Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Linked by the tie of awareness between them, she shared his cold, inert sprawl on the snow-clad ground of the barrens. Then that fragile impression shattered as a gentle hand clasped her shoulder.

  Vision snapped back into clarity. Elaira beheld a white mantle furred with a lining of snow lynx. Shining faint silver and fired gold, the garment was bordered with the stitched embroidery favored by Ath’s adepts. Nestled within was a man as sunburned as old shoe leather, with a wire beard gathered into yellowed plaits tied off with chunk beads of amber. His voice, when he spoke, was poured honey, filled with a kindness that razed off the pain. ‘Elaira?’ The fact he knew her name was the natural extension of a perception schooled to reach beyond flesh. ‘The hostel’s quite near, just over the ridge. I can call for a litter if you feel too shaken to walk.’

  Elaira gulped in the searing, cold air, unable to frame a reply. Her mind unreeled again, still tethered to a field of stained snow under the wild sky in Daon Ramon. There, a dark-haired prince sprawled inert, haplessly thrown by his leg-broken horse. The crippled animal struggled nearby, downed in thrashing agony. A pack of armed riders surrounded the rucked snow. In glass-edged focus, she saw they were unable to approach farther without risk of battering by striking hooves. Then her tortured breath stopped, while the archer among them received the crisp order to string his horn bow.

  ‘He’ll shoot the mare,’ the adept explained in swift sympathy. ‘Nor has the eloquent hate of the Alliance served its own cause on this day. The name of the Spinner of Darkness now inspires witless fear. Superstition will buy a delay.’ The support at her shoulder was joined by a warm palm that cradled her splitting head. ‘Bide now. Close your eyes. We’ll have you to shelter in minutes.’

  Elaira fought out a gasped protest. ‘I can walk.’ The rage seared her, that the one useless gesture was the limit her power could offer. She was helpless, hamstrung, unable to raise so much as a prayer for Arithon’s plight in Daon Ramon. If she still wore her quartz crystal, even had she ranged focused spells of diversion over such distance to spare him, she could not have done so without invoking a Koriani debt, for his life.

  Wisely, she had cut off such temptation beforehand.

  Nothing left, but to regroup scattered wits; through savage grief, she must make her unruly body take charge and resume the burden of bearing her upright. Yet even that basic discipline failed her. Anguish blurted her heart’s truth aloud, a cry torn from reflexive instinct. ‘Ath’s blessed mercy, they’re going to kill him!’

  ‘Not yet.’ The adept’s sturdy grip helped her to arise. ‘Listen. You’ll feel him still breathing.’ Yet before seeded hope could flower and buoy her, he added, ‘I’m sorry, lady. Before you ask, no, our kind cannot intervene in ways that disrupt the fate of the world.’

  Elaira caught back a wrenching sob. Close as she had never been to being drowned by blind terror, still, she forced the grace to ease his concern. ‘Forgive me, I knew better.’ She managed a step forward in spite of weak knees. Less easily, she stifled the ignominious need, to cast off respect and hound the adept to break faith with a round of tearful pleading.

  ‘You are far from helpless,’ the white brother observed. Yet if her mean thoughts had touched his awareness, his counsel came sourced in compassion. ‘Belief can imprison. You are not separate from Ath’s creation. Though stubborn reason may insist you can’t reach past the bounds of your bodily senses, your cries for help are heard, always. Each appeal is unfailingly answered. Your inner self extends beyond all constraint, though the outer eye, attached to the world, would impose its limited state of false order.’

  Now steadied enough to walk unsupported, Elaira crested the rise. Below her, nestled into the fold of the scarp, a confection of white granite and airy arched cupolas gleamed as though carved from delicate blue shadows and sunlight. The hostel of Whitehaven held a beauty to inspire the soaring flight of waking dreams. Caught by the throat as her pain dragged her earthbound, Elaira shook her head.

  ‘I swore an oath over a Koriani focus stone,’ she admitted. Through the ache of the cold drawn into her lungs, she said, bitter, ‘Is that not a binding constraint?’

  The adept regarded her, his expression benign, and his eyes deep as uncharted ocean. ‘Does an oath chain your wishes? Your emotions? Your desires?’

  ‘Yes, if I act on them.’ Elaira slipped on an iced boulder, and recovered. ‘Prime Selidie wants Prince Arithon trapped under an obligation to my order. My freedom lies in my steadfast refusal to comply, unless my distress could draw the attention of a passing Fellowship Sorcerer?’ When her wild-card suggestion raised no word of encouragement, she finished her thought out of obstinacy. ‘They seem able enough to act as they please, unafraid of Koriani retribution.’

  ‘No feat is beyond them,’ the adept agreed. He glanced aside, nodded in salute to the watching presence of a golden eagle, perched in mantled majesty on a broken shaft of dead fir. ‘You seem recovered, now. As you choose, you may pass through our gates. One will meet you there, and escort you into the sanctuary.’

  Without even a breath of disturbed air in warning, the adept blinked out of existence.

  Elaira yelped, startled. In belated chagrin, she realized the snow by her side bore no trace of another set of footprints. Yet she still seemed to feel the warm grip on her arm that had braced her through the onset of breaking crisis. ‘How do they do that?’ she asked empty air.

  No one and nothing replied but the wind, howling in gusts off the summits. Upslope, the stripped fir loomed empty, the eagle apparently flown. That oddity chafed. Elaira had not seen the bird spread tawny wings, or heard the whoosh of its feathers as it launched into upward flight.

  Ahead, the switched-back descent to the hostel led between frost-split rock, salted with snow and the hammered-steel glimmer of glare ice. Urgency only redoubled the hazard. Elaira averted another near fall as her boot toe grabbed in a crevice. Whipped on by her worry for Arithon s’Ffalenn, she would not slow her step. She clambered down the last slope in a rush that landed her, winded and scraped, before the gateway to Whitehaven hostel.

  There, despite tumult, the massive hush claimed her. She stopped short and stared, as every wayfaring traveler must who would contemplate the act of entry.

  The pillars before her were cut from merled granite, veined with quartz like gouged patterns of lightning. The uncanny, whorled symbols crafted by Ath’s Brotherhood marched across the faced stone, bands of ciphers that teased and confounded the eyesight: a shimmering movement that seemed wrought of light, until the blink of an eye changed the formless dance to a play of ephemeral shadow.

  Elaira had experienced such carvings before, at the old hostel at Forthmark. Abandoned and reclaimed as a Koriani hospice, the stonework there was as strangely alive. On hot summer days, she had sat by the shaded walls, feasting on wild grapes, while the southern sunlight scattered chipped reflections off the shale scarps napped through the sheep fields. There, the ancient works of Ath’s adepts had weathered with time, a willing ladder for climbing vines, or catch pockets for moss and rainwater. Between the arduous courses of study into advanced arts of surgery and healing, she had paused often to ponder the residual mystery.

  These pillars in the lofty peaks of the Skyshiels were as old, and as gouged by the trials of the elements. Yet here, the carvings were not disused. Nor did the forces that rang through them reflect the same gentle state of neglect. The power that greeted Elaira’s arrival was distinct, a delicate touch against thought and skin as precise as the point of a needle. She reeled under the uncanny impression that her clothing, and every item she carried, became subject to exacting scrutiny: as though leather and laces and oyster-shell buttons could speak, and comment on her record of stewardship.

  For that unsettled instant, the frigid winds of the abyss seemed to flow straight through her. ‘Merciful maker!’ she gasped, driven a startled step back. ‘What have I done?’

  Here, fingered by the uncanny magics wielded by Ath’s
adepts, she understood just how far their knowledge ranged beyond the craft worked by the Koriani Order. Such attention to detail became frightening, that a knife or a garment might be held in the same conscious regard as a person. Broken into cold sweat, Elaira understood that all freedoms would be observed without parity inside the bounds of these gates.

  Tempted to bolt to escape such a paralyzing self-examination, she held firm. The forces that probed her were intense, unremitting and precise, but not hostile. Only lies would be shredded as she crossed that dire threshold. Yet the price demanded was self, laid bare. No doubt remained that on the far side she would be greeted by someone who knew her. From her strength to her most ignominious weaknesses, she would stand fully exposed.

  A perilous vulnerability lay in such knowledge. Henceforward, the adepts would have gained the power to address her by her true Name.

  Swept by a rippling shiver, Elaira fought down her wave of blind panic. ‘Fatemaster guard me.’

  Naught remained in reassurance, except to abide in trust. For time beyond memory, the adepts had adhered to their gentle creed of compassion.

  Elaira stepped through, startled to find the strange pressure melted before her. She felt lifted, light, all at once more aware of the sun-carved shadows cast across crusted snow than of the pillars themselves as she passed them. Whatever strange field of spellcraft they wove, the effects absolved her of worry. Unbidden, her spirits unfolded into a rush of bubbling joy.

  Once inside, as though conjured by some fey, wild trick, the promised adept hastened forward. Her host proved a tiny, wizened old man with a sparkle in his jet eyes. His smile scored his dark-skinned, bearded face into merriment and laugh lines. He enfolded her numbed hands into seamed palms with the same exuberant welcome.

  ‘Elaira, affi’enia, come this way.’ His peppery, fast dialect marked his descent from the insular southshore desertmen. The diminutive term he chose for address was derived from the ancient root word that meant dancer, although his precise turn of phrase was not known to her. ‘Walk in Ath’s blessing, and find ease for the heart within this hostel’s sanctuary.’

  He drew her forward, amused by her evident relief that his pigeon-toed step impressed footprints. ‘The others you saw earlier were not flesh at all, but projections, a thought that was formed by intense concentration and focus.’

  Elaira jerked to a stop. ‘But they were so real!’ She fingered her wrist, unable to contain sharp surprise, that the strong arm that had assisted her after collapse had been no more than an apparition. ‘The one who helped me, his touch felt as solid as yours.’

  The adept chuckled outright. ‘I never claimed their substance was less than my own. Ath’s creation is myriad.’

  As she flushed, embarrassed for such an impetuous inquiry into his Brotherhood’s grasp of the mysteries, he gave her hand a congenial squeeze. The spark that enlivened his eyes acquired the glint of thrown diamond. ‘It is thought that spins form, not the other way around. Were you not fooled by your bodily senses, you would see the true way of the world. Thoughts and feelings combine to make dreams, and, in fact, they are the more real part of you. Did you come here to encounter the truth? Change will follow. If you wish to remain as you were, I suggest you step back through that portal.’

  ‘I came to learn,’ Elaira insisted. Consumed with dread for Prince Arithon’s fate, she lacked the spare resource to argue the nature of ephemeral philosophy. Her shaken nerve was scarcely enough to hold her to steadfast courage. This place offered no shelter behind falsehood or platitude. The incomprehensible power of the gate ciphers struck home the irrefutable risk: her quest for forbidden knowledge had already cast all that she was into jeopardy.

  Far more than cold air left her trembling. Chased from the shadow of self-recrimination, she acknowledged her fear. The choice to go forward might destroy all her sensible constraints, even lead her to defy her oath of obedience to her order.

  Yet her love for Arithon ran deeper than cowardice. No course remained but to drown her misgiving under the tatters of courtesy. ‘Please, if you will, brother, show me the way a seeker enters your sanctuary.’

  The adept smiled again, his walnut-toned skin crinkled with unutterable delight. ‘Dear lady, with all my heart, join our company and be welcome.’

  Bone weary, and emotionally numb, Elaira trailed his light footstep over the wind-sculptured snow. Arched entry and pillared anteroom passed by as a fitful blur. She registered the impression of profound quiet, then a young man’s kind hands removing the weather-stained wool of her mantles. She stared down, startled to find the reflection of a windburned face with waif’s eyes gazing upward from underfoot. Then the flyaway hair snapped to snake ends and elf locks made her realize the image was her own. The tessellated marble under her step had been honed to a glossy, high polish. The surface was eerie, far too refined to have been smoothed by tools in the hand of an artisan.

  Unwitting, she must have questioned aloud, for the desertman offered his cheerful explanation. ‘A speaker to stone would have sung the right lines to lay the marble into alignment.’ He steered her arm, gentle. ‘Please follow?’

  She was led down a pillared loggia. Walls and groined ceiling had been intricately carved with parallel lines of strange characters. To one who had mage talent, their presence spoke in hushed tones of sound and light. Elaira found their shapes eluded analysis by direct sight. She marveled as the effects of their presence stroked her skin and eased weary flesh like a tonic. The spiked edge to her worry softened and smoothed, gifting a detached awareness.

  ‘You won’t be separated from your feelings,’ the adept reassured. He directed her toward an arched portal to one side. ‘The sanctuary is a gateway to unmasked power. To enter, one must pass through the stream of the prime life chord. It is therefore necessary to calm the tumult from the supplicant’s heart and mind.’

  Doused in dizziness, then lifted by upending vertigo that flushed her to shivering goose bumps, Elaira caught and grasped the adept’s offered arm. ‘What’s happening?’ She felt as though the bones of her skull had dissolved, leaving her unmoored and drifting.

  ‘You are a born talent, and a vibrantly clear one at that.’ The adept steadied her wavering step. If aged features and small size lent him the semblance of frailty, his touch owned a tensile-strength confidence.

  Elaira clung to him in shameless gratitude, reminded of the resilience laid by quenching and fire into a tempered-steel blade.

  ‘The part of you that remembers harmonic balance is rising to match a higher range of vibration,’ the adept explained. ‘Few have the inner sensitivity to notice much more than a passing moment of faintness. If you find the sensation beyond bearing, you can choose not to enter the sanctuary.’

  They had reached the high arch, raised out of dark stone, and incised with patterns that bewildered perception. The quality of the rock seemed to reject solidity, one moment the absolute black of the void, and the next, the velvet of fathomless night, scattered with pinprick white holes that were stars.

  ‘I have to go forward,’ Elaira said, desolate. Though she could not feel the step of her feet on firm ground, and her head whirled in giddy gyrations, she held steadfast. ‘If I falter through faintness, please support me. Hope must lie ahead. Behind me, there is no path I know that won’t lead to a poisoned future.’

  ‘As you will.’ The adept gave her an encouraging nod, then drew her across that dread threshold.

  She was falling, fast and far, her flesh like a boulder dropped into a night sea. Drowning in density, her mind broke away, whirled and winnowed like a spark sucked up a vast flue. Light pierced her, blinding. She cried out, not from pain, but from startlement; fear dissolved on a breath to unbridled amazement. She had spiritwalked before, but never like this, stripped from the cocoon of Koriani discipline and the rigid array of self-limiting spells of protection.

  Each thought became chain lightning, flaring and branching in all directions at once, until the building layer
s of reverberation framed patterns of overlaid energies. Elaira strove to quell bursting tension. Trained enough to know that unconscious terror would find resonance here, and perhaps raise a harmful backlash, she tried vainly to contain her unruly mind.

  ‘Relax, you’re quite safe.’ The adept’s voice served to anchor her. Mazed confusion re-formed into shapes that had meaning, and she realized he still walked beside her. His flesh had acquired a glow that shed sparks, as though his moving presence was surrounded by thousands of swarming fireflies.

  Elaira wept for the sheer beauty of his face, and her tears fell as moonstones and diamonds. She glanced downward to see where they lit, or if they would splash upon landing, and saw herself changed. The sturdy boots she had worn in the mountains were gone, her leggings and wool clothing along with them. As though dreaming, she had been reclad in silk that shimmered in changing colors, now peacock blue, now green and gold, now moon silver in iridescence. Her bare feet were embraced in cool grass strung silver with dew, the flesh gone pearlescent and strange. Nor did she stand under a roof any longer. The sky overhead glimmered with starlight. Around her, a twilight grove of tall trees sheltered bell-shaped white flowers that shed a perfume of enchantment. Set like veined opal amid fragrant turf, a melodious spring trickled over a bed of white stones.

  ‘Where is this place?’ Elaira whispered, amazed. Unabashed in delight, she watched a brown-and-white thrush flit down from a branch and bathe in the shower of water.

  ‘You stand in the sanctuary of Whitehaven.’ The adept raised his hand in salute to the bird, which shook off a white mist of spray, then alit on her shoulder, singing. ‘Here, power walks that will lead you to know that your dreams are the most vital part of you.’

  Struck dumb with wonderment, Elaira raised a finger and stroked the thrush’s flecked breast. It blinked, cocked its head, and snuggled into her warm skin, perhaps aware of the times she had shared her bread crusts with its winged brethren. ‘This is my dream?’ The air held the loamy afterscent of rain, and from somewhere, the crisp tang of a breeze wafted in from a fair-weather ocean.