Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  The posed course of each future unreeled as running waves of searing impressions: of men caught in traps, or shot down in passes; of townborn patrols lured onto weathered stone ledges, to perish of falls as the unstable footing gave way; of men hazed up impassable gullies, then cut off, for bowmen to shoot down at leisure. She watched her beloved test substitute tactics: to spare this shepherd an end, trapped and tortured for information; to dispatch toward safety that encampment of mothers and young children; to deflect those advances that could not be stopped. Arithon worked the disparate threads of his resource from all angles, ferreting out every method to unravel the discipline of seasoned troops. He spun out unspeakable, ugly strategies designed to break nerves and devastate tight-knit morale. Where relived experience had shattered the mold for brutal ambush and massive casualties, the Maze of Davien unveiled one thing more.

  At first, Elaira thought she glimpsed a ghost imprint – the sudden, unlikely shimmer of movement brought on by overcranked tension. As adept as she was at wielding her inner senses, she found this ephemeral disturbance eluded her focused skill. Arithon’s initial attempt brought no better success. Yet the next time a phantom slipped through the weave, he was on wary guard. On lightning reflex, he snapped down a ward and froze the flow of the augury in midstream.

  And there, damningly inscribed, he uncovered the masked face of tragedy. Spellcraft derived from his signature style had been worked like snarled knit through his scrying. Here, strung in cobweb fine patterns, he read subtle runes of shading and masking; there, a seeded impulse to waylay the eye, as though by chance met distraction. Arithon pulled up short with stopped breath. Here, he encountered the deft nets of spellcraft he had once wrought to protect young clan children in Deshir on a carefree spring morning spent carving toy whistles.

  The maze stripped away pretense. That same innocuous chain of ciphers now obscured a more sinister activity. Proof stood, unequivocal: Desh-thiere’s furtive workings had in horrid fact infiltrated his mind and skewed the results of his augury.

  ‘Cry mercy!’ Elaira gasped in a soundless, stunned whisper. Her tears flowed then, for a grief beyond mending. For alternative pathways of future event had existed, no doubt ones with changed outcomes. The insidious compulsion of Desh-thiere’s geas had slipped them from Arithon’s grasp in vile and secretive cunning.

  In the heart of the maze, the Master of Shadow faltered between ragged steps. His face blanched bone white. Sorrow and guilt all but unstrung him, as he viewed the dawning horror of past judgments made on the basis of a false assessment.

  ‘Thirty thousand deaths,’ he ground out, punished by abject revulsion. Rage drained him, that perhaps probability had contained the unseen thread of happenstance that might have spared Lysaer’s war host from subsequent, sweeping carnage.

  Elaira choked back the cry of her heart. She could not reach through, or dare to point out that logic argued against such a likelihood. Given the preset array of raw circumstance, no ending could evolve with such wishfully clean simplicity. The Mistwraith’s covert meddling just as likely masked lies, well designed to entrap its victim’s sensitized conscience. A sequence of viable futures might lurk behind those insidious, spelled wisps of diversion; or the barriers might have been set as blank decoys to inflame an already tormented mind.

  Too easily, the gift of his forebears’ compassion might draw Arithon to lose himself in the mire of his past, endlessly seeking improbable reprieve on the lure of unfounded suggestion.

  The Teir’s’Ffalenn must have perceived that potential pitfall. Despite reeling distress, he turned aside, left the invidious snags without giving way. He abjured the temptation to salve his past agony through futile exploration. The maze forgave no man who refused the soured fruits of even his misled past action. To stop, to shy back and glance sidewards would be construed as a willful avoidance. Whether or not a bloodless solution had existed to resolve the battle plan gone awry at Vastmark, the path he had taken must run straight through the cliff-walled cove of the Havens …

  Cry mercy.

  Elaira had heard the damning accounts attributed to that spree of slaughter. For the wanton butchery enacted on that shore, Avenor’s judiciary council still held a sealed arraignment for black sorcery. Their case, heard in absentia, had hung on a disaffected sailhand’s account and conjecture, founded in scholarly diatribe.

  Unreconciled to town law, the clans had not shirked the horror of plumbing the truth. Rathain’s vested caithdein had been charged with the unsavory burden of conducting formal trial under the justice of kingdom charter. Earl Jieret had named the event as forthright murder, excused on the grounds of war and expediency. His sentence had been incontrovertible, with the prime testimony given by Arithon himself, bound under a blood oath laced through with truth seals, and with an unwilling Dakar forced to stand horrified witness.

  Still other voices had damned by omission. The Fellowship Sorcerers gave no opinion at all. Caolle, who had been second-in-command to his crown prince, had kept as stony a silence. Of the clan liegemen who had served in Vastmark, all returned changed; Sidir, who was closest, had wept.

  When challenged by a peer Koriani on the subject of Arithon’s guilt, Elaira had allowed him testy defense, saying, ‘I would ask him. Whatever his Grace of Rathain did, then or now, he will have had his own reason. I have never seen him lie for convenience. Nor have I known him to break from the sound tenets of his character.’

  Mearn s’Brydion, a clan duke’s brother with an uncanny, sharp mind, had said almost the very same.

  Now, in Davien’s Maze, at the cusp of reliving the unplumbed depths behind Arithon’s core of reserve, Elaira noted his expression of chiseled dread. The trapped quality to his stillness, captured between steps, scraped her nerves to quailing unease.

  Some truths perhaps were best locked away beyond even a loved one’s shared sight.

  The thought chafed like scaled iron, that his fear ran bone deep: she might not find the endurance to stomach the darkness he kept wrapped in obdurate privacy.

  ‘Oh, beloved,’ she cried, though he could not hear.

  For of course, if he halted, Davien’s wards would close down. Inaction on his part would kill her. ‘Give me torture and loss, give me death,’ Arithon forced out in a ragged, tight whisper: a repeat of the words he had spoken in Merior, when he had denied his love rather than author the cause of Elaira’s certain destruction. He finished in fluent Paravian, ‘Llaeron iel tiriannon an shar i’ffaeliend.’

  ‘Send light, to ward off the shadows,’ Elaira murmured in desolate translation.

  Arithon s’Ffalenn closed his eyes. From a heartcore of tempered strength he never knew he possessed, he summoned the grace to step forward.

  The scene in the Khetienn’s cabin resumed, launching the final sequence of tienelle auguries into full-bodied reliving: seed plan for the massacre Arithon had deployed from the rock inlet at the Havens. No thought could prepare, and no rote forgiveness withstand the visceral violence of the onslaught.

  Elaira encountered, face on, a savagery without parallel. She recoiled, appalled, as the pattern unfolded for a bout of killing no spirit born human might reconcile. Sickened through, weeping for release, she shared Dakar’s pealing cry of distress. For the explosive indulgence of cruelty was not random. Pinned to a crux of horrendous expediency, the enchantress watched Arithon hammer down compassion, stamp back his bardic sensitivity. Over his most ruthlessly trampled sensibility, he mapped a cold course to disown every moral tenet of his character. Here, in the scalpel-cut clarity of tranced scrying, he tailored a bloodbath with nerveless intent to revolt the most battle-hardened nerves.

  Stunned beyond word, wrenched outside thought, Elaira saw him design one brutal, sharp strike, to be enacted with heartless forethought. The wards of the maze permitted no secrets, but laid bare the hideous framework. Arithon engineered violence on a large enough scale to ensure no mistake, and to waive any possible grounds for ambiguity.

  His pr
emise sprang out of soul-chilling mercy: if five hundred men were cut down without quarter, the ploy might provoke the living retreat of Lysaer’s remaining thirty thousand.

  ‘Cry mercy,’ Elaira murmured, her aghast litany a plea to ward off the shattering vista of final disillusionment.

  Unfounded fear; upon the next step, the maze reaffirmed steadfast proof of Arithon’s intact compassion.

  He had not launched his course of premeditated massacre with no tested proof on the outcome. Before the influence of the tienelle faded, he embarked on his closing round of scrying to establish rigorous sureties. He sifted futures one after another, until he garnered his promised reprieve: a scene showing Lysaer broken in sorrowful distress, commanding the war host’s withdrawal. And there, in exacerbating viciousness, the resharpened vision of the maze exposed an insidious, fresh twist: the geas of Desh-thiere had not been quiescent. Flicked to flash-point life by the brief view of Lysaer s’Ilessid, the curse had been wakened, its touch invisibly subtle. A masked flare of static had sheeted through Arithon’s being, invidiously timed to break Dakar’s guarding hold over his guilt-ridden conscience.

  The spellbinder’s protective wardings had snapped by Deshthiere’s provocation, with the flattening burden of self-damning remorse fallen back onto Arithon’s shoulders.

  Just as before, the resurgence of blindness smothered his access to mage-sight. At the edge of defeat, as his born talent failed him, the Master of Shadow saw his work irretrievably cut short before he could cross-check his result.

  Nonetheless, he had not yielded tamely. Wrenched from the fast-fraying threads of his mastery, Arithon had grasped his last shred of awareness to effect a practiced unbinding. He saw Dakar freed. If his truncated augury brought a misstep in Vastmark, he could at least make sure the Fellowship spell cord that shackled the importunate prophet to his service would not tie another victim to his doomed company.

  The reliving ground onward, while the maze refigured yet another excoriating thread of repercussion: before the shattered scrying went dark, a fragmented incident had been swept aside, masked under the cascade as Arithon’s mage-sight subsided to blankness. The moment of faulted memory was no accident. The deep-seated influence of Desh-thiere’s design had effected another intervention, hazed under blanketing spellcraft. In chilling exactitude, Kewar’s spells revealed one last, lost sequence of augury. The scene unveiled a clandestine exchange in the field quarters of Lysaer’s war host. Now dredged up intact, its contents became incontestably damning: under tight secrecy, Lord Commander Diegan signed a writ of execution that ensured the handpicked survivors of the Havens never lived to report the atrocity to Prince Lysaer. The Light’s army had marched into Vastmark unknowing. Their proud companies advanced and attacked, fatefully ignorant of the warning Prince Arithon had designed to dispatch them safely homeward.

  ‘Oh, cry mercy,’ Elaira gasped in devastated shock. Five hundred murdered spirits at the Havens had died, each one, in unforgivable futility.

  The crucial flash of augury that cast doubt on the outcome had been hidden by Desh-thiere’s spelled geas. An indispensable gift of uncertainty that would have changed Arithon’s subsequent choice of action. Surely, without any cursed stroke of meddling, the campaign at Vastmark would have left a less brutally damning legacy.

  At what point does the strong heart fail? How many sliding falls into treachery, before the visionary mind must shudder off its set track, and seek the surcease of ungoverned madness? Hands braced to the narrowing walls of the corridor, Arithon attempted the next step. The pain slashed him, anguish sharpened tenfold. He buckled to his knees, bruised under a crushing, harsh grief that hounded him past reprieve.

  Cry mercy.

  His body rejected his will to arise. ‘Iel dediari,’ light forgive, he could not go forward, could not face again those five hundred premeditated deaths. Not struck to cold knowing that his premise had been warped by the poison of Desh-thiere’s manipulation.

  Cry mercy.

  If he broke, if he faltered or stopped, his dearest beloved would be destroyed along with him. ‘Elaira, I was wrong. You are more than my life. Never, ever forget that.’

  Cry mercy.

  He strove again to recoup his shattered initiative. Shuddering against the forced pressure of sobs he would not let break from his throat, his flesh failed him. He sank, bowed onto crossed arms. Nausea racked him. Crumpled to the stone floor, he shuddered, wrung by sickness. His stomach had nothing inside to expel. He retched, gagging bile. The dry heaves came on with overpowering savagery, and would not permit him to stand.

  Cry mercy.

  He could not face this, could not repeat the horror of the order to burn a ship laden with wounded; could not walk again those bloodied, wet sands, in silenced distress choosing which wounded man should survive, and which would be dispatched on the brutal, swift cut of the knife’s edge …

  Cry mercy.

  Willed initiative became as a black-glass wall, high and bleak and insurmountable. The blood and the fire, the shrill screams of the dying would grant him no quarter at the Havens. Lysaer’s massive advance would close in, inexorable. Thirty thousand deaths, and a war host milled under by the calculated, loosed force of a shale slide. Arithon wept, flattened under the pain of a reliving too massively vicious to contemplate.

  Cry mercy.

  The feather-light touch that brushed his hunched shoulder ripped him to a raw scream of recoil. Prone on the tunnel floor, limp as a shot animal, he lacked the bare strength to flinch in retreat. If the darkness seemed lessened, the raw ends of his nerves scarcely recorded the difference.

  A minute passed, filled by the rasp of his breath, before his shocked gaze registered the impression of a woman standing over him. She was not Elaira, but another, her form limned in the ephemeral blue fire of spirit light. Her shoulders were mantled in the coarse cloak of a Vastmark shepherd. She had fair, wind-wisped braids, tied off with soft yarn and the chiming, sweet clash of bronze bells.

  Arithon ripped out a gritted croak. ‘Dalwyn.’

  Elaira recognized the name on a flood of relief. Lane watch had once shown her the woman, warmed on a chill night by Arithon’s tender embrace. At the time the enchantress had wept, grateful for a release granted to her beloved on the heels of their desolate parting at Merior. Arithon had let Dalwyn importune him for comfort. In wise, female instinct, Elaira held that union beyond reach of possessive hurt or petty jealousy. Love made allowance for Dalwyn’s raw need, and gave grace for any small kindness that might ease Arithon’s deadlocked distress. Upon such small gifts, hopeless pain could find surcease.

  Now, in the clotted gloom of the maze, Dalwyn’s offered solace cast a circle of radiant light. As he had done in her moment of mourning, a light touch soothed his suffering in kindness. ‘For the caring you granted to support me through my trial of sorrow, your Grace, look ahead.’

  For a miracle, Arithon listened. He unclosed his fist, braced himself on one forearm. His glance turned forward as she bade him.

  Even as Dalwyn’s form faded at his back, another arose, this one a small girl standing on planted feet. Arithon recognized the departed child named Jilieth, lost to a mauling by wyverns. In the depths of a ravine, by a winter-chill stream, his Masterbard’s talent and Dakar’s healing spellcraft had failed to restore her to vitality.

  ‘Little one, forgive me,’ Arithon whispered. ‘You were heart set to go. Did you wish I had broken the stricture of free will? Should I have struck darker notes of compulsion and played other music to hold you?’

  She gave him laughter. Her brown eyes alight with bold merriness, she offered Rathain’s prince her small hand. ‘Come. There is no horror in crossing Fate’s Wheel. The dead are beyond suffering, as you will see. For the song that eased my passage, let me guide you. Together, we will walk until you win clear of the shadows that bind you to Vastmark.’

  Arithon bowed his head. His shoulders quivered. The tears falling and falling in silvered drops off his c
heekbones, he reached out and clasped Jilieth’s extended, ghost fingers. At her urging, he arose. Leaning in shameless need on her courage, he reforged the lamed strength to go forward.

  Cry mercy.

  Again, a red-streamered arrow snapped off his bowstring. The shaft arched into the vault of the sky above the cliff walls of the Havens. The signal descended, past fate to recall, and a picked band of marksmen loosed bows.

  Spelled wards spun their maze of insidious retribution, and Arithon died, ripped off sun-baked rocks as a broadhead whistled down and slammed through him. Again, he knew the tears of a widow and her orphaned child, a brother, a mother, and two unmarried sisters, keening unending lamentation …

  Cry mercy.

  For thirty thousand deaths, there would come no respite. Only a small girl’s unquenchable courage, insistently tugging him onward. Arithon stumbled ahead. At each dragging step, a broken corpse stayed him. He waded through let blood, deafened by harrowing sound, and the dying screams of a multitude. He was the cry of the wounded earth, the violated peace of whole mountains torn down to serve as his ready weapon. He was terror and pain, hammered over and over by the gut-ripping shock of all manner of lethal injury.

  Unseen, unheard, with no tender child to take her wrung hands, or to ease the edge off her suffering, Elaira endured all that Arithon must. She flanked his fraught passage as the horrors of the Vastmark campaign flowered into a nightmare of vivid reliving.