Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Cry mercy. Cry mercy. Cry mercy …

  Early Spring 5670

  Adept

  Cold morning and deep frost clasped the rock islets at Northstrait in a mantle of crystalline white. The brine broke and scattered like jewels over the rimed shore, and sunlight touched the outcrops to sequined platinum under a sapphire sky. That same pristine light flooded through the tower windows of Ath’s hostel, where the latched-back shutters admitted the scoured east wind. Pale stone walls captured the booming thrash of the breakers against a backdrop of silence, undisturbed as the field of snowy linen spread over the pallet, where a motionless figure reclined. The faultless, clean lines of hands and face might have been a master’s crafting of marble, but for the glint of red touched through fair hair and the unhurried rhythm of breath.

  Morning after morning, dawn had brightened the stark chamber, with the elements little changed. At one with the bleached-bone colors of winter, a fair-haired adept clad in gilt-and-white robes kept patient watch to one side. Through a passage of days piled up into weeks, she had measured her time to the change of the tides and the wheeling turn of the stars. Yet on this day, stirred by a current of imperceptible change, she raised her head, and at last saw an end to her vigil.

  For the first time since his flesh had been scorched by Khadrim fire, Kevor s’Ilessid opened his eyes.

  The orbs in their sockets were unmarked, a piercingly clear porcelain blue. New-grown hair fringed his unmarred brow, and his hands, tucked in a drift of clean bedding, showed not a trace of a scar.

  ‘Welcome back,’ the adept murmured, then settled, attentive, and waited for his reaction.

  Kevor licked his lips, blinked, drew in a roused breath. In total stillness, he allowed his restored consciousness to explore the healed miracle of his body. The transcendent cleansing he had experienced in the spring at the heart of the hostel’s sacred grove had been far more than a dream. All pain had departed. His damaged flesh was renewed. Yet if nerve and muscle and joint had found ease, restored to functional harmony, nothing else was the same.

  He was no longer the boy he had been, but a spirit annealed and reforged by the powers that had lifted him out of suffering.

  ‘My eyesight is blinded,’ he admitted at due length. The lapsed burden of speech held an awkwardness, grained to a rust-flecked whisper. As though use of words had turned strangely coarse, he resumed in halting impatience, ‘Yet everywhere I look, in my mind, I see light. You sit beside me on a cushioned stool. Your hair wears the colors of ripe wheat in summer and your robes are a river of molten silver, cascading under the moon. I don’t know your face. But even without making the effort to look, I perceive the rainbow weave of your spirit.’

  ‘A more accurate vision than the illusion of shadows our mortality values as eyesight,’ the lady adept admitted. ‘The change is quite rare, and considered by some to be a most blessed gift.’ Her smile of encouragement fingered his heart, more tenderly distinct than any physical sensation. ‘If you have been touched in this way, you will know your travels raised you far beyond the earthly side of the veil. A part of you still resides there. Is that troublesome?’

  ‘It should be, but no.’ Kevor found, with surprise, that he need not dwell on the matter. In hindsight, his childhood life at Avenor seemed a busy, constricting tangle of noise, cluttered with meaningless trinkets. Under the gilded trappings of royalty, the honeyed falsehoods, and the poisoned plays of intrigue that riddled the court and high council, a few genuine threads yet held meaning. Among them, he continued to value his love for his mother, a tie strong enough to have drawn him back across the divide and into the wellspring of life.

  Awake to the rush of blood through his veins, he felt reborn into heaviness. He sensed the poised stillness of the adept at his side, and knew that she understood: his tentative binding to recumbent flesh might not be sufficient to hold him. Ellaine’s grief at his loss all but shrank to insignificance before the undying glory he had experienced in his freed flight past the veil. The unreconciled dichotomy burned like rare fire. His heart seemed too small to encompass the absence left imprinted in waking memory. ‘I don’t want to return to Avenor. If my father wishes a high king for Tysan, he must find another heir to assume the crown.’

  Touched by the plangent note of desolation struck through his measured words, the lady adept reached out and closed his loose fingers into her own. Their joined touch was warm, unaffected by the icy wind swirling throughout the chamber. ‘No one expects you to return to Avenor.’

  Kevor turned his head. His air of remote beauty all but stopped thought and breath as he tipped his face toward the streaming east light admitted by the tower window. His expression showed a longing beyond words, as though he found even sunlight diminished, or his hands had held something precious, now irretrievably lost. ‘If I am released from the burden of royal inheritance, what is left?’

  ‘There is work for you in this world, if you choose,’ the lady assured, ever patient. The sewn ciphers on her hood flared to her movement as she released his grasp and sat back. ‘When you wish to arise, I will show you.’

  Slowly, tentatively, Kevor flexed one arm. No discomfort marred the movement of muscle and joint. No twinge of agony flashed down quiescent nerves. If regeneration had not restored his mortal eyesight, the loss caused no grief. The rest of him responded like oiled silk, strong and seamlessly functional. He gathered himself, though long unused to the heft of his own weight, and with distinct, fragile care, sat up. A slight frown marked the effort, as though he had forgotten the intricacy required to manage physical balance. The sheets slid away from his torso. Underneath, he was naked. The fact left him unabashed, an oddity he scarcely paused to examine.

  Once, he would have burned red to arise unclothed before the eyes of a woman.

  A faint smile curved his lips, an amusement. Such emotional tumult now seemed meaningless. He swung his legs clear of the bedding and stood on the frost white stone of the floor.

  The bracing wind buffeted him, tossing the bright ends of the hair that had grown back, unsinged. Kevor did not feel the cold. Remade by the mystical powers of the spring, he paused to laugh, as though drinking in the unaccustomed sensation of air flowing over his skin. Without embarrassment, he stepped to the window and looked out. If his eyesight was blind, the moving force of the breakers dashing themselves on sharp rock revealed a patterned play of energy, a tapestry limned in pastel colors fired through with delicate rainbows.

  He would not walk in darkness, wherever he went.

  Kevor tasted the thrown salt of sea spume. He stayed lost to reverie, while the clear, northern sunlight painted over a perfection of form that would have wrung tears of awe from a sculptor.

  ‘The world is still beautiful,’ he marveled at last. His spontaneous smile showed wounding delight, that one cherished fragment of joy seemed unexpectedly restored to him. He savored a last breath of the ocean air, then faced the lady adept, who had risen to wait by the open doorway. ‘I am ready.’

  Since he did not ask, she did not send for a robe, but matched her pace to his increasingly confident step down the light-shafted gloom of the stairwell.

  ‘You’re taking me back to the grove,’ he observed.

  Unsurprised that he could divine her intent, the lady led him across the outer threshold into the courtyard. ‘We’ll begin there, yes.’

  Kevor stepped barefoot into the ankle-deep snow fallen during the night. Untroubled by chill, he glanced down, moved to unexpected curiosity. The kiss ofthe ice crystals, melting, seemed to speak. Their whispered phrases formed a language he knew, if only he would stop to listen.

  ‘Time for that later,’ the lady adept said, laughing. Her touch at his shoulder gentled him onward. ‘All the days left to the world, if you wish. The pleasure is yours to decide.’

  Kevor raised sightless eyes, absorbing the shimmering light of her presence directly into his innermind. ‘You have something needful to show me first?’

  �
�I do.’ She accepted his offered hand. Though he required no guidance to find his way, she led his steps to the courtyard’s south door, then inside, through the polished-stone halls of the sanctuary, and between the pillars that marked the threshold of the sacred grove.

  Kevor s’Ilessid paused in the dew-drenched grass. Some of the strung tension flowed out of him, bled away into peace as he savored the aromatic scent of balsam, and the subtle fragrances of night-blooming flowers. The trickle of springwater over quartz stone braided into a soothing melody, and the silence between spoke of the grand chord that sourced all creation. He did not need eyesight to sense the flight of the snowy owl, who folded broad wings and perched on the bough of an oak. He discerned the essence of the field mouse in the grass, and the stilled graceful strength of the mountain cat which padded past his knee to lap at the pool.

  Cradled within the grove’s living serenity, Kevor felt the unassuaged core of longing inside him rise up, and almost receive its true match. The heartbreak, that something still fell indefinably short, lit a restlessness in him that could never be quenched by the banked embers of earthbound contentment. Touched to tears by the unnamed loss that raged through him, he trembled, his emotion resharpened to unblunted potency, and his grief, too poignant to bear. ‘Ath, oh Ath,’ he appealed, ‘should I not have come back? What is left here that does not seem dulled, or reduced to a poor, shadowed echo?’

  A white-silk sigh of movement, the lady adept squeezed his forearm and collected his scattered attention. ‘Come.’

  Where she guided, a hidden path opened through the towering trees. Leaves rustled. Spritely breezes frisked through the boughs overhead. Small stones sparkled, star-caught, with mica. The cool majesty of the forest enfolded them, alive with an air of green mystery. The mountain cat tagged playfully after their heels, while a woodthrush trilled its lyric arpeggios under the velvet mantle of twilight. Soothed by the wise endurance of the trees, Kevor settled. Uncaring of nakedness, unmindful of sightless eyes and the altered contours of his inward vision, which revealed the surrounding landscape as a tapestry spun from pure light, he made his way to a second clearing, where a low, mounded hill arose, crowned by night sky and a diadem of turning stars.

  At the crest, a circle of white-robed figures stood with joined hands, immersed in silent concord.

  ‘They are Ath’s adepts,’ the lady explained with hushed anticipation. ‘Go forward, if you wish. They have invited you to join their circle. Permission is given to share in their dreaming.’

  ‘They are all from this hostel?’ Kevor inquired, a bit distant. His attention had snagged in rapt fascination upon the play of golden light shimmering and falling like a misted rain over the adepts’ convocation.

  ‘All hostels send them,’ the lady explained. ‘Each sacred grove has a path that leads to this place, for ones who know where to find it. Will you accept the experience?’

  Carefully as she guarded her intonation, Kevor’s altered vision detected the strained edge of possibility, that if he refused, he was likely to retrace the steps of an untold number of predecessors and lose his fresh foothold on life. The vitality brought back from his exalted sojourn of healing would fade with disinterest, until the awareness required to maintain health slipped away, replaced by prolonged periods of sleep. In gradual stages, his mind would drift into unconsciousness, then past the Wheel’s turning into death.

  No adept of Ath’s Brotherhood would argue his free choice to depart. The lady waited quietly on his answer, wrapped in seamless tranquillity. She made no mention of pitfalls. In the unwritten way of her kind, she would not ply him with blandishments.

  Yet the deep-buried cry of the world’s pain touched through her presence, striking as a spark of scribed fire against Kevor’s altered awareness. He grasped the sense that his decision would matter. He listened between the notes of the night-singing birds, and the crickets’ chafed song in the grasses, and heard in them the shared echo of the adepts’ muted urgency. The quiet plea moved him. In fact, he was sorely needed.

  Nor could the mores of a prince’s upbringing be fully and lightly cast off. Kevor’s smile held the steadfast promise of his ancestry as he touched the lady’s hand to his lips in an abandoned gesture of court courtesy. ‘Show me the mystery you speak of.’

  Together, they waded through the lush grasses and climbed toward the top of the rise. Delicate white flowers wafted perfume, and the young crescent moon fired the dew to strewn diamonds. At the crest of the hill, no word was spoken. No one cared that Kevor was unclad. Two hooded figures amid the gathered company stirred and parted linked hands. Their circle expanded, then seamlessly rejoined, as an elderly grandfather and a smiling woman admitted the younger man and his fair-haired lady attendant. The rustle of white robes fell still. The soft flames of spirit light wove through the round, burnishing sparks off the thread-worked ciphers stitched into pearlescent silk.

  Then, as one, the adepts drew breath and chanted the word for the Paravian prime rune. Their raised voices melded into a chord, sealing their company into a sweet, running torrent of joined sound. Kevor felt pierced through and through by that current, until his heart spiraled upward in joy. His mind took flight, arose, unfolding in bursting exultation. Propelled on a fountainhead of burgeoning vibration, he felt as a bird, with white-feathered wings outstretched. Soaring, now, effortless, he took wild flight: up and up, until once again, he sailed on the rivers of pure light, which spun through the realms past the veil.

  In wonder, he bore witness, while the adepts who sang him back to ecstasy dipped into that quickened stream. As they had, many times, they gathered unharnessed power in looping coils. Their deft handling braided the energies into a rope, then guided the living current back down, through their linked minds, into the heart of the circle.

  There, the power surged, made gently captive to the wisdom of their intent. Into the cataract of drawn light, they dreamed, and their thoughts spun the fires of energy into form, ephemeral and unearthly fair.

  Kevor cried out, his spirit raised to an explosion of exquisite delight. He beheld the living mystery, whirled into the dance of pure light as the adepts interceded, calling down the singing powers sent forth by Ath Creator. He witnessed the alchemy of transmutation, as their Brotherhood invoked unity and blessing, and allowed the wild forces to adorn the heartcore of their sacred groves. The limitless creativity of their dreaming sustained their liminal forests, and brought forth the water to endow the deep wisdom embued in their welling springs.

  Here, the hoop of the cosmos was joined, sunfire and moonbeam and love bent to earth and cradled there in tender care, to engender undying celebration.

  At first hesitant, then with an unleashed, bursting confidence, Kevor joined into the summoning. He had walked that far place, where the power was drawn from the limitless flow of abundance. He had seen and touched patterns that others had not, in the course of his convalescent sojourn. From those far horizons, the thread of his gathering flowed into the weave, and the colors of twilight flowered in joy, as the first new voice in a hundred years joined into the circle’s chanting …

  The moment was marked.

  Far southward, in Ath’s hostel at Scimlade Tip, an adept named Claithen opened his eyes, aroused from his hour of contemplation. He stretched as though touched by a fresh breath of wind, though no breezes stirred the dead leaves, gathered in brittle drifts at his feet; nor had, for a quarter of a century.

  ‘Oh, blessed,’ he whispered, as the burgeoning awareness touched him and powerfully infused his wearied spirit. As though heavy darkness saw the first blush of dawn, he straightened. Almost, he thought he heard the tentative trickle of water splash over the dry stones of the spring.

  ‘Oh bravely blessed, let me bear the truth.’ Afraid that his aggrieved longing might have tricked his sore heart, he looked up just in time to behold the blighted tree overhead burst into a fragrant shower of white blossom.

  ‘Oh blessed!’ His shout rang. ‘We are given a s
avior and the gift of rebirth.’

  His trembling smile melted into tears of gladness, and the echoes of his cry brought the dusky-skinned lady, who alone had remained at his side to attend the withered wreckage of a grove that had once been made green through thousands of years of devotions.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, ripped into laughter as the joy burst from her throat. ‘Who has accepted the white robes of adept and brought us the first breath of healing?’

  ‘You don’t recognize the voice of this miracle?’ Claithen caught her slender brown hands, his dark eyes shining with wonderment. ‘Life has wrought another full circle. His birth name was Kevor s’Ilessid.’

  Early Spring 5670

  Crucible

  Exhaustion was a blanketing weight, dragging him down into darkness. The draining ordeal of Vastmark behind him, Arithon sank to his knees in Kewar Tunnel as Jilieth’s determined grip faded and left his limp hand. He realized he must not give way before weariness. Must not lie down in prostrate surrender, or succumb to disorientation.

  Yet the traumatized nerves that suffered the impact of thirty thousand violent deaths were by now numbed past response. Emotions tormented by a surfeit of grief had wrung dry, scorched beyond reach of desire. The screams of the lost had pummeled Arithon’s mind until he would have been grateful for deafness. He had cried aloud for heart-torn remorse, until his voice wore away, leaving a ringing, blank silence. To feel nothing at all seemed the very haven of peace. Pummeled half-witless by the experienced trauma of repeated battering wounds, his shrinking flesh clung to the false safety of stillness. Ingrained reflex insisted the least effort to walk forward would unleash the floodgates of punishment.

  Arithon battled that visceral recoil. Blood oath had been sworn to the Fellowship Sorcerers. No less than Elaira’s life lay cradled between his two hands. He dared not succumb to the leaden weakness dragging him down into lassitude.