Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Midnight downed another horse with a torn tendon. This one they shot with a quarrel through the brain and abandoned in the gully where it lay. Fresh bickering raged over the beast’s steaming carcass. On foot since the morning, the tracker was soaked through his fleece leggings, and grown testy. He questioned the reliability of what scant sign he could glean from the iced-over bogs in the hollows.

  ‘One bad reading could turn us astray. We’d be drawn leagues off course, come the morning. Could lose our quarry for sure. Might be days before we could find his cold trail. Fresh snow’s an unmerciful disadvantage.’

  The chief headhunter rebutted, ‘But the fugitive hasn’t turned. He’s crossing these hillocks on a crow’s course, straight for the towers of Ithamon. The plain fact he’s not paused to lay a false trail means that he’s pressed, even desperate. I say we’re too close at his heels for him to attempt the precautions of a trapped fox.’

  A gust raged full force, raking snow like barbed glass against the riders’ bared faces. Through the misery of the moment, while men suffered unspeaking, the shrill neigh of a westbound horse rode the storm like a shred of blown rag.

  ‘By the dark, that’s none of ours!’ cried the garrison sergeant, wheeling his mount. ‘We’ve got no outriders that far ahead.’ He dug in his spurs without waiting for conference or orders from his fellow officers.

  Strung out in disorder, the rest of the company plunged after him. Each man in his way cursed the impulsive action. Yet to pause and deliberate was to risk separation amid the black brew of foul weather. Given scant choice, the captain in charge barked at the laggards to fall in.

  The night was a wadded shroud of black felt, knit through by the forces of chaos. Ahead, amid the treacherous terrain with its rock crowns and unseen gullies, scouts picked up the muffled drumming of hooves, now sure of the beast they were tracking. The sound came and went like a phantom between gusts, a lure that kept beckoning onward. In a frenzy propelled by spell-driven eagerness, Jaelot’s men-at-arms forged ahead. Whipped up to the blood-sport passion of the chase, they pursued the twisting, blind flight of their quarry until their mounts were belabored to exhaustion.

  Their pace slowed to a walk, the hours passed, interminable. Cruel winds bit and snarled. Snow swirled and sifted and stung like edged sleet, the storm’s onslaught continuous through air like stirred pitch. Tempers frayed. Two men came to grief, thrown from their saddles when their horses missed stride in the potholes. During the pause while the company healer set and dressed one unfortunate’s broken arm, the chief headhunter returned with the unwelcome word they had spent a fruitless chase to corner a riderless gelding.

  ‘What?’ snapped the company commander, caught dismounted to examine the withers of a horse chafed raw where the saddle had shifted. ‘I thought one of your scouts said he’d sighted someone astride?’

  Shamefaced, the headhunter qualified. ‘What he saw was a decoy, a manikin fashioned from old clothing tied and stuffed up with pine needles.’

  To the owner of the galled horse, the commander said, ‘Strip the mare’s bridle and pack that sore with salve.’ His frustration set a lash to his already sharpened speech. ‘Nobody rides anywhere until we recover sound wits and a sense of direction!’ Then, to the headhunter who shifted from foot to foot in the dark, ‘You’re here to tell me we’ve spent the whole night running blind circles for nothing?’

  ‘We’ve caught a lame horse,’ the man stated, shamefaced. ‘The single count we’ve got going in our favor, our enemy has just one mount left.’

  ‘Which does us small good. Now the fiend could be anywhere!’ The commander did not need the trapper’s gloomy confirmation that the fugitive’s trail would now be obliterated, perhaps lost beyond all recovery. No option remained but to camp until dawn on the hope the storm would relent. Only the glimpse of the rising sun could reestablish their obscured bearings.

  The men hunkered down, soaked and miserable without fires. The low brush was too thin to sustain a good blaze, and the demon gusts extinguished the sparks the field cook coaxed from dry tinder. The horses were too spent to paw for the grasses that poked spiny clumps through the weather sides of the snowdrifts. Men huddled in blankets amid punishing cold, uncomforted by the knowledge that their enemy endured and suffered the selfsame privations.

  The night roared and howled, possessed in the grip of what seemed an interminable punishment. Dawn did not come. The men in their misery ached and wept pleas for the return of comfort and light. No voice answered. In vain, they held steadfast. No dark hour in memory had reigned with such force, that the advent of day should stay banished.

  Early dread became whispers, spun to volatile fear. Surely this was the end. The Spinner of Darkness had worked his fell shadows and consigned his pursuit to oblivion.

  As the mutters swelled toward an outbreak of panic, the officers fought to stem ebbing morale and keep a sane semblance of order.

  ‘Are you ninnies and girls, to wail fear of the dark? No one’s hurt. No one’s dying. Have faith in the Light, for the dawn came again, even at Dier Kenton Vale and the maelstrom that beset the war fleet at Werepoint. We are numbers against one. This wall of shadow is doubtless no more than the work of a driven and desperate criminal.’

  Men huddled together. Some sang. Others prayed. In due time, the vortex of darkness thinned and lifted to unveil a late day ripped by storm winds and blizzard. The adverse conditions would not permit tracking, nor could spent horses be forced to bear laden packsaddles and riders. The company chose the sensible alternative, and made camp in a dale where a thicket of thorn formed a windbreak. They lit fires, ate a cheerless meal of stewed horse, while their officers conferred, and decided at length to proceed for Ithamon. They would join Jaelot’s guard captain there with all speed as soon as the weather relented.

  ‘Better hope the Master of Shadow is ahead of us, bound headlong into our trap.’ The sergeant slapped chips of ice from his mail and voiced his bitter conclusion. ‘Else we’ll be ordered to regroup and give chase when the storm clears enough to take bearings.’

  Yet the snow fell at sunset, and all through the next night, a horizontal barrage that layered the landscape like draped gauze, and battened the sky in fleece scud. The brushfires burned to coals, then steamed and went out, puddled to slush and dank embers. The next cheerless day, the wild tempest blew out to thin cirrus. A platinum-pale disk spat hazed sun dogs. East, against an enamel horizon, the looming peaks of the Skyshiels notched the view in ice-clad splendor, skirted in foothills of spruce.

  ‘Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance!’ the gaunt tracker fumed. ‘We’ve drifted back eastward! Sithaer’s deepest pits, we’re so far astray we ought to weep as the butt of our enemy’s laughter.’

  ‘Well, he won’t laugh for long.’ The chief headhunter pulled out his whetstone and dragged it, screeling, along the kept edge of his dagger. ‘He’ll find our sweet ambush at Ithamon soon enough. May the sword of the Light and Sithaer’s righteous fires drive his accursed spirit past the Wheel.’

  Arithon s’Ffalenn believed himself braced for return to the haunted ruin of Ithamon. Across the sparkling, snowy vales of Daon Ramon, under sunlight like shards of white glass, he had seen spirit and sinew put to the test. Surely the three decades elapsed since the Mistwraith’s capture should have allowed ample time to address the scarred wounds that remained. Yet the passage of years had done nothing to soften the old pain, scalpel-cut to the heart. No mind trained to mastery could reconcile the loss, when misuse of grand conjury in defense of his feal clans had severed his access to mage-sight. If the agonized sufferance of such a blinding could not be resolved, the cold burden of guilt could be borne. The stab of roused memory lay familiar and worn, like the ghost throb of a severed limb.

  Yet when Arithon crested the knife ridge of drifts that edged the dry bank of the Severnir, he found himself grateful for the misfortune of his shuttered talent. This pass, he would be spared the visioning dream of the ghosts that shimmered and coil
ed through the ruin. He would see no past kings pleading for the hope of a crowned heir bringing long-sought restoration. Their gut-wrenching sorrows and their cry for reborn grandeur now lay beyond reach, safely screened from mage-gifted senses by the barriers of unhealed affliction.

  Arithon would not be wrung by the tears of his bygone s’Ffalenn ancestors. Nor would he behold the searing grace of the Paravian spirit forms that sheared like bright flame through the mists.

  Yet if he escaped the echoed reflections of lost glory, he could not be spared the terrible desolation of the ruins themselves. The shattered stone walls, with their smashed carvings, still bespoke the bitter violence of the uprising. The memory of dead high kings still walked moss-grown battlements. The wild winds keened through the shells of breached keeps, stones laddered in stripped ivy and an aura of tumbledown majesty.

  Arithon pressed his exhausted horse northward, troubled in thought and memory. He had known these hills in the mantle of winter; had ridden, then as now, across crusted snow, with the parallel ridges carved out by gales turned the shot gold of damascened silk. A sky as lucent as aquamarine crystal reduced him to a toiling speck upon a spread tapestry of landscape. So many years since he had left this savage country in the trickle of spring thaws, savoring his last days of freedom after the arduous conquest of the Mistwraith, and before the inevitable, fated coronation that laid him under geas at Etarra. His half brother had gone mounted, pensive, beside him, while the chickadees in their solemn slate plumage had scolded over the sere fruits of last year’s briars.

  As if no shed blood and no curse lay between, the birds sang still in the branches. The springs burbled through their paned ice in the dells, as if only seasons had changed, and no wars strained the cloth of world destiny. Arithon paused only to water his horse. Pushed to the bone-weary limit of endurance, he wished he had less time on his hands for the morass of solitary reflection.

  Too real, the chance he might fail in the mission sealed by his sworn oath to the Fellowship.

  He rode with his ears sometimes ringing with fever, the relentless ache of his wounded right hand slung in a pinned fold of his cloak. Under dressings he had been too hard-pressed to clean, a raw sore leaked pus where the traumatized flesh refused to close over and heal. His chin was a stubble of uncut, black beard, and his shirts stank of unwashed sweat. By day, the sun lit flash fires in his brain. By night, the fierce stars of Athera’s vast heavens pierced him with limitless emptiness.

  He felt like a vessel sucked hollow of dreams, until the dread moment he chanced to look up to establish a routine bearing. His fate lay before him. Against the scribed ribbon of the horizon, he beheld the upthrust scarp of rock that bore Ithamon’s ruin like the battered rim of a diadem.

  Just as before, the sight struck his heart like a blow, leaving him winded and breathless. No less poignant for the forewarning of memory, the eloquent testament of smashed lives and broken dreams in the stark, tumbled stone of the wreckage. Then the four towers arisen among them, still pristine in grace, pure as a cry amid the tumbledown battlements. The ruled fall of sunlight struck their façades, raising fine sound like the chiming tap of a bronze mallet against keys of crystal and glass.

  A man raised to the powers of a masterbard’s art would have to be deaf not to hear. Arithon gasped, smote to the heart by that soundless chord of vibration. Four pealing notes, whose fifth register was absent, a void like a wound into darkness; for of four towers raised to anchor the tenets of virtue, the fifth one had been cast down. The King’s Tower was crumbled, reduced to a weed-grown foundation on the hour a Paravian king had been murdered.

  Hunched on his horse, his fist crushed to wet mane, Arithon bowed his head, shattered. He wept unabashed. The nerve in him faltered, for what lay ahead. Though blinded to sight of the spirits, the practiced maturity of his bardic perception laid him wide-open all over again. There would be no escape. He would hear in song, pouring from broken stone, the bittersweet echoes of beauty and truth, cut down by violence and bloodshed. The call would sing to him, sinew and nerve, and shackle him to the future. As the last surviving s’Ffalenn prince, his was the born burden to shoulder the promise of crown rule and restoration.

  Never mind that the very thought of that role ripped him to mangling agony. The ruin sustained protest, endured against time. Its state of desecration could not alter its set law, or its ingrained fire of inspiration. Here, the unseated stones themselves rang to the foundational chord of compassion and undefiled mercy. That imprint waited with the blank patience of time, to be reclothed in its rightful, lost harmony. Arithon tasted the salt of his tears, reduced to abject humility. While he lived, Ithamon would never release its ancestral hold on the blood and the bone of him.

  Torn open, exposed against silver-clad hills, with the winter’s harsh grip embossed foil on black rocks, and the wind a honed dagger to flay him, Arithon fought for the necessary courage to prod his thin mare forward. The ache in his spirit would not be assuaged, nor the guilt that rode at his shoulder. There were too many dead for his name, since Tal Quorin, then those casualties multiplied manyfold more, at Minderl Bay and at Vastmark.

  Those ghosts would bind him to the seat of s’Ffalenn sovereignty, and hound him to desolate madness.

  A more cruel moment could not be conceived, for enemy riders to sight him. Attached to the garrison men encamped by the ruin, the party of five had been sent foraging for game to ease the scarcity of supplies. Their shout of discovery from the crest of the next hilltop caught their quarry defenselessly vulnerable.

  Arithon snapped face around. Shot erect by dousing, shrill fear, he took in at a glance the ragtag black surcoats worn by Jaelot’s city guard. He drew Alithiel left-handed. While the enemies who charged to kill drove downslope in a spray of burst snow, he reined his mount, staggering to meet them.

  ‘Go back!’ he pealed out, a cry that distilled his raw tumult of unanswerable pain. ‘Ath pity your families, desist!’ Through the trained timbre of his Masterbard’s voice, the hills spoke in echoes to shiver the spine.

  Here, his blood tie as Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince could not fail to be recognized. Where the current of the fifth lane sang through the kingdom’s ancient heartland, the flux line itself bore the stamp of the Fellowship ceremony that had sealed his affirmation. The light striking off Ithamon’s high towers peaked in resonance and burned, raised to a beacon flare of wild magic.

  Then that errant burst snuffed out like blown flame as Arithon clapped down a defense wrought of merciless shadow. Through a darkness to freeze living flesh to dry powder, he reined about and urged his horse to a stumbling gallop.

  Downhill he raced, toward his pursuit. To reach Ithamon, he must pass through them. His mare was too spent for a circuitous chase back through the open countryside. Heedless of bad footing, he forced reckless speed. The guidance that steered him was the jingle of mail, and the bewildered shouts of the armed men who blundered, equally blinded, to take him. If he held slight advantage for his trained grasp of sound, they were five to his one, and mounted on horses that were decently fed and well rested. Raked by thorns, slapped by branches, Arithon smashed through the gully. The heave of the horse’s shoulders beneath him informed him of rising ground. Armored horsemen thrashed headlong down the slope. The shod hooves of their destriers struck red sparks from flint rocks, and their curses were all but on top of him.

  Arithon sifted the oncoming barrage of sound, the whine of wind sliced across someone’s bared steel, and the jink of roweled spurs, and a bearded man’s labored breathing. He angled Alithiel, braced to thrust as he passed, prepared for the shock as Paravian steel sheared into armor and bone. His worst risk, the chance the blade might bind fast, and tear from his grasp in the wrench as the maimed rider tumbled.

  One stride farther on, his mare misstepped, slid a foreleg on ice, and crashed sidewards. Arithon tucked into a roll before impact. He struck full force on his shoulder. The air slammed from his lungs. His grasp on the shado
w screen lapsed for one second. He saw light strike through, flash in dazzling reflection off the bared runes of Alithiel, outthrust away from his body. Then the hooves of the enemy horse thudded over him, and a blow to the head sundered him into the yawning void of unconsciousness.

  Winter 5670

  Whitehaven

  Turned off the steep, winding road that climbed the North Gap to Eastwall, a left-branching goat track led to the hostel of Ath’s adepts. The trail was narrow, a rough staircase of flint rock, hedged by the stunted firs that clung to harsh life at high altitude. Overhead, jagged summits scraped the roof of the sky, ripping the hems of the fast-moving storm clouds, or else capped by fair-weather ice plumes condensed from the sea-warmed, westerly currents that combed through the teeth of the ranges. The rare traveler attempted that route in deep winter, though the scouring north winds often razed off the drifts that mired the lower passes. Fewer still, the wayfarers who braved the upper peaks in solitude. The rigorous ascent in thin air could inflict vicious headaches and nausea, or spells of blackout faintness.

  At first, Elaira presumed she had succumbed to such wasting sickness. The sheet of glare thrown off white snow stabbed like knives to the brain, distorting her overtaxed sight. Then vision failed utterly. Her perception disintegrated as though a thousand shot pinholes suddenly let in the dark.

  She stumbled. Thrown to her knees, the enchantress grabbed blindly to save herself from a tumbling fall. Sharpened edges of stone gouged her shin, despite her thick hide leggings. As her outraged flesh recorded no more than the ghostly impression of bruising, she realized, through a split second of terror, that this was no ill effect from thin air. Then the side of her skull burst and exploded, as if someone clubbed her full force with an iron-studded bludgeon. Her cry, as she dropped, was no call for help, but the name of Arithon s’Ffalenn.