Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Janny Wurts

  PERIL’S GATE

  The Wars of Light and Shadow

  VOLUME 6

  THIRD BOOK OF THE ALLIANCE OF LIGHT

  To Jeff Watson,

  the guardian gryphon in charge

  of technical wonders without

  which more deadlines

  would have been missed

  Contents

  Third Book

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  I. Retribution

  II. Recoil

  III. Baiyen Gap

  IV. Prime Successor

  V. Spinner of Darkness

  VI. Clan War Band

  VII. Threshold

  VIII. Evasion

  IX. Caithdein

  X. False Step

  XI. Nightfall

  XII. Rockfell Peak

  XIII. Teir’s’Ffalenn

  XIV. Hunted

  XV. Peril’s Gate

  XVI. Path of the Damned

  XVII. Second Recovery

  Glossary

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Winter Solstice Night 5670

  I.

  Retribution

  Arithon s’Ffalenn,

  called Master of Shadow!

  For the sake of your crimes against our

  fair city of Jaelot, your spirit shall be

  delivered by sword and by fire to your

  rightful hour of death…

  – Mayor of Jaelot, decree of execution

  Third Age Year 5669

  The storm settled over the Eltair coast just after the advent of nightfall. Like the worst winter gales, it stole in on cat feet. The fitful, fine sleet dusting over sere landscape changed on a breath into muffling snow as the temperature plunged below freezing. The moment caught Arithon s’Ffalenn, last living Prince of Rathain and birth-born Master of Shadow, crouched in the iced brush of a hedgerow.

  Each labored breath burned his lungs like cold fire. His sprint was cut short, though the city of Jaelot’s stone walls lay scarcely a bowshot behind him. A skulking fugitive hard-pressed by enemies who hunted by sword and by spellcraft, he shot a concerned glance sidewards as Fionn Areth folded, gasping, beside him. The young man had spent the dregs of his strength.

  Even the threat of relentless pursuit could not stave off stark necessity: the goatherd just snatched from death on the scaffold could run no farther without pause for recovery.

  ‘Rest,’ whispered Arithon, as winded himself. ‘For a moment. No more.’

  Fionn Areth’s clipped nod showed resentment, not gratitude.

  Yet no moment could be spared to treat with the young man’s inimically misguided loyalties. Enemies hounded their backs without respite. Koriani seeresses would be tracking with spelled snares. If the mayor’s armed guardsmen from Jaelot prevailed first, the pair would be slaughtered on the run.

  ‘They’ll find us.’ Fionn Areth cast a harrowed glance over his shoulder. His chilled hand tightened on his sword grip as he noticed the patrol sweeping the high crenels of the battlements. The flutter of their pine brands speared rays of light through the thickening snowfall. Arithon measured their movement, intent. The alarm bells stayed mute. No outcry arose from the gatehouse. Careful to mask his own tension, he said, ‘Bide easy. The mayor’s guards can’t know we’ve slipped through the walls unless the Koriathain decide to inform them.’

  Nor would the senior enchantress, Lirenda, be anxious to disseminate word of her failure. Since her towering arrogance had granted her quarry the opening to escape, she would be loath to approach her male allies. Once again, her order had bungled their promise to entrap the Master of Shadow.

  Left raw by the price he had paid to win back his threatened autonomy, Arithon closed with dry irony, ‘From stung pride, I expect the witches will try to recoup their blunder in secret. That’s to our advantage. Thick snowfall should foil their scryers and hide us, at least for a little while.’

  Fionn Areth returned a poisonous glower from a face that, feature for feature, was a mirror image of the Shadow Master’s. Having narrowly missed execution and burning for the crimes of his look-alike nemesis, he still suffered the morning’s shock of discovery, that his appearance had been fashioned by the meddling design of Koriani spellcraft. The cruel fact chafed, that he had been used as unwitting, live bait in their conspiracy to ensnare the unprincipled killer beside him.

  The betrayal stung yet. ‘Never mind witches,’ he gasped in spat venom to the Spinner of Darkness. ‘The Alliance won’t rest until you’ve been dismembered and burned to serve justice.’

  Expressionless, Arithon refused answer. He was no less enraged at being made the political pawn in the feud that pitched the enchantresses against the authority of the Fellowship Sorcerers. Since bare-bones survival perforce must come first, he took ruthless stock of bad circumstance.

  While night settled like impenetrable felt over the Eltair Bay coastline, he wrested the lay of the land from his reluctant memory. Northward, past the black spur of Jaelot’s walled headland, small farmsteads patched the land like paned glass. The occupants were suspicious and ill set toward strangers, the ancient codes of hospitality long lost since the rising that threw down the high kings. Nor did the countryside offer safe prospects. Tangled cedar windbreaks and hedgerows of red thorn squared the rough, fallow fields. Two vagrants in flight from the mayor’s justice dared not ply the lanes, with their drystone walls high enough to entrap, and their rutted mazes of crossroads. To the east, the salt waves of Eltair Bay thrashed a raked stretch of shingle, and a wind-razed, shelterless marshland. To the west rose the forbidding stone ramparts of the Skyshiels, sliced by ravines of weather-scabbed rock, and mantled in glaze ice and fir.

  Fitful gusts already stirred the stilled air, first warning whisper of the bass-note howl yet to build to an oncoming gale. Arithon tucked frozen hands under his cloak. He held no illusions. The snowfall that helpfully covered their tracks, and disrupted the Koriani scryers carried a double-edged threat. The night ahead would bring lethal cold, and blinding, bewildering drifts. Inadequately clothed to withstand hostile elements, he and the victimized herder he had rescued could easily die from exposure.

  For the storm that drove in had not arisen out of natural forces. Arithon sensed its song deep in his bones. The subliminal, whining vibration of dropped pressure came exacerbated by the imbalance wrought by disturbed magnetics. Earlier, Dakar the Mad Prophet had served him hard warning: the Fellowship Sorcerers were themselves caught in crisis, distracted by some larger upset. The illicit magics Dakar had engaged to unravel the Koriani defenses in Jaelot had assuredly added more stress to the roiled currents of lane flux. With the surge of winter solstice cresting at midnight, Arithon lacked accurate means to measure the backlash that might follow. As he chewed over that burden of worry, Fionn Areth stirred in the darkness.

  Warned by a muffled, metallic ring, Arithon spun. He clamped the boy’s wrist in a strangling grip and arrested the sword halfway pulled from the scabbard. ‘Eighth hell of Sithaer, are you insane?’

  ‘I should kill you here!’ Fionn Areth gasped through locked teeth. ‘There are widows across the five kingdoms who’d thank me.’

  ‘They might,’ Arithon agreed, his annoyance turned acid. ‘But a blade in my back won’t see you safe. The opposite in fact. My blood in the snow would act as a beacon for Koriani scryers. If you think you can manage to evade their spelled snares, Dakar has the food and the horses we’ll need. You aren’t going to find him without my guidance. Better to salve your fool’s craving for justice after we’ve scrambled to safety.’

  Fionn A
reth’s murderous resistance failed to slacken under restraint. Darker truth eclipsed reason. He knew this creature who entreated in pressed self-defense was unnatural, an unprincipled sorcerer whose guileful strategies had slaughtered three dedicated war hosts. Across the continent, men flocked to Lysaer’s sunwheel standard and pledged to the Light to destroy him.

  ‘Then swear me your bond,’ Fionn Areth insisted. ‘As Prince of Rathain, prove you meant what you said when you offered me trial by combat.’

  ‘Very well. Accept my given word. We’ll cross swords at the first opportunity, but after we’ve slipped our pursuit.’ Solemnity spoiled by a stressed thread of laughter, Arithon provoked with glib melodrama, ‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear strike me dead should I fail you, though the point will likely prove moot. Koriathain and Jaelot’s guards would end Rathain’s royal line with no help from Ath’s angel of vengeance.’

  Fionn Areth found his sword arm released, though his volatile temper stayed unsettled. Ice showered down in cracked shards from the branches as Arithon ducked free of the hedgerow. All animal grace and dangerous focus, he cast no glance backward to ascertain whether his oath was accepted. On the insufferable assumption his young double must follow, he pursued his route across country. Brisk progress was sustained in swift bursts that utilized each quirk of terrain for masking cover.

  Fionn Areth flanked him through closing curtains of wet snow, dreading the oncoming thud of hooves, and fearing, each step, the clarion cry of the gate watch’s horn at his back. Led on by a felon whose motives were suspect, he nursed his distrust through the erratic sprints between hayrick and thicket and cowshed. The low-lying fields confounded simplicity. The verges were crosscut with dikes and ditches, or brush brakes riddled with badger setts. The ice-capped stone walls could turn a man’s ankle. Despite such hazards, Arithon stayed clear of the cottages with their inviting, gold-glazed windows. The byres and yards with penned sheep and loose dogs were avoided, no matter the punishment exacted by chilled hands and feet and the limits of flagging stamina.

  Another pause, snatched in a thicket, while snow sighed and winnowed through the frost-brittle brambles. Under lidded sky, wrapped in lead-sheeted darkness, Fionn Areth sensed Arithon’s measuring scrutiny. However he strove, he could not hide his weakness. Jaelot’s abusive confinement had worn him, and the relentless pace of their flight left him battered half-prostrate.

  Each passing second redoubled their risks. The storm would grow worse, and the snow pile deeper. They struggled ahead on borrowed time, against the inevitable odds: at any moment, the town gates would disgorge mounted patrols with pine torches. Guardsmen would ride with the trained trackers lent by Eltair’s league of headhunters. For the prospect of claiming the bounty on royalty, they would unleash their dread packs of mastiffs, cut mute as pups to course human quarry in silence.

  In uncanny answer to brooding thoughts, Arithon whispered encouragement. ‘If there are dogs, they won’t scent well in snow. Can you manage? Let’s go then.’ He forged onward, the tenuous landmarks he steered by scarcely recognizable after a quarter century of change. Stone markers and storm-bent sentinel oaks were masked by snowfall and darkness; buildings and bylanes appeared blurred into maddening sameness. No margin remained for mistakes. A single wrong turn would lose his bearings amid the flat apron of coastal landscape. Nor did Arithon dare slacken. Koriathain might guide the mayor’s patrols, intent on recouping their losses. They knew, as he did, the storm would not wait. Posed the grave danger of being outflanked, Arithon chivvied his stumbling double into the lash of the wind.

  A dike almost tripped the herder. His sliding descent fetched him short in a drain ditch. The skin of ice smashed underfoot. Muddy water soaked through his fleece boots. Fionn Areth swore in grasslands dialect, his consonants rattled by chattering teeth. As chilled himself, Arithon forged ahead. The mismatched pair splashed over the slough and labored up the eroded berm. A field of corn stubble speared through the snow, rutted mud frozen underneath. Past an osier fence, they flushed a herd of belled ewes, who bolted in jangling terror.

  The wind had gained force. Its bite chilled their wet feet and keened through snow-sodden clothing.

  ‘Not far, now,’ Arithon murmured, then broke off. ‘Get down!’

  Dazed to plodding exhaustion, Fionn Areth missed the cue. Jerked back, then knocked prone as Arithon felled him, he stifled a shrill cry of outrage. Disastrously late, he reached understanding: the drumming he heard was not caused by the thrash of bare branches. Flattened beneath the frail sticks of a hazel thicket, shivering under his wadded wool cloak, he held breathlessly still while the torch of an outrider flittered by.

  ‘Well, we had to expect this.’ Arithon stirred, shaking out clotted snow spooned up by his oversize cuffs.

  With the mayor’s guard now sounding the alarm, the countryside offered no haven. Uneasy farmsteaders would be out, scouring their hay byres for fugitives. They would unchain their dogs and round up their horses, and stab pitchforks through the mesh of their cornricks.

  Nor did the worsening storm sustain its fickle gift of respite. The snow had already piled too deep. Once a search party stumbled across their plowed prints, they were going to become hunted animals.

  ‘We’re farther afield than they realize,’ Arithon assured, to every appearance unperturbed as his extended hand was refused. While Fionn Areth struggled erect on his own, he added, ‘Nor will they guess we’ve an ally waiting to shield us. If fortune favors, they’ll keep the belief we’re given to aimless flight.’ For prudence, he chose not to mention that Dakar would likely need spellcraft to further mislead their pursuit.

  Inured to harsh weather by his moorland upbringing, the young herder stumbled onward. The overwhelming speed of events had left him too numbed to think. Through bitter necessity, he trailed Arithon’s lead through the banked snow of the sheepfold. Another deep ditch, and a slippery crossing over the logs of a stile, then partial respite as they plunged into the fir copse beyond.

  Fionn Areth tripped twice before his dulled mind made sense of his jumbled impressions. In fact, they had covered more ground than he thought. The open land of the farmsteads lay behind them.

  An evergreen canopy closed on all sides. The sky was blank pitch. Each gust shook crusted snow from the spruce, a mere clutch of seedlings before the towering growth that ruched foothills to the west. The tumbled chimney of a cottar’s house jagged under the pillowing drifts, the broken yard gate a mute testament to some cataclysmic misfortune. Beyond the old steading, a ravine razed the dell, where the annual spring snowmelt roared in white cataracts to egress in Eltair Bay.

  Despite the hard freeze, the crossing was arduous, the undercut banks being ice clad. Jutted rocks caved away at each step. Wet to the knees, and wrung wretched with shivering, Fionn Areth cursed the cold rivulets that chased down his boot cuffs and collar. His gloves had soaked through, the fingers inside chilled to lumps of shrill agony. Close on Arithon’s heels, he panted uphill and crossed the exposed crest, harrowed each step by the howling winds off the seacoast. Descent proved as difficult, the stony soil overgrown with young firs cased in glaze ice, and uncut by even a deer path. Raked and slapped by needled boughs, Fionn Areth broke through to a clearing, too miserable to care that Arithon had reached his obscure destination.

  An abandoned mill loomed on the swept shelf of snow, crooked in the oxbow bend of a stream. Its unroofed, square shell carved the gusts into dissonance. The rotted wheel canted in a rimed tumble of frozen waterfall. Nor was the ruin deserted. A stout, muffled figure emerged from its gloom, its waddling stride on the uncertain footing as ungainly as a discomposed duck.

  ‘Dakar!’ hailed Arithon, sounding weary at last. ‘I want––’

  ‘You bastard, you just about killed me with worry! Old storm rips my fixed wardspells to static, and you take a fiend’s sweet time to make rendezvous!’ Halted in huffing distemper, the fat prophet who served as the Shadow Master’s henchman scowled.

  Blown snow
frosted his ginger brows and his unkempt bristle of beard. ‘You don’t hear the horn calls? The Mayor of Jaelot’s sent lancers abroad. I had just about written you both off as meat for the headhunter’s mastiffs.’

  ‘Dakar,’ Arithon broke in, wrung by a shiver. ‘Did you bring horses?’

  ‘Dharkaron’s black bollocks! Are you both soaked as rabbits?’ The Mad Prophet flicked his irritated glance from one alike face to the other, spell-carved to match the same chiseled angles under wind-snagged sable hair. Unerringly able to discern the original, he thrust out a forearm to support young Fionn Areth. ‘Yes, I managed to meet your request. We have four geldings, three hacks, and one knock-kneed packhorse. Come in. There’s also a fire and hot gruel, and before you ask, yes. I’ve set masking runes, and have maze wards running against the mayor’s riders at each of the four quarters.’

  Arithon winced at the mention of ward sorceries, which, predictably, balked Fionn Areth.

  Dakar jerked the boy forward in unvarnished exasperation. ‘Ath preserve idiots with misaligned scruples, come on! His Grace of Rathain might prefer to stay outside and brood, just show me an Araethurian herdsman born with warm-blooded good sense.’

  Fionn Areth resisted, given short shrift as Dakar vented his leftover tension through scolding. ‘I’m damned glad you’re alive and still standing to greet me, boy. That won’t lift the blight of Daelion’s curse off the bone-headed folly that spared you! Your prince won’t have mentioned, but the risk undertaken to snatch you from Jaelot takes the prize for catastrophic stupidity.’

  At next step, they crossed into the ring of set guard spells. Fionn Areth cried out as a sharp tingle raked his skin. He nearly sprained the Mad Prophet’s wrist in his panicked effort to bolt.

  ‘Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance!’ Dakar exploded. Fingers locked in the Araethurian’s wet cloak, he held on, his corpulent bulk no more bothered than if he had bagged a struggling game fish. ‘Koriani witches changed your whole face through black use of their sigils of force. What’s a middling weak veil of concealment going to do, except save your skin from execution? Find the sweet reason that Ath gave your goats! Get yourself warm and dry enough to think clearly before you decide we’re your enemies.’