Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  An acrid bite of charred wood also lingered along the upper passage. Smoke had grayed the groined ceiling. Pallid light fell through the lancet windows and struck bladed rays through a film of blue haze. The leftover smell bore a nauseating reek of singed meat, poorly masked by the purging fragrance of herbs. Through the delicate perfume of sweetgrass and gardenia, sharp as filings, Lirenda noticed the bracing tang left by an infusion of tienelle. That trace scent of seersweed awoke damning proof: something more than an act of deep conjury had transpired behind those shut doors late last night.

  Snapped from self-absorption, Lirenda took stock of the overlooked details and noted the undue tension that stilted her colleague’s self-righteous carriage. Speculation rekindled, igniting the predatory glint in the depths of her tawny eyes. She had heard that a Senior Circle had met, filled by members of the Koriani Council. She had not guessed, nor had stirring rumors yet ruffled the routine affairs in the sisterhouse, that their works had gone drastically wrong.

  Lirenda smiled, sparked to provocation. ‘I’m not being called to mop up the spilled broth?’

  One brief returned glance brushed her off in contempt. Yet the stunned, secret silence that stilled Cadgia’s tongue bespoke a far-reaching disaster.

  Lirenda had no chance to probe whether the setback could be milked for advantage. The older enchantress turned down a molded gilt archway, set her pink, matron’s hand to the latch, and clicked open the door to the Prime’s private apartment.

  The anteroom, with its dark, tasseled tapestries, and its low, cushioned divans, lay empty. Stale air and closed-in dust suggested the casements had not been opened for freshening. The plush rugs, bordered with sigils of guard, had not been brushed up by the servants. The purple wool pile bore the crushed imprint of many feet, coming and going. An overbearing taint of tansy salve lingered, the rancid musk of the goose-grease base intermingled with the dried lavender the past Prime, and now her young successor, preferred to sweeten her closets.

  The Prime’s bedchamber door was also closed, with the thick velvet curtains gathered over the lintel drawn across to muffle sound.

  Curiosity prickled too sharply to quell. ‘Selidie’s unwell?’ Lirenda demanded in a disbelieving whisper.

  Cadgia regarded her, again without answering, the chill deep as layered ice in blue eyes. She brushed back the curtains, gently tapped. As the page inside responded and inserted a key, then unlocked the oiled-wood panel, she gestured for Lirenda to enter. ‘You’re expected.’

  The disgraced enchantress straightened, chin raised. She needed no refined skills of observation to sense that looming peril awaited her beyond. Her dignity regal despite her wisped hair and the sulfur streaks marring her skirt, she crossed over the threshold to answer the mandatory summons.

  The curtains over the windows were drawn.

  Under gloom deep as night, scented candles burned in tiered ranks from silver holders atop the armoire. More tapers blazed from bronze stands, set on both sides of the raised bed. The furnishing itself was massive and old, of black Vhalzein lacquer, gleaming with citrus oil, and inlaid like white fire with floral patterns in costly mother-of-pearl. The tied-back folds of the bed hangings were purple, the sumptuous Narms dyes dark enough to seem black. The warding sigils stitched in copper and gold thread, whorled in patterns of hold and bind, bespoke an exhaustive, even desperate strength. The chained ciphers described no pattern of protection Lirenda had ever been taught.

  All but overcome by the sudden, shrill instinct that urged her to drop dignity and flee, she clung to decorum. Step by trembling step, she advanced. The figure propped amid the pillows regarded her, the cold eyes pale azure, not jet. Yet with her lush hair bound under a headdress of white linen, and her porcelain skin pale as a snowfield, Prime Selidie for one unnerving moment seemed as wasted as the ghost of her late predecessor, Morriel.

  Shaken by that uncanny impression, Lirenda reached the throw rug spread at the foot of the bed. Deportment sustained her. She curtseyed. Yet even as she drew breath to pronounce the formal words of obeisance, another woman’s voice interrupted; someone whose presence had been shielded behind the strategic dazzle of candles.

  ‘You will not address her,’ informed the sisterhouse peeress. ‘Nor will you otherwise speak, except in reply to set questions.’

  Lirenda lost poise, her gasp of sheer terror like a rip in the absolute quiet: for this summons was no formal audience, and no straightforward reprimand. She had been called to the ritual, closed trial reserved for initiates who had transgressed their vow of obedience.

  The peeress’s presence had passed unseen because she would be veiled and gowned in black for her role as Ceremonial Inquisitor.

  Heart hammering, drenched in the sudden, sour sweat of a fear of suffocating proportion, Lirenda shut her lips against protestations. The order’s strict form would not permit questions. By ancient custom, the Koriani Prime could refuse to speak to outsiders. As an initiate placed on trial for infraction, Lirenda was forced to rely on the inquisitor to stand as her intermediary.

  ‘You will kneel,’ instructed the peeress. Even her judgmental nature showed distress for the gravity of the charge. Also aware of the unspeakable horror that attended the supreme penalty, she visibly struggled to uphold her office with the semblance of neutral decorum. ‘Face your Prime.’

  Lirenda did as bidden. Worse than afraid, she shifted her gaze and confronted the Matriarch enthroned on the bed.

  Selidie’s regard encompassed her with frigid dispassion. The eyes beneath her delicate, arched brows were placid, clear as the glaze on the gentian glass blown by a Falgaire artisan. She appeared settled, in full command at initial, first glance.

  Yet the fine-grained, young skin wore the faint stamp of circles beneath masking layers of rice powder. The experienced eye read the signs: the Matriarch was spent from some hard rite of spellcraft, her febrile exhaustion betrayed by the light, kept low to ease sluggish pupils. Composed as she seemed, the hands in her lap lay concealed in the frothy, voile lace of a shawl.

  Her tone as she spoke was blunted and languid, as though she had been dosed with strong possets. ‘Inform the accused there will be no questions. Her guilt is already proved.’

  Lirenda jerked back from retort just in time. Any speech, any appeal would compound her disobedience, closing forever the last loophole in due procedure, that her sentence had not been pronounced. Under the burden of unbearable tension enlivened by panic, she could feel every fiber of the pile rug digging into her knees; each fan of draft across her damp skin. The scent of the air, laden with unguents and the medicinal sting of turpentine, all but overwhelmed her strained senses. Lirenda swallowed, choked mute. Despite every effort, her body betrayed her: once she began shaking, she could not stop. Humiliation stained her cheeks as the long, raking tremors built and built, then swept beyond hope of concealment.

  A word from the Matriarch would seal her fate for all time. She could be condemned as a witless one, pinned down and marked with the oathbreaker’s brand on her forehead. That cruel debasement would become her last conscious memory before her core self became forfeit. By Koriani law, the mind of the forsworn was routed out by spelled forces channeled through a major crystal until her last shred of identity became stripped.

  Selidie said nothing.

  Through the hideous pause, the candles kept burning. The boy pages in their gold-and-violet livery maintained their assigned post by the door. Under the muffling veils of the Ceremonial Inquisitor’s regalia, the peeress scarcely breathed. Her long fingers clasped white knuckled at her waist, the only detail picked out of the shadows to reveal her silenced distress.

  Raked over the coals of a reviling helplessness, Lirenda sustained under torture. Her sole voice was the lifetime result of stern training: a will that let her endure in raw courage. She held herself, kneeling, just shy of collapse, quiet in the threadbare pretense of a calm that had long since been shattered.

  Selidie stirred finally. Her h
ead tipped back to rest amid the pillows sewn with sigils in metallic thread. She slanted a glance toward the Ceremonial Inquisitor. ‘What should be the punishment for acts of vengeful spellcraft inflicted upon a company of unsuspecting guardsmen from Jaelot? That harm cost their lives.’ Her voice dulcet, she added, ‘The geas of pursuit that drove them to ruin was not done by my order!’

  Forbidden to answer unless the question was addressed to her by name, Lirenda stayed silent. Pinned under the Prime’s devouring regard, she still wrestled her risen distress. Her body refused the same self-command. Perspiration stippled her brow and rolled in drops down her temples. Frozen as the mouse before the coiled snake, she dared not even wonder how the Prime had discovered the details of her transgression. She had set rigorous sigils of guard against scrying. A linked construct tied in by masterful invention should have kept the spell’s signature from imprinting any telltale traces on the lane flux.

  The Ceremonial Inquisitor also was reft speechless, while the ranked candles burned, the white beeswax run liquid and refrozen in grotesque, clumped driblets.

  Selidie Prime held her blazing regard on Lirenda. Her stilled quiet stayed absolute, the linen mantled over her as freezing white as the shimmer off a distant ice field. At length, she snapped a command to her pages. ‘Fetch the Skyron crystal.’

  Brittle as blown glass, drained sickeningly hollow, Lirenda fought not to faint. Mercy upon her, she was not sentenced yet! But the desperation, the looming fear of annihilation, threatened to break her before time. If this were Morriel she faced, everything that transpired was a test. The penalty confronting her was not pronounced; its severity could yet be mitigated. But not if she snapped or lost her head. Lirenda hung on beyond reason and will, her soaked clothing plastered against quivering flanks. She closed her dry throat against pleading until the tears she refused to shed brimmed the shelves of her eyelids.

  ‘The accused has schooled herself to a superb self-control,’ Selidie observed, while the page who filled her request came forward and raised the lid of a bronze-bound coffer. ‘A great shame she could not show the same character regarding her personal feelings.’

  The peeress herself could scarcely withstand the bearing pressure of those glacial, blue eyes. She curtseyed, her black robes and veil a sigh of stirred draft in the stillness. ‘Given a stay of clemency, the accused might yet learn.’

  Selidie’s delicate features showed no change of expression. ‘She has been shown quarter. Was, in fact, granted an earlier reprieve in the form of a trial of recompense.’ Contempt like a whipcrack infused the last line, and the chill gaze blazed back, to flick over Lirenda, from her raised, rigid chin, to her cramped, slippered feet, tucked under her buttocks as she knelt in ruthless suspense by the foot of the Prime’s raised bed. ‘She failed the test, and in rebellious fury, committed the act that has brought her here to face sentence. This time, no plea will be heard.’

  The peeress bent her head, chastened. ‘Your will be done, Matriarch.’

  ‘Bind the wrists of the accused with stout cloth,’ Prime Selidie commanded the page who remained by the door. No gesture accompanied her ringing, hard words. ‘Then bring her before me.’

  To the Ceremonial Inquisitor, she instructed, ‘Take up the Skyron crystal when the boy retrieves the small coffer. You will unveil the stone. Raise its active focus, then hold the channel open for my use.’

  Lirenda shut her eyes, a fractional break in control, but one impelled by necessity. Dizzied and faint, she could not stay upright for another moment without easing her spinning vision. Sound continued to reach her, the remorseless train of forward events marked out through a swimming, self-imposed darkness: the approaching step of the page, then his hesitant touch as he grasped her. She must not resist, must not flinch at the tightening bite of the cloth as he knotted her wrists behind her back.

  Nor did that ignominy blunt the clink of wrought brass as the peeress unlatched each one of twelve fastenings on the box holding the Skyron aquamarine.

  Although this focus stone did not emanate the overwhelming aura of the Great Waystone, its unveiled presence could be felt, a dire current flooding through the sharp taint of ointments, and the musk of Lirenda’s terrified sweat. She fought her turned senses, roused deadened flesh to respond as the page’s prod at her back signaled her to arise. Stumbling against the boy’s inexpert touch, she mounted the low step to the Prime’s bedside.

  There, she was again bidden to kneel, this time on bare floor. The wood hurt her knees. The discomfort compounded the raced thud of her heart, and the shuddering weakness that remorselessly threatened to unstring her.

  ‘Ath’s pity upon you,’ the peeress breathed, her whisper in Lirenda’s ear surreptitious as, relentlessly bound to obedience, she was told by the Prime to touch the enabled aquamarine against the neck at the base of the accused’s skull.

  The contact burned, colder than arctic ice and tingling with a charged corona of power.

  Lirenda would have collapsed then, had the peeress’s stout knee not braced her back from behind. What lay ahead would be worse than unpleasant. Twice in her career as First Enchantress to the Prime, Lirenda had been the one asked to bear the live focus stone while a condemned initiate was rendered witless.

  Prime Selidie knew as much. She observed her victim’s stifled panic, remote in disinterest as a reptile.

  She has not read the sentence, even still, Lirenda reminded herself. The stress climbed unbearably, while the cloth ties she reflexively fought in tight jerks chafed her skin red, and terror all but overmastered her.

  Yet no reprieve came. Step by step, the process resumed as the Prime demanded the surrender of the accused’s personal quartz crystal. Lirenda bit her lip to throttle her urge to whimper as the page came forward, dug under her tight collar, and caught up the stone’s silver chain.

  Head turned aside, Lirenda choked back a gasp as the quartz pendant was lifted away.

  ‘Remove the covering from my hands,’ Selidie directed the page. ‘Then turn the accused’s crystal over to me.’

  White lace was lifted away, releasing the cloying stench of styptic powder, unguents, and herbs. The hands, now revealed, were a grisly ruin, all cracked, charred flesh, and brittle ends of seared bone.

  Lirenda stifled a gagging shriek. Suffocating under the nightmare web of anticipated experience, she needed her last shred of will to stave off total breakdown. Second to second, she battled hysteria with the fact that she had yet to be sentenced.

  The creeping suspicion stayed all but drowned under her blasting fear: that whatever power had upset the Prime’s conjury had acted on a scale unimaginable. Never before in the order’s long history had Fellowship Sorcerers broken through the wards of the Great Waystone. Ath’s adepts, or Paravians, none else were capable.

  Lirenda latched on to the faint breath of hope, that such a crisis meant she was needed. Perhaps after all, tonight’s brutal trial was no more than a course of chastisement.

  Prime Selidie refused the humane course in any case. She did not soften or speak outright. In punishment, surely, for the past folly of Lirenda’s insinuations at Whitehold, she followed the irreversible steps that would sunder the condemned from personal volition and memory. The Matriarch accepted the quartz and chain into her crippled hands, despite a pain which snatched her breath ragged. She hissed through her teeth and unbent crabbed fingers, then traced the Prime’s sigil of command over Lirenda’s crystal.

  The accused felt the force of that binding lock over her. Vised in its hold, body and mind, Lirenda became powerless to move. While thought and feeling raged on untouched, shackled within helpless flesh, she felt the first, sawing tingle of the Skyron stone thrumming its invasive vibration through her skull. All her barriers were stripped. The fire of impelled presence poured in liquid torment along the trapped channels of her nerves. Nausea followed, ripped by spinning dizziness. Unable to seize even the animal relief of letting her stomach wring itself empty, Lirenda heard every wor
d as Selidie pronounced the formal lines of her sentence.

  ‘For the crime of disobedience, for causing willful harm without direct orders from a Koriani senior, the accused will wear the brand for the rest of her natural life.’ The Prime Matriarch leaned forward. The raised crystal, its dangling chain gently swinging, was touched to Lirenda’s brow.

  Dread flowered from the contact, a desperate, suffocating panic that snapped reason like so much spun thread.

  Cut off from survival’s most primal instinct to flinch, Lirenda longed for her wheeling senses to shut down. Relief lay beyond reach. She could not faint. The Skyron aquamarine charged with the Prime’s master sigils denied her any small respite. The sickening stench of Selidie’s roasted flesh enveloped her like a cloud. By force, she endured the corpse-touch of bare bone, a prick alongside the chill point of the quartz crystal bearing on her sweating skin. She smelled the Prime’s breath, sour with herb tinctures, as the incantation was spoken.

  Then the blinding, hideous pain, as the powers of prime command were unleashed through the crystal, searing the indelible mark of shame on her forehead. Then the figure was completed, the branding accomplished. The quartz point rested still upon Lirenda’s brow, driving a rod of coruscating agony into the depths of her cranium. She heard more words, felt the faint snap of connection as the smaller stone became joined into resonance with the overbearing currents raised through the Skyron focus.

  Merciful Ath, the worst was to happen. She would be made witless and finish her days as a drooling husk. Lirenda breathed in snatched whimpers, lost now, about to be broken beyond hope. Through abject terror came wretched relief, that within a few moments, the numbness would come. She would not feel, would not think. Though the body would survive, her humiliation would be ended, all personal awareness erased into peace for the rest of her life.