TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  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 t
he 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 glimmer 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.

  Arithon muffled his ears, to no avail. His bard's gift woke him to empathy. Undone by fresh grief, he battled for callous will to tug free of beseeching fingers. He turned back raw suffering with unblinded eyes, shouldered ahead, and threaded his beleaguered way forward. Yet this time his movement brought no relief. The maze responded by raising another obstruction. The chasm that opened ahead of his feet was no less real for the fact that his vision could not perceive it.

  Only the hollow whisper of air gave him warning, its sibilant consciousness picked out by mage-sight. Where the staid tones of earth should have spoken the deeper-toned language of stone, air described the lip of an unseen abyss. Arithon stopped. The jostling press of the maimed barged into him, threatening to stagger him forward. He must not fail to concentrate, even bled as he was by the abrading pull of emotion. Such pity might kill, if he lost firm grasp on the requisite balance to pierce through the veil of the maze.

  A triumph of entropy, if he died for a tearful child whose existence was likely a spell-turned trap to snare him through moral integrity. Arithon grappled to silence the cry of his heart, while his nerves became slowly scraped raw. He felt strained and guilt-ridden, as though he ought to be able to disarm the snare that enacted such dreadful suffering. For mercy, he dared not even raise art through song, to ease even one grieving grandmother's sobs. His swift, testing effort to call down a banishing recoiled in slamming backlash.

  Arithon set his teeth, ripped off-balance as pain shot needles of fire down his nerves. He could not dispel such power as this. The mere effort to stay the sad wretches who pressed him wrung his senses to gray and left him dizzied by the searing scourge of a headache. Shoved a stumbling step by a man with a crutch and a woman with two whimpering children, Arithon confronted the horror of a death by cold sorcery that could conceivably extend past the veil. Should he pass Fate's Wheel still bound by the maze, he might remain trapped as a wraith. Another few moments would see him pulled down unless he tried desperate measures.

  'Might as well choose damnation in style,' he gasped through a shudder of nausea.

  A mage of his stature could not hope to subdue the vast reach of the forces ranged against him. But through errant recklessness, and novel use of an ill-set combination of ciphers, Arithon could loose the powers of chaos to unbind. Once, at Tal Quorin, he had entrained such a spell and unmade a steel quarrel shot by a marksman to kill him. The impact had caused ruin on a scale unimaginable, and damaged the
use of his mage-sight.

  Wisdom argued against the repeat of that measure. To wreak an unmaking was a violation of Ath's law, though the bounds of that stricture correctly pertained to the energetic ties that strung matter into formation. Davien's Maze was no solid form, but an entrained mesh of spells worked through the stone of the cavern. In bold theory, the rune string to wake primal fire might be tempered. If Arithon directed that force to break nothing more than Davien's lines of intent, only the linked continuity of the spell seals would succumb to annihilation.

  Stone and natural flesh would be spared, but the driving ciphers that ranged their substance against him would fly into shreds and unravel.

  Logic and theory might not hold true. Arithon had never pitted his mastery against a Fellowship Sorcerer's grand construct. The audacity of thinking to meddle on that scale set his heartbeat racing with dread. Yet delay was no option. The crowding horde of injured spirits snatched and pushed him, their needy cries growing more desperate. The wrist exposed by his shredded sleeve already bore bleeding scratches. Though armed with Alithiel, Arithon saw peril in drawing the Paravian steel. These folk might have existence outside Davien's Maze. If some sorry facet drawn from his future created their miserable plight, the cause he defended would not be just. The chance was too real that a wounding in Kewar might cause actual harm somewhere else.

  Little use, to jab elbows and fists and push back. The packed mass of supplicants would just tear him down. Alone against many, he would become trampled, or shoved off the brink of the crevice.

  Arithon sucked in a swift, harried breath. He must narrow his focus and shut out distraction, subdue the demons of sorrow and fear. Survive, and perhaps, he could make Davien answer for each of the horrors he witnessed. Yet first, he must banish all thought from his mind. The rune sequence he had resolved to engage was ugly and unforgiving. The chain could be dangerously swayed by emotion, lending a disastrous twist to its already pernicious function. He must become the blank page to hold contrary ciphers, lay each delicate stay of protection without slipshod error or omission. One mismatched seal set against a rune catalyst, and the wretched chain of spellcraft he fashioned would sour and turn in his hand.