Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  The gestalt labor of resealing Rockfell’s triple ward rings had exposed their appalling deficits. Unlike Kharadmon, who delighted in mayhem, Luhaine was left irritable and depleted. Rather than loose his vile temper on Sethvir, the Sorcerer coalesced to a pinpoint of chiseled awareness. He drifted earthward with the settling snow and alit on the stairway carved into the flank of the mountain by Davien’s intransigent artistry.

  Gargoyles watched him. Crested heads capped in drifts, and cold eye sockets scalloped with crusts of rimed ice, the carvings aligned their uncanny awareness and sampled his stalking presence. Stone wound in spells did not stay inert, but flared into a surly corona.

  ‘Listening, are you?’ the discorporate Sorcerer snapped in rancid distemper. ‘You’ve spurned Sethvir’s queries for long enough. I, Luhaine, do summon you here! This world stands in peril. Your choice to retreat can’t excuse shirking dalliance as Athera falls into jeopardy.’

  A moment passed, filled by whirling flakes, hard driven by keening winds.

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t hear me,’ Luhaine accosted, tart with impatient asperity. ‘You’ll surely know Sethvir’s flattened with weariness, minding the world’s deranged grimwards. The way you eavesdrop, you’re surely aware that Kharadmon’s gone alone to divert a migration of free wraiths.’

  ‘Luhaine, how boring if the world falls to ruin, and you, poor sod, never change,’ the carved statue pronounced in reply. ‘Must you always bear in like the jaws of a pit terrier when you lose your self-righteous temper?’ The voice was Davien’s, and the awareness just arrived, knife-edged with dissecting sarcasm. ‘Since I won’t hear your lecture, you can’t go away? What an unimaginative stalemate.’

  Luhaine’s churning presence spat ruffled sparks. ‘Where will your vaunted complacency be on the day an invasion from Marak descends on your lair in the Mathorns?’

  Davien’s bent of humor roused a diamond-hard gleam within the stone eyes of the gargoyle. ‘Such gaudy melodrama! The bit part’s not like you. And who claimed, about free wraiths, that I’ve chosen to lounge at Kewar in frivolous solitude?’

  Touched by a bolt of stark apprehension for that fox-subtle change in tonality, Luhaine punched an agitated gyre through the horizontal lash of the snowfall. Already he sorely regretted his impulse. Sheer folly, not to have consulted Sethvir to ask for the current news. ‘Don’t claim you’ve left to assist Kharadmon.’

  The gargoyle’s mocking leer seemed to change, sculpted eyebrows raised in astonishment. ‘That’s assuming your henchman would want me along to share his labor in unreconciled partnership? Don’t, please, die laughing. We’re sticklers for truth.’

  Had Luhaine still been embodied in flesh, he would have flushed deeply scarlet. ‘He named you Betrayer. On good days, the rest of us usually agree, the delicate question’s still dangling.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said the carving that spoke for Davien. ‘The verdict might fall with me out of favor, depending what happens to Prince Arithon.’

  That instant, full force, Luhaine felt the chill wind, and the roaring dark of the abyss. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Despoiled the lynchpin that upholds this world’s promise,’ the Betrayer replied with a bite that invoked outright challenge. ‘Or else forged you the weapon you can’t do without to stave off the throes of invasion. The hours ahead will determine the outcome.’

  ‘What have you done?’ Luhaine repeated, though the gargoyle cast back a statue’s blank silence, and in truth, he already knew. Clear as a spearcast, Arithon’s flight would have led to the entrance to Kewar Tunnel.

  ‘Mercy, brave heart,’ Luhaine whispered, as wild with sorrow as the keening gusts that lashed over Rockfell Peak. ‘Bitter, the hour that brought your Grace to shoulder Kamridian’s trial, and woe to this land should your spirit fall short in the course of that sorrowful testing.’

  As always with Davien, ethics tangled with necessity, until even the enlightened among Ath’s adepts might be sorely beset to discern the fine line between meddling choice and the justifiable dictates of crisis.

  Arithon struggling to survive passage through Kewar bespoke a crushing potential for tragedy; but against threat from Marak, Athera would require all the help and straw hope the Fellowship could wring in support.

  ‘Fires of eternity!’ Luhaine hissed in vexation as his presence shot aloft and veered west to resume his deferred passage to Althain Tower. ‘Let me not be the one sent to tell the Mad Prophet if Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn fails his oathsworn charge to survive.’

  Bound by the coils of Kewar’s forged spells, Arithon mustered frayed nerves and committed another step forward. Behind, sprawled the corpses of Baiyen Gap, and the unburied dead from Jaelot and Darkling dispatched to their doom in Daon Ramon. He had shared their suffering struggle for last breath; had wept, as their widows in mourning. Exhaustion remained, a shuddering weakness that burdened his frame like dipped lead.

  Ahead, he still faced the last battle by the Aiyenne, and the fates meted out to Lysaer’s sunwheel companies as they closed to engage Jieret’s war band. A few hundred casualties, when laid against the slain thousands undone at Tal Quorin and Dier Kenton Vale. Yet in Kewar, no loss by armed conflict was a pittance. Each bereaved mother and each orphaned child scored the heart with their signal patterns of tragedy.

  Such sorrows could be endured, mourned in suffering, and finally atoned by forgiveness.

  Less easy to reconcile were those clanborn fallen who had perished to break the Alliance’s cordon. Braced for the savage toll wrought by their sacrifice, Arithon stepped into the maelstrom, and died.

  He knew the eviscerating rip of the spring trap, and the mangling crunch of the deadfall. He was a horse, tumbling head over heels, a snapped foreleg snagged in a noose. He died of arrows, of quarrels, of cold steel thrust deep into shuddering flesh. He was the hot spurt of blood on cold ground in the screaming mêlée of battle. Clanblood or townborn, the battering shock brought an agony alike to the very bone. Arithon died, of a warhorse’s battering hooves, of an axe cut that severed his spine. He fell, weeping, beside slaughtered comrades at arms, his croaked prayers to the Light left unanswered.

  He was Eafinn’s son, shivering out life facedown in a snowdrift. He was Theirid, lying maimed in thick brush, screaming to draw fire from enemy bowmen to spare other men pinned in a thicket. He was an officer from Etarra, choking on vomit in the thorny waste of a gulch. He was a widow sobbing in a sad, empty bed, then a child scourged by nightmares no pension in gold could restore a lost father to assuage.

  Another step, his foot dragging with unreconciled dread: Arithon encountered Earl Jieret’s untenable conflict. He saw mage-sighted conscience clash with brute will, then ached with remorse as an unfailing heart shirked the charge of a bloodborn heritage.

  ‘Oh, my brother, forgive!’ Arithon’s apology scattered echoes down the confines of Kewar Tunnel. Yet the sorrows of Jieret’s shame did not lift. The caithdein’s dark destiny stayed excised to exposure by Davien’s entangling spells.

  Arithon shivered, arms wrapped to his chest, for an ache beyond consolation. ‘My brother, you have suffered my sorrow at Minderl Bay, but with no stalwart hand to uplift you.’

  Unspoken, the useless, hagridden protest: that the man standing vigil beside the ninth acorn before Lysaer’s advancing vanguard should have been Braggen, well hardened for war by his festering grudges, and unburdened by initiate mage talent.

  The maze ceded Arithon no ground for the fact his tailor-made orders had been spurned; that Earl Jieret had shouldered his fate by free choice, against the will of his crown prince. The Teir’s’Valerient had already passed over Fate’s Wheel. Now bound to stand as unreconciled witness, Arithon brazened through shrinking cowardice, one shaken step after the next.

  Reliving burgeoned in lurid detail, and a crossbow bolt flew, striking Jieret high in the shoulder. A triumphant Sulfin Evend strode forward to claim the trophy brought down by his marksmanship. Disregarding the fallen cai
thdein’s croaked warning, he ground the frail shell of an acorn under his contemptuous heel. The shards scattered. A string of ciphered spellcraft unreeled and spread with the winnowing wind.

  Jieret’s full-throated howl of regret could not stay that unleashed construct.

  Nor could Arithon’s remorse, as spellbound observer, do aught to reverse the course of determined consequence. The diabolical impact of his own design bloomed over that sere, winter hilltop. Woven shadow and illusion invoked Desh-thiere’s curse, whipping Lysaer to berserk ferocity.

  Earth and sky rained white fire. The percussive blast of uncounted levin bolts sheared over the hapless landscape. The strikes hammered down, on and on in blind reflex, but brought no consummate release. Geas-roused passion would not answer to reason. No power of light could defeat the wild wind, or the blighting provocation of set banespells. The Narms field troop who marched on the strength of their faith were immolated where they stood. Arithon learned their Names to the last man, his flesh razed from bone in a shrieking deluge of agony.

  Bound to their pain, Davien’s Maze saw him burn through three hundred hideous deaths. In manyfold horror, he felt crisped skin blister, then blacken to paper, and peel. He could not weep through eyes torched to carbon. A throat choked by flames could not scream. Nor was the scope of his suffering confined to the fate of two-legged humanity: Arithon was the brush, razed stem from root. He was the hare, and the deer, and the field mouse, torched as he foraged the sere thickets. Lashed by the terrible, indiscriminate ruin released by the sweep of his strategy, he endured measure for measure in destruction. No mercy was shown as Jieret’s chains of rote spellcraft reaped a swath of wholesale slaughter.

  Graven in mind and flesh, Arithon bore the furious brunt. As his half brother’s attack recoiled in blind fury through the acorns imbued as his fetch, he was old stone, heat-split as the snowdrifts boiled skyward. He was the tortured disharmony of the land, raped by manic rage and the hostile misuse of the elements.

  No recourse, for guilt, but to keep moving forward. Arithon lost count of his stumbling steps. Aware he must walk the full course of the holocaust, he held no saving hope. Dogged endurance must see him through. Lysaer’s rampant fury added peril to hardship. As the wakened response of the curse clawed his mind, Arithon called upon mage-trained resilience and raised music to stave off insanity.

  Each note that he forged was a victory snatched from the closing jaws of disaster. Through grief, through sorrow, through the horrors of scourged flesh, he must frame without flaw the ethereal chords extracted from Alithiel’s grand harmony. The toll of such effort came at punishing cost as the screams of the dying and the moans of the burned unstrung concentration and poise. Time and again, he was forced to start over. In lockstep perfection, with no drift in tone, he reordered his mind and raised the exalted harmonics that dissolved Desh-thiere’s geas-bent drive to shed blood.

  The music itself laid him open. The suspension of unbridled joy shattered thought, set against a raw backdrop of violence. Arithon made his way, scorched to branding remorse for the choices his botched fate had presented. Savaged by inconsolable grief, he fought to bridge shattering dichotomy: while binding his cognizant mind to the sound that had seeded the glory of creation, he died: over and over, he fell, screaming other men’s curses amid the base terror of war. Star song woke the earth. He was the lane energies flowing through boulder-strewn slopes, the spun force of magnetics ripped out of true by hatred and ruin and strife. Remanded to peace by the keys of rebirth, the torn heart could not be reconciled. Let blood stamped the shadow of desecration on a land once cherished by unsullied majesty: the frost-silver grace of Riathan Paravians, running wild under spring moonlight.

  Another step; another; Arithon pressed onward. Each cycle of death exacted its forced reckoning, until the one wound that could not be absolved. Kewar’s maze forgave no affliction. As the last victim’s suffering faded behind, the gnawing ache of the crossbow bolt remained sunk in Earl Jieret’s shoulder.

  ‘Mercy on us both, how did you survive?’ Raked over the coals of his unresolved sorrow, Arithon saw Lysaer’s Lord Commander crest the hilltop and bind Rathain’s caithdein captive.

  ‘Jieret, no! You can’t have lived through this, not for me, not even for the sake of the realm!’ Arithon braced himself, shaken, against Kewar’s unyielding stone wall. The appalling penalty set on the next step hurt too much for his bruised heart to bear.

  Memory blazed back, a lacerating truth drawn from one of Jieret’s past arguments. ‘What is left in this world after us, liege, but earth and sky, each bearing the imprint of our living stewardship?’ The words brought fresh pain, graven with the straightforward affection the clan chieftain had shown during life. ‘The legacy of your lineage must survive all our choices, and all of our failings, your Grace.’

  Another fragment of recall surfaced, as sharply damning, from another dispute with Erlien s’Taleyn, affirmed as the steward of Shand. ‘That’s how it’s given for caithdeinen to test princes …’

  Arithon finished the stricture aloud: ‘to lay down their lives, if need be.’ First Steiven, now Jieret; wrenched to bristling abhorrence by his ties to royal birthright, the Master of Shadow reeled onward. Yet no cry of scorched conscience stayed the brutal reliving as the Alliance Lord Commander dragged his injured clan captive downslope.

  Spurred on by his outrage, Arithon stayed upright. ‘There are limits!’ he accosted the spell-charged air. Yet if Davien was listening as hidden observer, no plea for succor was granted. The vision unreeled, showing Jieret’s doomed effort to drive Lysaer and Sulfin Evend to disparity. Rathain’s crown prince wept. Doubled with dry heaves, he watched Steiven’s grown son lose his bold tongue to the knife.

  ‘Avert and forgive!’ Arithon gasped in wracked protest. The injustice stopped thought, that the maze shaped this trial with invasive disregard for an intensely proud man’s guarded privacy. No worse humiliation could have befallen Earl Jieret. He would never have condoned such a legacy as this: a prince loved as a brother forced to experience the sordid ignominy of his suffering.

  ‘Enough!’ shouted Arithon. Surely, the Betrayer’s shackling spells weighted the scales too severely. Sworn as Rathain’s protector, a crown prince must answer for the welfare of his pledged liegemen. Yet the inhumane handling that brought Jieret’s death had occurred outside choice, beyond reach of his royal justice.

  Unrelenting, the bared truth rescinded his plea. At next step, Arithon received the heartsore reminder he had abdicated his will without reservation to a caithdein bound to serve the inflexible dictates of duty. Stumbling to meet the array of strict consequence, Arithon cursed the black hour his spirit had been drawn from his flesh and merged with the spelled steel of a sword blade.

  He could beg no mercy for the whiplash reprisal bought by that act of submission. The sole route to survival must scribe its straight course through the nightmare of Jieret’s captivity.

  Arithon clenched his jaw, hackled to revolt. In self-honest reflection, he understood that his willed choice on the staircase had framed his consent to this challenge. Yet to endure the low drama of a friend’s degradation abrogated the fabric of human decency. Warned that his path through the maze could not deviate, Arithon poised his inner awareness and reached, sounding the well of spell-textured silence above the range of natural hearing. He strained every limited resource of talent, seeking to access the vortex that aligned his course to the stream of past conflict.

  He heard nothing; felt nothing; encountered no more than the mirrored image of himself, entrapped by the riddle engraved on the black-stone portal that admitted him. The enemy before him, behind, and against him was still himself, and no other.

  Impelled by the blaze of a scorching, bleak rage, Arithon rammed his way forward. Helpless to intervene, he watched Jieret’s flesh become cosseted coin, held for barter to draw in the proud clanborn. Brutality made a mockery of honor and cause. The price paid to enact a royal escape surely came at
too high a cost.

  ‘Was the future worth this?’ Arithon gasped, as vision showed his caithdein dragged like stunned game off the back of a steaming horse. He shared shaming pain, every futile recrimination as Deshir’s clan chieftain was installed in drugged stupor within the Alliance campaign tent. ‘Would you have heeded my pleas by the Aiyenne if you knew you’d be trapped for a public maiming?’

  For answer, a raven’s spread wings rustled out of deep darkness. The tips of her primaries flicked Arithon’s cheek as she passed to a breeze of sliced air. The sealed deeps of Kewar roiled like smoke in her wake as her passage tore open the gateway to Ath’s greater mystery.

  Arithon staggered, whirled into the exalted perception of mage-sight.

  Expanded sensation unleashed his awareness. More than just light, he experienced heightened sensitivity to sound. The vast chord that arose from the heart of the mysteries came alive to his bardic discipline. He saw form rewoven as ribbons of light, orchestrated by waves of grand harmony. Stone yielded its secretive dance of wild energies. Arithon felt reborn into wonder, the reforged access to his lost mastery a gift that restored balanced strength.

  Drawn past the veil by the guidance of the raven soaring ahead on stretched wings, the Master of Shadow understood his fresh insight could be nothing else but shared dream, derived from Jieret’s past journey. This uplifting spiral of wild talent arose from the spontaneous unfolding of the caithdein’s innate gift of Sight.