TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  'No!' His scream pierced the reliving, made bare stone ring with the echoes of horror to come. But no sound and no agony could stave off the flaying knives of his conscience. Through, the eyes of the Spinner of Darkness in Kewar, Arithon saw the forged pillar of self-worth that had founded his master's integrity; crumble, then winnow away into dust.

  The lens of the maze realigned his perspective. The music that founded his emotional mainstay, the surrogate outlet for the love and close family he never had as a child, rang hollow. Forced to retrace his past step from the trial of the high mage's circle, Arithon was no longer blind to the fissure shot through the weave of his character. His ears were not deaf to the seed of rank discord soon to sour his untrammeled happiness.

  Lessons in ancient language and lore, the arduous study of spellcrafting, the respite he wrought through his skill on the lyranthe, every hour of reflective contentment he enjoyed in the company of animals passed him by, a cascading flicker of imagery.

  Again, he stood red-faced, as his grandfather upbraided him for letting the kitchen maid lure him into the hayloft for a bout of giggling dalliance.

  'Boy, you're born with talent!' The old man tapped a white heron's quill against his creased palm, while the migrating geese streamed past the window, and autumn breeze wafted, sharp with the scent of the apples being pressed to make cider in the yard. 'You have sight well beyond the dullard's vision that Ath granted to men born with two eyes! Did you use it today, boy?'

  Arithon maintained a desperate, locked stillness, his snarled shirt laces still half-undone, and his sable hair caught with straw. He stood straight as iron, too embarrassed to cringe. 'No, grandfather.'

  Mak s'Ahelas arose. 'You will, then. Right now. Terik will escort you down to the harbor. You will visit the sailhands' brothel, not to indulge, but to observe what occurs in the aura when a man and a woman lie down in the act of coupling.'

  Arithon paled, then flushed in shrinking humiliation.

  But his grandsire showed no shred of masculine mercy. 'Sex creates an energetic binding, you'll not forget. You will accord women your deepest respect, whether or not they grant themselves the same reverence. Use your body as a spiritless object of pleasure, and you'll tie up your strength and bleed off your power with more subtlety than an addiction. You will go to the brothel, and perceive the cost, and know not to undertake such things lightly. Done without love, any congress between man and woman degrades the creative intelligence that graces your humanity.'

  The maze granted no quarter. Young Arithon saw the past lesson through, by the end of the night brought back weeping with mollified pity. He avoided the kitchen maid after that, and later, threw silver to the sad-eyed harlots who accosted him on the street. 'For your comfort,' he told them, not accepting even one grateful kiss on the cheek for his blessing.

  His last years at Rauven streamed past in a blur of marred happiness.

  Arithon shrank from the heartbreak to come. In step-by-step traverse down Kewar's narrow corridor, he suffered the past, strapped to the pain of his future losses. Each revived memory arose resharpened by the untempered lens of blithe innocence. Again, he reenacted his learning to transmute the poisons of tienelle. From trance, he retraced his first spiritwalk, striding the limitless stream of the mystery whose wellspring lay past the veil. Still gloved in flesh, he learned to split his perception at will. The indescribable thrill of wild ecstasy rode him, as he first read and mapped the energy signatures of Name woven from the living elements, fire, earth, water, and air.

  Once, all of those things had been effortless.

  He had never questioned their permanence; never thought to imagine that the solid foundations of self could be cast to the four winds and jeopardy.

  The foreknowledge of pain all but shredded his being as, again, Arithon watched himself make the decisions that would come to unravel his core of integrity. The ephemeral expectation of triumph slammed his heart like a physical blow on the day he completed his final initiation, and his grandsire bestowed the earned accolade of full mastery.

  Every particle of will, of good sense, of learned wisdom, wished for opening to remake the past. Yet the maze forced one foot to follow the next. Arithon could not change his cognitive memory, or alter the choices that unstrung his fate. All over again, with bruising awareness of consequence, he answered his father's request to shoulder the heirship of Karthan.

  Then, as now, the decision cut like a sword's edge. The inherited drives of farsight and compassion unraveled his peace until he could not escape. The needs of a people must ever overshadow the cry of his burgeoning talents.

  Yet this time, as Arithon repeated the impassioned words that sealed his decision to depart, vision widened. The maze forced him to share in an aged man's heartbreak. This pass, he was shown his grandfather's frail hands, locked in whitened anguish on the wooden desktop to mask their grief-stricken trembling. The dark, intense stare and inviolate stillness, then mistaken for censure, became cruelly unmasked as the High Mage of Rauven heard fully and finally that he would be losing his daughter's beloved son.

  The most gifted master he had ever trained stood tall before him, and pronounced his intent to voyage to Karthan and rule a sandspit of marauding pirates. In measured, firm words, Mak s'Ahelas saw his years of restraint bear the fruits of triumph and punishment. Arithon had indeed learned to think for himself. The irony came barbed, that the relationship a wise grandfather had expected to cultivate with the young man he had tenderly guided would not ever flower under his roof at Rauven.

  'Avar is fortunate.' Mak s'Ahelas had said, honoring his grandson's independence. By then a weary, lonely old man, he had been great enough to allow his young protege the gift of his heady freedom.

  The maze replayed every wretched detail. Again, Arithon s'Ffalenn knelt at his father's feet and swore his oath of peace over the bared blade of Alithiel. To the cheers of Karthish sailors, and the high mage's stifled sorrow, he set sail from Rauven, into blue waters and the very wreckage of his youthful hopes and dreams.

  The barren fields encountered on that distant shore were no less an offense against nature, for the fact they were revisited in memory. The hunger of babes and the tears of the widows whose loved ones died at sea marked the heart with no less wrenching a sorrow. Arithon settled among the villagers of Karthan. Sharing poverty and rags, he engaged his deep talent and strove to transmute salted soil back to grain-bearing fertility. He engaged his mastery, used every trained resource at his command to assuage the devastation of generations of feud that had shackled a proud kingdom to garner subsistence through piracy.

  The knowledge of his inevitable failure turned his words of encouragement to bitterest ash on his tongue. The maze did not forgive, or soften the outcome. Arithon now could not apologise for the defeat of his high aspirations.

  His appeal died, broken to echoes between Kewar's unyielding stone walls. He could make no redress for the promise of hope that would be irremediably broken.

  In wounding, inexhaustible detail, he retraced his path through battle and fire to the hour of his father's death, then his exile to distant Athera.

  As the white static forces of the Worldsend Gate hurled him from Dascen Elur to the Red Desert, he screamed like the damned, to no avail. No ears heard. No help came. The Maze of Davien allotted its victims no mercy. Ahead, inexorable, lay the curse of Desh-thiere, then ten thousand dead in the field of blood on the banks of the river Tal Quorin. Arithon knew, oh, he knew, he could not repeat the violence of that reliving.

  The wardspells allowed no deliverance.

  'No!' Arithon walked, milled to abject despair. He could not face the consequence of the horrors he had wrought, bound by oath to the Kingdom of Rathain. His misuse of grand conjury to save lives would not spare him the vicious lash of full consequence. The spells in Kewar Tunnel were bound by their nature to mirror the past with strict clarity. He must experience the unspeakable toll of atrocity with no saving shield of separation. Every death,
every wound, every shed drop of blood that already savaged his conscience would be replayed in clear empathy upon the stripped cloth of his mind, and the bound, naked flesh of his body.

  Early Spring 5670

  Gyre

  Protected in sanctuary at Ath's hostel at Whitehaven, the Koriani enchantress Elaira slept undisturbed as the night stars wheeled, and the stately turn of Athera led in the moment of midnight. Across the world from the point where she rested, the blazing noon sun touched the zenith, conjoining the balance of opposition. The waxing half-moon notched the eastern horizon, dragging the sea's tides, and the twining dance of the subtle energies of creation marked and measured each moving change of alignment.

  Ath's adepts lived and breathed the awareness of such currents. They walked through each day, attuned to the harmonies of the spheres, adroit at reading angularities and patterns. In that late-night hour, as the vortex of tuned energies unlocked the electromagnetic signature that keyed the dimensional gateways across dreams, the male adept assigned to keep guard and watch sensed the forewarning of threat. He spun off a formed thought, then charged its ephemeral image with the gist of his focused intent.

  Deeply asleep, Elaira's breathing acquired a slower rhythm. Her quickened thought traveled the corridors of dream, inevitably steered by the living flame of her steadfast love for Prince Arithon. The empathic linkage between their paired minds had been forged amid the quickened flux of a grand conjury. Such a binding ran outside of time and space, a marriage of consent between their two spirits sealed across the veil of the mysteries.

  No posset could quell those aspects of self that transcended the bonds of the flesh. In longing, in need, in tacit awareness of Arithon's raised state of distress, Elaira's footloose thoughts traveled. Her seeking journey unfolded, tracing the barriers of Davien's wrought wards, testing the force of each balking construct down multiple parallel avenues. Until midnight, crossed by the tide of sun and moon set in angular alignment, the tangential energies sprang into resonance. Led by the dance, her questing mind at last encountered the one opening that could grant her untrammeled admittance.

  Wrapped in the raiment of lightbody awareness, the enchantress pursued her core of desire. She reached the pillars that framed the etheric entry to the grove of Ath's mystery. Beyond lay the heartcore of the hostel at Whitehaven, a well of bright power established and tended by generations of resident adepts.

  Waiting on that threshold to meet her was the messenger of the male guardian, diligently standing his watch. 'Brave lady, beware. If you should cross this particular threshold, you will enter Ath's grove, but through a passage that will not answer to our directives. No one of us can extend you protection. The sacred grove lies outside the veil, and the gyre of forces therein will answer what lies in your heart. The strength of longing and passion can fuse. You can shift the framework of esoteric ideas into experienced form on the wings of your breath and pure thought.'

  Her urgent awareness of Arithon's peril had no patience for sensible precautions. Yet Elaira forced the restraint to rein in her impetuous need. 'What are the dangers if I should go forward?'

  The spun image of the adept bowed his head. Gold and silver ciphers entwined on his hood gleamed, a flare of bright radiance against the unformed shadow of dream. 'There are three. First, Davien's wards themselves forbid entry, once the powers of the maze have been raised. You would travel to Kewar through the gateway of Arithon's heart, in plain fact, your presence admitted as a breathing, inseparable part of him. If he dies there, the cord to your body would be cut. Your unmoored spirit would cross the Wheel along with him, while the flesh left under our care would slowly wither and finally stop breathing.'

  'If I chose life?' asked Elaira, more wise than before to the nuance of the greater mysteries.

  The adept's thought construct regarded her, gravely still. 'At that moment of crux, you could break your ties and claim separation from him.'

  As Elaira started in surprise, the imprinted messenger nodded, his demeanor subdued with sorrow. 'Yes, brave lady, you can walk a path that does not twine with Arithon's. Choice gives you the inarguable right, but what then? You would stand naked in the Maze of Davien. Even the founding tenet of Ath's law could not intervene to avert the dire consequence. The act of laying claim to your fate would spare you the Wheel's turning, but leave you exposed, made vulnerable to the powers that hold Kewar inviolate. The protections there would destroy you without quarter for trespass upon warded ground.'

  Listening, undaunted, Elaira spoke after scarcely a second's thought. 'You mentioned three perils?'

  The adept's sending yielded in sad acquiescence. 'The last pitfall, the most obvious, concerns the ties to your order enacted by Selidie Prime. If you help your beloved, if you extend yourself by thought or by word to lend him support through your presence, you would bind him. As you fear, Prince Arithon would become entrained to obligation by a Koriani oath of debt.'

  'I understand,' Elaira said in level earnest. 'If I don't go, Prince Arithon has one less chance to emerge from Kewar Tunnel alive.'

  'Does he, in the harshest light of full truth?' The adept's messenger regarded her, his penetrating survey not unkindly, while the gray mists of moonbeams drifted through myriad ghost shapes about them. 'Your prince is s'Ffalenn born, tied to compassion as well as the gifted farsight of his matrilineal ancestry. The trial of the maze might snap his endurance, despite everything you can give.'

  Elaira faced the bittersweet challenge, unblinking. 'I won't know that answer if I stay behind. Better, I think, not to abandon a man's fate on the basis of timid assumption.'

  The adept's sending bowed. 'Brave lady. Believe this, whatever comes, the love you bear is not wasted. Go in grace, and may Ath's greater mercy walk beside you.' White robes seemed to shimmer as his form stepped aside, clearing her path to the portal.

  Yet Elaira made no immediate move to advance. 'Have you other advice to assist me?'

  Her request raised a blinding smile of relief, the outright acknowledgment her greatness of heart held to unselfish character and rare depths. 'Bless your wisdom for asking, yes. The entry must be carefully handled if your arrival is not to draw notice. When you pass these pillars, go straight to the spring. Look neither right nor left. Reach the water, wet your hands, and close your eyes. Do nothing more than imagine your beloved. Let the water absorb the fullness of your feelings. Allow the transfer to happen through love, with no stake set on the outcome.'

  Elaira returned his smile in salute. 'Thank you, wise one. Rest assured, I shall do as you say.' She stepped forward then, her commitment made firm by the irresistible cry of her heart. The adept's reserved warning had simply reechoed the augury once given by no less than the Warden of Althain: that if she failed Prince Arithon, or he failed her, the result would call down disaster.

  Elaira did not pause to reflect or look back as her step crossed the portal, and the sacred grove's gyre of wild energies closed down, and irrevocably swept through her being.

  * * *

  The icy splash of clear springwater sluiced through her, transmuted into a maze of overlaid images. Multiple views blurred one into the next, their kaleidoscopic spiral spun down to sequential memory . . .

  Elaira experienced the green eyes of Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn meeting hers in the gloom of a seeress's garret. Amid split-second contact, the still, small shock of awareness closed the gap between minds. She knew beyond doubt that here sat a man fully trained in the ways of the mysteries . . .

  Then fleeting contact melted away, submerged by the tumbling bedlam of a taproom brawl. The moment came back, resharpened to living immediacy, as Arithon fell to the blow from a pastry roller. Dropped at her feet, his harried consent reechoed with laughter, as he allowed her wrought sleep spell to claim him . . .

  Renewed recall yielded the chilly night gloom of the innyard stable loft. Elaira breathed in the dust of old cobwebs and the meadow-sweet scents of mown hay. The piercing eyes this time reflected a rage that b
lazed in adamant rejection of a crown prince's inherited fate. Karthan's griefs were all too hurtfully recent, and the temptation, refused, though just barely, when love and loyalty had sorely begged the false steps of engaging wrongful acts in requital! Arithon had not turned his knowledge of grand conjury to spare a father from dying. He had not killed by causation. The wardings of shadow engaged for defense against Amroth's fleet had been cast with intent to dispatch the confused enemy into a harmless retreat.

  Ships had burned; men had died in steel and fire, but only because overriding aggression had mistakenly caused frightened captains to turn in attack on each other. Arithon had not done willful murder. But the razor's edge of awareness borne away from the poisoned crux was that, so easily, he could have . . .

  Then tumultuous emotion dropped into eclipse as the juxtaposed layers of images resolved down to one, stamped into pristine clarity: Elaira felt Arithon's warm palm cup her cheek. His other hand stroked wisps of hay from her hair with a touch of unnerving tenderness. Dream and longing merged into resolute form: he was there with her, all of him, self laid bare in the vital charge of a moment's restructured symmetry. Elaira was Koriani, exactingly trained to interpret the nuance revealed by a face. The contact purloined through the Maze of Davien exposed the intimate feelings replayed through a man's being. This time, the empathic link wrought in Merior lent her the leverage for full understanding. Not the shading of conjecture she expected, evinced by the subtle tensions reflected in carriage and expression; instead, the unveiling took her by storm as the door between two separate minds opened without clouding pretense.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn was mage-schooled to evince the exacting self-discipline of mastery. He lived and breathed, attuned to a reflexive state of rigorous mental clarity. Therefore, the bolt of fierce passion that shot through him scribed its response on his vulnerable heart. He resisted the hitched breath, let the feelings flow in unimpeded. His spontaneous reaction, by conscious design, became wholly turned inward, self-questioning.