Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Alone in Kewar Tunnel, he would plumb the vested truth of that statement: he would know in full measure the savage impact of the choice he had taken, the torment and loss of eight thousand dead played through on his living flesh.

  ‘Cry mercy,’ Elaira whispered. She choked down the sympathy that urged her to let down her barriers. To watch was unbearable, a violation of all of a man’s guarded privacy. Yet in love, for survival, she must hold fast. Stilled to awestruck silence, she watched Arithon measure the abyss and muster the rags of his courage.

  Eyes shut, he trembled. Sweat sprang and rolled down his temples. ‘This is not punishment, but knowledge of what a man, a woman, a child have all borne,’ he entreated in ragged unsteadiness. In anguished effort to brace up his nerve, he exhorted in the musical cadence of Paravian, ‘Anient fferet i on arith,’ the broken phrase meaning, ‘All action must beget consequence.’

  At Tal Quorin, his hand had shaped spells that killed. He had wielded a sword and done murder. Fear strangled resolve, for the reckoning the maze would mete out, a lash to inflame the already bleeding wound of s’Ffalenn conscience. Compassion could never be reconciled with suffering. Reluctance became weakness that threatened to unman him, and for one dire moment, he faltered.

  The embedded power of the maze reacted.

  Arithon’s form shuddered, shimmered, lost definition at the edges. Through a second of suspension, Elaira beheld his fractured being, split off into alternate images: the past self, which had no other choice but move forward, and the present, ripped out of itself by remorse, that shrank back from owning the burden of an unbearable destiny.

  Koriani awareness awoke the shrill instinct of danger. Elaira fought panic, well aware that such separation must open Arithon’s defenses. Divided against himself, he would face annihilation. Anything less than whole being would rend his awareness into fragments that could not sustain breathing life. He would perish, tormented as his ancestor Kamridian, first condemned, and then shredded apart by the poisoned storm of his self-hatred.

  Braced to act, poised to rip down her wards, Elaira was stopped by a movement. Caught short, she beheld the spun-silver wraith of a girl, standing staunch at Arithon’s back. The child had a horrible gash in one hand. Her face was carved into piteous hollows by the ravages of fever and starvation.

  Elaira recognized the little one. This was the clanbred child, sickened from gangrene, who had been delivered out of slavery from the horse knackers’ sheds at Etarra. The girl who had died free, her last breath drawn in the shelter of Arithon’s arms. Because she had been too ill to walk, he had taken her onto his mare in the course of his harrowed flight out of the city.

  Now, in the stifling darkness of Kewar, the girl’s smile emerged like the play of light, dancing over clear water. ‘For your kindness,’ she said, and closed her small fingers over the limp hand of the ghost trace of Arithon, who now faltered. ‘My liege, look forward.’

  In split form, Rathain’s prince turned his head. He beheld the one moment of forgotten grace that occurred in advance of the carnage. Again, young Jieret, son of Steiven s’Valerient, knelt with a boy’s knife for carving. Flushed by excitement, he cut his palm and completed the formal binding of friendship with the man who was sovereign prince. A blood oath bound and sworn by a mage set its ties to the living spirit …

  Merged back into one with a shuddering cry, Arithon stumbled, caught by other strong hands: Steiven’s, wrought of silver-spun light, and after him, an ethereal, sweet touch that bespoke encouragement from his lost wife, Dania. ‘For your sacrifice,’ they whispered, ‘for the continued survival of Deshir’s old bloodlines, and for the cherished life of our son.’

  Arithon drew a ragged breath to entreat them, to explain that Jieret had been murdered by Lysaer s’Ilessid after all, quartered and burned as a sorcerer. ‘He was taken captive in my place, then butchered like a dog in Daon Ramon Barrens.’

  But his voice went unheard. The ephemeral shades of Rathain’s lost caithdein and his lady already stepped back and faded. Arithon was left standing upright, shivering in clammy sweat, surrounded by biting, cold darkness. Saved. He had only to move forward again and face the full reckoning that waited in Strakewood Forest.

  ‘Cry mercy,’ Elaira whispered, still shielded. Shaken by wretched tremors of dread, she watched her beloved reach into himself and muster the will to press onward. Just as the past he had lived had not allowed him to abandon Steiven and Dania, Arithon could not fall short in the Maze of Davien. As Rathain’s crown prince, he had sworn the Fellowship Sorcerers his blood oath to survive; nor could he cast away Jieret’s brave death, that had set him free of Desh-thiere’s triumph, and his half brother’s armed trap in Daon Ramon.

  Arithon stepped forward, and died first as a horse, down and rolling with the agony of a javelin shaft impaled through the gut. Thrashing, his throat opened in a scream of animal pain, he pressed on, and died again, as that mount’s fallen rider. Paralyzed and neck-broken, he choked out his life with the taste of green moss and mud mixed with blood on his bitten tongue. Death did not release him. He suffered the lingering, penumbral shadow: the bereaved ache of that man’s aged mother, and two brothers; of sister, and wife, and three fatherless children. Their tears and smashed dreams hammered nails of pure sorrow into his laboring heart …

  ‘Oh, cry mercy!’ whispered Elaira. Ribbons of tears coursed down her dreaming cheeks. Far removed from Whitehaven and the sheltered, secure couch of her body, she felt nothing of the hands that cradled her head, and brought towels as her pillow grew sodden …

  She walked Kewar, as Arithon died, again and again, uncounted assaults of wounding steel; of arrows; of drowning; of maceration under thundering tons of unleashed current and logs, and razed trees. He died of spring traps, moaning from the ripping cut of sharpened branches that disemboweled. After a hundred contorted falls, he lay sprawled amid the spilled steam of his organs, whimpering for nonexistent mercy. He gasped out his life with crushed lungs, pinned under the weight of a bloated, dead horse. He drowned in his own vomit, facedown in black mud. He died trampled by panicked companions, and of threshing plunges into cunningly masked deadfalls, where he writhed impaled upon pointed stakes. He died of a cut throat by the hands of a furtive child. He died, weeping for his mother, his father, his young sons; for babes orphaned and wives abandoned to the miseries of unmarried childbirth.

  Over and over and over again, the Wheel’s dark crossing claimed him. Worse, sometimes he lived, croaking in fevered delirium from the slow agony of suppurating wounds. He begged in the gutters of Etarra and Narms, without legs, or a hand. Other times he endured in wasting neglect, in the care of impoverished relatives. He exhaled Gnudsog’s last breath, gagging bile and silted water, and lay broken on a rock in a river as a girl child shot down by a quarrel. As a woman, he drowned in a river of hot blood while the bright sunlight faded to dark.

  He died, raped and screaming, as Jieret’s young sister. Of a sword thrust in the belly, he died yet again as Steiven’s violated wife. He died as a babe, torn from the breast of his mother and spitted. He died, an old man, hacked like carrion; and the same, in eight thousand sickening variations, again and again, a progression of visceral nightmare that skinned his throat raw, leaving him voiceless. He pleaded in a scouring whisper, and still died, without water, without succor, without hope or mercy, while the repeated assaults of shattering pain hounded him to the threshold of madness.

  When he could not walk, he crawled. The steel-poised awareness he sustained through mage training yet clung to a battered understanding. The spells that entrapped him allowed no relief; to stop would only prolong an already untenable suffering. He died of burning, of freezing chill shadow, of arrows that sleeted down through ripped leaves, and out of the dazzle of sunlight. He died to the frenzied, shrill clamor of steel, and then of a crossbow whose metals were sundered by an unspeakable, warped twist of spellcraft.

  His ugly work; even mage-blind, he sensed his own patterning. F
or that act of transgression, young Jieret had survived; even still, conscience howled. He heard his grandfather at Rauven, words quiet and scornful with censure, then the thunder of Dharkaron’s condemnation, a shriek that lashed with edged lightning, denouncing him in Paravian that no end ever justified the foul means.

  Steiven’s Deshans survived; the act had to mean something. But surcease was not granted in deliverance.

  Arithon clawed forward by tortured slow inches, and died: of sword thrusts, of quarrels, of jabbing, sharp steel, snared in the slow sap of a tree’s dreaming, his mind and his agony filtered in the muffled fall of snow and the whisper of leaves through midsummer. He died, slammed in the back by a javelin as he fled other clansmen wrought of illusion.

  Then the moment of reliving he most dreaded overtook him, etched out in unnatural hatred. Arithon fought to rise up on one knee as he beheld the past vision of his half brother Lysaer, and reexperienced the smashing assault of Desh-thiere’s curse. He howled in despair. No one answered. Again, his humanity was lost, milled under a riptide of black, burning passion. He felt mind and heart consumed by fell fires that tore away all restraint.

  Again he opposed Lysaer, reforged as the Mistwraith’s claimed instrument of destruction.

  The horror returned, magnified, venom-sweet, as the ecstasy of surrender raked through him. Again, he blazed with the ripe triumph of the moment when he had mustered his shadows and raised his bared steel to annihilate his half brother.

  One split second, in the maze, Arithon felt the inward recoil: sensed the lashing response as the curse awoke in him, no stripped vision of reliving, but as an excruciating storm of live force that bludgeoned his exhausted grip on identity.

  Then young Jieret blundered into him with wrenching force, and tore him back into his past. For this, the boy lived. Always to call him back from the brink, and for what purpose under Ath’s sky? The suffering and death were ever destined to recur. The damning proof would compound, seeding holocaust at Minderl Bay, at Vastmark, and Daon Ramon Barrens …

  Broken, weeping, Arithon crumpled.

  He died, seared by fire and light, and died again, as a thousand trees, burning. He lay for uncounted hours in pain, tortured breaths puddled in rivers of shed blood, then met death again as a friend on the sharp, skilled knives of his kinsmen.

  Grief beat him down. He languished in mourning for loved ones slain, and for others lost to nightmares and madness. He moldered as hacked bones beneath a stone cairn, under the singed trees of Strakewood. He blew on the winds as dry ash, and he cried as the rain falling on the slagged rock of a grotto.

  At the end, lying flat on the slab-cold granite that floored the Maze of Davien, he wept for the beauty of a single voice. The bard was his lost self, immersed in the guidance of mage-sighted singing, that called on compassion and used woven harmony to settle the riven shades of the slain who wandered Tal Quorin, bewildered.

  ‘You have to arise,’ urged a gentle voice. A hand firmly tugged at his shoulder.

  Arithon turned his head. Sucked clean of strength, he regarded the sad ghost who knelt over him, bearded and kind in the starlight. Tears clogged his throat. He unlocked his tongue and gasped a mangled utterance that resurrected a name from the past. ‘Madreigh?’

  ‘For the gift of your care,’ the clansman admitted. His soothing quiet drowned the fading last clamor of Strakewood’s red toll of slaughter. ‘I breathed through the sunrise, and was laid to rest alongside my sons. For your effort, a brother survived me.’ Madreigh reached out again. His touch was silvered mist, and his hands, healing light, as he bore Arithon’s battered flesh up in his arms. ‘Let me carry you through the crossing. As you did for me, let compassion free you from the pain as you meet your hour of reckoning.’

  One step, two; Tal Quorin fell behind. The ghost of Madreigh embraced his liege, cradled like a child in his arms. Then he set his royal burden down, and on soundless footsteps, departed.

  The nightmare horrors receded, leaving the bright-graven memory of eight thousanddeaths, bound in chains of guilt and the withering ironies of Desh-thiere’s entrenched geas of vengeance. The legacy lingered, no less cruel in reliving: Arithon felt the blank caul of blindness settle over the marvel of his gifted talent.

  Set back on his heels, alone with searing grief and the ache of a loss beyond words, the man who was Master of Shadow and prince leaned gasping against the smoothed stone of the tunnel wall. He begged the still air for the grace to bear his bruised spirit onward.

  No one answered; nothing stirred.

  But in time, under starlight, a soft spray of lyranthe notes emerged and buoyed his flagging resolve. In music, he bought consolation, if not healing. On world-wearied feet, he assayed the next step, and the next, and the next, after that.

  ‘So, prince, are you guilty?’ Asandir’s voice lashed at him from the darkness.

  The harsh answer condemned.

  Arithon shivered, still punished by the unequivocal truth forewarned by his tienelle scrying; that now, beyond the pale of his knowing, an enchantress he cherished shared also: had he broken his crown oath to Rathain and fled, had he not stood to Deshir’s defense using talent, the toll of dead would have numbered half of the eight thousand who had passed beneath Daelion’s Wheel. But of the four thousand he might have left standing, who could have marched back to Etarra triumphant, no single one would have been clanbred …

  Deshir would have sheltered no standing survivors. The legacy of Jieret’s people would have been utterly destroyed, lost to memory and land forever after.

  ‘Cry mercy,’ Elaira said, her shielded whisper scraped raw by sorrow. ‘Beloved, I never knew.’

  Early Spring 5670

  Hour of Darkness

  Told by Ath’s adepts that Elaira has dreamed herself passage to join her mind with the fate of her beloved, the Warden of Althain closes tortured eyes; for although the news brings him strong affirmation of Arithon’s continued survival, he views probabilities, caught into recoil by an evil stab of foreboding: ‘Cry mercy,’ he murmurs, grief-struck and subdued, ‘she’s likely to break before he does …’

  Met by Whitehold’s seeress as her galley docks, and informed of Arithon’s attempt to seek sanctuary inside Kewar Tunnel, Selidie Prime lends her view to the forecast that Rathain’s royal lineage must be irretrievably lost: ‘We know, since we once used a fetch to provoke Desh-thiere’s curse, that the binding responds to ephemeral stimulus. Davien’s Maze will grant Arithon no mercy. On the outside chance he can emerge alive, he will not retain grip on his sanity …’

  During a catnap snatched on the crumbling wall in the midst of Mirthlvain Swamp, Asandir is touched by a true dreaming: again on the night sands of Athir, he accepts the fresh-blooded blade that Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn once used to swear his oath to survive; but the rending cry cast through time and space to the Sorcerer’s listening presence on this hour frames a scream of unending agony …

  Early Spring 5670

  XVI.

  Path of the Damned

  Within the reactive spell-wards of the maze, the oath sworn at Athir changed everything. Immersed in the coils of reliving his past, Arithon knelt upon salt-damp sand, the knife cut beneath his freshly dressed wrist stinging like Dharkaron’s vengeance. The full-throated scream torn out by his anguish slapped diminished reverberations down the corridor of Kewar Tunnel. The echoes rang still in his dreaming mind, though above, vision showed him a tranquil night sky, cloudless and jeweled with stars. Waves unraveled their white-lace petticoats against ribboned sand, glistening like old, tarnished silver. The dune grasses whispered of breezes.

  Arithon ground his knuckles against his closed eyes, but could not erase the overlaid memory imposed by the powers of the maze: of the moment of oathswearing, when Asandir’s vision had bled into his awareness, smashing across the blockage that blinded his mage-sight.

  For one reeling interval, he had shared the breadth of the Fellowship Sorcerer’s perception, the structural imprin
t of present experience underpinned by its etheric array of probabilities. Through Asandir’s eyes, Arithon had watched the unloomed thread of creation spinning the course of the future. At the instant he pledged, while the searing, white lines of his binding promise became sealed by let blood to his fate, he had glimpsed the jagging red cords of Desh-thiere’s curse, nipped like tight stitches through all he had done; and far worse: all he would strive to accomplish in the days and the years yet to come.

  If Arithon had successfully thwarted the drive to pursue his half brother’s murder, one glimpse through the Sorcerer’s clarified perception revealed that his acts had not been untainted. Desh-thiere’s geas might not have broken him to fully consenting collusion, yet it had still managed to rob him. In vicious small increments, its whispering currents sapped his autonomy. Creeping influence stained even innocuous thought, and slipped barbed hooks through his weaknesses, until the fragile balance he maintained between incidents abraded clear thought like the burn of salt rubbed in a blister.

  Unmasked, as the blood oath tied him to life, Arithon reeled under the certainty that such secretive incursions must increase over time. The curse gained force and momentum at each subsequent encounter with Lysaer. Even the accreted memory of conflict sharpened the impetus of its pattern. The constant trickle of subtle manipulation must eventually swell to a current that would burst his last barrier and flatten him.

  Arithon saw beyond ambiguity: within Davien’s Maze, each subsequent reliving would refire the geas, invoking the additional increase in virulence raised by a live encounter.