Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Now the very rock in the walls of the cavern cast back his full-throated appeal: Arithon of Rathain gave his own Name and ancestry. As Alithiel’s bearer, he asked to be heard in his hour of need. His melody underwent a towering transition, as he translated his love for Earl Jieret into free-ringing sound. Line upon line, he poured out his heart, a detailed account of what he stood to lose if his sworn caithdein slipped past Fate’s Wheel.

  The clan scouts who heard him shed silenced tears, for the depth of their misunderstanding. Given, firsthand, the steadfast integrity of their chieftain, wrapped like white flame in the gratitude of s’Ffalenn compassion, they realized that the sons and daughters of Deshir who had died in defense of their prince were remembered, each one. Cherished, such that their loss for the cause of s’Ffalenn survival had left their sworn prince indelibly wounded in spirit. Arithon begged, in eloquent pain, that Earl Jieret not be asked to suffer the same sacrifice. The cost of one life could come too high. As a spirit beggared beyond hope of restitution, as a prince indebted to his liegemen’s dedication, the bard cried aloud for reprieve.

  His humility touched Braggen with stunning force, until the huge man covered his face in shame, massive shoulders bowed and shaking.

  The tension raised to an unbearable pitch. Such unfolding purity of expression in song could not be sustained for much longer.

  Yet the bard did not falter in his delivery.

  He arose to the impossible, climactic effort, and phrased the opening notes, one by one, of the chord that would waken the Paravian starspells.

  First, nothing; the fluid beauty of Arithon’s voice became flawed by a burr of rough anguish. He gathered himself, sang the sequence again, as though he might squander his living essence to fuel his expression in sound.

  A faint shimmer glanced the length of the blade. A bystander loosed an awed gasp. Arithon hung on the last, powerful high note, heart and mind joined as the dimmed cavern burst and burned under an explosion of sound and white light.

  Alithiel woke. Her cry was the grand chord of glorified illumination that seared reason away in a burgeoning blast of wild joy. While each mortal listener became swept headlong into unbridled rapture, the bard alone held to his purpose. Lent a near-to-inhuman concentration by the strength of his desperation, he wrapped his own song in counterpoint to that blaze of primal mystery. Through Alithiel’s unbound might, he sang Jieret’s name, interlinked with his own plea for mercy.

  Harmonics awoke, born out of the melody twined with the dance of the starspells. The air quivered like stressed glass. The gathered scouts felt, to a man, as though their heartstrings might wind taut and burst. Arithon held, his face ribboned with silvered light, where the sword’s burning brilliance lit the wet tracks of his tears.

  Then the crescendo passed. Sound faded, diminished to a whisper that died away into a cavernous silence.

  ‘Jieret?’ Arithon said, desolate.

  Yet under the dimmed flame light, the gray hazel eyes had reopened. Jieret sucked in a stressed breath. He coughed. Choked up by a throat stung yet from the tienelle, he gasped back a coherent answer. ‘Blessed Ath, I feel scoured from one end to the other in forces impossible to bear.’ He stared upward. The reverberation of remembered awe gained fresh impetus as changed senses took in the experiential vision of newly roused mage-sight. Yet the wonder of that sacred moment came marred by a welling burst of emotion.

  ‘Arithon, for mercy,’ Jieret gasped in iced clarity. ‘Is this what you forfeited for our sake when you spared Deshir’s clans on the banks of Tal Quorin?’ He surveyed the form of his liege looming over him, the impact of that hideous truth vised behind the mute grip of Arithon’s stillness.

  His caithdein, in that instant more painfully vulnerable, could not match the strength of that effort. His aquiline features shuddered and broke, torn into lacerating pity. ‘If so, how do you bear it?’

  ‘Son of Eafinn!’ Arithon snapped in a harsh change of subject. ‘Sheathe Alithiel. Let Theirid carry her out of my presence. Once you have that assurance, I ask you to cut me free.’ He raised stunned eyes to take in the others, still staring, locked into paralysis by the drama unfolded before them.

  ‘Leave us,’ pleaded the Prince of Rathain, his voice frayed hoarse from strain and exhausted gratitude.

  For mercy, this time, his heartsore appeal was obeyed. The clansmen who were his sworn liegemen departed, abashed. Eafinn’s son stayed alone, to stand guard by the entry. As a gesture of profoundly inadequate apology, he was left the black sword, Alithiel, entrusted to his steadfast hand.

  Late Winter 5670

  Commitments

  Two hours before dawn, in the hollow where the Alliance company takes pause to allow the diviner-priest his scrying, Jeriayish breaks from his trance, dazed incoherent and weeping; given his tearful confession that spellcraft and music have unbound his oath to the Light, Lysaer consults Sulfin Evend. ‘Allow the cavalcade a brief rest. The priest’s madness won’t matter. I can sense the enemy by my own resource. He’s not more than five hours’ march distant …’

  Clouds break from storm over the Skyshiels, leaving skies of rinsed blue above blanketed ridges, where the guarding shade of a Fellowship Sorcerer watches two diminutive figures inch up the trackless slopes toward their long-sought destination: the black scarp of Rockfell, thrust upright like a wracked tang of iron, and bearing the shaft of Desh-thiere’s prison …

  In Whitehaven hostel, Elaira attends the adept who has answered her earnest request to study the mystical properties of quartz; and his features stay shadowed by concerned reservation as he opens with a grave warning, ‘First you must recognize the crystal you partner is a living, free consciousness. That truth you will honor, but at a high cost. For you will be set into headlong conflict with the practices of your order …’

  Late Winter 5670

  VIII.

  Evasion

  Restored to the solitary company of his prince, Earl Jieret shut his eyes, overwhelmed. The shift wrought out of the fires of the tienelle trance had reforged the landscape of his mind. Sense and perception were overturned into change, until he could scarcely orient to any aspect of his surroundings. Ordinary objects had acquired a complexity beyond grasp of thought or reason. Solid rock seemed to shimmer with motion, while the air wore its currents of draft and convection in confusing, transparent overlays.

  Jieret discovered that closed lids relieved nothing. Darkness itself seemed sheared into rainbows, each color a dancing glory of undying celebration. The drawing pull posed by that play of fine energies in fact owned a perilous fascination, a splendor that might hold a man mesmerized until he forgot the driving force of his birth-born identity.

  Worse, the caithdein feared to look again at his prince, whose form now wore an aura of pale gold, streaming like needles of refined fire against a backdrop of shadow that lived in ways beyond language to express. Jieret reeled, still shocked to awe by a majesty he had never dreamed might exist underneath the day-to-day weave of creation. His heart felt all but torn asunder by the magnetic draw of powers that spoke as a layered tapestry of song.

  The bewilderment dizzied. Jieret rested his head against Arithon’s knees, helpless as a babe, while waves of rapture burned him to a dichotomy that remade the weight of his body into a shackling burden. ‘Do you suppose this is how our ancestors felt after an encounter with Riathan Paravians?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ his liege ventured. The bard’s voice wore its gifted richness as a tuned instrument, wakening an answering range of vibration. Reverberations streamed past the veil into mystery, transformed to expression as pure light. Such fullness of vision made a bothersome effort of hearing plain words, far less discerning their mundane meaning. ‘Your senses have expanded past the limits of flesh,’ Arithon qualified. All tender patience, he well understood not to rush his charge through the awkward process of assimilation. ‘As the tienelle’s effects wane, you’ll be able to filter those added perceptions at will.’

  ‘I fee
l like soft clay that was mashed into pieces, then fired with everything set in the wrong place.’ As if a wind had punched gaping holes through his brain, admitting a range of alien sensation, Jieret balked at the opened gateway to new knowledge. If he wished, he could pick out the individual consciousnesses twined through the air, or laced through the matrix of stones. No part of Ath’s vast creation was inert. In despair, wrenched to nausea as a shudder of reaction coursed through him, he agonized, ‘How in the name of my oath to the kingdom am I going to handle a sword?’

  The mere thought of killing while gifted with mage-sight posed a desecration beyond horror to contemplate.

  Shaken, and badly, Jieret shivered again. He forced his eyes open, made himself look up into the dazzling presence of the man who braced him in steadfast calm. ‘I never understood, until now, what my father asked of you when he charged you as Rathain’s prince to uphold our defense at Tal Quorin.’

  ‘The Fellowship knew,’ Arithon said, his reassurance swept clean of rancor. ‘Don’t forget, they were first to take my oath of accession, binding me to the kingdom.’ Some concepts lay utterly beyond words to express, among them, the terrible reverse, that Earl Jieret must soon endure the same nightmare for the sake of his liege’s escape.

  Arithon shifted, caught a horn dipper of water, and added a pinch of powdered root from his remedies. Then he raised Jieret’s head in support and offered the bittersweet contents. ‘Drink until you can’t take any more. The marshwort will cause sweats. The tienelle poisons must be flushed from your body, or you’re going to be wretchedly ill.’

  The ice touch of the water raised an explosion of sensation, actinic as lightning flung in branching arcs across Jieret’s already traumatized eyesight.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Arithon soothed, his grip eased to allow the recoil as his chieftain yanked back from the contact. ‘Water carries strong electromagnetic properties, a useful tool for a mage who knows how to harness them.’

  ‘Fatemaster’s mercy!’ Jieret exclaimed. ‘The whole damned world’s gone crazy.’

  ‘It’s been that way all along,’ Arithon contradicted. ‘Enveloped in the flesh, most of us simply never sharpen the ability to see.’ He offered the water again, not quite smiling in sympathy as his chieftain mastered tight nerves, propped himself on one elbow, and drank. ‘Rest if you can. Everything’s raw, and too fresh to integrate. The gifts you have wakened will settle with sleep, and the aftereffects of the tienelle won’t lift for another hour.’

  ‘I don’t think I can sleep,’ Jieret protested, hating the thin, lost tone of his voice, slapping back forlorn echoes from the sandstone walls of the cavern.

  Arithon caught his hand and gripped back in encouragement. ‘You will. You must. I can help.’ Spent though he was from his earlier effort, he engaged his bard’s gift and cast song into phrases that gently compelled the overtaxed mind into quietude.

  Jieret wakened, disoriented. Lapped in a languid, warm peace that left his limbs battened in lassitude, he had no wish to move, though his shirt and hose were glued to his body by a film of sticky sweat. The prodding need to empty his bladder at length made him open his eyes.

  The sandstone cavern seemed awash in a silver-gray light that rendered his surroundings desolately colorless. Disjointed by grief, as though something priceless had been jerked beyond reach, Jieret caught his breath with a cry. The sudden, stabbing hurt ran clear through him, for a world turned unexpectedly dull and lifeless as ashes. Caught by the throat by a fierce urge to weep, he said through locked teeth, ‘I thought you said sleep would help me adjust!’

  ‘It has.’ Arithon’s solace was immediate, and nearby, a razor’s edge of alertness. ‘If you think you’ve gone blind, look again. You’ll see I’ve extinguished the candle to save wax.’ As Jieret blinked in disoriented confusion, he phrased his explanation with delicate care. ‘It’s barely past dawn, and no light shines in here. If you find you’re not in total darkness, what you’re seeing are the spirit forms of your surroundings.’ A movement of clothing sighed to the left as Rathain’s prince shifted position. ‘That’s astral mage-sight, Jieret. You’ve triumphed.’

  ‘But the colors,’ Jieret gasped, still wrung by their loss. He felt reft, his heart all but shredded with yearning to somehow restore them.

  ‘Not gone.’ Arithon’s reply carried an imprinted echo of shared pain, that for him, his forfeited access was permanent. ‘You’ve shed the augmented influence of the tienelle, which lends the illusion things have changed for the worse. In fact, you’ll be able to exert self-command. Once you’ve calmed down, I’ll show you. With practice and discipline you’ll soon perceive the higher levels of vibration at will.’

  ‘Well, such lofty happenings will have to wait until after I’ve gone out to piss.’ Jieret cast off the mantling bearskin, then wrinkled his nose at the reek of sour sweat in his shirt. ‘Dharkaron’s Five Horses, I stink as though I’ve slept all night in a midden.’

  ‘Your sense of smell has been sharpened,’ Arithon agreed. His caithdein’s ripe oath clashed with his laughing devilment as he added, ‘The gift isn’t always an advantage.’

  ‘If you die with no issue, prince, believe this,’ Jieret grumbled. ‘My curse will ride Fate’s Wheel and hound you on the other side of the veil.’ Still manfully swearing, he stepped out, one hand braced against the rock cleft, and the legs underneath him shaky and unreliable as a newborn’s.

  The Earl of the North felt stronger by the time he returned, shirtless and dripping from a bracing scrub in the river. If his physical well-being seemed somewhat restored, his mental equilibrium still suffered an array of unsettling tricks. His vision stayed strange. All solid objects wore a phosphorescent haze, lending their appearance an eerie double image. When light touched their edges, he found himself dazzled, as strange flares of reflection fractured into unexpected, prismatic rainbows.

  Inside the cleft, cut off from sunlight, he sensed other powers alive in the earth clamoring at his raw senses. He strove to bear up, aware as he rose to the unfamiliar challenge that he felt no piercing regret. Truth walked in the mysteries. Now that the film had been lifted from a blindness suffered since birth, he shuddered to think of the price to be paid, should he ever be forced to step back into the dimmed realm of common perception.

  Again, the swift recognition of grief, that Arithon of Rathain had met such a fate and found strength to go on living. Jieret walked softly, moved to awed respect as he rejoined his prince’s presence.

  Arithon had kindled the candle stub. The finer blaze cast off his aura seemed like spindled gold wire amid the hot orange glow of the flame light. Jieret had to squint to discern his friend’s purposeful hands, busy cleaning the meats from the acorns that Theirid had been sent to gather last night. Sundry other items rested amid several packets of dried herbs from his healer’s stores, those the least reassuring: silk threads unraveled from Arithon’s frayed sleeve cuff now tied the cuttings of black hair into neatly laced bundles.

  Chilled by more than the frost on the air, Jieret wrung icy water from the end of his clan braid. He forced his numbed fingers to work and began dragging the snarls from wet locks. ‘What fell bit of craft are you spinning with that stuff?’

  Arithon’s glance lit to a glint of pure wickedness. ‘In theory, Morriel’s ugly little tactic with a fetch can be used in reverse, against Lysaer.’

  Jieret locked his hands in the soaked auburn tangles. Through the spiking, sweet moment, while an almost unbearable hope pierced his heart, he somehow held on and recovered the calm to restart his breathing. ‘You mean you can haze the enemy into the mistaken belief there’s actually more than one of you?’

  ‘I can’t. You will. The setting seals must be yours, since my sighted talent won’t answer.’ Arithon picked up one of the quartz pebbles, then reached out and unsheathed his main gauche. ‘I don’t like the method, but in case Lysaer’s scryers use blood magic, we’ll choose the one that’s reliable.’ He set the blade to the inside of
his wrist and jabbed a small nick. The stone was dabbed with a small drop of blood, then thoughtfully nested inside the hollowed-out shell of an acorn.

  Touched by a queer grue, that a line had been crossed beyond which no safety existed, Jieret held silent and finished replaiting his clan braid.

  ‘I chose eight, for the symbolism,’ Arithon said. ‘In all workings of craft, such things by their nature lend clarity to intent.’ The admission sparked an evil ring of irony as he qualified his decision. ‘That’s the dread number of Sithaer’s blackest pit, and also the closing note in the octave whose resonance, amplified, lets demons take solid form on this side of the veil.’

  ‘Ath bless!’ Jieret threw off his unease long enough to grin through his beard. ‘That’s bound to seed unholy mayhem with your half brother’s arse-kissing priests!’ He shook out his damp shirt, undecided if he dared take the time to hang-dry it. ‘You’ll force the Alliance to split forces?’

  ‘Well, I can hope so.’ Arithon coiled one of the tied strands of hair, packed it over the smeared quartz, then jammed the cap of the acorn back into place over the contents. Lastly, he secured the small package with pine pitch and a pliable strand of silver wire filched from Alithiel’s scabbard. ‘Plants pass on their qualities, when used in a construct. In this case, I picked oak for its strength, endurance, and longevity.’

  Jieret snorted. ‘You’re thinking to teach me the ways of such fell tricks?’ He grimaced, hesitated, then decided to pull on the damp cloth of his shirt. Outside, the sun was still too low on the horizon to have warmed the hoarfrost from the scrub brush. Enemy troops now closed on three sides, with the watchful eyes of their front-running patrols far too near to risk even a scout’s tidy fire. Under clear sky, a spire of smoke would be seen for leagues in every direction.