TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  For some reason acutely aware of that passage, as night made way for the sunrise, Arithon was raked by a sense of uncanny expectancy. He tipped his head to one side, strained and listening. Something grazed his senses. A high note, beyond sound, like the prelude to a chord wrought from a band of wild energy. Touched by a leaping shiver of bliss, he said, startled, 'What's the date?'

  'Equinox,' came the answer from under the wolverine. 'There's a centaur's mark, not far distant. Do you sense it? Some say the stone sings at the turn of the season.'

  Forced to snatch back his poise as the gray sidled under him, Arithon glanced about, interested. 'We've straddled the lane, then?'

  'The fourth, near enough.' At the crest, the wind's blasting shear raked their faces. The horses' flagged tails snapped like streamers. Still speaking, the scout snatched at black-and-white fur, as his heavy cap threatened to whisk off. 'The line runs from the ruin at Penstair through Strakewood, then down the rock ledges with Tal Quorin. From there, she crosses the old dance site at Caith-al-Caen.'

  In fact, the ancient marker stone did sing aloud, as herald of the true dawn. Its tuned cry pierced the whining hiss of the wind and raised the hair at the nape. For Arithon, sensitized by a masterbard's talent, the sorrowful overtones bespoke violent death, and fresh blood spilled on Daon Ramon Barrens. Through the hour that followed, he rode, beyond speech, while around him, the high mountain silence became stitched with chirping birdsong. Firs braided the lonely voice of wind with their secretive whispering. The gusts smelled of spruce and scrub pine and scoured ice, and slacking, wore the tang of sweat damp leathers and horse.

  Late morning, they paused. The scouts fed and watered their mounts, and the gray, with its pale, snowflake dapples. Arithon sat in solitude, arms clamped over drawn-up knees, the desperate ache for the loss of Earl Jieret swelled into a grief he could not assuage. He tried not to care how the pair of scouts eyed him when they thought his attention lay elsewhere. He detested the need that required their presence, and the lifelong demands of sworn sovereignty. Nor could he argue their bond of feal service. Circumstance rankled, that Braggen's exhaustion and a Sorcerer's blood oath should have constrained all his preferences. He wished no owed loyalties, no more death and striving. Dread rode him, whetted by the urgent, needled warning as Desh-thiere's curse scraped his nerves and informed him that Lysaer was moving.

  The dichotomy seared, for the wrench in perception, with the Mathorns' stilled splendor commanding caught breath at every angle of view. Arithon shut his eyes, overcome. His rank, inward turmoil seemed an offense, while the sunlight sparkled gilt-silver and diamond, off snowbank and cornice and mica-veined granite.

  Yet the wild upland peaks could not ease his mind, for all of their savage majesty. The rising spate of the equinox lane forces sheared through the ground, charging the bared stone underfoot. The unseen, swift current set Arithon on edge. He felt as though an overcranked string was just plucked, outside the range of his hearing. In odd fits and starts, he glanced over his shoulder. Some presence seemed to stand at his back, or a distant, chill touch threatened to comb through his aura. He did not share his heartache, that once, given mage-sight, he could have scried and found name for what ruffled his instincts.

  The hesitant crunch of a boot sole on gravel informed of approaching company. Arithon lifted his head. The younger scout picked his uncertain way toward the boulder where he took refuge. He wished all at once he could duck out of sight. Beyond bearing, that he might be addressed with diffidence, or uncertainty, or worse, even fear; wounding proof, whatever expression awaited, that his reputation had distorted the person he was, underneath the encumbrance of state titles.

  Avoidance was nothing if not straight cowardice. Arithon met the young man face on, set to handle whatever hurtful presumption might cloud the discourse between them. He failed to anticipate the crushing, bright pain: First Steiven and Dania, then Caolle had died, with Jieret's fresh loss the most grievous. Arithon pulled in a deep breath, let the chill douse the rise of his anger. He stilled his revulsion, that this eager young man might too easily become the next sacrifice for a crown rule that would first shackle, then suffocate every last precious shred of autonomy.

  Fact lent him no quarter. Arithon faced the quandary, that to disown this one would dishonor the others before him. Unstrung as he was, even the slight movement of air hurt his skin. Yet s'Ffalenn compassion and bardic perception allowed him no shield. He could raise no self-determined defense against the exigencies of his own character.

  He beheld the young scout in the full light of day, and read in the man's windburned, flushed face a grave sincerity, wrapped thread on thread with pride and desire. Raised to uphold the traditions of heritage, such a liegeman would honor the trust invested in his clan ancestry. Some mother's beloved son, some brother's cadet, he was a brown-haired individual wearing a stained leather baldric, and steel-studded war gauntlets; old enough to take pride in his competence, yet too young to have passed on his gifts, or to behold the legacy of his grown child. He had youth's cocky strength, a matched set of fine weapons, and a flamboyance that led to a silver earring hung with a nugget of turquoise.

  Aware in that instant of Arithon's survey upon him, he stopped. Embarrassment brightened the flush lent by weather. Braced wariness squared his trail-wise carriage as he acknowledged the presence of royalty. 'My liege?'

  Arithon inclined his head, a considered response he hoped would allow the scout to gather himself. Though the private part of him wished, heartfelt, to eschew royal etiquette, he refused the indulgence as cruelty. If weapons were drawn later, the crown that he stood for would lend courage and meaning to what, in sharp fact, was no better than outright waste. He contained his temper, though every fiber of his being reviled the lie, that defense of his person became a sore tragedy his personal code could not countenance.

  Caolle and Jieret should still be alive, and before them, Steiven and Dania.

  Mage-schooled to mask the deep bent of his thoughts, locked motionless with forbearance, Arithon waited. Despite his strung patience, the scout glanced away. Discomfort deepened his flush.

  'There's some trouble?' the Teir's'Ffalenn prompted.

  Reluctant, the young man plunged ahead. 'Maybe. Hewall says there's a place to camp in the next corrie. He's suggested we stop there.'

  Arithon's lifted eyebrows showed all of his stark surprise. 'Unwise, for my sake.' He stood, unable to contain his dismay. His hagridden nerves stemmed from no defined source, which unleashed his scalding, quick anger. 'Trust me, Hewall can make camp wherever he likes, but Lysaer s'Ilessid is marching. Let him gain ground, and Desh-thiere's curse will slip my grasp. That's a risk I won't stand for. Tell Hewall, I can't brook the slightest delay.'

  The scout shook his head, consumed by frank misery, and dropped his bad news like a stone. 'Hewall comes from a lineage that has Sight. He says you won't ride any farther.'

  'He has prescience? What did he see?' When the scout could not answer, Arithon strode past to pursue the matter directly.

  'You doubt Hewall's vision?' the young scout pursued, his anxious glance sidewards a stabbing rebuke to his prince.

  'I doubt no one.' As neat on his feet as any man forestborn, Arithon cut a path for the tree where the resting horses were tethered. 'Camp in the next corrie, or not, I'll know what might possibly arise to prompt such a foolish decision.'

  But three steps later, the reason became manifest without need to consult Hewall's talent. Arithon was clouted by what he first thought was a buffeting gust of rogue wind.

  The blow staggered him. Knocked to his knees, with the scout's dismayed cry ringing in his ears, he fought and failed to level his whirling senses. The snow under his gloved hands, and the solid, stone presence of the Mathorns suddenly seemed as insubstantial as smoke. He sucked in a breath of bone-hurting cold air. Yet speech would not come through brute effort. Had he not lost his talent by Tal Quorin, years before, he would have attributed his distressed confu
sion to a nerve storm brought on by mage-sight.

  But the imposed state of calm he had trained hard to master slipped through the clenched fist of his will. Faint with distance, he heard his Name spoken in tones like mallet-struck iron. Understanding touched his heart like a finger of ice: he was being summoned, by powers of magecraft he had no defense to withstand.

  The next second, all his barriers became hammered flat, down to his innermost mind. The driven will gripping him seemed honed by the fires of destiny that had once forged Dharkaron's Black Spear. 'You are entrained by a Fellowship mandate, and for this, you are called into service, prince!'

  Hit again by a rushing current of force, Arithon gasped. The hands he plunged wrist deep in soft snow failed to anchor his reeling balance. Mazed by an overwhelming impression of power sweeping over the earth like the tides, he lost track of the scout's distressed shouting. The waking vision overrode all awareness of outside sensation. Arithon realized that the wilding currents plaguing him were not wind at all, but the cascading rush of an imbalanced lane flux.

  Which should have escaped him, impaired as he was, his mage-sight still deafened and blinded. Not only that, noon lay a full hour away in the steep-walled dell where he sheltered. Lane's crest through the western spur of the Mathorns had yet to occur by the sun's arc. Arithon grappled that unsettling truth. Through the hollow sensation that preceded fraught fear, he realized: the aberration he picked up must originate from the east, where the sun would already ride at the meridian.

  The worst onslaught lifted. Arithon recaptured his lost breath. Upset senses stabilized; a split-second interval restored the spinning impression of torn clouds and blue sky, with silver-and-black pinnacles folded one on another like serrated rock shards driven through crumpled foil.

  He managed to drag words through his mauling weakness. 'I'm not beset.'

  Insistent fingers clamped his shoulder and arm, trying to help him stand upright. The scout's urgent speech raised a rattling buzz his ears could scarcely interpret. 'What's wrong? Are you ill? Or does your Grace suffer the onset of the Mistwraith's curse?'

  'I don't think so. Not yet.' Arithon groped, caught a boulder, seized just enough presence to sit.

  Through wheeling confusion, the second influx drowned out all else, as the voice resumed in thundering command: 'Crown Prince of Rathain! You are called! By your sworn oath to serve, the land has dire need!' Arithon recognized the touch as Kharadmon's, then received, 'Dakar is at Rockfell, in crisis. The fact he holds your free will permissions has drawn you into the conflict.'

  Open contact with the Sorcerer lent a channel of clarity that provided a flash-point assessment. Arithon shut his eyes. Propped on the boulder by the scout's steady arm, he labored to speak before splintering vision whirled him off-balance again. 'There's threat to the kingdom,' he managed, while Kharadmon sent through a horrific summary of the catastrophe pending at Rockfell.

  Arithon felt his shocked blood all but freeze the hammering beat of his heart. 'Merciful Ath, we have trouble!'

  His liege's torn note of anguish at last struck the scout's exhortations to silence.

  Yet none else but the ward rings binding the Mistwraith were besieged by the imbalanced lane flux. Anguished, Arithon saw how his past transfer from Sanpashir could have exacerbated the problem. He was given no space for regrets or apology. Kharadmon's entreaty showed Luhaine's stressed presence, immersed at the crux of doomed struggle. Yet even the most desperate measures could not stem the solstice tide at full onslaught. Dakar was not going to recover his lost grip. A blind fool could foresee every effort was futile: no resource the Sorcerers commanded at Rockfell could claw back the disastrously slipped balance.

  Time itself seemed suspended as Arithon scrambled to encompass the full scope of the problem Kharadmon's message unfolded. Head in his gloved hands, he sat helplessly shivering, while a chill more intense than the bitterest wind reamed him through to his core.

  'You are sensing the skewed lane tide as it crests through the Skyshiels,' the Sorcerer sent in raced urgency. 'And yes, if our endeavor fails here, more than Rockfell's protections will sunder. Grimwards will burst free of their ancient, set boundaries. Earthquake and ruin will follow, unstoppable. All of Athera will suffer the brunt of a devastating backlash.'

  Kharadmon's terse appeal implied an annihilation utterly without quarter. In bitter despair, Arithon found himself made party to a dilemma beyond hope of salvage. Worse, far worse, than Desh-thiere's release, or the loss of clear sun, or any threat posed by loosed free wraiths, he was shown the chains of linked spellcraft binding the grimwards in Rathain and Melhalla. The mastership rigorously earned at Rauven let him read their threatened configuration. Their seals restrained chaos beyond all imagining. If such bulwarks were to be even marginally compromised, the chaotic forces inside would storm unchecked through the breach.

  Arithon saw disaster and trembled with rage. Impaired as he was, he could not lend direct help using spellcraft. Denied the intelligent expression of his talent, he became the hapless string puppet to need, so much straw fodder before the raging flame of an irrepressible holocaust. His unconditional permissions to Dakar would let the Sorcerers tap and drain his vitality; as they must'. To stabilize their construct, Kharadmon required the living shield of a borrowed bodily form. He would have no choice but to draw Arithon's life force to shore up the Mad Prophet's faltering flesh. Either that, or lose everything; bow without fight before apocalyptic failure.

  'Forgive!' came the plea, Fellowship Sorcerer to sworn crown prince, for an act of gross usage that would come to cost unimagined torment before death. 'For the world's sake, forgive!'

  Obdurate, Arithon rejected defeat. Torbrand's lineage to the marrow, he refused to embrace the suicidal rush toward destruction. 'Do you not hold my irrevocable bond to survive?' he flung back into Kharadmon's teeth. 'Even for this, I am constrained to fight. Or did your Fellowship accept my grief lightly, on the hour I was asked to swear my blood oath to Asandir at Athir?'

  The paired Sorcerers at Rockfell received that raw cry. Before courage and duty that demanded full due, its appeal stunned them to humbled silence.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn flung back his head, under torn cloud and chill sky in the Mathorns. Eyes shut, braced against the steadfast presence of a frightened young liegeman, he clamped his fists in bone white denial. Straight logic insisted all prospects were spent. He faced crushing odds, with the fate of the world attendant upon his sure failure. Still, he could not back down. His sworn oath forbade him. 'As you value life, no matter how I scream, keep me upright,' he instructed the scout through clenched teeth. 'Though my clothes catch fire, or flesh burns in your hands, don't dare give way! Do not let me fall unconscious!'

  'Ath guide you, my liege,' spoke a voice to his right. The other scout reached him and knelt in support, and a second staunch hand braced his shoulder. 'As long as life remains in our veins, you don't carry the kingdom alone!'

  Arithon had no chance to acknowledge such bravery. He had already immersed in the sharpened awareness instilled by his master's training. Against the imperative, breaking disaster, he still owned his store of hard-won experience, tempered and tested through twelve initiations undergone at Rauven. He could not assist by working grand conjury. Yet he retained an exacting knowledge of spell strictures and natural law. By the grace of Halliron's teaching, he also possessed a masterbard's schooled ear for harmony.

  Formidable strengths, paired once before, when he and the Mad Prophet had jointly attempted a doomed effort to draw an injured child back to health.

  Arithon stood on the presumption that every avenue of straight conjury had already been fruitlessly tried. Music offered the sole, untapped reservoir within his province to lend.

  Kharadmon's fleeted thought grasped that untapped potential. In lightning response, the Sorcerer suspended his claim to a Teir's'Ffalenn's life to dam back the breaking breach. Fast as ricochet, Arithon received terms for that stay of reprieve: he could be gran
ted no more than split seconds to shape a successful response.

  No moment to spare, for the scouts' rampant worry, no thought, for Elaira's anguish. She would surely sense the sword's edge of peril through the linkage that joined their emotions. Unable to affect any saving last grace, Arithon threw all that he was into action. He was forced to let go, plunge down and down again, deep into his innermost self. There, he sought the listening source of his gifted inspiration. Through cycles of seasons, for thousands of years, the ancient Paravians had once channeled lane force through ritual song and dance. If Arithon could plumb the key phrasing in time, he might sift out the tonal chord that would call the fourth lane's flux to shift resonance. If his mastery could match the massive demand of such challenge, if mortal man bearing the title of Masterbard could perhaps encompass the thundering scope of that untamed peal of primal harmony, one chance might be pried from the jaws of adversity.

  No course, but to try. Arithon surrendered the pure, blank mirror of his intuition into the battering thrust of the lane tide. He allowed sound to rule him, body and mind. Naught else must concern him. He dared not think past that initial step. Nor could he spare thought to question slim odds, that no means in existence could find access in time to use that enabled gateway. A gulf lay between the first capture of melody, and the raw methodology required: to bleed off the raging crest of the equinox, then to bend its rarefied high frequencies into a safely reduced register of vibration.

  Arithon drifted. Sleeting noise rushed over, then through him. Plunged into immersion, cast headlong into the shredding dissonance of the fourth lane's skewed forces, Arithon gasped in white pain. The deranging explosion of chaos enveloped him. His sharp, strangled outcry pinched off, unvoiced. At once, he perceived that the current tumbling his thread of freed consciousness was no natural pulsation of earth's magnetics. The flux surge the Sorcerers wrestled at Rockfell bore no resemblance to the clean, lilted flow he had sounded before, one starry winter midnight amid the black sands of Sanpashir.