Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Drawn forward, unwitting, Arithon took one stumbling step, then wrenched himself short with a cry. His denial extracted a harrowing cost. Stopped, gasping, he slapped down the raw yearning of his musician’s sensitivity. Stormed by the fires of raging thirst, he strangled the passionate wave of desire evoked by the dream of Elaira’s sweet touch. He stifled all clamor, all human need. The effort required pierced his heart to sore grief, making him shiver like an addict deprived for a beauty that dazzled him witless.

  Yet the promise enticed like the bait of a trap, set too perfectly close to the bone. Like a windfall apple dropped ripe to the hand, the haven the portal presented would carry rot at the core. No enchantment could reclothe naked truth. Elaira was vowed into lifetime service, and Davien’s known works were not kindly.

  Eyes shut, his frame quivering, Arithon reminded himself of the proof. He had already run afoul of the Five Centuries Fountain. The Betrayer’s grant of longevity already exacted its toll of afflicted sorrow. A man must live on while his closest friends aged. Over time, the relentless shadow of loss must poison an isolate future.

  ‘Keep on,’ said Arithon in gritted rage to the unseen Sorcerer’s presence. ‘You’ll just scour out every weakness I have, until nothing remains to exploit.’

  Steadying the shadow back on its course required sharp use of his resources. Breathless, sorely shaken, he braced his core will, then summoned the courage to cast his inquiry deeper. His probe snagged, then burst through a veiling ward; and paradise dissolved, torn apart like burst silk. The colors that beckoned bled off, mere illusion. Elaira’s form melted like evanescent wax, and the music dissolved into the plink of cold water, seeped from an underground spring.

  ‘Avert!’ Arithon snapped. A sick shudder racked him. Pricked by a threat like blown smoke at his back, he intoned the word for the Paravian rune of ending and freed his spun shadow to disperse.

  Bruised by the riptides of aftermath, he considered setting an anchor in stone. If he secured his stance, he might guard against being duped into thoughtless folly. At second thought, the hint of a smile turned his lips.

  ‘Ah, no.’ A whisper of laughter beneath his caught breath, Arithon raked the stuck hair from his temples. ‘Much too easy.’

  The mind that had fashioned the core spells of the maze was unlikely to try repeat tactics.

  Arithon turned a half step, widdershins, then dispatched his next probe through the portal lying adjacent.

  This one arrowed straight as a spear’s cast under the roots of the Mathorn Mountains. Unencumbered, it emerged on the northern slopes. Arithon received an untrammeled view of bright snowfields, scoured under clean wind where the freewheeling stars turned over the Plain of Araithe.

  Startled wordless, he cried out. Braced as he was for entangling, difficult trials, the clear passage all but unmanned him. Ahead, if he chose, lay the grant of his freedom. He might take his release from Kewar Tunnel. Whole of mind and limb, he could reclaim the dropped threads of his life and resume his disrupted affairs. Instinct, or perhaps the assurance of mage-sight, let him know he would draw no pursuit on his back trail. Farther north lay the trackless forests of Deshir. A hardy few scouts still maintained a clan presence. Hardened raiders, sworn to the realm, they guarded the land through their handful of outposts, tucked deep in the glens of Tal Quorin. Restored to his former ability to scry, Arithon could find their encampments. Spring already loosened the ice. Once the thaws broke, he could seek passage by boat and make his safe crossing to Atainia.

  Sethvir would grant him his right to claim sanctuary. Arithon could rest at Althain Tower and eventually send summons to rejoin his crew aboard Khetienn.

  Yet he stilled the leaping thrust of raw longing, fought longer to quell common sense. Gut instinct warned him of Davien’s caprice. The offer posed by the second portal might be cruelly rescinded if he paused for a second thought.

  Arithon tightened his jaw, resolute. He dispelled his sent shadow, braced against disappointment. He would not return to the world on the pretext his ordeal in the maze never happened. Crown prince, or pawn, he would make that change serve him. Neither Sorcerer, nor Mistwraith, nor meddling Koriathain would gainsay his choice to forge his own destiny henceforward.

  Cleared of past guilt, released from tortured conscience, he refused to embrace the old life of attrition, set running before Desh-thiere’s curse.

  Arithon firmed his nerve. Straight as hammered iron, he stepped widdershins again, then launched his next streamer to plumb the secret beyond the third portal.

  His shadow knifed into the impenetrable dark, struck a wall like black glass, and wavered. Resetting its deflected course rocked him dizzy. Arithon prevailed by main force, only to watch as his construct became swallowed. Guard spell and shadow, his sending was erased by a featureless well of oblivion.

  Only his charged field of awareness remained. Arithon whispered a cantrip in beleaguered effort to shore up its failing linkage. Cold silence enveloped him. His probe became savaged by an unutterable blankness that refounded the concept of emptiness. Past the door lay a gap more desolate than the void, a stark well of nothing, untenably barren, with no living matrix of consciousness. The prison he sounded held no content but absence, a sterility stripped of even the unbirthed potential that demarked the far deeps past the veil.

  This emptiness consumed. Within moments, the tracking spell’s delicate cohesion tore asunder. No pattern could withstand such a well of blank entropy. Arithon’s set runes of binding dissolved, leaving behind the echo of unending despair.

  The insight arose with unbidden clarity, that the horror just experienced had not been aligned for humanity.

  Arithon bristled, wrung to antipathy as he realized that the prompt which deflected his thought might arise from an outside intrusion. Yet his reflexive effort to unmask the origin passed through air without trace of resistance. He encountered no presence to grapple. The fleeting touch he had sensed scattered out, dispersed like water into dry moss.

  ‘Why not show yourself plainly?’ he provoked, spiked to taunting derision. ‘Only a fool would presume you aren’t watching. Surely a power of such stunning audacity could have designed more inventive torments than a portal to smother out hope.’

  Arithon reexamined his contempt, suddenly chilled by a specious revelation that destroyed every precept of mercy. Who was Davien, to toy with live beings, as though they were no more than game pieces? For the lurking bane in the last open corridor surely described a trial to test a Paravian.

  Once broached, the idea fit the concept too well. The old races did not die unless mishap befell them. Yet Desh-thiere’s invasion had shown how their spirits could fade out of worldly existence. Althain’s archive preserved the tragic accounts, compiled from Second Age history. Paravians could succumb to relentless sorrow. Against prolonged grief and unending loss, the clear light of their vision must languish. Sethvir had explained that their farsighted wisdom could not sustain the least veneer of delusion. They were Ath’s gift, born to shine with the unity that brightened the realms past the veil. Their hearts could not sing to the promise of false hope, which let mankind endure in the face of certain mortality.

  Arithon stilled his fast-rising revulsion. Carefully, coldly, he contained his visceral revolt, then set the inflaming lash of emotion into perspective against reasoned experience. The blurred facts that survived as long-winded ballads all converged with unsettling consistency. According to myth, Davien had once thrived on the habit of demolishing his arguments through provocation.

  ‘“Oh, bold wicked beast!”’ Arithon quoted, snatched breathless and almost enjoying himself. ‘“Chase the sly fox, the hunt will be merry. Course the wolf, greet cold death or be wary!”’ For icy hindsight exposed the third portal’s darkness as no less than a diabolically elaborate feint to splinter his balance through anger.

  ‘Betrayer!’ Arithon shouted, not needing the prickle of lifted hair to warn that he courted a disaster. In Kewar, a huntsman would
lose more than hounds if he let his brash instinct mislead him. ‘Why not come out? I don’t plan to be sidetracked.’

  A stir of amusement swirled through the chamber, there and gone in the flash of an instant. Arithon could not grasp its thread, though he tried. The current he chased might be no more than the echo of his own self-mockery. As though in reproach, the portal that offered the northlands, and liberty, remained open as invitation.

  Yet Arithon confronted the final barred doorway, spurred by his mulish resolve. The veiled insult galled him, that any Sorcerer’s shade should presume he was irresolute, or that his choices were fickle and changeable. The Prince of Rathain cast off his last shadow, a thrown gauntlet that spurned every blandishment to turn back.

  The construct slammed against arcane barriers and returned, inscribed by the record of the blood oath sealed under Fellowship auspices at Athir. Nor was the rejection of trespass light handed. Dizzied by the punitive burn of a self-inflicted backlash, Arithon rubbed stinging palms, and asked, ‘Why?’

  No voice gave him answer. Only a feather touch of awareness instilled thought with respectful clarity: his Grace of Rathain had sealed that last doorway by choice. The closed portal contained the straightest path of them all: the promise of crossing into the light that graced the realms of Athlieria. No whim of Davien’s, but a crown prince’s pledge to survive ruled the force that denied him passage.

  Arithon stood, unexpectedly swayed by a wave of fierce desolation. Had he not sworn, that threshold would lie open, offering the bloodless departure from life through the gateway to Ath’s greater mystery.

  ‘No.’ Preference resurged, the valued part of himself that anchored his love for Elaira. Arithon would not abandon her; could not, without destroying the balance that buttressed his inner identity. After the grace of a centaur guardian’s absolution, he would not spurn his burden of steadfast dead, fallen to buy his survival.

  ‘An offense!’ Arithon snapped, needled to rage as he rejected the portal’s profligate temptation. He would not deign to challenge its well-guarded lock. Whether or not he could break through the wards, no promise of paradise could erase the charge of the heirless bloodline he carried.

  Arithon pressed shaking hands to his face, mortified that such a backhanded trick had even raised a reaction. Though the portal that led to the Plain of Araithe presented the sensible option, he turned one last step. The fifth wall of the chamber remained, its surface innocuously blank. The wax-fed flames in the sconces burned unnaturally still, casting his form in unwavering shadows.

  One weighted second flowed into the next. Arithon maintained fixed concentration, then swiftly averted his gaze. No change. Opaque stone remained solid as striated glass, glistening with flecks of mica.

  Too solid, perhaps; a spasm of gooseflesh roughened Arithon’s skin. ‘Who spits against heaven, it falls in his face.’

  Davien was listening. Touched by the feeling that the uneasy silence seemed to be holding its breath, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn stepped forward. The wall he confronted mirrored his advance, imposingly dense and massive. Inside arm’s reach, he did not raise his hand. He refrained from exploring touch. Instead, he pronounced a reviling satire against the name of Kewar’s creator.

  Nothing happened. No wrathful presence descended to retaliate. Arithon whistled the opening notes of a jig. His collar rustled to the whisper of stirred hair as he cocked his head to the side. No sound, beyond the rasp of his breath. Yet in listening, he received his oblique confirmation: the wall deflected no echoes.

  ‘First fall, to the wolf.’ Arithon’s hint of a smile turned feral. ‘The lock on that portal was an affront I’ve chosen to redress in person.’ The Master of Shadow strode up to the wall and, with no hesitation, stepped through.

  The illusion admitted him without sensation. Nothing solid stood in his path. A six-sided chamber waited beyond. Each wall was lit by a wax-candle sconce, and inset with a jeweled doorway. The frenetic shine of gold-wire inlay and the brilliance of faceted gems burst against refined mage-sight, raising a scintillant dazzle of rainbows. Arithon looked aside. Since the blare of rank opulence muddled his mind, he unfurled a stifling shadow on impulse and extinguished one burning wick.

  All of the candles in the chamber flicked out.

  The doors underneath proved a construct as well, their form ripped away to lay bare seamless slabs of rough-hewn mountain granite. Closed in drowning darkness, Arithon locked sweating hands. He tried and failed to curb his unsettled nerves and quell his uncontrolled shaking. The unorthodox spellcraft that had granted his impulsive entry had already faded behind him. He had exposed the true Maze of Davien, and beyond doubt, his brash challenge was accepted. Now, he must grope his way forward. If the limits of knowledge and training fell short, no outside resource could save him.

  Arithon stamped down the first jangle of panic. Since his concrete senses could not be trusted, he shut his eyes, stilling the nagging impulse to speculate over what might have befallen had he succumbed to the lure of those queer, jeweled doorways. The disturbing possibility could not be dismissed, that he might become endlessly diverted, exhaustively sounding through spells of illusion until his body gave way in collapse.

  Dwelling on worry would earn the same end. Arithon released his strung tension, deliberately slowed the ragged edge from his breathing. One by one, he channeled his resources inward. As he had learned as a child at Rauven, he achieved centered balance, then diffused his attention through the poised well of his mind. Inner stillness immersed him. Awareness dissolved, erasing the boundaries of separation until his subtle senses embraced the layered stone of the mountain. He reached from that still point, allowing what was to infuse his listening silence. Slowly, he sounded the chamber, entrained into a communion of etheric rapport drawn from the natural elements.

  The signature configurations of air and earth revealed the six walls to be solid. The ceiling showed him a smooth, groined vault, unbroken by shaft or skylight.

  Arithon deferred apprehension through patience. Persistent, he measured the expanse of the floor, and there, the room yielded its secret. The exit lay scarcely three paces ahead, a shaft that plunged steeply downward.

  Tacitly careful, Arithon reopened his eyes. He had solved the next riddle. Now unveiled to mage-sight, a staircase descended from an oblong vault in the floor. Testing each cautious step, he worked his way downward, though the prospect of delving into the mountain ran hard against better instinct. He could not determine how far he had come since he had left daylight behind him. Fellowship spellcraft could bend time at will, or extend the body’s vitality. If he felt the slight pinch of hunger and thirst, he had no means to tell whether the deprivation had extended for days. Anxiety hounded him. He might wander too long and finally perish, ground down by Kewar’s inexhaustible invention.

  The stairwell ended abruptly. No lighted sconce appeared to relieve the pall of featureless darkness. Arithon worked through mage-sight and painstakingly traced the walls of another sealed chamber. This room had seven sides, and dishearteningly yielded no sign of a hidden exit. The stairway behind had predictably vanished, and the air wore a textured, velvety thickness, its presence burdened with spells.

  Arithon countered bewildering complexity by choosing the simplest option. He groped, found the shoulder strap hanging the wallet that contained his tinder and flint. As he drew his small knife for striking a spark, the pressure surrounding him tightened. Any slight move apparently shifted the balance of unseen forces. Since delay seemed just as likely to spur a reaction, Arithon twisted a spill from a rag, then struck a tremulous flame.

  His brave pool of light sheared into the darkness, birthing a rustle of movement. Arithon started. A yearning circle of wax-pale hands reached for him out of the shadows. Unveiled by the wildly flickering brand, he glimpsed a circle of anguished faces steadily closing around him. He could not step back. Old men, grandmothers, women and boys, more people crowded behind him.

  That moment, his glim
mer of flame light snuffed out. The blanketing dark that returned was not empty: the gathering of specters his presence had wakened remained plainly visible to mage-sight. Arithon stamped down the fool’s impulse to recoil. He had nowhere to run. Whether or not the fell creatures had form, their presence ringed him like jackals. They suffered all manner of hideous affliction: limbs with weeping sores, twisted bones, or the ghastly deformities caused by old scars that had atrophied to shrunken tendons. Other folk were emaciated and starving. Man, woman and toddling babe, they jostled against him, pleading relief from their suffering.

  Arithon reeled, choking down his distress as the crowd continued to press him. He smelled the musty, diseased pall of flesh. Mournful wailing tugged at his heart. He could move nowhere, for the pressing crush of such need, or shake off the plucking grasp at his clothing.

  Worst of all, the creatures raised a fell chorus of voices that called him directly by name.

  Accosted no matter which way he turned, Arithon saw no one he recognized. Some people were rich, others raggedly poor. Their dress came from all walks of life. No singular clues identified which kingdom or world held their origins. They might have been victims of Kewar itself, trapped in eternal confinement. Or they might have derived from the unlived future, sickly harbingers of some misfortune to come, arrived to demand retribution in advance for unmade choices that would come to ruin them.

  Arithon had no succor to offer, no balm of healing or hope. He could not answer their beseeching questions, or promise to seek their release. Disaster in Kewar might wear many guises. If these people were living at all, their presence in this place would be nothing else but another form of entrapment.

  Yet his inborn compassion would not be ruled by the dictates of hard-core logic. Tears poured down the blanched planes of Arithon’s face for the harsh fact he dared not show pity. The least intervention to try and ease pain might invoke the consent for a tie of commitment. Yield out of kindness to just one lost child, and the Teir’s’Ffalenn knew he might bind his fate to the plight of these hapless victims. He could ill afford the mistake of misjudgment. Act without caution, and his next step could seal his permanent downfall.