TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Within the five-sided chamber cut into the base of Rockfell Pit, the Mad Prophet huddles in aching exhaustion, while Luhaine, of necessity, weaves the last sequence of primary wards with dire energies whose vibrational frequency would sear away living flesh; the defenses mesh to a crackle of whipped air, leaving only the seals on the shaft itself, and the outer stone entrance, incomplete . . .

  Early Spring 5670

  XVII. Second Recovery

  Dakar dreamed. In the visions, his eyesight was seared by a million pinpoints of light. The flecks endlessly shuttled in coiling spirals that twisted his guts to sharp nausea. Though he shut aching lids, he could not lose the imprint: of haloes of blued light, tinged with a deadly corona of black-violet that beckoned his thoughts toward ravening madness. He spoke summons in a language his mind could not translate, then watched as his sweat-clammy fingers shaped intricate knots of spelled runes. The forces he handled had no mercy in them. Contact hazed his skin to scraped pain that stung worse than a raging sunburn.

  Strive though he might, he could not awaken. His cries for release went unheard. At times, the focused intensity of his nightmare seemed destined to eat him alive. The powers he annealed into balance coursed through him in manyfold layers of complexity. Their sharp focus crossed dimension and transcended matter, ripples interlocked into chains of wrought forces that commanded the weave of creation. The bound edge of such grandeur caused Dakar to cower. He touched concepts that ripped him to abject terror, and still he did not awake.

  The hold binding his mind wore Kharadmon's voice, unbreakable as welded steel shackles.

  There came no relief. As one pattern of torment came to an end, the process was wont to repeat itself, some cycles climbing at intervals of fifths, others set into sevenths, with the octaves firing the refined harmonics too rarefied for mortal cognizance. Sureties were unfailingly woven in triplicate, with coils that pierced the grand tapestry affirming their anchors within time and space. Familiar sensation was surpassed as well. The spellbinder knew heat with a subtlety that altered the blood, and cold beyond concept of freezing.

  The horrors he endured outstripped mere entrapment. Hearing delivered the whispering voices, beating against the throb of his heart and whispering pleas through his mind. They exploited the pinhole cracks between thought. They begged. They whined. They promised and wheedled, then resorted to viciousness, invoking threats with ghastly invention. Had Dakar been given reprieve for a meal, the descriptions would have caused him to render his gorge.

  'You can't listen,' Kharadmon admonished in response to his mewling misery. 'The wraiths find their foothold by preying on fear.'

  Kneeling within a five-sided pit that was darkness, the Mad Prophet whimpered, harrowed as he watched his inept flesh weaving patterns of shuttling light. That vision broke sometimes, its intricate, spelled circles smashed like a plate of dropped glass. The gaps between shards unveiled the star-strewn black of the void, where more voices gibbered, crying of insatiable hunger.

  Called back to lift Rockfell Pit's massive capstone, and yelping from a bruised finger, Dakar lost himself again, immersed into chanting strung couplets that only a Sorcerer's mind understood. He held an extended conversation with the mountain, then traced mazes of cold wards through stone.

  The dreaming peace that descended like a benison proved wrathfully short-lived. The exhausted rags of Dakar's awareness exploded in bursting red pain, as though, all at once, every nerve he possessed had been drawn through his skin like hot wire. The top of his skull felt torn away by a rocketing thrust that scrambled his brainpan to jelly.

  Immersed in his misery, undone by his foolish word of consent, Dakar scarcely noticed the moment that insistent hands started shaking him. The sensations of cold wind and iced rock seemed unreal before the delirium that routed his being like limp flotsam.

  Again he was spinning rimes in bright light, tying them off into endless, chained rings of spellcraft . . .

  'Wake up!' someone shouted. The snarling vowels of a grasslands insult described an act of rude congress with a goat.

  Adrift in oblivion, Dakar failed to respond.

  Whoever harangued him yelled louder. 'Damn your fat bulk, Luhaine says he can't heft you! Or do you truly intend to freeze your bollocks to marbles? Just keep on playing the limp sluggard. We'll let you stay like a corpse on a slab in the teeth of the coming snowstorm.' The hand with the wringing hold on his collar shifted grip, then delivered a slap on his cheek.

  The Mad Prophet watched the explosion of sparks gyrate across darkened vision. After dense cogitation, he discovered he still possessed a furred tongue and somewhat slurred powers of speech. 'You don't have to hit me,' he mumbled, offended. 'A man can fall prostrate from strong drink, time to time, and not perish under the aftermath.'

  'This wasn't a binge!' cracked his tormentor. 'You can't sleep off a backlash exposed on this ledge, and Sorcerer or not, a ghost can't help you sit upright.'

  Dakar unstuck stinging eyelids, blinked, and absorbed the whirling gray view of a sky fogged under wool batts of cloud. He tried to swear. Yet the word that emerged from between his chilled lips came out in actualized Paravian. Before he could retract that horrific mistake, the air flashed with bursting streamers of light.

  'Have you gone mad?' Luhaine chastised, a shrill gust of urgency. 'Rockfell's grand wards are already sealed! You don't have the restraint to speak in that language now that Kharadmon's presence has left you.'

  Dakar's subsequent groan was interpreted as a question.

  'You didn't see the state of the star wards yourself?' Luhaine huffed, amazed, then supplied his miffed explanation. 'Kharadmon left in haste to forestall an incursion of free wraiths.'

  Dakar dredged up a blank stare, too drained to his dregs to assemble the list of threatening implications. Even if he had wanted to think, Fionn Areth switched tactics and tugged. The jostling stoked the fires of agony in each joint and overstrung ligament. Dakar mumbled. This time his brain had unscrambled enough to use sailor's vernacular in king's tongue. Pleased to discover he could swear as he chose, he decided to study the drifting snowflakes that settled into the eyes.

  Luhaine allotted such dreamy recalcitrance short shrift. 'Really, Fionn Areth is only trying to help. You honestly do need to move.'

  Skin and bones, Dakar ached as though stretched on a rack. A sulfurous aftertaste fouled his mouth. No evil penalty brought on by drink had ever left him so wretchedly sick. Against the resistance of air in his lungs, the Mad Prophet made his pronouncement. 'Never mind wraiths, Kharadmon was remiss. Next to him, Jaelot's rotgut gin was a kindness.'

  'Say so when he's present, he'll steam-clean your ears,' Luhaine pointed out with no sympathy. 'Not least, you'll need something more bracing than rough language if I have to help Fionn Areth force you back to your feet.'

  Dakar turned his head in martyred injury. 'I thought I was asked if I'd rather freeze solid. At least then I'd escape maceration.'

  Luhaine would not bend his dignity to answer; a glance showed the contrary Araethurian herder was unwilling to back his rash statement, implying a state of free choice. In fact, his green eyes looked a bit too much like Arithon's, pinched by an impatient frown. The frayed muffler he wore snapped in the gusts, making him shout to be heard. 'You'd rather be slid down sheer rock on your arse?'

  Not Arithon's style, except for a tone that bespoke nasty promise rather than threat. Breath hissed between his clenched teeth, the Mad Prophet mustered his assemblage of joints and plaintively shambled erect.

  'There's a cave lower down,' Fionn Areth added more kindly, as vertigo set his charge swaying. 'Bear up that far, you can sleep in dry blankets or stuff yourself on stewed deer.'

  'Rockfell's sealed?' Dakar asked, his eyesight rinsed blank by a rolling riptide of faintness. In vaguely sketched fragments, he recalled resetting the capstone over the pit. A bruised finger attested the memory was real, though the rest of his mind seemed corroded away by attrition.

  '
The wards are refounded,' Luhaine reassured from his vantage above the abyss. Beneath his windy presence, the cliff sheered away, the vertical drop hemmed by frost-broken stone left heaped by the force of past slides. 'Desh-thiere is secured, and none too soon, considering the invasion that threatens the star wards.'

  No lecture followed, an ill omen, from Luhaine. Trouble of unknown proportion descended, freshly arisen from Marak; Dakar himself was too spent to measure that worrisome turn of event. Since he lacked any power or resource to help, he applied what remained of his botched concentration toward the hazards that menaced his balance. Each wobbling step down the spell-crafted stair served up the evil reminder: Davien's works always held the unkindly penchant for tripping his unwary feet. Dakar would have paid gold for the chance to sit down. Fionn Areth's sharpened temper aside, he knew if he settled, he would never again recover the brute will to stand upright.

  'Not much farther.' prodded the herder, no doubt concerned as Dakar's slipshod steps seemed ready to give at the knees. Huffing under the stout spellbinder's braced weight, he hastened his pace, unable to suppress his uneasy shudders each time they passed the eldritch regard of the Betrayer's sentinel statues.

  Even to Dakar's overplayed mind, the creatures appeared more than usually watchful. For some reason that anomaly bothered his nerves, even moved him to make tired comment.

  The wind moaned across the swept ledges of Rockfell, but carried no Sorcerer's answer.

  The Mad Prophet stopped short. 'Sithaer's breeding fiends! What's happened to Luhaine?'

  Fionn Areth stared at him. Given Dakar's blank bafflement, he grudgingly said, 'The Sorcerer left a few minutes ago.' As Davien's carved stairway came to an end, the Araethurian visibly relaxed. 'You didn't notice when he flitted away to look in on Sethvir in Atainia?'

  Not about to admit the Betrayer's queer works had unsettled him, Dakar let the younger man steer him off the last of the uncanny risers. Panting and slipping amid the dense snowfall that sifted over the scree, he ventured the question the Fellowship Sorcerer had certainly been avoiding. 'Did Luhaine leave word about Arithon's safety?'

  'He said you were free to pursue your affairs.' The herder plowed through a drift, then, more slowly, flanked his charge's gimping progress toward a cornice of fractured rock. 'The haunt added that his Grace would keep his planned rendezvous with Khetienn in spring, if he could.'

  Dakar damped back an involuntary shiver, praying the paroxysm arose from the cold. Just now, the fiend packs of Sithaer could not make him embrace his errant talent for prescience. Weary as he was, and suffering raw backlash from Kharadmon's murderous usage, he had no wish to set off the tranced fits that delivered his auguries. Whatever rough scrape still embroiled Prince Arithon, the Mad Prophet knew he was in a useless state. If he assayed as much as a cardinal-point scrying, he would assuredly set slipshod wards and unleash a fumbling disaster.

  Arrived at the rough cave where Fionn Areth had made camp, Dakar resisted the overpowering urge to sink to his knees where he stood. Once off his feet, he was likely to tumble headlong into unconscious sleep. Since the howling descent of Dharkaron's Black Chariot would be unlikely to rouse him, the thorns of integrity demanded a reckoning. He could not let go until he vouchsafed his promise to see Arithon's double to safety.

  'You're willing to remain in my company to Alestron?' he pressed Fionn Areth. No way to guess how the opening was received, with the uncanny likeness of spell-changed features blurred by the pervasive gloom. 'I have to know. Will you accept a secure place in Prince Arithon's service and discharge your debt to him fairly?'

  'I'll finish the trip to the coast as he asked,' the young herder allowed after scarcely a moment's hesitation. The experience at Rockfell had seeded a change. No longer green with the uncertainty of youth, Fionn Areth's carefully tempered reply showed the flint of adult determination. 'After that, who can say? I don't plan to raise goats. The s'Brydion loyalty is allied with the Light. Perhaps I'll enlist with Duke Bransian's field troops.'

  'Well, for that you won't suit,' Dakar said in rejoinder. He sat all at once, choking down ripe laughter that might rankle the Araethurian's stiff pride. Nevertheless, the hilarious irony raised the Mad Prophet's sly humor. 'The duke picks his men for their silent tongues and their unquestioning obedience.'

  'I can learn, you stuffed tripe sack.' Fionn Areth sniped back. 'At least, watching you hump your fat arse off this mountain will teach me unbreakable patience.'

  Too weary by half to sling back biting insults, far less delve into the thorns of subversive truth, the spellbinder curved his bearded lips into his best mooncalf smile. He knew, none better, that Alestron's clan lineage could not stay aligned with town interests. In rich fact, the s'Brydion had been Arithon's active spies since an hour's incisive exchange in a shepherd's hut back in Vastmark. If Lysaer's sunwheel fanatics should levy for troops, Alestron's crack companies were most likely to answer the muster by arming against them.

  Yet that vexing snag must be broached in due time. Helpless to do more than snatch rest in false peace, the Mad Prophet rolled into his blankets. Inside of a minute, he was dreaming again, this time of drinking mulled wine in a brothel, sprawled across perfumed sheets. Best of all, the bed was not empty. A lush pair of doxies stroked his back with sweet oil and murmured suggestive endearments.

  * * *

  In a striking departure from methodical propriety, the discorporate Sorcerer Luhaine deferred his departure for Althain Tower and his planned consultation with Sethvir. Gale winds and snow posed his self-contained presence no ruffling inconvenience. The morbid unease that distressed his staid mood did not settle, though at first, the Sorcerer had tarried on the pretense of ensuring that the Mad Prophet was escorted to shelter. Yet even after the rash goatherd delivered his promise to finish the journey to Alestron, and through the interval while Dakar slept off the rough worst of the backlash Kharadmon could not stay to avert, Luhaine continued to linger. A tight-laced, trim vortex, he whirled unseen in the storm above Rockfell Peak.

  Recurrent anger plucked at his thoughts and rankled his prosaic nature.

  The rock ledges beneath sensed the Sorcerer's distress, and in patient empathy, concurred: seldom had the world of Athera been threatened by perils of such wide-ranging potency. Sun might still shine while the living earth turned, yet who knew for how much longer? Wraiths inbound from Marak could endanger all life. Between imbalanced grimwards, and Khadrim flying free, Luhaine gloomily tallied the seeds of disaster that lay primed and ready to germinate. Ever and always the cheerless pessimist, he spun in tight circles and fretted. His obstinate sensibility balked at the raw fact that his overmatched Fellowship lacked the resource to manage the next crisis.

  The gestalt labor of resealing Rockfell's triple ward rings had exposed their appalling deficits. Unlike Kharadmon, who delighted in mayhem, Luhaine was left irritable and depleted. Rather than loose his vile temper on Sethvir, the Sorcerer coalesced to a pinpoint of chiseled awareness. He drifted earthward with the settling snow and alit on the stairway carved into the flank of the mountain by Davien's intransigent artistry.

  Gargoyles watched him. Crested heads capped in drifts, and cold eye sockets scalloped with crusts of rimed ice, the carvings aligned their uncanny awareness and sampled his stalking presence. Stone wound in spells did not stay inert, but flared into a surly corona.

  'Listening, are you?' the discorporate Sorcerer snapped in rancid distemper. 'You've spurned Sethvir's queries for long enough. I, Luhaine, do summon you here! This world stands in peril. Your choice to retreat can't excuse shirking dalliance as Athera falls into jeopardy.'

  A moment passed, filled by whirling flakes, hard driven by keening winds.

  'Don't pretend you don't hear me,' Luhaine accosted, tart with impatient asperity. 'You'll surely know Sethvir's flattened with weariness, minding the world's deranged grimwards. The way you eavesdrop, you're surely aware that Kharadmon's gone alone to divert a migration of free wraiths.'

/>   'Luhaine, how boring if the world falls to ruin, and you, poor sod, never change,' the carved statue pronounced in reply. 'Must you always bear in like the jaws of a pit terrier when you lose your self-righteous temper?' The voice was Davien's, and the awareness just arrived, knife-edged with dissecting sarcasm. 'Since I won't hear your lecture, you can't go away? What an unimaginative stalemate.'

  Luhaine's churning presence spat ruffled sparks. 'Where will your vaunted complacency be on the day an invasion from Marak descends on your lair in the Mathorns?'

  Davien's bent of humor roused a diamond-hard gleam within the stone eyes of the gargoyle. 'Such gaudy melodrama! The bit part's not like you. And who claimed, about free wraiths, that I've chosen to lounge at Kewar in frivolous solitude?'

  Touched by a bolt of stark apprehension for that fox-subtle change in tonality, Luhaine punched an agitated gyre through the horizontal lash of the snowfall. Already he sorely regretted his impulse. Sheer folly, not to have consulted Sethvir to ask for the current news. 'Don't claim you've left to assist Kharadmon.'

  The gargoyle's mocking leer seemed to change, sculpted eyebrows raised in astonishment. 'That's assuming your henchman would want me along to share his labor in unreconciled partnership? Don't, please, die laughing. We're sticklers for truth.'

  Had Luhaine still been embodied in flesh, he would have flushed deeply scarlet. 'He named you Betrayer. On good days, the rest of us usually agree, the delicate question's still dangling-'

  'Perhaps not,' said the carving that spoke for Davien. 'The verdict might fall with me out of favor, depending what happens to Prince Arithon.'

  That instant, full force, Luhaine felt the chill wind, and the roaring dark of the abyss. 'What have you done?'

  'Despoiled the lynchpin that upholds this world's promise.' the Betrayer replied with a bite that invoked outright challenge. 'Or else forged you the weapon you can't do without to stave off the throes of invasion. The hours ahead will determine the outcome.'