Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  Where the tallix crystal passed, a line of light shimmered upon the air. Haldeth blinked, dazzled by glare. When he opened his eyes next, the seam had parted, and he gazed upon a sight that wrenched all his senses to behold.

  XI. Visions of Alhaerie

  To look through the gate Orame had opened upon the air was to experience the living face of chaos. The alter-reality of Alhaerie was color and movement with no pattern, a churning swirl of energies that the eyes could not reconcile without relinquishing all grip on reason. Haldeth gazed upon a film of pearlescence that had no analogue to anything understandable in Aerith. The universe that existed beyond the gate possessed neither up or down, nor any other measurable dimension; time itself was skewed there, stirred and non-linear as spilled fluid. Haldeth felt crawling discomfort. He looked away swiftly, but the hair continued to prickle at his neck, and his stomach clenched with nausea.

  "You travel through that stuff?" he asked tightly.

  Orame returned an abstracted reply as he traced a pentagram before the gate. "With extreme caution, yes."

  "Neth!" More than ever, Haldeth wished himself back at Whitestorm. His better sense told him he should flee at once, even surrender Korendir to his fate; that way he might survive to know peaceful old age.

  Except that Orame caught his wrist in a grip like prisoner's shackles, then propelled him forcefully forward.

  The first step carried Haldeth across the bounds of the pentagram. Electricity caused every hair on his body to rise. Spellcraft and safe-wards pressed his being on all sides; the magic constricted him physically to the point where the scream that arose from his lungs could find no escape through his throat. Half choking on unuttered sound, the smith felt himself dragged onward. His unwilling feet carried him across the spell's far boundary and on through the wizard's gate beyond.

  The strangeness that was Alhaerie flowed over Haldeth and ripped away everything familiar.

  His senses tumbled into chaos. Sound, smell, sight, and orientation disappeared. His boots trod upon nothing, and yet he did not fall. Neither did his steps convey any measurable sense of movement. The nerves in his feet transmitted no feel of solidity beneath his weight; his eyes saw only mad swirls of color. In desperation, Haldeth looked at his body, but not even the fabric of his cloak and tunic remained in understandable form. In place of clothing, he wore a churning mass of visions, as if events had been stewed in a pot, and all the cloth's creation was simultaneously made visible: from the seeds of the plants that produced the fibres, to the sweat of the dyer's labors, to the click of the weaver's loom, to the rot of moths and mildew that awaited in the future to come.

  Haldeth felt sick. He wanted, no needed, to bend double and spew the contents of his stomach. Orame's hold prevented him. Through disorientation that wrung him dizzy, he opened his mouth to protest.

  A hard hand sealed his lips, and at the same time a warning not spoken in words rang through Haldeth's inner mind: You must not speak in this place.

  Orame's precaution served to focus scattered thoughts. Only then, through meaningless waves of sound that buffeted his ears like an assault, did the smith come to notice that the wizard chanted spells in a sing-song held down to a whisper; the prohibition against talk proved no arbitrary restriction. Alhaerie's reality transformed even sound to a thing which defied credibility. Each phrase that left the wizard's lips became manifest; silvery, razor-thin ribbons that were words cleft the roiling atmosphere and left no doubt of their solidity.

  Haldeth's heart banged in his chest.

  Orame's spell chant alone affirmed continuity. The stuff of his wards unreeled with precise control; in time, through his pervasive unease, Haldeth observed that the shimmering strands did not disperse into chaos as random sounds might have done. Instead, like braiding, the recitation interwove to form a cord of netted energies. This the wizard bent into a pentagram. He released Haldeth long enough to cast the figure around himself and the mortal he escorted. Immediately, although nothing visible resulted, the smith felt as if firm ground supported his feet. His vertigo subsided, and with it, the cramps that crippled his gut.

  He opened his mouth to give thanks, then recalled his peril and snapped his teeth shut without speaking.

  Backed by the indefinable chaos that was Alhaerie, Orame of the White Circle smiled. "You may talk if you wish. We are behind wards now, and protected."

  "But I don't see anything." Haldeth gestured, baffled.

  Orame tapped the shining band of the pentagram with his finger; at his touch the structure rang like the struck peal of a bell. "Senses are deceptive in this place," he added, patronizingly complacent. "Trust only what you feel."

  "Sick," Haldeth said sourly, although in truth that discomfort had faded. His boots might seem like they trod upon bedrock, but he preferred ground that he could see tree roots, pebbles, and dew upon.

  "Alhaerie does affect the mind," Orame agreed. "Its energies can cause insanity in a man too long exposed without shielding spells." He tapped the ward again and roused a repeat of the same clear tone. "D flat," he concluded after a bird-bright glance at Haldeth. "The pitch seems steady enough. Shall we go on?"

  "I'm not a singer," Haldeth said obstinately. "I wouldn't know D flat from the thump of an acorn falling."

  Orame's brows lifted into an acerbic peak. He stepped onward; the pentagram moved with his motion, and rather than get sliced through the ankles by the following boundary of the spell, Haldeth stumbled forward.

  Oblivious, the wizard continued his discussion. "Acorns don't fall in Alhaerie, unless a mortal not under the protection of wards chances to think that they do. Then there would be trees and acorns aplenty, until the stability of the man's being was entirely unravelled to provide them."

  This esoteric drivel made no impression on Haldeth, who was trying to reconcile the solid ring of his heels with nothing beyond the eerily glowing pentagram which continued to travel in stride. The smith was scared out of his skull, and without credulity to spare for riddles. As if those affronts to rationality were not enough, D flats meant even less to a man born tone deaf to a sixth generation ironsmith.

  "Well," Orame concluded, as if he could guess the nuance of mortal contemplation as he walked. "Even without D flat, you would know if my spellcraft was unstable. When I struck the ward, the pitch would have risen to a dissonance that made you wince. Musician or not, most men can distinguish between the yowl of a cat in heat and a tuning fork."

  Haldeth gave no reply. He had no interest in figuring how a wizard might offer insult, and still less in understanding the alien splendors of Alhaerie.

  Toward that end, Haldeth finally clamped his eyes shut. He walked on trust alone. The occasional brushing touch of Orame's sleeve became his only assurance that he remained in the wizard's protection. How long the crossing lasted was impossible to determine. Departure from the tower might have been minutes, hours, even days in the past; or unlikely as the concept seemed, that moment when the tallix scored the gate through the void could have taken place in the future.

  Orame might have said for certain, if the mind of any wizard on Aerith could reliably know such things; Haldeth could not escape his morbid doubts. His nature was not like Korendir's, to be drawn to fascination with the unknown. Reconciled at last to a permanent self-affirmation, Haldeth wished for nothing beyond surety that he would forever after this keep his place within the world he understood.

  And yet for all his longing, the transition back to Aerith happened by surprise. A sound intruded like a rip upon the air. Haldeth did not react in time to unseal his closed eyes. His next step carried him from the glassy smooth surface of spells onto the rocky and unforgiving slope of a mountainside.

  He stubbed his toes on jutting shale, then tripped into the thorns of a gorse bush. Too late to save himself, he flung out his arms in time to get slapped by a nettlesome sting of branches. His oath of annoyance tangled with Orame's last incantation, to the detriment of both. The wizard's spell shaped sluggi
shly. Fell gusts tore through the closing slit of the gate to Alhaerie; the wizard's robes flapped like whipcracks around his ankles, and Haldeth overbalanced backward.

  Disgruntled by Orame's exasperated scrutiny, this time the smith was wise enough to stifle complaint. The ground was unpleasantly damp; threat of more rain lurked in the clouds that bunched like combed cotton over the peaks. The gate had delivered wizard and smith to a windswept crag. The weather here was milder than that which froze the north shores at this season; since the caves of the Ellgol were situated well south of Whitestorm's latitude, Haldeth presumed the enchanter had been correct in his navigation across the void. The wilderness where they emerged must be located in the Doriad mountains.

  Thorn-studded branches tore the smith's shirt and ripped at skin as he pulled clear, yet scratches seemed of small consequence beside the fact that Orame had drawn his pentagram after him into Aerith. The thing drifted in the place where the gateway had closed, a silver-bounded shape with no discernible thickness and a center brimming and boiling with the kaleidoscopic chaos that was the essence of this world's opposite.

  "Great Neth, get rid of that thing," Haldeth burst out. The dance of non-colors hurt just to look at, made his eyes water and his stomach spasm. "Please," he added, as Orame returned a glare of naked irritation.

  The enchanter made no move to banish his figure with its contained seethe of Alhaerie. "Mortals," he muttered in disgust. "Why do you all most obstinately fail to appreciate the fine things in life?"

  Orame glanced keenly up, then down the mountainside. He stroked his chin as if his companion had ceased to exist. "Ash," he said thoughtfully after a time. "And rowan wood inlay." Then he frowned at his drifting pentagram and spoke a word.

  The air near his feet seemed to explode. Light flashed, and a wash of shed heat made Haldeth blink. His vision cleared to reveal the presence of a finely polished table, carved and inset with rowan wood into patterns of exceptional beauty. Astonishment made the smith shout.

  "Quiet." Orame scowled. "I'm busy with decisions." He tapped his foot briskly on rain-damp shale, as if he had furnished kingly trappings to the crags of the Doriads every day of his life. Haldeth looked on with a mix of amazement and worry, for the sting of gorse prickles in unmentionable places had affirmed that despite his quaking nerves, he was safe, and in Aerith; somewhere nearby, Korendir's life was in consummate danger.

  Orame paced sharply left and then right: "Ham, one rye loaf, cherries and cream, and fresh goat's cheese." He stopped, slapped his forehead with his palm and added, "Ale, five years old, from the best Torresdyr brewery."

  The list was preposterously inopportune, but Haldeth noted the last item with pity. In his traverse of Alhaerie the wizard had assuredly lost his wits. The request for five-year ale was the sheerest impossibility, since every brewer in Torresdyr had suffered under blight for the three quarters of a century prior to Korendir's victory over Anthei.

  Apparently this fact escaped both Orame and his spell because the named victuals appeared, including a chilled crock that foamed unmistakably with ale. The labels listing vintage, brewer, and kingdom looked inarguably genuine.

  Haldeth looked for a rock to sit down, remembered his thorns, and stayed standing.

  "Napkins," continued Orame. Then, as if in afterthought, he tipped his head to one side and described a final request. "Chairs with red velvet cushions and silver braid, five in number, and let's have legs that match the terrain, for I don't fancy getting overset onto wet ground."

  The furnishings appeared in brisk order; at last drained of power by their creation, the pentagram drifted lifeless as smoke upon the air. Orame waved away the fumes. He perched on the nearer chair, and by some unseen artifice of magic the legs conformed to compensate for rocks, and the extreme pitch of the slope.

  Haldeth stared with his mouth open.

  "Sit down!" The wizard waved toward an empty cushion. "Eat." He glanced at the surrounding bleakness of the hills and shrugged. "Or don't eat, but you won't have a better chance, I'm thinking. It's past the season for berries."

  Haldeth's temper flared. "You choose a poor time for foolishness. What about Korendir? While we dally over ham and cherries, there are wereleopards hunting him."

  Orame grasped the rye loaf in long fingers and broke it into halves. "Forgot the butter," he noted peevishly, then focused eyes like chipped obsidian on Haldeth. His manner seemed outwardly unchanged, but through some indefinable subtlety, his presence acquired an air of command. "Sit down. At this moment your companion is in less danger than you are. If you don't trust my judgment on the matter, you'll pay for that folly with your life."

  Inscrutable as a crow, Orame turned to his repast and started slicing cheese and ham; except there was a watching stillness about his pose. His eyes did not track the motions of his hands, but darted often to assess the surrounding hillside. Not quite brazen enough to disregard the warnings of a White Circle enchanter, even one who apparently acted upon fancy, Haldeth pulled up a chair.

  He had no wish to ask after the magic which kept his seat stable on a footing of soggy lichen and shale; neither did he incline toward filling his belly with bread and cream concocted of wizardry. "Tell me, you're expecting guests," he said with a sour glance at the empty places which surrounded the table.

  Orame lifted his knife, speared a morsel of ham, and chewed carefully. "I am expecting company. But not the invited sort."

  The meat smelled delightful. Haldeth swallowed once, twice, and berated himself for a fool. The idea of eating struck him as absurd. Even if he could bring himself to trust in victuals summoned by spells, concern for Korendir took precedence. His frustration found expression through sarcasm. "By the spread, I'd guess you expected your mother-in-law, and maybe her aunts in the bargain.

  "I'm not married," said Orame succinctly. "Most White Circle enchanters aren't, and for good reason." He sipped his ale, and the tiniest spark of amusement flashed in his eyes. "Appearances can deceive."

  Haldeth studied the chairs more carefully. He had moved his own when he sat down, surely; and yet the spacing of the remaining three, along with Orame's, described a perfectly symmetrical pentagram. Insight dawned belatedly. "A ward figure? This?"

  Orame made no reply. Instead he dropped his eating knife and shoved with shattering speed to his feet. The silver landed with a clang on the ham platter, overlaid by the wizard's shout. At once his chairs fashioned of spells unravelled into snapping bars of light. Thrown down without ceremony onto stony soil, Haldeth had no chance to cry protest. The breath left his lungs with a painful whoosh, and for a moment his eyes saw darkness.

  Orame started chanting again, from an indeterminate point nearby. The air split with a ripping sound, and Haldeth blinked. He still seemed enveloped in shadow; but emerging from the deeps of the murk was a form that rippled and flowed to a shape of impossible contours. Dimensional laws could neither encompass the thing, nor define it; but decidedly it lived, and attempted to enter Aerith with Neth knew what destructive bent in mind.

  Haldeth knew fear. A clawed foot raked through the dark and crashed into the ham platter. The blow sent both meat and Orame's knife flying. The silver blade clipped a talon, which promptly burst into ill-smelling smoke. The monster attached to the nether end screeched. It rocked forward in pain and set weight upon the ash table; claws furrowed ruinously into baroque scrolls and rowan wood inlay.

  Orame shouted again, unmistakably triumphant.

  And the creature, with its bristles, hooks, and barbed, odiferous scales, turned a blinding and incandescent red. Haldeth covered his eyes, then wished he had extra hands to stop his ears as a yowl broke from the monster's throat, piercing enough to deafen the fish on the sea bottom.

  Then Orame framed a word in bitten consonants that miraculously restored silence.

  Haldeth dared a cautious look. A burnt smell lingered upon the air; the ham and knife lay tumbled on the ground, while various platters and an ale jug drifted incongruously a
t table height. Of the ash and rowan wood furnishing little remained but a charred and steaming tangle of sticks.

  "Neth's mercy," muttered Haldeth.

  Orame paused in the act of straightening disheveled robes. "Hardly that."

  Haldeth remained blank until he focused and fully realized that absolutely nothing supported the ale jug, the cherry bowl, or the cheeses and cream.

  The smith's stupefied exclamation prompted Orame to explain. "Every spell not derived from earth magic draws power from the alter-reality of Alhaerie. The separation of the void between opposites becomes weakened through such use, which is why wizards take exhaustive precautions. But a gate which allows passage from one reality to another does more: it actually mingles the separateness of Aerith and its counterpoint universe. Traces remain on both sides, if the breach is not promptly sealed. Sometimes creatures try to break through before the barrier has fully knitted. We are not in a wizard's tower where defenses are permanently laid down to compensate. Therefore I expected trouble, and prepared for it."

  Unremittingly practical, Orame plucked up a goblet, caught the floating ale jug, and poured out a healthy draught. This he handed to the smith.

  His earlier reservation forgotten, Haldeth drained the glass and licked the last drop from the rim; the label unquestionably had not lied, and the damp which soaked through his breeches and cloak no longer chilled with such viciousness. "Why the table and chairs?" He asked when he could be certain his voice would hold steady.

  Orame raised his brows» as if the reason was obvious. "Beings from Alhaerie don't like silver, ash, or rowan."

  "Well your style is certainly flamboyant." Haldeth hitched himself clear of a rock, caught a punitive prick from a thorn, and winced.