TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  'Cry mercy,' the listening enchantress whispered on the wrung rags of her breath. The unveiled pitfall yawned under her feet with acidly punishing clarity. For the heartrending phrases that Arithon had once spoken, imploring their separation at Merior, never showed a more vicious coil of truth: 'Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction,' he had said. 'Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.'

  She must not lose her grip. Arithon's fragile hold on self-trust had never in life been more threatened. The unwelcome exposure, that she had dared step into jeopardy alongside him, might easily become the telling stroke that sealed his destruction. His trials in Vastmark still lay ahead, an entangling chain of events that must preface the most brutal encounter of all.

  Sealed inside her warded circle, Elaira watched Arithon retrace the year's late spring and early summer, each facet of activity replayed with spell-stripped clarity. There had been joys to temper the sorrows of Merior's forced abandonment. Notes for gold, written in unshaken faith by friends at Innish; a young boy rescued, to mitigate the tragedy of a six-year-old shepherd girl's fatal wounding on the claws of a wyvern. The thrill as the brigantine Khetienn's completion raised a flush of pride and accomplishment. The untamed night splendors of the Vastmark sky lifted spirits, and the rough, chafing humor as the tribesfolk worked their herds of recalcitrant sheep. Afraid beyond words for the violence to come, Elaira ached for Arithon's braced recoil as he encountered the fresh stings of bared truth. For the sinister weaving of the Mistwraith's intent had indeed been laced through his most stringently guarded planning.

  Ground down by that ongoing backdrop of devastation, Elaira cherished the rare moments of warm, human contact, blessing those acquaintances who had lent her beloved their affections, or steadied his moments of uncertainty. During the months the Alliance host mustered, Arithon had applied himself, unstinting, to life. The enchantress tasted his exhilaration in the archery contests, and again in the madcap pranks played to manage the cross-grained clansmen sent to handle Shand's raided livestock. She tracked her beloved's dizzying invention, then the inspired flight of planning that had arranged his daring abduction of Princess Talith.

  Elaira's laughter, unheard, tracked the piquant contest of wits as Arithon proceeded to raid Tysan's ransom gold. Yet as the summer days lengthened, such byplay lost its savor. Grief shadowed the razor's edge of awareness, that the ending brought Talith to tragedy.

  The princess's marriage would come to founder. The taint left by Arithon's wily handling would finally lead to her death, arranged by the machinations of conspiracy that riddled Lysaer's inner cabal at Avenor.

  The small hurts struck deepest for being unexpected. Elaira suffered the backstab of the widow Jinesse's distrust, and the needling pitfalls of Dakar's virulent hatred. She watched, awed, as Arithon met the Mad Prophet's undermining interrogations with stark truth. Hazed in the smoke of a summer night's campfire, he had once admitted, bald-faced, the self-damning possibility that Desh-thiere's machinations might color each facet of his affairs. Davien's Maze saw that bleak probability confirmed, making a razor's nest of past hope.

  Self-determined, Arithon sustained. Though the darkening trial of his planned defense, and the unforeseen snares wont to snag him, each footstep, he relied upon Caolle's gruff and unfailing support.

  Too soon the freedom of Vastmark was exchanged for the tense court setting at Ostermere. At each turn, the maze affirmed Arithon's effort to maintain his core framework of honesty. The proofs stood like stars: in his unvarnished confession to Sethvir, that the insidious grasp of the Mistwraith's curse deepened its stranglehold at each encounter; then through the dance-step reenactment of diplomacy, as he rebuffed Havish's courtiers through the due public process of restoring Princess Talith to her husband.

  The deep, hidden wounds were relentlessly exposed. Elaira shared Arithon's grief-struck rage at the stunning news of Captain Dhirken's death, hurled down in petty revenge as the ransom in gold was accounted. She endured the bleak hour of Arithon's recrimination, as he reboarded the Khetienn and drove under spelled winds back to sea.

  On that hour, no friend stepped forward to help lift his leaden depression. Elaira resisted the sting of her pity, lent no grounds for interference. She had seen her beloved sustain worse as his nerve snapped at Minderl Bay; when at his royal orders, Earl Jieret had been compelled to break him at sword point, then force him to complete the hellish strategy that provoked Lysaer to destroy his own fleet. She clung to belief, and begged fate the next stage of reliving would not hold the unseen barb that would cripple. Given the clear winds and the freedom of seafaring, surely Arithon could use the delay to regain his fractured resiliency.

  No succor came to him. The maze retraced his past, unremitting, and the hour delivered its freighted burden, a poisoned interval of self-condemnation suffered inside the locked privacy of his cabin. The ongoing strain compounded since Tal Quorin at last shredded Arithon's restraint. Nothing prepared Elaira for his suicidal risk, as he embarked on a maudlin and desperate bid to wrest back the slipped reins of his fate.

  The method he chose courted outright disaster: to force the locked wall of his blinded talent by attempting a tienelle scrying.

  Davien's Maze could only exacerbate the danger as the narcotic smoke of the herb expanded perception. The sudden, drawn tension in Arithon's carriage reflected his redoubled apprehension. A decision once made in isolate security, surrounded by leagues of salt water, must inevitably strike a more plangent chord in the course of a spell-forced reliving.

  The volatile, fresh contact with a past, high-stakes crisis must provoke Desh-thiere's curse in live concert. Arithon shuddered, jabbed to unchecked terror. The next step might see his free will thrown irrevocably into forfeit.

  Beyond any doubt, he had acted the fool, that unpleasant night after Ostermere.

  The coils of the maze would redraw the penalty against irrevocable stakes. Arithon held no illusions. He confronted a passage of harrowing traps. To emerge intact, he must hold the Mistwraith's geas in check through raging madness: brave the unclothed nightmare of drug-induced visions, with no counterbalance of reason to temper his visceral reaction. This trial would hurl him outside known limits, a live testing in fire made after subsequent encounters had strengthened the impetus of the curse.

  Arithon bore up under sweating dread. His strength now relied on his unassailable belief that he walked the maze in strict solitude. If the wretched worst happened and Desh-thiere's will triumphed, the bleak comfort remained, that no others would be doomed alongside him.

  'Cry mercy,' whispered Elaira. Her resolute confidence ebbed to a flicker. Woe betide her if she came to break, and Arithon's peace became shattered by the signal unkindness, that her presence in fact rode the unmalleable risks laid against his fight for survival. The maze forgave no inept fumbling, no blunder of fatal ignorance. Like Arithon's rash move to drive fate through tranced consciousness, the enchantress could not reverse her decision. She could not escape the dread consequence of commitment as her beloved steeled himself and advanced.

  Again, in the tossing dimness of the ship's cabin, Arithon lifted a spill from the candleflame. He ignited the bowl of the packed stone pipe with trembling fingers, set the stem to his lips, and drew breath. Like the seed of damnation, the spark ignited the silver-gray leaves of the tienelle. The stinging tang of toxic smoke spread throughout his filled lungs. The herb's effects followed, a swooping, spiraling rush that upended and shattered the senses. In transfixing fear, hung on the thread of agonized hope and the rage of rebellious exhilaration, Arithon rode the first wave of expansion.

  Resolve from his past had welcomed the chaos. He could no longer tolerate life as the storm-tossed victim of fate. Stung by his forced abandonment of Merior; aggrieved by the unjust deaths of Lady Maenalle and Captain Dhirken; just that evening dealt a Fellowship Sorcerer's word that divis
ive ruin would sour Lady Talith's royal marriage, Arithon raged at his shortfalls. For far too long, he had left himself hobbled, unable to set the most basic of safeguards around his day-to-day movements. Trained talent had once accorded him mastery. He refused to handle the trials ahead, shackled by crippling helplessness.

  Friends suffered for even his innocent acts. Acquaintances who enacted his business had died for the curse that beset him.

  Arithon sucked down another rash breath. Confronted by pending invasion of Vastmark and the might of his half brother's war host, he saw no alternative but to try and wrest back his mage-sight. Hurled without anchor into the tienelle's rush of expanded awareness, he must wrest back the foothold to force the locked doors to his talent. In the past aboard Khetienn, at the crux of the crisis, he had rejected the likely alternative, that he might kill himself in the attempt.

  Davien's Maze ripped away that tissue of delusion, laid bare his self-blinded dismissal. Impelled to the precipice, Arithon stayed chained to the instant as drug-fired vision unreeled out of control. He battled sharp terror. Amid thundering chaos, already lost, he wrestled the tide to cling to bare-bones survival.

  Then nightmare dropped like a blanket and swallowed him. Fragmented visions flooded his mind. Deaths at Tal Quorin came indiscriminately mixed with the fatalities of sailhands, burned and drowned with the fleet at Minderl Bay. Their thrashing torment and their screams yanked him down. Arithon shuddered, unable to stay upright as the agony of a thousand unendurable wounds pulped his body and mangled his awareness. Not again; the maze had already extracted its due for those victims his actions had slaughtered. Yet Arithon failed to subdue his flayed nerves. Hurled to visceral revolt, he reeled, helpless, as his curse-driven violations of integrity touched off an explosion of drug-induced chaos.

  No discipline saved him. The strictures to restore calm tore through his flayed grasp, and his access to mage-sight stayed darkened.

  Arithon lost his anchoring contact with the present. The fixed stone of Kewar seemed fallen away, dissolved to a well of oblivion. Unmoored amid tumbling torrents of dream, he thrashed screaming, the horrific fragments of experience shredding thought to an abattoir of white pain. He was many men, dying to the red plunge of steel; he was the tears of women raped and widowed; he was a child, burning with fever instilled by a septic hand; he was a young girl, lying broken on rocks, bleeding out life from a crossbow bolt.

  'No!' Arithon gasped. 'Not again.' But drugged vision cast up random memory like jetsam, and the maze, uncaring, reclothed unending deaths in the torment of pitiless detail.

  'Cry mercy,' Elaira murmured, unheard behind her sealed ring of wards.

  For this reliving augmented by tienelle exceeded the concept of punishment. Resharpened senses snapped each experience into still more ruthless a focus. Emotion expanded. Suffering and fear and blinding agony came refigured to a barrage of magnified emotion. The mind lost its boundaries. Imagination seized on distortions and ran rampant, until quivering flesh balked at mapping the scope of an ordeal driven amok. Ripped apart under the heightened influence of narcotic smoke, Arithon felt himself savaged. His talent stayed blocked. Each access he attempted pounded into blank emptiness, congealed over mind and heart. No method availed him. He could not break through.

  Yet in contrary malice, the flares of unruly vision skittered past every stay of encumbrance. Etheric perception opened his sight in raging fits and starts. The effect made each battlefield a stark nightmare. Over pulped bodies lying churned in wet silt, Arithon watched the contorted flares of loosed energy shred into streaming smoke. Here, in the wake of violent death, animal magnetism bled off in a spilled miasma. The impact as spirit was torn from dazed flesh ranged outside the physical senses. Arithon felt each passage arise as a cry, marring the grand chord that inflamed the realms past the veil. He was a mote in a gale, flailed and winnowed as the destruction of massacre wailed across the living web underpinning all conscious creation.

  The battered intellect languished, assaulted on levels beyond mind or heart. Drug-honed perceptions smashed identity and reason, until shocked flesh, torn asunder, defined breath and life. Arithon shivered and wept for release. Easier, to let go. So simple, to lie back and die of the next arrow or sword wound, to embrace a battering fall from a yardarm torched into crackling inferno. To surrender life, shed the mangle of crushed tissue, and let the turn of Fate's Wheel mill him under. The temptation to surrender himself to Daelion's judgment beckoned with the honeyed syrup of oblivion.

  Yet the oath sworn at Athir forbade him that grace. Binding spells set over freely let blood strapped him to suffering survival.

  Arithon plowed forward on hands and knees, long past mourning his gutted integrity. He was the sword, slaying; he was the arrow aflood in the stream of arterial bleeding. He was the cold brine of Minderl Bay, filling the lungs of a rat trapped inside a foundered vessel.

  Davien's Maze had long since immolated the threadbare remnants of pretense. No refuge existed as the tienelle visions unfolded full view of his wretched, curse-driven destiny. The birth-born mold of s'Ffalenn compassion left him a wrung rag in the trapjaws of self-condemnation. Arithon dragged himself onward, his knuckles skinned raw against the stone floor of the cavern. He owned no more recourse beyond brute resistance. He could not evade culpability. No cursed act of violence could ever be justified under the Law of the Major Balance. His bruised conscience accepted expiation as meaningless. The dead would stay killed. An ocean of tears would not restore them. Arithon endured that assault of futility through bare-handed, dogged persistence.

  And nightmare spurred him, each forced inch of progress achieved to the rake of steel through his heart. He was the fire, voraciously feeding until entrails and flesh crisped to paper. He was the tears of a grandfather's lonely despair. He was a clansman, gasping in leaked blood, perpetually caught at the crux of a mortal wounding. At next breath, he was an innocent babe, flash-burned by the levin bolt hurled down by Lysaer into the grottos of Tal Quorin.

  That single death, in the random deluge of thousands, wakened the sleeping dragon.

  Arithon bristled as the blaze of Lysaer's unleashed talent roused the coils of Desh-thiere's curse.

  This, the true enemy whose handling could unstring him. Arithon howled in abject terror. No wall he raised might shelter the opened well of his mind. The geas rammed like a knife through the gaps torn by the tienelle visions. The cold-cast force of compulsion blazed uncontested through and through his whole being.

  Stripped naked amid the surge of the torrent, Arithon planted his will in denial. Just as well ask the sand to reverse the riptide. Intact resistance had crumbled long since. For years, he had moved and breathed the insidious taint of Desh-thiere's spell turned corruption. Each year, each encounter, eroded him further; Davien's Maze even now battered the footing that grounded his failing stance.

  Tienelle vision refocused truth with unflinching, painful clarity. Arithon owned no untouched bastion within, no clean space to guard his self-worth.

  No choice, but to strangle in sighted awareness, tugged this way and that by the strings of the Mistwraith's revenge. The lockstep rape of choice that plundered his joy could only give birth to more acts of self-damning violation. Arithon groped forward. He wormed on his belly, confronting the mockery of a resistance that came to mean nothing. Brute endurance might sustain him for an hour, or a day, or a minute, all to no meaningful purpose. He must finally break down. His abraded identity would wear away, until he was sucked to a hollowed shell, directed by the string-puppet pull of the relentless evil he carried.

  'No.' His whisper cast back flurried echoes. 'I will not go down.' Over and over, he repeated the words to stave off crushing surrender. Nor would the Mistwraith have the least part of himself, uncontested. He would hold on, as he once had in Riverton, until the mind came unmoored from the last frayed tie holding sanity.

  Yet even so brave, he could not sustain.

  Elaira wept for inconsolable pi
ty as the tienelle visions fell as a scourge upon Arithon's conscience. Better that his refined talents had never been born to Talera; that a world beset by Desh-thiere had never known the rarefied light of his talent. The loss would darken Athera for all time, that the exalted grace of her Masterbard's empathy should be cut down to mute struggle by suffering.

  Elaira cursed the spelled works of Davien as Arithon shuddered into collapse. At any moment, the Mistwraith's cursed geas must finally shatter him. Well braced for this hour, worn sick by necessity, the enchantress readied the ritual runes of unbinding. Before she watched her beloved give way, she would cast off her concealment and dare intervention. Lent her strength and her balance, buoyed by her undying love, Arithon might find the grace to stave off final ruin. Debt to the Prime Matriarch seemed a small price to pay, if her joined presence could defer Desh-thiere's triumph.

  If compromised, his will might be salvaged intact.

  Yet her move to react was cut short.

  An outside assault of rough magecraft hurled in, smashing like a dropped boulder through the churned visions of backlash. Elaira's bursting hope, that her need had drawn rescue, became instantaneously dashed. The disturbance was only another reliving, drawn out of Arithon's past. Exasperation struck next as she realized the mangling invasion could not be a Fellowship working.

  The rash of taproom swearing that followed tagged the unlikely culprit. Kicked from his rut as the complacent wastrel, Dakar had embarked on the startling effort to draw Rathain's prince to safe haven. Only a fool would undertake such peril lightly. Arithon's blinded talent had not stripped out the trained patterns instilled during childhood. Dakar's clumsy effort provoked a defensive response out of hair-trigger reflex.