Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Murdered,’ gasped Jieret. ‘Why not collar Avenor’s inner cabal and ask for the truth?’

  ‘Enough, damn you!’ The Alliance Lord Commander twisted sidewards. He snatched up his knife, hacked a seam, then shredded a strip from the edge of the blanket. ‘I’ll bind your mouth. Knotted rope would hurt most, but the nicety will have to wait.’

  ‘Indulgence of cruelty won’t change the unsavory facts. You zealots at Avenor are no better than string puppets played for a blood feud.’ Breathless, near fainting, Jieret turned his face just in time.

  The punch of Sulfin Evend’s studded fist grazed his cheek, plowing pain from his scarcely scabbed burns.

  ‘Coward!’ Jieret kicked out his lashed ankles. The wrench ripped him out of his enemy’s grasp just long enough to invite, ‘Why not ask Lysaer which one of us abuses Ath’s grace with presumptions?’ Unable to gauge Sulfin Evend’s reaction without eyesight, Rathain’s caithdein risked all and provoked, ‘Or are you afraid you’ve bent your pedigree neck to a mortal man who’s a liar?’

  ‘Honorless scum! I said, that’s enough!’ A scrambling lunge spat a spray of loose gravel. Enraged, but far too controlled to indulge the reckless urge to kill outright, Sulfin Evend rammed into the barbarian’s back and neck and trounced him flat in a snowbank.

  Jieret thrashed, tried to roll. His lips split, ground into frost-cracked rock and ice. Helpless to fight back, he prayed for the swift slice of a blade at his throat. Again fortune jilted him. He received instead a shattering slam, as a wood billet cracked his nape like a bludgeon and cast him adrift into darkness.

  Earl Jieret roused, gagging. The copper-sweet scent of blood clogged his nostrils. His mouth gushed. The drowning sensation of tepid liquid flooding his gullet wrenched him double. He choked, curled into a spasm of coughing. He tried to spit and clear his mouth. Yet the horror did not subside. The effort stunned him to wounding pain and a shocked surge of dizziness.

  When he gathered himself and sorted the damage, the uncouth discovery unstrung him. His outcry of rage was reft wordless. Revolted body and mind, he curled in a knot, while appalled revulsion grasped his gut with barbed hooks and twisted him witless with nausea.

  Had he known any way to stop reflex, he would have willed his ruined flesh to cease breathing.

  ‘Your tongue was cut out,’ said a steely voice from a point not far overhead. ‘My Lord Commander, Sulfin Evend, wielded the knife. Had he not addressed the matter forthwith, you would not have been spared. The same act would have come at my command.’

  Blind, now reft dumb, Jieret clamped bloodstained teeth. If he must weep, the bandages masking eyes hid his shame. No such kindly recourse existed, for hearing. He refused to cringe, or whimper like some pitiful, trapped beast as the speaker addressed him again.

  ‘Surely you realize your worth as a hostage?’ Such seamlessly detached majesty could only belong to Lysaer s’Ilessid himself. ‘If you regret your insulting, brash words, you’ll have no more chance to complain.’

  A pause, while Jieret fought his spasming throat to locked silence.

  The Divine Prince leaned closer, his magisterial tone shaded to contempt. ‘Try to write, and I promise, both your hands will be put to the sword. The foul rumors you broached were not only ugly, but dangerous.’

  Degraded beyond bearing, unable to avoid the slimy puddle of his own filth, Jieret turned his face to the ground. He raged to lash back that such goading was moot. Crushed and bleeding, overwhelmed by abject despair, he could write nothing at all with bound hands. The hurt squeezed his heart, that he should have lived to become a tool in the hands of his enemies.

  Prince Arithon must be left free to prevail, unimpaired by encumbrance or hostages. The outside hope waned, that Sulfin Evend could be moved to question his unbending loyalty. The small seed of destruction that Jieret had planted had found no fertile ground, to have earned a vindication of such vile proportions.

  Footsteps approached, tagged by chiming spurs. ‘At least dose him with poppy,’ suggested the Lord Commander. If he felt any pity at all, his following line came dry with laconic practicality. ‘You want a live prisoner, we’ll need to do something humane to ease his condition.’

  ‘He’s a meddling black sorcerer!’ snapped Lysaer s’Ilessid. ‘There will be justice served for that, and the longer list of civil crimes committed against my city of Etarra.’

  Sulfin Evend abandoned his argument. A matter of firm record, Red-beard’s marauding raids had preyed upon innocents for years. The Northern League of Headhunters kept a damning tally of the number of caravans with drovers and draft animals slaughtered. By Etarran account, this slinking clanbred assassin had shot the marked arrow that cost Lord Mayor Pesquil his life. Worse, he had stood as the Master of Shadow’s collaborator when the fleet burned at Minderl Bay.

  The finish carried the cold ring of finality as the Blessed Prince made disposition. ‘Let the murderer languish. His trial of nightmares and suffering will answer for each of our men who has died.’

  Tortured awareness was all that remained.

  Jieret was left sprawled upon stony ground, condemned to a grinding extension of life that promised indescribable agony. His bound limbs had already stiffened with chill, until every joint ached with persistence. A blind man could not mark the passage of nightfall. He could wrest no comfort from measuring the critical three days of grace, through which Arithon s’Ffalenn might sustain his perilous refuge under the masking spells holding his spirit apart from his flesh.

  Minute to minute, the uncertainty racked Jieret, that his liege’s survival might lie beyond all redress.

  Caithdein of the realm, he wept then, a silenced outpouring of grief. He could do nothing, only beg for the descent of Dharkaron’s Black Spear to lay waste useless flesh and bring him the surcease of release.

  He received no deliverance. Only Sulfin Evend, with a bitter decoction of willowbark and betony. ‘His Blessed Grace is resting. Bedamned if I’ve taken this much trouble just to sit by and watch you succumb out of shock.’

  Jieret averted his face and refused the strong drink.

  ‘Devil!’ his tormentor gasped under his breath.

  Locked teeth were pried open and the remedy dribbled into the prisoner’s lacerated mouth. Reflex made him swallow. Fed gruel and rebandaged and cleansed of his own filth, Jieret struggled, cuffed and pinned down like a puppy until the dregs of his pride lay in tatters.

  He sprawled listless afterward, too spent to move, while the virtues of healing herbals slowly dampened his rioting pain. His poisoned, trapped thoughts now ranged free of distraction, gnawing his spirit without surcease. Guilt raked him, that Arithon’s parting word had been a plea to die fast and cleanly.

  Jieret tipped his head toward a clouded sky his ravaged eyes could not see. Light snowfall dusted his bandaged cheek. His other companion, a prankish southeast wind, tossed him scraps of conversation. His deprived mind seized on those fragmented bits, a hunter’s skill Caolle had drilled into his being until he reacted by instinct.

  ‘… no other survivors,’ Sulfin Evend was saying. The clipped chink of rowels told of purposeful strides toward the picket where, by the smell, Lysaer’s horse had been tied. ‘Just myself, and your mount …’ A gust tore a gap, then, ‘… can’t last three days on the rations left in my pack.’

  Lysaer’s response was spiked with testy consonants.

  Avenor’s Lord Commander gave him back unsympathetic practicality. ‘Well, there’s not much alternative. Unless you care to share carrion with the vultures?’

  A ripped intake of breath, then a curt phrase from Lysaer, from which the word ‘sorcery’ stood out with etched clarity.

  Leather harness creaked. A girth buckle clanged upon rock. Sulfin Evend evidently saddled the one horse. His exasperation wafted through a snort as the animal shrank from the embrace of cold trappings. ‘… foolish belief you could match mortal troops against the Spinner of Darkness unscathed! I’ve said fifty times, do I need to
repeat this? Meddle with a demon who’s been trained to mastery, you’ve no choice at all but to defend with arcane protections!’

  A shrill hiss masked the following line as snow was dumped on the hot ring of stones where the fire burned. ‘… rejoin the Etarrans,’ Lysaer ended, his cool equanimity restored as the coals subsided to steam and wet ashes. ‘Their priest has dispatched a half company to meet us. The rest have been told to stay encamped until the ones who are scattered can regroup.’

  ‘Then we should wait here for them,’ Sulfin Evend objected. His voice strengthened as he turned back toward camp and shook out the white stallion’s bridle. ‘Forgive my presumption, my Lord Exalted. But we have no scouts and not a standing man for protection. The wise course is to lie low right where we are. Let the Etarran trackers find us.’

  Silence, from Lysaer, who perhaps had sat down. The rustling friction of wool cloth and silk mantles became lost in the rise and fall of the wind.

  ‘Bedamned to your sacred mission to destroy the minion of Shadow!’ Sulfin Evend resumed, apparently undaunted by what must have been a scathing glare of displeasure. ‘We are as two straws amid a burned landscape that doesn’t have spit left for landmarks!’

  No response, just the magisterial bustle of hands, stubbornly repacking a saddlebag.

  Sulfin Evend’s tirade resurged in earnest. ‘Have you gone mad? A storm’s moving in. You’re not recovered. In harsh fact, you look likely to measure your length if you stand up to empty your bladder. This horse has singed legs. He can’t bear two riders. Let me tell you, that barbarian prisoner’s too injured to shoulder a journey on foot. We’ve thwarted the last reason he has to keep living. Push on, strain him further, he’ll tip over the edge. Might as well draw your sword and just kill him.’

  Stillness descended, the wind’s wail touched through by the whistle as an ember expired in the fire pit. Lysaer never moved. When he spoke, his collected tone held the dangerous tang of sheared iron. ‘What will be said to the widows at Narms, if we make no effort to pursue? Could you tell them the Spinner of Darkness went free for the sake of a road-raiding murderer’s safety? We break camp, no matter the cost. If you think the barbarian hostage is too weak, then I’ll fare on foot. Let him be the one to go mounted.’

  The eagle circled high overhead, a stealthy shadow knifing through spangling flakes of light snowfall. He observed the racking indignity as Jieret was hauled upright and lashed to the back of the horse, while the unseasonal, cold wind hissed down from the north and tweaked the brushed bronze of his feathers. Over the land, patched charcoal and white, the late winter closed in, the iced freshets gnarled like twists of wrapped steel through frost-hardened soil that languished for sign of coming spring.

  ‘It’s due to lane imbalance,’ Davien supplied, the enchantress whose awareness rode with him sharing his relentless reconnaissance. ‘Weather can’t break until the winds shift their pattern, a cycle unlikely to see change before the midsummer solstice.’

  That bit of ill news would bring famine in the north. Late-planted crops might have no time to yield, before next autumn’s frosts spoiled the harvest.

  Yet Elaira was unable to focus for long upon worries concerning the future. Far beneath, an ant figure in byrnie and helm, Sulfin Evend slogged ahead. The burdened stallion plodded on a lead rein at his heels, its coat smirched ivory against the watered-milk flurry of snowflakes. Lysaer s’Ilessid accompanied on foot, morose in his soot-grimed finery. The gold-and-white sunwheel mantle now hung ragged at the hem, irretrievably soiled by cinders. Storm and gloom cast his gilt trappings in tarnish, and his steps betrayed stumbling unsteadiness.

  ‘He can’t last an hour,’ the Sorcerer reassured. A downbeat of wings skimmed him on a quarrel’s straight course through a gust. ‘If you want, we can wager when he’ll collapse. Double stake, if Sulfin Evend can manage to catch him before he lands on his face.’

  Yet even the bite of corrosive humor failed to raise any quip in response. Elaira’s anguished attention remained fixed on the blanketed form strapped over the drooping horse.

  Distance and altitude failed to mask the details of Jieret’s relentless defeat. He still wore his leathers, the soft buckskins Feithan had tanned with such love streaked and torn where the light bolt had grazed him. Bloodstains blotched his wounded shoulder, bound up in frayed strips of rag. The russet braid that had once rallied his war band like a banner dangled down, clawed to napped tangles by each grabbing thorn branch. Wind flicked and snapped the stained ends of the dressing bound over his ruined eyes.

  The ignominious certainty must sting like rubbed salt in the sore of his misery, that shortly his cut clan braid would be nailed to Lysaer’s sunwheel banner as flaunting proof of his capture. In a day, Lysaer’s cause had undone a lifetime’s unassailable dignity. A s’Valerient son who should never have failed in his charge as Rathain’s caithdein, his proud build and stag’s strength had been purposefully broken. The horse bore him on like a ragpicker’s haul, bundled for two-penny salvage.

  While the snow swirled and winnowed, and the eagle sustained its grim vigil, Elaira’s held presence erupted to fury for Lysaer’s self-righteous cruelty. ‘Ath’s deathless mercy, I dare not move to help him! How much worse, as caithdein if he became forced to betray Arithon under the obligation of a Koriani oath of debt?’

  The eagle bristled the hackles on its crest. ‘Meddle in the fate of a sanctioned crown prince? No Prime Matriarch ever dared!’

  ‘You’ve been out of touch,’ Elaira revealed, her acid thought shaded to sorrow. ‘Selidie’s predecessor already set precedence. Morriel laid claim to Cattrick that way, and spoiled Arithon’s machinations at Riverton.’ She had the respect not to press home the point, that Koriani politics had grown more aggressive through the years, with Fellowship numbers and resource left erosively curtailed.

  The eagle shook out its ruff. The sharp lift of the wind screamed through taut pinions as it circled. ‘You’ve the same flaying tongue as Kharadmon, even if female wit is more subtle.’

  A spark of grim humor leaped through the contact, a flicker that might have been laughter had Elaira’s awareness been couched in its housing of flesh. ‘I’ve no guile at all, as your colleague Kharadmon already had the poor grace to find out.’ A pause, while the snowfall thickened to pearl. The wind-whipped procession below stalled for parley, then turned off the trail to seek shelter and rest in a gully. While the gelding shook the caked ice from its mane, and the captive was unlashed from its saddle, Elaira bit back in acerbic honesty, ‘Are you going to act?’

  The eagle folded broad wings and plunged in a whistling descent. He leveled off mere yards above the iced tips of the brush. The veiling scrim of the snowfall that obscured a clear view of the valley scarcely troubled his silken glide. ‘I am guile itself. Knowing that, and informed of my reputation, would you care to strike a bargain?’

  Elaira’s self-contained pause wound into taut trepidation. ‘This won’t be a contest concerning how long the s’Ilessid takes to fall down.’

  The Sorcerer’s silence seemed an ominous affirmation.

  Below, the horse slipped and scrambled down a bank of loose scree. A bloom of bright red showed that Jieret’s ripped shoulder had opened and started to bleed.

  ‘The choices are ugly,’ the enchantress returned, agonized. Yet the fierce heartbreak engendered by pity ruled her more powerfully than fear. ‘Speak first. I can’t weigh the decision without knowing your terms.’

  Davien flapped, the strength in his wingbeat no natural bird’s, that drove without effort through the rough gusts of low altitude without buffeting. Nor did his yellow, predator’s eyes show emotion as he fixed on the party of three men and the horse, now jammed into a huddle in the thicketed lee of an outcrop. ‘As caithdein of Rathain, Earl Jieret is entitled to ask Fellowship help. I can, perhaps, arrange the opportunity for the man to enact that fine point of law in free will. In return, I require your presence. You need do nothing else, lady. No act of yours sha
ll touch Jieret’s fate. Just lend me your company as living witness for the duration.’

  Elaira knew better than to ask what stakes might be played by a Sorcerer named as Betrayer; rankest folly to think she could second-guess the least clue to Davien’s underlying motivations. Pragmatic by necessity, she considered the clan chieftain, and the devastating cost that would be extracted for his untimely survival. ‘Can you assure me that Jieret will see release and live out his days a whole man?’

  No liar, Davien did not play on false hope. ‘I can promise nothing concerning a mortal man’s destiny. Earl Jieret’s own choice must prevail. What can be restored is his power to act. He alone must decide how he’ll use it.’

  Wrenched by the sight of the limp form being manhandled off the steamed horse, aching for the crimson stain slowly soaking through the ill-tied layers of wool bandage, Elaira cut off debate. For Arithon’s sake, as well as Earl Jieret’s, the stakes riding on her refusal posed the more deadly predicament.

  The misery of inaction would torment her far worse than flinging all caution into the winds.

  ‘Very well, here’s my word.’ Brought up driving hard-handed bargains with thieves, the enchantress phrased her matching bid in shrewd language. ‘If there’s a chance Earl Jieret can escape the entrapment of serving as bait to draw Arithon, I accept.’

  Late Winter 5670

  Near and Far

  Crouched over her scrying mirror at Highscarp, Prime Selidie gasps in stunned joy to the peeress, ‘Mother fortune, we’ve been blessed! Davien the Betrayer has just made a serious misstep. He can’t know we’ve reclaimed our Great Waystone from Sethvir’s keeping at Althain Tower, or he’d never dare seal a bargain with an initiate who’s bound under my sigils of prime power. He’s vulnerable, don’t you see? The great amethyst can entrap his discorporate spirit, lent access to him through Elaira …’