. Harried to a shambling run, Arithon rounded the first landing. A fleeting glance backward could only slow him; no breath could he spare for the heart-torn appeal of a prayer. His chest felt strapped in wire. The effort of each riser made his thighs burn and his taxed breath whistle through his throat.
Davien had set rows of gargoyles on pillars, creatures winged and beaked and snake-necked, with eyes that watched a man, climbing.
Yet Arithon had little chance to heed instinct, or address the shrill cry of Elaira's unease. He rounded the second landing, fended himself off the snout of a carved gryphon. The cold burned his aching lungs raw. Sweat blurred stinging eyes. Gusts lashed the hair not left drenched by the rain, or slicked by sweat to his forehead. At his right hand, the wild stone of the mountain dripped snowmelt. Runoff streamed down the stairwell, guttered by the seamless marble wall. Beyond the flat coping hung a chasm of air, and a drop that turned the mind dizzy. The penstroke stands of evergreen folded into the valley seemed a raveled assemblage of scrap cloth and burlap and stuck pins.
Arithon slipped on an ice patch, bashed his ribs into the lip of the wall. The arm he flung out caught him short of a fall, but the blow had shocked the wind from him. Elaira hung on the bloodless pallor of his face. Second by second, she agonized with him as he waited for his paralyzed diaphragm to break out of spasm.
The delay lasted too long.
Two landings below, the leading scout shouted. His cry was close followed by an officer's horn, pealing the shrill triumph of discovery. The blaring note rolled down the chasm of the valley, then rebounded, scattering echoes off the high rims of the peaks.
From the vale, another horn answered; then another, a league farther back. The rallying cry of Sulfin Evend's rear guard resounded from farther still. The fanfare was answered this time by a knifing burst of white light.
Elaira raked her cheeks with tight knuckles. 'Merciful grace, don't give in!' For the moment could not have been timed with more cruelty, that Lysaer s'Ilessid should receive confirmation the picked guard dispatched by his Lord Commander had run the Spinner of Darkness to earth.
Lit by the
flicker of that distant burst, Arithon snapped straight as though branded. His outcry was wordless, and his face, stripped to shock. He whirled. Lashed on by the fast-snapping threads of his will, he rammed himself breathlessly forward.
Elaira lost words. The quartz sphere felt welded between her numbed hands. Love and sorrow poured out of her stricken heart as the Mistwraith's curse claimed its firm foothold. Arithon's lips curled in an inhuman snarl. Shivers racked him from head to foot. He shook off the assault. As though hazed by wild bees, he gasped out a mangled phrase in Paravian. The light, lilted cadences somehow helped snag the fast-fraying threads of lost reason. No respite lasted. The roused force of the curse redoubled its siege, too inhumanely strong to deny. Arithon battled, regardless, his features contorted as though every nerve had been dipped into acid.
The green in his eyes lay eclipsed, pupils stretched into widened, black wells. Before the force that demanded surrender, he had no name, no mind, no grace of memory. All that he was became channeled will, to mount the stair and lay claim to the final landing.
The third one now visible above, flanked by winged carvings and guarded by a two-headed stone demon perched upon skulls. Another horned face overshadowed a dark archway. There lay the dread threshold of Kewar Tunnel: a place where the natural world ended, and spelled sorcery loomed order into the patterns of peril known as the Maze of Davien.
Yet Arithon had no moment to weigh what good or ill might lie in wait in the passage ahead. The flash-point crucible of Desh-thiere's geas already immolated his identity. Unswerving destruction would rule him within a matter of seconds. He would turn and draw steel, and howl for the blood of the half brother framed as his enemy.
One more burst of light sent by Lysaer must hurl him over the edge.
In a caroming stagger, from wall to rough rock, Arithon battered up the last risers. He drew his dark sword, left-handed, perhaps ruled by curse. Or perhaps, as a futile gesture of fight toward the Etarrans who charged in a yelling pack just behind him. Elaira dashed away tears. Alithiel, in the grasp of her beloved, would do nothing at all to deflect Desh-thiere's curse. The blade's powers could only arise when turned against the evil that locked down to claim him.
