Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  The lie was transparent, a deception of such arrogance that Dakar’s gorge rose. Entrained into empathy with the mountain’s predicament, he exploded in revolted fury. ‘What can you do? The critical hour has already passed! Even with all seven Sorcerers helping, you can’t hope to refigure the wardings that bind Desh-thiere’s prison in less than eight hours!’

  No recourse existed. The equinox tide would blast over Rockfell’s skewed axis. Roiled energy would leach through the imbalanced ward rings, and Desh-thiere would seize its fell freedom.

  ‘Then the wards will stay flawed,’ Kharadmon agreed without rancor; the opposite, in fact, as he bowed to the truth behind Dakar’s frantic outburst. ‘Since the misaligned axis must be healed second, we’ll try for a stopgap remedy up front, and protect warded stone from the elements.’

  Given the Mad Prophet’s blank incomprehension, Luhaine’s windy presence sketched out an explanation. ‘We must isolate Rockfell. The faulted bindings inside have been patched. Desh-thiere’s prison will hold stable as long as the ward rings can be shielded from the direct surge of the lane flux.’

  The overweening arrogance of that undertaking struck Dakar utterly breathless. ‘You think you can divert the equinox tide at its crest? Sheer insanity!’

  ‘That’s the workable option.’ Unlike old stone, Kharadmon had no patience for dissecting esoteric minutiae. ‘If you have some genius alternative, speak up. If not, we have a lot of brute conjury to lay down before the advent of sunset.’

  Such a working must be unassailably in place, Dakar realized with flattening dread. Once the lane flux arose with the dawning of equinox, there would be no recourse; no pause to remedy inadvertent mistakes, or to make last-minute adjustments. The Sorcerers must foresee every ramification, on all levels, with no detail left overlooked. The task posed complexities of titanic proportion, a challenge to strain vision as broad as Sethvir’s, with the Paravian gift of his earth-sense.

  ‘We’ll have Rockfell in partnership,’ Luhaine pointed out. To Kharadmon, brusque, he demanded, ‘Which remedy, a sink for grounding the distressed recoil, or shall we attempt to create an alternate conduit?’

  Still in contact with the mountain through Dakar’s bare hands, Kharadmon framed his answer in consultation. ‘The sink is no option. We have a canted axis, and this imbalance is impelled energy, not meant to travel to ground. To try would fire the veins of magma that run molten under the Skyshiels. We dare not build pressure under the fault line. The risk of cracking a new fissure is too high, which leaves urgent need for a conduit.’

  For Dakar’s benefit, Luhaine spoke aloud. ‘Attractant or bridge?’

  ‘Bridge,’ Kharadmon snapped, then added the imperative driving his decision. ‘At the crux, we are two to your one.’

  The dismayed revelation set the Mad Prophet aback. Now aware he must loan more than his flesh, but also the inadequate discipline of his craft, he recalled his part in the death of a girl child in a lonely Vastmark ravine. Despite Arithon’s forgiveness, the shame of Jilieth’s memory still rode him. Easier by far to balk in straight fear, like Fionn Areth; to fail as the victim of mishap rather than endure the conscious awareness of becoming the bumbling wretch who fell short.

  The equinox forces could not be averted to spare the weak link in a chain. ‘I have no discipline to match this demand! Moon and tide, I can’t stand in the path of the flux!’ Dakar shivered. ‘You ask the impossible!’

  ‘No?’ Kharadmon’s amusement stung fierce in denial. ‘Then you’ll hold the breach while Luhaine and I do our best to prove you are wrong.’

  Neither Fellowship Sorcerer would give any thought to the range of unbearable consequences. Dakar gasped a last, strangled protest. ‘If you’ve gambled badly?’

  Kharadmon lifted the spellbinder’s quivering shoulders into a fatalistic shrug. ‘No remedy left. We all die for it.’

  Refusal pinched off, with Dakar’s free permission an already irrevocable pledge, the Sorcerers pursued preparation. Luhaine whisked off on a brisk crack of wind. Kharadmon resumed his intense communion with the self-aware essence of Rockfell. His dialogue was too dense to follow, beyond the immediate gist: as the mountain yielded its requisite consent, the spellbinder grasped that the Sorcerer asked leave to unbind the outermost ring of defense wards.

  Rockfell’s acquiescence tripped off an igniting burst, as Kharadmon’s risen power combined in a synergistic flow of cause to instantaneous effect.

  Dakar felt the strain. A burning pull jarred through muscle and tendon as his short, pudgy fingers were pressured to match an ephemeral impression, where the effortless reach of Asandir’s larger hands had spanned the smooth rock face before him. The masterful tracings of embedded spellcraft imprinted the spellbinder’s sweat-drenched palms. The virulent sting as the contact engaged raised his yelp of incensed surprise. Kharadmon paid the disturbance no mind. The vibrations pulsating through flesh and bone spoke a code that his adept intellect could interpret. He responded with precise counterwards, a sequence of runes framed in light, visualized in his mind. Dakar could not fathom their meaning, but only gasp awestruck at the complex shadings of colors and line overlaid in a mapwork of dazzling geometrics.

  There were traps. Templates of overriding emotion triggered and burst through mind and flesh at staggered intervals, designed to wreak ruin and break concentration. Kharadmon disarmed each onslaught. Wave after wave, he banished wrought barriers of terror and pain and illusion. The defenses he unwove were not set in place only to deter intruders, Dakar realized. The hedging maze framed a double-edged warding also intended to repel an escape from within.

  Thought encumbered by mortality could not track the rapidity of the sequence. Kharadmon kept pace with the unleashed torrent by setting his ear to the stone, then extending his awareness into the aura beyond flesh. Dakar captured only the lower register of resonance, as the Sorcerer assimilated the loftier frequencies past the range of his mental agility. Kharadmon’s upstepped perception reached farther. His tactile senses pierced through the grand veil, then extended across the unknowable range of the parallel continuum.

  Dakar felt his stretched senses flicker and pinwheel. Engulfed by the mystery until he spun, lost, he fought reeling faintness. Hearing and sight juddered in wracked disarray, interposed by null intervals of darkness. Then activity ceased; the warding under his drenched palms lay sundered. Shaken, he shared the moment of transmutation as mirror-polished stone relinquished its guarded secret: how the linkages of fused mineral secured the portal that gave entry to Rockfell’s upper chamber.

  Kharadmon had unlocked Asandir’s primary defenses, an array that could only be addressed by a spirit securely enfleshed.

  ‘Luhaine?’ the Sorcerer demanded; then lifted Dakar’s head and stepped back.

  Their linkage of consciousness extended the range of the spellbinder’s faculties. He witnessed the source the discorporate mage raised to unbind the last seal on the portal. The power was not Luhaine’s; only the guidance, as he called on the unshielded potency of the elements. They responded, not in submission to need, but through an abandoned and joyous partnership. Lightning cracked and burned, a stiletto of pared might, threaded through the poised lens of Luhaine’s request. No breathing flesh could support such raw charge.

  Caught in close proximity, Dakar shivered. Every hair on his body lifted erect. Only the support of Kharadmon’s seasoned steadiness let him withstand the barrage. Nor did the wonder diminish. The Sorcerer’s augmented mage-sight unveiled the consummate delicacy of Luhaine’s work, as he wielded the lightning as stylus.

  Stroke by precise stroke, the electromagnetic bands of chained light bonding stone to itself became sundered. The sequence itself involved demanding intricacy. No tolerance existed for mishap. The untamed forces that surged in release as solid matter dissolved were vast beyond comprehension; enough by themselves to batter Athera to a litter of dust and smashed fragments. Luhaine had made disposition. Chains of spellcraft embedded through the mi
neral matrix recaptured the shed backwash that flared in sharp bursts. Runes appeared in the rock face, infused to cold blue, as the forces were safely channeled off and returned to a source far beyond human recourse to fathom.

  A corona of bled heat whipped the air to thermal eddies. The drifting floor of banked cloud billowed upward in recoil, anviled to towering thunderheads. Dakar recalled being scared by the sight, on the hour of Desh-thiere’s first confinement. Now, as he beheld the bared forces that raised massive storms from tranquillity, his utter terror escaped speech. He longed heart and spirit to be safe on the southcoast, lolling drunk in an Innish brothel.

  ‘You won’t blot out the nightmares, no matter how strong the drink,’ Kharadmon pointed out in rough solace. He laughed at the sour curse Dakar croaked back, taking impish delight in the searing, shrill winds whipped up by the play of grand conjury. His unbending will held the spellbinder upright, while the tempest raged and battered their shared stance on the ledge abutting the rock face.

  At length, his task finished, Luhaine bid the elements to subside. The runes of discharge faded from harsh blue to violet. Empty space remained where stone had stood, seamless, scarcely minutes before. The uncanny light flickered into quiescence, leaving an incised, rectangular portal cut through the sheer side of the mountain. Dakar regarded the gaping vault, his gut roiled to acid trepidation. Inside, doused in darkness, he beheld the square chamber incised floor to ceiling with patterns and sigils of guard. Their core strength was so virulent, a man felt his teeth ache even at safe remove on the threshold.

  ‘You first,’ Kharadmon invited the spellbinder whose shrinking flesh necessity forced him to wear. ‘Your knees are shaking like jelly, a frank hazard. Fat as you are, if I have to walk for you, we’ll likely fall flat on your face.’

  ‘Fionn Areth!’ protested the Mad Prophet, grasping excuses like broomstraws. ‘If a storm brews up while we’re working inside, he’ll certainly die of exposure.’

  ‘A risk,’ Kharadmon agreed. ‘But there’s nowhere else safe we can take him before the equinox tides run their course. The conduit we build to reroute the lane flux must pass through Rockfell itself. Exposed to such forces, unshielded, human tissue would burn to a crisp. Outside, the hazards of weather will allow your pet herder a chance. He doesn’t lack for warm blankets.’

  ‘Remind me never to trust you again,’ Dakar groused as he assayed a wobbling step forward. ‘You have a mind as crafty as Prince Arithon’s, and you keep given promises like a starved crocodile.’

  ‘For which you should be grateful, prophet,’ Kharadmon needled, delighted to whet his predatory malice after years of lonely vigil in the star fields. ‘Just remember the hunting pack of wraiths left diverted, while I turn your mind to the unsavory business of keeping Desh-thiere confined. We have only a few hours before equinox eve midnight. Believe me, we’ll need every one of them.’

  Spring Equinox Eve 5670

  Testament

  The adept keeping watch at Sethvir’s bedside in Althain Tower straightened, her shining white robes a soft, varnished gold by the spill of a single candle. Concern stitched a frown line between her silk eyebrows. Despite the masked dread binding her sorrow, she stroked the Sorcerer’s limp fingers on the coverlet, her touch a firm reassurance. ‘The request you have asked will be granted.’ Shattered from calm, her voice shook as she added, ‘One of us expected this hour might come. The witness is already summoned and waiting here at Althain Tower.’

  The Sorcerer’s eyelids returned the barest, small flicker. He hoarded his dwindled strength, while his game heart pushed the blood through his veins, unflagging as time itself. Yet unlike an organ wrought of formed flesh that could be asked to answer his bidding, he could not slow the trickling passage of seconds, or defer the last, waning hours before equinox.

  The adept waited, not patient or resigned, but troubled by the entangled coils of the world’s fate, a knot far outside her strict provenance to answer. She could succor Sethvir, but not his bound causes; such was the nature of the power she wielded, that sourced itself in the prime life chord.

  ‘Brave spirit,’ she whispered. ‘As always, we live in the Fellowship’s debt.’

  Nothing else could she give Althain’s Warden. Words fell far short, for her depth of gratitude; the inadequate solace of her patient presence could do nothing to stave off the perils to come.

  Desolate, she measured the deep, spaced intervals of Sethvir’s breathing, while the fugitive brilliance of the candleflame flickered, its wobbling illumination cast over the wine red carpet. The chamber was stark, in its sickbed neatness, the tipped piles of books and worn bridles put away, and the chairs and side tables tidied. The wicker hamper in the corner was empty, the holed stockings darned and folded into the bronze-studded clothes chest. The adept bent her head, chafing Sethvir’s slack palm. Her throat closed, and her shut lids trembled with sudden, upwelling emotion.

  ‘You’re weeping?’ Sethvir ventured, his speech a thread-slender whisper.

  She swallowed, fought up a wounding smile. ‘Sometimes tears have a mind of their own, do they not?’

  ‘A diamond is less precious,’ the Sorcerer replied.

  The silence that followed was grief-struck.

  Nor did the brine tracking the adept’s dusky cheeks leave space for her rage, or the furious protest that howled inside like the smothered blast of a thunderclap. The Prime Matriarch and the Koriani Order had desired the Fellowship sundered, the guiding covenant of their compact with the Paravians broken. Now, the crisis brewing at Rockfell Peak threatened to finish the objective Morriel’s conspiracy had set in train the past autumn.

  The Warden the adept guarded might never arise from his pallet. If the worst happened, Sethvir of Althain would not be allowing small spiders to make homes in his teacups again. He could lose the chance to wear out the soles of the new wolfhide buskins Traithe had sent as a gift. Nor would a human successor step forward to inherit the wide-ranging gift of his earth-sense.

  Stark tragedy, that the Koriani Prime deemed the price of Athera’s survival as a bargaining chip, to leverage back access to the starfaring culture renounced by mankind’s destitute forebears.

  Too weakened to scry through the thorns of possibility, or to measure the scope of the pitfalls that might lurk in the uncharted future, Sethvir faced the dire worst without flinching. He had made his request to record a last testament. Should Luhaine, Kharadmon, and Dakar fail at Rockfell, and Desh-thiere’s fogbound entities burst their wardings, he had no hand left to send to avert their inbound brethren from Marak. Athera could be devastated, first by the malevolent sentience in the mists taken captive at Ithamon at terrible cost to two princes; and then by invading free wraiths, voraciously seeking possession. Horror would not end there. Every living spirit on Athera, enslaved or free, would be lost in turn, immolated by the dreams of dead dragons as Sethvir’s steering hold on the land’s fractured grimwards weakened and finally faltered.

  ‘Keep trust in your spellbinder,’ the adept whispered, shying back from the darkening maze of possibilities, each one a bearing landscape of ruin too grim for cool sanity to contemplate. ‘Dakar has untapped strengths. In crisis, he may well discover them. Believe in the strictures Asandir instilled over the course of his training. Your Mad Prophet may yet keep his stance through extremity.’

  But Sethvir’s stilled face showed no flicker of hope in the kindly spill of the candleflame. He held to his wish, unrelenting.

  The Sorcerer had begged the service of a witness of Ath’s Brotherhood to help seal a record in crystal. As Warden of Althain Tower appointed by the Paravians, Sethvir was insistent. The integrity of his post lay at risk. His last act before he engaged threatened faculties must catalog the cascade of events that might soon write the last lines of Athera’s closing chapter. Should Asandir return from his labor to find ruin, he must know in detail what had passed. The great drakes had entrusted the Fellowship of Seven to ensure Paravian survival. An integrity outla
sting three ages would not founder; not without leaving clear word of the struggle that could stand as the Sorcerers’ epitaph.

  At length, a soft tap at the chamber door; the adept called in for his specialized skills had arrived to enact Sethvir’s dispensation.

  The bursting glitter of silver-and-gold threadwork emerged like a cry from the gloom of the outer landing. The slim figure stepped in and closed the oak panel. Such was his care, the latch fell without sound. Then he pushed back the hood, with its crowning cartouche, the interleaved ciphers of safekeeping and trust framing the seal of the bonded witness. If the man was still young in years, with the beautiful thin hands of an artist, his talent had powerfully marked him. The solemn brown eyes in his beardless face reflected an ancient’s deep wisdom, paired with an astuteness that had gazed into world upon world past the veil.

  He nodded to the lady on watch at the bedside. His poise could have been a dancer’s, a warrior’s, or the mold for a sculptor’s masterpiece as he knelt at the Sorcerer’s shoulder.

  ‘I am here by request to stand witness,’ he greeted Althain’s Warden, then laid his hand overtop of the lady adept’s, still clasped to Sethvir’s slack fingers. ‘Though I wish that the sorrow of this hour had not come, and that I was not the one called to assay the burden, know you are beloved. As ever, our Brotherhood bides in your shadow. Mine, the honor, to serve your request with integrity.’

  The Sorcerer’s fingers fractionally tightened within the adepts’ linking grasp. A tormented interval elapsed before Sethvir opened his eyes. His speech came with effort. ‘In the aumbry under the arrow slit you’ll find five wrapped crystal spheres.’ His voice sounded stiff as the rust on old hinges as he labored to impart his instructions. ‘I ask, leave the amethyst and the citrine. The clear quartz preferred to work with Ciladis, and should stay undisturbed. Of the two smoky quartz, bring the pale one.’ His breath exhausted, the Warden explained by sent thought that for joyless tasks that particular sphere was most likely to grant its expansive permission.