TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  The gift of his prescience granted him more: the soft, all-but-inaudible whisper of song called forth from the throat of a man trained as Masterbard.

  That subliminal thread of sound swelled and grew, fashioned into a low, sustained note, richly textured with layers of harmonics. Its tonal complexities ranged beyond hearing, a living current that keyed into the true chord which accessed the world's primal mysteries. If the townsmen who paraded as sentries heard nothing, the land underneath their staid tread was not either deaf or oblivious. Answering vibrations awoke out of stone. First the pebbles and round boulders in the Severnir's bed, then the rocky crown of the hills joined with the bard's keening refrain. These in turn woke the bedrock foundations of the hills near Ithamon, until the staid granite underlying the cold earth rang to the same pitch, keyed downward to subsonic octaves.

  Even removed in the solitude of dreams, Jieret sensed the hair at his nape prickle erect with foreboding. Whatever fell crafting the Masterbard spun, the effect would not leave any men inside earshot untouched by the weave of its summoning. Soon enough, the first sentry crumpled at the knees. Heedless of duty, he curled in the snow and yawned, his half-lidded eyes grown compulsively heavy until he slipped into fast sleep. One by one his companions succumbed also. Within minutes, the whole company sprawled in deep slumber, entrapped in the subtlety of the Masterbard's skill that wound a cocoon of dark sound. The slow rise and fall of their breathing became the sole sign of life left within them.

  Unafflicted amid their motionless forms, Arithon rolled and wormed, belly down, toward the nearest of the fallen sentries. He paused often, nursing the pain in his head. The tender care as he extended his body became a heartbreaking testament to the intensity of his bruises. Still whispering fragmented song through locked teeth, he purloined the man's dagger, and in painstaking steps, freed his wrists. He sat up, swayed through a braced moment of dizziness, then sawed the cord binding his ankles. Still sick and unsteady as he rose to his feet, he disarmed his enemies with careful and chilling efficiency.

  From the patrol's acting captain, he recovered his sword, Alithiel, his main gauche, and his confiscated hunting bow. Once only, he bent, racked through with cramps. His battered head pained him. His trained instincts as healer would warn him he should not be upright or walking. Nor could he afford to cosset his injuries, with who knew how many Alliance reinforcements inbound to take charge of a dangerous prisoner. Arithon wrapped snow into a rag as a compress. The deliberate pace of his movements bespoke a will that could dismantle mountains. Jieret's heart ached for the dream that would not allow him to offer his liege any word of encouraging comfort.

  He could but watch as Arithon s'Ffalenn made his way to the picketed horses. He saddled one, then loaded the rest until his captors stood stripped of provisions. Dawnlight flooded the east primrose yellow by the hour he rode out, driving the small herd before him.

  The chord raised to resonance through his Masterbard's art stayed sustained by the stone, as though the untamed fiber of the land spoke for the blood prince granted rule by the Fellowship's charter. Asleep in the snow, stripped of swords and provender, Jaelot's proud company slept oblivious, perhaps to awaken and discover their plight, or else to lie comatose until their hearts slowed, and the winter chill froze them to marble. Earl Jieret felt no shred of pity. Whether they died, or awoke to face a slower end by starvation, he prayed that Dharkaron let none of them stir before his liege was away and safely tucked into hiding.

  Hunched in the saddle, grasping mane to keep balance against waves of sucking vertigo, the Master of Shadow turned northward. He did not look back. Ithamon was suspect, entrenched with camped enemies. Weak with shock as he was, he dared not reconnoiter and risk any chance of flushing more troops out to hound him.

  'I'm sorry, Caithdein, my brother,' he pleaded, either raving, or else intuitively aware that in dream the absent earl who was his oathbound liegeman might hear his ragged apology. 'Tell Luhaine I can't keep our rendezvous.'

  Whether Rathain's prince sensed the presence that rode with t him, Jieret s'Valerient lost his chance to attempt a reply. The fickle thread of his prescient contact snapped under a surge of blank darkness. Through the void came the hissed sound of feathers in flight, then an ink-upon-blackness impression of form that resolved to reveal a jet raven.

  The bird lit before him in a burst of white light, the whetted edge of its primaries obsidian knives that carved a haze of diffracted rainbows. The crisp rush of swept air as it folded its wings framed a Word far beyond spoken language. Jieret sensed the intelligence in its fathomless eye. Nor was the fine point of protocol left in doubt, that he must be the one to speak first.

  'Do you bring me an augury?' he demanded, afraid, all too aware he lacked a schooled mage's discernment to tell if the presence before him was dangerous.

  The raven shuffled its feathers as though to shake off the buffeting winds that blew far outside mortal awareness. Its clawed feet spanned a parchment scribed with a map of Daon Ramon. There, Jieret realized, its message could unveil the most critical course of the future; or the array might be the lure of a life-sucking demon, offered to tempt him to folly.

  'Ath preserve, ten enemies with swords would be easier,' he snapped to himself in distaste. Yet a caithdein was born to spend life in royal service. Haunted by Arithon's plight at Ithamon, Jieret shook off quaking nerves and dared the risk of the next step.

  'I accept you as harbinger, cruel though the news be,' he invited in ritual courtesy.

  The raven that was Prophecy tipped its head to the map, then tapped its bill three times to the parchment. Vision bloomed at its touch, a daytime view of Ithamon's east-facing battlement. Beneath broken walls laced with canes of wild briar, Jieret beheld a muster of men. Their filthy, snagged surcoats bore the badge of Jaelot's snake and gold lion. Two officers argued inside their tight circle. Hot words and snapped gestures harangued against the mad prospect of tracking a captive who had escaped their patrol of outriders during the night.

  Their woes were well justified. The criminal sorcerer had purloined critical supplies, and eight of their better horses. The haunts in the old ruin demoralized nerves, and the barrens offered inadequate shelter for those victims just found, and aroused out of spellbound sleep with their hands and feet crippled with frostbite. The bitter conditions that lamed them were not going to relent anytime before spring. In the deeps of midwinter, westbound storms would keep coming. Under such onslaught, even the wild deer sometimes sickened and froze on the downlands.

  'What are you men, a bunch of fat farmers?' The captain at arms strode onto the scene and quashed the resolve to retreat. 'Just squat by the damned fire at the killing frost and count the acorns that fall on the roof? There's a sorcerer at large gaining ground while you whimper! I want every hale man in the saddle, and riding. The wounded and those without mounts are no use. They can limp in disgrace back to Jaelot!'

  The small troop formed ranks, with the gruff, zealot captain still busy reviling the laggards. Lent the uncanny, keen eye of the raven, Jieret noticed an unnatural shimmer about the man's burly form. His imposing, mailed figure seemed spun about with filaments of violet light. Intuition unveiled the terrifying truth: that Prince Arithon's pursuit had been driven all along by a Koriani geas of obsession. The spirit forms that guarded the old Baiyen road, and the ghost cry of Ithamon did not daunt them. Even on short supplies, they would hound the Shadow Master's flight northward. Entrapped by the pull of strong spell seals, they were pressured to ride beyond the limit of sanity.

  Jieret was granted no time to measure their plight in considered assessment. Once more he beheld the spread parchment map, with the raven's lordly, deliberate tread marking the path of Arithon's beleaguered flight northward. His Grace's evasion followed the dry gulch of the Severnir, the swale of the floodplain offering the best footing for a mounted man to make fast passage. At the broad, horseshoe loop, where the river bent east, the bird paused, its clawed feet planted between strid
es. It regarded Earl Jieret with mournful, sharp focus.

  Then it croaked the Paravian word for the rune of beginning, and blinked . . .

  * * *

  A white moon rode the sky, three nights past full. Winter stars framed the hour, precisely.

  A gaunt man dipped a glittering bronze pendulum in fresh blood and uttered unclean incantations through the drug-scented smoke of a brazier. One hot, scarlet droplet spattered the map, and ignited a scene of pandemonium.

  'Rise!' screamed a priest in a sunwheel robe, standing guard at the site where the bloodstain had marred the inscribed terrain of Daon Ramon. His fanatic's glazed eyes beheld auguries in fire, and his shouts awoke horn calls that shattered the night calm.

  'Rise and ride!' he exhorted. The banner he flourished in frenzied excitement showed the tower and mountain blazon of Darkling. 'In the name of the Divine Prince, the faithful are called to raise swords for the cause of the Light!'

  Rousted by his cries, men stumbled from sleep. They cursed, and groped through cold darkness for weapons and harness, and untied nervous horses from the picket lines. Trained hands yoked the six-in-hand teams to the supply sledges while the visionary priest bellowed his urgent tidings.

  'Our allies from Jaelot drive the Spinner of Darkness in flight across Daon Ramon Barrens! For the mercy of the world, we are charged to take arms. Blessed is the steel that cuts down the enemy without quarter, and blessed the man who sends his black spirit to Dharkaron!'

  On edge and watchful, Darkling's task force of three hundred advanced, westbound and primed for engagement. Through the eye of the raven, they appeared nondescript, a tinker's scrap of pins and steel filings, cast across moonlit dales. The defiles swallowed the shrill gleam of their steel. Gusting wind masked the snorts of their horses. Ahead, alone under the vast bowl of night sky, the Master of Shadow turned before them. He lashed his band of stolen geldings to flight, a tactic of graceless necessity.

  Darkling's three hundred had caught him, exposed. They spurred their fresh mounts and gave chase. Vision showed their charge into the dry gulch of the Severnir. Relentlessly trapped, Arithon responded. The white moon showed his face, wrenched to wild-eyed grief, as he engaged his born gift and wrought shadow.

  The bursting wave of the enemy advance plunged headlong into a well of spun blackness. The dark showed them no mercy, nor the ancient, water-smoothed boulders scabbed over with rills of green ice. The horses floundered. Rank upon rank, they tripped, and snapped legs, catapulted head over heels while their riders sprawled, dashed and broken among them. The rear guard reined back from the treacherous ravine. Valiant officers regrouped them. A brave few pressed ahead and picked out a safe crossing, only to find the unnatural darkness sucked the life and warmth from their bodies.

  The terrain proved no ally, but winnowed them separate. First scattered, then cut down to groping, small groups, men blundered and circled and cursed the blanketing blindness until their wretched mounts shivered beneath them. The balking arrivals were driven on, whip and spur, until the iron bit rings froze fast lo the flesh of their muzzles, and tore them to headshaking agony. Frightened riders drew rein and halted. The prudent who paused to seek wood and strike fire met their doom before moonset. The stones in the riverbed sang them to sleep, and the shadowing chill stopped their hearts.

  The ones who wandered, distraught, survived, barely. When the first blush of dawn touched the white-shrouded waste of the barrens, the company that had marched from the city of Darkling numbered a scant fifty-six. They cursed the name of the Spinner of Darkness. Some wept, while hurried cairns were raised over the glass-stiff, few corpses they recovered. Others sharpened their steel for revenge, oblivious to the punishing toll their defeat must exact from the thorns of s'Ffalenn conscience. The sunwheel priest led the rites for the fallen, then accosted every man still fit enough to raise steel to press the minion of evil who had veered west to avoid them.

  'We have brothers in Light marching down from Etarra. They must be warned of the ruin we've faced, lest they close unaware of the danger. The Divine Prince himself sweeps eastward from Narms. His power of Light will dispel these fell shadows. For the weal of the land, we must not falter now! Let our losses this night renew our dedication. Honor their memory! Redeem their sacrifice! Let us harry the Master of Shadow without letup. Drive him like vermin into the net the Alliance will cast for his downfall.'

  * * *

  Vision faded back into the form of the raven, poised like a live cipher on the map. It opened the midnight fan of its wings, then sidled northwestward, each mincing step an unembellished recounting of Arithon's marathon flight. Although Earl Jieret received no encompassing visions, he sensed sharp impressions, of punishing cold nights spent without fires, and the flaying torments of east storms. He touched, like an echo, Prince Arithon's despair, as he laired like a fox in the thickets. He shared sapping nightmares of dead men and warped music that did not dispel under daylight, but only changed form into memories as damningly punishing. The raven's cry bespoke madness and pain, intensified by the season's cruel hardships and the passage of days that extended to weeks of relentless solitude.

  Nor did the map remain clear of enemies. Where the raven walked, Darkling's fragmented company pursued, vengeance bent. Earl Jieret sensed their advance on the face of the parchment, the swarming specks of miniature men mounted on ant-sized horses. He beheld the more massive incursion from Etarra, then the response to Darkling's sent courier that caused them to wheel as though choreographed. In time, a cordon closed in tight lines to box in Arithon's position.

  'They know where he is,' Earl Jieret surmised, stormed by gut-wrenching alarm.

  The raven regarded him through its sequin left eye. Plunged through the glistening pitch of its iris, Rathain's caithdein beheld the chilling confirmation of his hunch. The sunwheel priest sent as the Alliance diviner traced the Master of Shadow's each move with foul arts and a blood-drenched pendulum. His scrying would synchronize three city war bands, and see Arithon s'Ffalenn hazed like a trapped beast to slaughter. While Etarra and Darkling and Jaelot closed the noose from behind, Rathain's prince would be systematically hounded into the advance out of Narms, and into a final disastrous encounter with Lysaer s'Ilessid. The confrontation sparked to flame by the Mistwraith's curse would end in battle and agony on the frozen banks of the River Aiyenne.

  Overwhelmed by sinking despair, Earl Jieret understood that the s'Ffalenn gift of compassion was going to destroy any possible hope of reprieve. The past upheld proof. Once before, Arithon of Rathain had used the full range of his mage talents in defense of his threatened people. Though his act had staved off an annihilating loss, the toll of fallen had left him shackled in guilt. His access to talent had been blinded. On the plain of Daon Ramon, his mage-sight would stay blocked; but now, inexorable training had raised the art of his music to bridge the veil and rebuild a new framework to access the mysteries.

  That power could kill; had now led men to death. Entangled in the Mistwraith's geas of destruction, bound by blood oath to the Fellowship Sorcerers to seek survival by any expedient, Athera's titled Masterbard would face Lysaer and the Alliance with no other weapon to hand.

  Just as clearly as Jieret knew the maiming potential of steel, he foresaw that Arithon would be forced to raise music in the cause of self-defense. Even if he survived, the fierce brilliance of his bardic gift would become crippled, as stifled to silence as the born talent for mage-sight already tragically sacrificed.

  Such a blow to the heart would not be sustained. Arithon denied the expression of music posed a penalty too harsh to contemplate. Jieret ached for the quandary. Aggrieved that his war band would not be enough to stem the oncoming disaster, he cast his appeal to the raven. 'If you're sent here to guide, then how can I help?'

  The bird regarded him. Black as the void, a creature born of the uncanny fusion of feather and bone and great mystery, its gaze seemed to weigh the sincerity of his heart, if not the exact sum Daelion Fatemast
er placed on his living worth. Pierced through and nailed by that measuring survey, Jieret felt his courage tested as never before. Even amid the blood heat of combat, the stripped force of his will had not given way, or threatened, as now, to unravel in weakness and fail him. Only his unyielding love for his prince held him from looking away.

  'How can I help?' he entreated again. Surrendered long since to the perils of the dream, and to the cruel price that could be demanded to uphold his caithdein's service to Rathain, he matched the raven's dense scrutiny with challenge sprung like fire from the core of his being. 'I will not choose the life of my liege, or his sanity, ahead of my bound task to shield him. I have an heir and a sanctioned successor to carry my family name after me.'

  The bird bowed to him, a tribute that touched him like pain for its unexpected magnificence. Then it cawed shrill warning, and bent its dark head, and stabbed its bill through the map where the River Aiyenne turned back on itself in a south-bending, horseshoe crook.

  Earl Jieret took sharp note of the site, then wept as he grasped the significance. One chance; a precious, uncertain bid for salvation, if the men in his war band were willing to throw themselves into the breach. They might engage the armed might of Lysaer s'Ilessid in the tangling brush of the river bottom. Not to triumph; they were too few to hold out any hope of a victory. But if at the critical moment they could buy a few hours' delay, the trap jaws might be jammed from closing.