TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  'I am the living Light,' Prince Lysaer returned, his unsmiling correction almost tender. 'Your life rides in my hands, not the other way about.'

  Sulfin Evend inclined his head. The thoughtless, bright elegance of the prince alongside stamped him to the acutely discomfited awareness of his own grizzled stubble, and the marring splotches where rust on his mail hauberk had bled into his rumpled surcoat. The owlish silence fallen over the men implied he was no fit figure of command. The finest of his officers seemed a clay martinet, ineffective and silly as his drunken light horse, who had fled Davien's stair without posting even the basic pretense of a sentry.

  The cut marble soared upward, an uncanny fashioning. Of the band of tired men gathered beneath, only Lysaer's self-possessed, golden authority seemed a match for its dimension of exalted challenge.

  'Lend me your shoulder.' said the Prince of the Light. 'When I reach the first stair, I'll haul you up.'

  The Lord Commander masked his own shaken nerves behind the ripe pretense of Hanshire arrogance, well aware that on his own account, he would never be treading anywhere near such a place. Yet in Lysaer's shadow, a man found himself. The core fiber of his being became reforged into something addictively glorious. Whether or not his death lurked ahead, he would not back down before uncanny evil, or quail in the face of adversity.

  'Then grant me the folly of kindness, Lord Exalted.' Sulfin Evend squared his shoulders, hapless as the fighting cock tossed into the pit to challenge a mastiff. 'For the sake of my peace of mind, first humor my needless request.'

  Still smiling, Lysaer unbuckled his sword belt. Sapphire settings flared in the half-light as he passed the blade to the gaping man at his right hand. 'I, myself, am the weapon sent to drive out the Darkness.' he reminded. 'For both our sakes, don't forget that.'

  Sulfin Evend set his jaw, assaulted by memory of seared men and horses, smoking on the razed earth of Daon Ramon. Even so, he stepped forward.

  Ahead of his asking, two others offered their bodies as living ladder to assist the Divine Prince up the sheer rock abutment. No easier path granted access to the carved staircase. For the act of trespass upon his most intricate creation, Davien the Betrayer had set his explicit demand: the journey began with an unequivocal act of free choice.

  Sulfin Evend stripped off his scale gauntlets, which might hamper his grip on sheer stone. Sweating and pale, he followed his prince, aware as others were not, that threat to his own person might not arise from the Dark, or from dread assault by any Sorcerer's laid wardspells. He alone had stood witness to nightmare, as the brave company from Narms had been shorn down by Lysaer's own Light, set off by a conjured illusion.

  Integrity held him, and the bound obligation that the same endowed gift of s'Ilessid had once spared his life. The Alliance Lord Commander set his boot and thrust upward.

  'Bless you, Lord, guard his Exalted self.' murmured the captain behind him. 'Light bring you both back unharmed.'

  Sulfin Evend returned a curt glance of acknowledgment. The latent talent inherent in his trace of clan ancestry would grant him instinctive warning. He would not shirk his place, standing guard.

  The stair had not been fashioned by artisan's tools, the Hanshireman realized as his bare fingers encountered the seamless, slick surface. Nor had woven spells engendered the mirror-smooth polish. Embedded like silk in the grain of the marble, he sensed the touch of its maker: a being who had mastered an unearthly power through a sympathetic bonding with the structure of mineral itself. The Sorcerer and the crystalline matrix he worked had conjoined into physical partnership. The result had rewritten the bounds of the veil, reshaped the layered slab of stone from its native, wild synergy to something other: a creative, new order that struck the mind dumb, and that recognized no man's known boundaries.

  Sulfin Evend had handled the cognizant skulls cut from the flesh of unhatched dragons; had experienced terror as Koriani Seniors built constructs through the harnessed matrixes of major spell crystals. He had witnessed the light flickering over Paravian marker stones at solstice midnight and noon. Yet never, even in the oldest of ruins, had he perceived such a working as this.

  The stair which led upward to Kewar Tunnel framed a monument to innovation, an unsettling gift of rogue genius that instinctively lifted his hackles.

  Lysaer must have sensed the same dimensional groundswell. 'Who was Davien?' he asked aloud, half-startled by the sound of the thought he had given careless voice.

  'Who are any of the Fellowship Sorcerers?' Sulfin Evend stood upright on the bottom-most stair, fighting the sense that the stone underfoot was not entirely secure, or in any other way trustworthy. 'No parchment record I've ever seen mentions their point of origin.' He readjusted his cloak against the tug of the wind, then qualified, 'The Seven were here long before men came and settled this world. Koriathain claim their arrival heralded the dawn of the Second Age. That could be truth. The order's archive is not written down. No initiate sister I've met will say how the Matriarch's records are kept. But Koriani knowledge of history survived the uprising more intact than any library spared from the burning that swept the breached towns.'

  Side by side, Lord Commander and Blessed Prince resumed their ascent on the stair. Lysaer, bareheaded, seemed serene, until a swift, sidewards glance snapped the illusory veneer of deportment.

  His lucent, blue eyes seemed hedged as blued steel, the mind behind a turning millwork of furious thought. 'One town never fell,' Lysaer stated, pensive.

  Sulfin Evend raised startled eyebrows. 'Alestron?' Thought of the s'Brydion stronghold raised a queer twist in his gut, as though the supporting logic fell away from every prior assumption of strategy. 'Why Alestron, here and now?'

  All patterns of conjecture appeared cast to the wind, the pertinent strands of the weave spun outside of his grasp. Sulfin Evend repressed the hot impulse to swear. Of all men living, his uncle Raiett Raven routinely cast him outside his depth. When he floundered against Lysaer, the feeling he was but a puling babe seemed a thousand times more intense.

  Where Raiett would have offered a riddling hint to sharpen the mind to new possibilities, Prince Lysaer kept silence. His fingers, also bare, ran in questing touch over the knife-cut edge of the marble coping that finished the guard wall.

  Arrested by the unswerving focus reflected in that sharp survey, Sulfin Evend felt his thought crystallize. 'Not Davien!' His disparate unease hardened into a knot that slammed like a fist in the belly. 'Sithaer's Fiends, the Fellowship of Seven named that creature an outcast! You can't think to try meddling with a spirit so dangerous, or possessed by such deadly caprice.'

  'Is he dangerous?' Lysaer asked, his query chasing down the undisciplined lines of a free-running exploration. 'Or was Davien named the Betrayer because he disagreed with his colleagues? Maybe over a matter of ethics, or perhaps an adherence to principle? His trial by his peers was never made public, though all of us hold common ground. Every lord mayor ruling inside town walls owes the new order to that Sorcerer's black-sheep meddling. If he wasn't insane, the rebellion he raised could not have been wayward action.'

  'Well, that doesn't presuppose Davien's going to prove a willing ally against Shadow.' Pricked beyond testiness, Sulfin Evend stalked around the first landing.

  Overhead, the high clouds wore their last rim of sunlight. Already the mounded snow on the slopes lost depth and crisp definition, flattened by impending dusk. Sulfin Evend flexed his chilled hands, wishing the afterglow would not fade into gloom before they accomplished their unpleasant errand. Ahead, the first ranks of carved gargoyles peered from veiling shadow, motionless, yet inexplicably more alive than any warm-blooded creature.

  Wrung by an involuntary shiver, the Lord Commander lost his power of speech until the paroxysm released him. By then, the gap torn through the conversation made his words seem nakedly groundless. 'The assumption could be deadly, that such a spirit would rise out of five centuries of seclusion to cross Fellowship interests again. Yes, Davien's dangerous
. Beyond all we know. The stone here screams magic. These bindings appear to run crosswise and counter to currents everywhere else.'

  'Did you ever wonder if such a power might have lured the Master of Shadow to its web?' Lysaer's piquant suggestion dangled as he started mounting the next course of risers.

  'No wonder Raiett Raven says you think in fiend's knots!' Sulfin Evend snapped. Next to an avatar's unearthly poise, he took on the semblance of a chastened child, tagging a grown brother's footsteps. 'If that's true, then I'll drink myself senseless with the men and entrust all your cities to muddle themselves clear of Darkness.'

  Abreast of the first gargoyle, a snake-tailed, winged demon with a forked tongue, scales, and clawed feet, Sulfin Evend glimpsed a sharp flare of red out of the corner of his eye. He spun, sword half-drawn. But his wary stance met only stone eyes, carved with inanimate, sly irony.

  'Bleeding death!' Enraged by the caprice of guard spells that seemed to needle the peeled ends of his nerves, Sulfin Evend rammed ahead. His irritable haste collided with Lysaer, who had stopped short, his proud face blanched as fine linen.

  'You saw that, too?' the Blessed Prince said without mocking.

  Sulfin Evend recovered himself, grimly steadied by acid amusement. 'You're surprised? Don't be. Your s'Ilessid heritage well might include latent mage-sight.'

  'Well don't tell Vorrice,' Lysaer said, queerly shaken. He fell back on humor to restore his habitual sangfroid presence. 'The break in rigid dogma would shatter him.'

  'He would jump off a cliff,' Sulfin Evend agreed, his answering grin just as shaky. 'But then, you could hardly appoint a man of vision or imagination to the post of Crown Examiner.' Oddly strengthened by Lysaer's stripped moment of weakness, the Lord Commander gestured ahead. 'Go on. Unless you're wanting to see the rest of the sights in the dark?'

  Lysaer's grin was a white flash of teeth, lightning swift amid deepening gloom. 'You forget,' he admonished. 'Where I walk, there can be no foothold for Darkness. Come on, or stay as you please.'

  Sulfin Evend advanced. At his side, the jangled clash of gold spurs bespoke a step sure and even. Lysaer s'Ilessid mounted the next span of the stair, his hands relaxed at his sides. Perhaps wisely, he restrained the temptation to raise illumination from his gift.

  The pair reached the second landing, locked into welded silence. Neither one chose to pause. The breathless, white plumes of their puffed exhalations hung like evanescent fog in the well of crystal, cold air. Up they went, while the warded stone eyes of the gargoyles flared sultry red and chill blue at their backs. Neither one turned a glance toward the feathered watcher who wore the still, perched form of an eagle. Unseen, its living, sharp glance surveyed the son of s'Ilessid from head to foot. Yet that raking, invasive moment of scrutiny did not draw notice as the two men followed the steep stairway upward.

  At length, their paired step crossed the third landing. Above loomed the tumbled crags of the mountain, punch-cut against cobalt patches of sky, and streamered in misted cloud. The first stars glimmered through, fuzzed in argent halos. The stairway razed across the sloped crag of the face, its geometrically ruled lines a stubborn anomaly that could not be discerned as separate.

  Stopped to recover his overtaxed breath, Sulfin Evend examined the seamless join between a sheared block of marble and the sedimentary layers laid down eons past in strata of primal bedrock. 'The two kinds of stone appear as though fused,' he concluded in whispered awe.

  A man could not stand here untouched by awareness of the mind that had crafted this structure; a cognizance that tapped the deepest mysteries surrounding the nature of being itself. A power of understanding vast enough to encompass plain granite and limestone, then transmute jumbled form into stairs, and basic structure into another dissimilar mineral.

  'Don't wake your gift, here,' Sulfin Evend warned sharply. 'I have the terrible sense such a move might be taken as meddling.'

  'Sooner started, soonest finished,' Lysaer s'Ilessid said, equable. He offered no promises. If he found Davien's prodigious craftwork intimidating, no further trace of uncertainty showed. The firm set of his shoulders and the inborn ease of royal carriage framed the appearance of intimidating strength.

  'Why do you not fear to tread here?' Sulfin Evend burst out, a startling break.

  Lysaer mounted the next riser, the pale gold embroidery on his surcoat like moving flame in the fast-falling dusk. 'If I turn back, who will go forward?' All at once too humanly vulnerable, he added in clear desperation, 'The issue at hand is not whether the Spinner of Darkness is dead, but whether his claim to a dangerous sanctuary might garner him a new ally.'

  Sulfin Evend felt as though he had reached for a stick and twisted the tail of a snake. 'That's why you wondered whether Davien might not stand in league with the rest of the Fellowship?'

  'That's the hope we must lean on.' This time, as Lysaer resumed the climb upward, his frayed edge of unease sawed through. 'Otherwise, to protect the innocent populace, the Light must raise a defense such as this world has never seen.'

  Ahead loomed the archway, a carved folly of knot patterns with the horned face of a greenman standing vigil over the keystone. Winged gryphons supported the right and left pillars. Their powerful, taloned forms held a predatory grace, imbued with the virtues of eagle and lion: killing strength tempered by the stern mercy of aggression, which enacted swift end to all suffering.

  Yet the portal between was no longer open. The entry that admitted Arithon s'Ffalenn was now sealed off by a slab of seamless, black stone.

  'Light save us all,' gasped the Blessed Prince.

  The Master of Shadow had bought his escape. Unequivocally, he set himself beyond reach. The helping hands of his friends could not touch him, or the punitive swords of his enemies.

  Sulfin Evend regarded that wall of defeat, at first without words to encompass his upwelling explosion of rage. Once, years ago, in pursuit of the Master of Shadow, he had entered a grimward with forty brave men. Not a husband, brother, or son among them had survived to return to his family. No bodies were recovered for the widows to mourn. Sulfin Evend remembered each harrowing death; he still suffered sweating nightmares. The far-reaching impact of Arithon's escape left him hollow with frustration.

  The debt invoked by his survival still bound him. One step shy of requital, and freedom, the term of service he owed to the Light was rendered unfinished. Here, at one stroke, with no blood and no fight, the release of atonement was canceled. A barrier of spelled stone stood between his father's city of Hanshire and the son's duty still owed to his family.

  Sulfin Evend could have hammered that barrier with his bare fists, had he not known the tales the old records held concerning the caverns inside.

  'This place is no haven,' he managed at last, his voice a forced note of normality. 'The minion of dark will surely encounter the torment of final destruction. No one enters the Maze of Davien. There is no surviving what lies inside, and no turning back from this entry.'

  But Lysaer shook his head. Under feathered blond hair, through the glinting, gold grain of unshaved stubble, the hardened angles of his set jaw appeared graven by shattering setback. 'A mortal might perish of what lies within,' he agreed. 'But Rathain's black prince is a demon.'

  In the dauntless, bleak gaze of the Blessed Prince, Sulfin Evend beheld the future. The exhaustive scope of that vision all but crushed him. They would have to go back and bear news to the towns, then prepare in cold cunning for the rebirth of a peril beyond all human imagining.

  Early Spring 5670

  Respite

  On his return to Althain Tower, Asandir was met by a white-robed adept bearing news that the last s'Ffalenn prince had stepped irrevocably into peril. Delivered in the echoing, bare walls of the focus chamber, her grave pronouncement shattered the weary relief he found in his moment of homecoming. 'His Grace of Rathain was hard-pressed. Desperation and Desh-thiere's curse have forced him to seek refuge in Kewar Tunnel.'

  The Sorcerer raised a
cinder-burned hand to his face, stunned beyond poise by an ill-turned event he had never thought to imagine. 'Not Davien's Maze!' he blurted, shocked as though he had rammed a stone wall. 'Anywhere else in Athera but there.'

  The white-robed adept bowed her head to his grief. She extinguished the candle set into the north-facing gargoyle, the faint golden shimmer of her aura subdued in the fallen gloom. 'I'm so sorry,' she murmured. 'No one of your Fellowship had the free rein to attempt an intervention.'

  Asandir let his battered hand fall. Never before had his strong fingers looked helpless, dangling limp at his side. 'Did Arithon's mind-set allow them an opening?'

  The adept glanced away. Her innate sense of grace left his question unanswered. In strict fact, the fine point was moot. Any such keyhole of missed opportunity could not be accessed unless the Sorcerer chose to lift the veil of time; and the record of the actualized past made even that possibility forfeit. The license to act had been overturned by free will on the instant the Teir's'Ffalenn made his choice to cross over Davien's dread threshold.

  'I have always regretted that the cavern and maze were never destroyed on the hour of Kamridian's death,' Asandir stated with rare vehemence. Haunted by shadows of that tragic past, his weathered features turned sharp with a desolate focus, as though the discernment of exacting farsight carried thought into unpleasant distance. His silver-gray eyes gone bleak as stormed granite, he stood fast, the inlaid geometric of the Althain focus flaring in sheets of smoked light at his feet.

  The tenor of his being jangled too close to bitterness for the adept's serene peace of mind. She resisted her instinct to step out of range. Nor would the code of her Brotherhood let her issue a restraint in warning. Quiet, she stood, radiating sympathetic peace. She abided the precarious instant without censure, sensing the vast tides as the Sorcerer's power churned through him, grazing the fraught edge of release.