Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Stand up. Very slowly.’ No fear in that order; only competence that made retribution a certainty.

  Acute peril shattered Jieret’s deadlocked indecision. Finality faced him. If he crossed the Wheel, cut down by a quarrel, his fall must seal Arithon’s death. Pulse racing as panic threatened to darken the pitched sensitivity of his mage-sight, the Earl of the North bent his head. No need to feign the shock of defeat as he tightened his hold on the quartz shard. His shaking limbs would not let him stand upright. All options were forfeit but one. Jieret inscribed the Paravian cipher for ending and closed the inner, spelled circle. Then, as though pleading for Dharkaron’s deliverance from the enemy holding him cornered, he whispered the last words of release.

  ‘Stand up, I said!’ barked the townborn commander. ‘Or lie there stone dead with my steel through your neck. You won’t gain by delay. Your henchmen can’t save you. My trackers made certain before I closed in. You’re alone, Red-beard, and bound for your overdue reckoning at the hand of the Blessed Prince.’

  Jieret sealed the incantation. He lifted his head. Turning his body in feigned surrender, he masked the critical, trailing finger that snagged off the loose twist of silk. The acorn imbued as the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s fetch rolled free of its protective covering. The cleared charge of its presence keyed the spelled circle active. The kick of connection as bound force locked with catalyst flared through Jieret’s body, a brief, leaching burn of meshed energies.

  The man bearing the crossbow stiffened. Perhaps rankled by an unsettled shift in the breeze, or a hint of latent talent, he somehow marked the shocked, lucid moment as the elements aligned before cataclysm.

  Earl Jieret stood erect, a weaponless target. Blind instinct screamed warning: his harmless appearance would not disarm the adversary now primed to kill him. Through a howling force like a vast, indrawn breath, and the cry of raised mysteries, magesensed, he provoked, ‘Have Lysaer take my personal reckoning, instead.’

  The crossbow twanged in release. Timed to the same second, the ritually laid circles relinquished the amplified signature of Arithon’s Named presence to be winnowed on the random play of the winds.

  Light answered.

  Not the gentled fires of raised spellcraft, but the annihilating blaze of Desh-thiere’s curse unleashed in ferocious hatred. Already set on hair-trigger edge, Lysaer s’Ilessid lashed out with his gift on the surge of animal reflex.

  The coruscation ripped through the winter air like forge-heated steel plunged screaming into white ice. The bolts struck too closely spaced to assimilate. Rattled by the drumroll concussion, shaken bone from bone by the booming reports as the hills rocked and slammed under punishment, Jieret scarcely knew whether the crossbolt ripped over his head, or if wood, feather, and forge-sharpened steel had been reduced by instantaneous immolation.

  For that moment, Lysaer’s fury consumed all the world. His howling screams meshed with the shriek of hurled balefire. Spurred by the illusion, driven wild by the surety that his half brother’s being surrounded him, the Blessed Prince gave vent to the full range of his powers. Again and again, the bright levin bolts rained down. The teasing winds bearing their illusion whirled and parted, unmoved by the turmoil as he extended himself to obliterate his nemesis in a murderous fit of possessed hatred.

  The blasts seared across Daon Ramon’s seamed hilltops. Jieret cowered, knocked flat by their unleashed violence. Though the protection of the elements raised to guard point within the outermost ring of his circle spared his life, he could not dissociate from the killing shock to the land.

  Snow sheared into steam. Brush and briar torched in conflagration. While the concussive reports slammed and battered the ground, ancient bedrock exploded and burst. Fragments kicked aloft, smelted to run lava that fused into teardrop nuggets of black slag. The grip of Desh-thiere’s curse subjugated its victim with a force that canceled all mercy. More than once, Jieret had borne witness to horror: he had seen the last trace of humanity extinguished from Arithon’s eyes.

  Lysaer was all the more sorrowfully vulnerable, lacking the course of arduous self-discipline Rauven’s mages had instilled in his half brother. The s’Ilessid prince had no resource to grapple the twisted obsession that drove him. That pitiless consequence Arithon had foreseen, and turned to his hand as a weapon. His knowledge and Jieret’s fresh talent had been conjoined to raise fiendishly inventive devastation. ‘The sense of my presence will prod from all sides, an irresistible provocation. Desh-thiere’s geas will triumph at a stroke. Lysaer will lose all reason. He might well be pressed to expend himself until he drops from exhaustion.’

  The massive assault did not recognize limits. The rage stirred to life by the windblown essence of the fetch kept up its jabbing aggravation, invoking the cursed mind to still more desperate response. Lysaer went mad. Trusted friends assumed the appearance of foes. No matter how loyal, the neat ranks of Alliance horses and men were shown no grace of reprieve. The light razed their brave ranks at a stroke. Jieret coughed on blown smoke. His stomach clenched from the stench of charred meat.

  ‘Ath show them mercy!’ he ground out through a flattening spasm of nausea.

  Yet no piercing regret could ever reverse the consequence of his action. On all sides, the land raged in wildfire, stitched through by sheet lightning and levin bolts. Narms’s headhunter company was already consumed. Memory and flesh, their corpses were winnowed to carbon and ash, lost before they could draw breath and scream.

  More mercifully dead than the raped clanswomen and girls, once burned alive in Deshir; yet peace did not come. The last bolt whiplashed the sultry sky. Its harsh, slapping echoes rolled over the hills blasted to waste and black char, and then faded. Stillness returned, more dreadfully empty than the stunned quiet after an earthquake. Jieret propped himself on one elbow. For the sake of the incised black arrow that waited, he dared to survey the vista left by his handiwork.

  A lone fleck, pristine white against ravaged landscape, Lysaer crouched, undone. At some point, he must have dismounted. Collapsed on his knees in dangerous proximity to the skittering hooves of his charger, he still clutched his reins out of habit. The gold sunwheel emblazoned on the breast of his mantle invited the arrow that would finish him.

  Jieret swallowed. The merest thought of drawing his bow stitched his gut into wrenching distress.

  The remorse in the hunched s’Ilessid shoulders was too human, the fair face laid bare by revulsion that damned with too honed an edge of stark truth. Despite the past cruelties embedded within the campaigns launched at Tal Quorin and Vastmark; regardless of proof, that Lysaer’s brilliant statesmanship could effortlessly reclothe ugly facts in self-righteous lies, the caithdein of Rathain could not evade his own callous manipulation. The s’Ilessid gift of justice and Desh-thiere’s warped curse had become his ready tools to cast his own drama of purging destruction.

  Even for Rathain, the price came too high. The leveling unity exposed by his mage-sight unstrung the illusion of vengeance.

  Amid blighting drifts of smoke and whipped ash, through the actinic flares left scored by each light bolt’s aftershock, Jieret beheld the wisped haze of spirit light ripped out by the trauma as each victim perished. Like a lingering malady, he tasted the acid despair of every man’s unfulfilled dreams. He ached for their grief, crying their wordless woe for the beloved families the Alliance crusade of false justice had left abandoned and fatherless.

  His throat knotted, Jieret called on the force of bare will and closed his hand on the strung bow. His integrity as caithdein was the lynchpin for a kingdom, in a strategy that must not fail. If he folded to shame, these deaths would become but the first wave of casualties in an unraveling chain of disaster. Compassion for life could not exonerate him. He guarded the very threshold of hope, a short step from the act that would free his crown sovereign from the perils of Desh-thiere’s vengeance. One stroke would secure Prince Arithon’s safety, and unshackle a future that relied on restored charter law.

 
; Jieret reached in resolve. He touched the black arrow, and cried out, jerked back by the burn of his own hatred. The energy coiled like unclean filth into the steel of the broadhead. He saw rage and cruelty: long years of unreleased grief for his mother and sisters, slowly twisted into a whispering poison. The taint stained the fiber of feather and twine, a man’s dark domination of innocent wood, whose place in Ath’s order served no cause and no purpose beyond an abiding peace without word for suffering bloodshed.

  The dichotomy snapped him. Convulsed in a silenced, agonized sob, Jieret abandoned the arrow. He could no more have wielded the bow in his hand than he could have knifed his own child.

  No moment could yield a more wretched exposure as the muffled clank of a crossbow’s cranked ratchet sawed through drifted smoke and stunned quiet.

  Jieret flung himself prostrate. Tear blinded, near helpless, he realized his enemy must have sheltered beneath the rock rim of the hillcrest. He lay flat, pulse racing. Torn nerves and outraged senses still stressed him to gasping vertigo. He could not grip his sword. One attempt, and his gut seized to cramps at the barest touch of forged steel. Ripped prostrate by gagging spasms of nausea, he realized muscle and nerve would not harken to the bald-faced demands of survival. Defenseless as a babe before the thundering chord that called him to rejoin Ath’s unity, Jieret wept for his daughter and wife. His tears fell as bitter for the prince yet to pay the fatal cost of his weakness.

  ‘Brother, forgive me,’ he whispered in shame.

  For answer, a loose rock scraped at his back. The shriek of steel cable as the crossbow released tore through the blameless song of the breeze. Jieret accepted the hammering whap as the bolt ripped into his shoulder. Smashed facedown on chill stone, the let flood of his bleeding a tortured echo struck through the weave of the lane flux, he found the grounding spike of raw pain an almost welcome relief.

  He coughed, spitting gravel. Dizziness raked him in beating, black waves. Through ebbing senses, he heard his enemy’s footsteps stumble upon his array of scribed runes and spelled circles.

  ‘Don’t cross the line,’ Jieret warned, eyes pinched shut against the spasm of agony that wrenched him to shuddering paralysis. ‘Enough killing’s done.’

  But the sunwheel officer’s stunned exclamation overrode his whispered protest. ‘Light save us all! You’re no clan fugitive, but Shadow’s damned henchman, and a sorcerer!’

  ‘Don’t cross the circle,’ Jieret begged. If he would die a failure, let him not go with more spell-wrought deaths on his conscience.

  ‘I’ll do more than cross,’ his enemy snapped back. ‘I’ll erase every unclean line of your works, and destroy the fell seed of your conjury.’

  Movement; a grate of kicked gravel, then an eddy of breeze acrid with carbon brushed across Jieret’s exposed cheek. Then mage-sight exploded in a shower of sparks as the armed townsman scuffed out the first line, with the command for a ritual cleansing. ‘Avert!’

  ‘No,’ Jieret protested, to no avail. The first circle was breached. The second was already half-scrubbed away under his enemy’s industrious heel. Shortly only the innermost circle remained, with the acorn construct left forlorn on its bed of weathered stone.

  ‘Don’t.’ But the caithdein’s desperate plea passed unnoticed.

  The Lord Commander of the Light’s faithful erased that final, frail barrier. Protective spells crumpled, a sheet-thin failing of light unveiled by the torn shreds of Jieret’s mage-sight. He saw no explosion, heard no clap of backlash. Yet around him, the barrens went utterly still as the mazing runes that had masked the location of Arithon’s conjured fetch broke away.

  Absorbed by his crude exorcism of spells, Avenor’s Lord Commander never glanced down the hillside. The change passed unnoticed, as the white-clad figure straightened up from devastated collapse. If Sulfin Evend heard his Blessed Prince’s ravaged cry, he paid no more heed than he gave the gasped warning from the barbarian chieftain his quarrel had wounded.

  As the sparking burn of Lysaer’s raised light once again seared across the sky and earth, blinding Jieret’s dazed sight, the Lord Commander raised his spurred boot. He stamped down on the acorn. The fragile shell smashed. Its delicate, spelled contents sprang into release, and a rune of stasis unraveled. Grand conjury met and matched preset patterns of intent, as the intricate, wound spring of Arithon’s last line of defense spells unfurled, beyond any man’s power to recall.

  Late Winter 5670

  Eagle’s Eye View

  Shadow erupted, a scrolled spiral of jet ink that uncoiled in release from the remnants of the crushed acorn. From the eagle’s high vantage, circling above, the darkness expanded, whirling into a maw that encompassed Lysaer’s deluging blast like caught magma. Light, shade, and the inset directives of masterfully laid magics interlocked with a bestial howl. Unlike other clashes provoked by Desh-thiere’s curse, the darkness did not seek to smother the coruscating bursts. This counterflare of shadow had been tempered by spelled ciphers that bent and funneled the light bolts with capturing force. Lysaer’s assault became whirled into a needlepoint focus as it struck its intended target: the eggshell remains of the acorn, and the mica construct bound in black hair that wore the pattern of Arithon’s Named essence.

  That blasting intervention became all that spared the two enemies locked in their crisis of contention. Both the Alliance commander and the clanblood chieftain shot down by the bolt from his crossbow escaped the horror of instantaneous incineration. Swathed and shielded under those veils of risen dark, they were the fortunate ones.

  For the light hammered into that conjured bait did not disperse into flash-fire heat. A crafty intervention by set wards of grand conjury grappled the aggressive impetus of Lysaer’s unsheathed gift and engaged a locked glyph imprinted with its matched opposite: the barbs of compulsion Desh-thiere’s curse had twisted through Arithon’s aura. Hate fused with like hatred. Across space and time, the light bolts exploded, raging. The spelled lure that drew them raised the unslaked fury of years to a storm of mindless annihilation.

  Across the winter hills of Daon Ramon Barrens, eight other acorn constructs responded. Fused into unity outside the veil, the fetches of Arithon’s presence responded as one. The blindfold directive of the Mistwraith’s geas could not discriminate between states of existence to separate one clever construct from the next. Nor had Lysaer’s intent as he struck encompassed the possibility that his marked quarry would be split manyfold.

  Yet the eagle’s lofty perspective unveiled the full breadth of the defenses wrought by Rathain’s prince and his caithdein. The conjoined finesse of a master’s trained knowledge, and the fresh exuberance of Jieret’s wakened mage talent, diverted Lysaer’s attack across time and space. The blasting coruscation smashed with obliterating force into each of the eight enspelled acorns. Their bearers, fallen, or living and hounded to flight, bore the flash-burn brunt of the impacts. Whether flying in retreat, or locked in mortal combat, men were razed, willy-nilly, where they stood.

  The sprawled, broken body of Eafinn’s son ignited, along with the sly-faced tracker from Darkling, paused to harvest a barbarian scalp and cash in on the mayor’s bounty. The headhunter band with him danced, set aflame, horses and humans screaming in raw-throated agony.

  Two leagues farther east, the spelled company from Jaelot became torched. Their unfortunate officer had cut Theirid’s clan braid. Paused to stuff the trophy in his saddle pack, he died, blazing, along with his mounted escort. Not a dead man among them ever guessed the acorn tucked into the rag knotting the barbarian’s hair had been anything more sinister than a talisman worn as a luck charm.

  Of the southbound ranks from Etarra, none perished; but the well-knit course of their advance burst into harrowed disarray as other acorns planted across their line of march erupted to rocketing sheets of white balefire. Wind-borne sparks seeded a wall of burning brush across the countryside. Some of Jieret’s clan war band escaped through the gaps, saved by the opportune evasion as the enemy�
�s scorched ranks came unraveled. Others in pitched battle seized on their chance as the roiling pall of smoke broke the nerve of well-disciplined mounts, and hazed the Alliance host into reeling retreat. Others died in the merciless, red rage of skirmish. Sword to sword, closed into a jostling ring, the townborn locked weapons with screaming clan foes left no choice but to fight to the death. Jieret’s scouts stood their ground, back-to-back. They cut and slashed, grimly knowing, as the air in their midst exploded to shrieking flame and bright lightning. The ten who still stood on their weary feet burned. Irreplaceable lives set forfeit to buy the most bitter of victories: they charred, having lured their Alliance enemies to share terrible doom through their oathbound ties to the Light, and the darker obsessions of battle frenzy and bloodlust.

  Where no spelled acorn had been set to cause mayhem, the ranks of the townborn scattered in wailing fear, unsure if the levin bolts might strike them next. They cowered, or fled, or wept where they stood, unmanned by their terror of treacherous black sorcery, and the rampaging conflagrations that had unraveled their stern strength and immolated brave officers and companions.

  High above the smoke, and the fires, and the screams, where the winds blew untainted, the golden eagle still circled. His farsighted vision tracked the hellbound flight of clan riders, and singled out the furtive bearer of a spelled sword wrapped in leather. That one drove two saddled remounts at a relentless gallop, his determined course bent northwestward. A blink, and the bird watched man’s doings no more, but traced the distressed lane forces purling across the smoldering vales and scorched earth. His Sorcerer’s perception soon found what he sought: a dissonant, edged whine that sawed through the barren’s chill silence. The eagle banked, following.

  Landscape unreeled beneath each driving wingbeat, tracing that streamer of strayed energies back to its original source. The disturbing current emanated from a gap between hills, an unclean residue left in the wake of the fires still charring the bones of Jaelot’s ill-fated garrison. The geas of forced intent that had warped their behavior now drifted free, left unmoored when the slain captain’s spirit crossed over Fate’s Wheel.