Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  This time, the enchantress whose awareness rode under the eagle’s protection raised thought in shocked distaste.

  ‘That’s an uncleared remnant of a Koriani sigil! No doubt some botched effort of Lirenda’s to avenge herself on Arithon s’Ffalenn. Her attempt to cause harm using preemptive spellcraft was certainly never sanctioned.’

  The eagle returned a stripped fact in reply. ‘Your Prime Matriarch was displeased enough to reassign the enchantress to a stint of unranked service at Highscarp’s sisterhouse.’

  ‘Did she?’ Elaira’s rejoinder shimmered with rueful amusement. ‘Well then, Lirenda’s unlikely to humiliate herself further by petitioning the old peeress there for the leave time to disperse these embarrassing remains.’

  Sorcerer and enchantress were both well aware those loose ends posed a potential danger. Unless ruled by a banishing, such unattached sigils could settle upon a man wit-lost in drink, or attach to some unguarded traveler. A forge-fire spark touched the eagle’s sharp eyes. His opinion came razored with sarcasm. ‘Shall we provoke? I’d say your colleague deserves a comeuppance for slipshod practice and arrogance.’

  The question did not beg any grace of permission. Without pause for Elaira’s considered response, the bird banked again. Icy winds keened through taut feathers as he abandoned his lazy circling. The seared, corpse-strewn landscape unreeled beneath his sharp plunge.

  A fast-moving scrap of suncast shadow, the eagle swooped down upon snow-patched hills, then over the smoldering waste of acres blackened to carbon. The steady beat of his wings whipped the brush, still streaming the sulfurous smoke of spent wildfires. His path leveled over the gulches where the maimed and the fallen still bled, writhing in nooses and spring traps, then skimmed toward the razed hillcrest where Rathain’s wounded caithdein lay sprawled at the feet of an Alliance commander. In wicked certainty that Elaira’s presence would be the tracked lure for Prime Selidie’s scryers at Whitehold, Davien bent the roundabout course of his passage directly across the keening roil of Lirenda’s illicit spellcraft.

  In far-off Highscarp, a single lit candle challenged the gloom in the Matriarch’s chamber of audience. The daylight flooding the wide, breakfront windows lay muffled behind velvet curtains, while six senior seeresses tracked Davien’s flight through an oval obsidian mirror. Following each twist and turn of his progress, Selidie Prime stiffened in sudden censure.

  She expelled a hissed breath, then flicked a finger to the peeress standing as witness. ‘What is initiate Lirenda’s assignment on the sisterhouse duty roster?’

  ‘She assists our fifth-rank senior sealing fiend banes.’ A small, wizened woman rendered bone thin by strict service, the aged prioress had outworn her tolerance for inferiors with rival intelligence. Years of jostling for rank had resharpened her antagonism to a consummate arsenal of tact. ‘An eighth-rank’s trained knowledge has been a great blessing to Saytra, whose hands suffer pain in cold weather.’

  Selidie stroked the delicate nail of her forefinger down the curve of one flawless cheek. ‘Lirenda’s discipline, sadly, does not match her abilities. When this scrying finishes, you’ll send summons in my name and appoint another assistant for Saytra. Lirenda will be referred to me for an audience. Henceforward, I will take on the selection of her assignments.’

  ‘Your will,’ murmured the peeress, disconcerted and unsure whether the change had gone in her favor.

  Like every ranking senior at Whitehold, she had learned to step softly before the Matriarch’s quicksilver temperament. One moment Selidie might order the attentive company of a dozen seniors; at the next breath, she was likely to send them all packing with a peremptory demand for privacy. No way to forecast which way the storm blew; the clear, girlish features saffron lit by the candle were an immaculate, expressionless doll’s. Selidie had depths to her no one dared touch. From the shining, pinned knot of her marigold hair, to the tip of each manicured finger, the new Matriarch bore the weighty mantle of prime power with inscrutable, adamantine authority.

  Today’s close examination of events in Daon Ramon showed no sign of cessation.

  ‘Stay with that eagle,’ Selidie commanded her assembled circle of scryers. Tight focus restored, she resettled herself on her tasseled hassock, the gleaming gold sigils stitched into her overskirt set adrift on a tissue of silver muslin. The grape-colored velvet of the garment beneath melted without seam into a darkness that swallowed her slippered toes. At the Prime’s knee, surrounding the dusky polish of the scrying slab framed in its lion-foot stand, the six seniors who shouldered her bidding remained submerged in linked trance. Their faces set wax in congealing shadow, they breathed in tuned unison against a silence that hung dense as soaked felt.

  The entrained flow of images they channeled from Daon Ramon described a horrific contrast of destruction and tumult. Where the eagle’s flight skimmed, the raised fires of Lysaer’s wrath had fanned a scorched vista, strewn with the smoking, charred ribs of hapless small animals and deer. The seared meat of downed horses pinned the grisly, scorched corpses of riders with faces beyond recognition; men fallen with blackened, fragmented finger bones still obscenely wedded with the melted lumps of steel weapons. The worn stone of the hills had been blasted to slag, a feat not seen since the wars in the Age of Dragons.

  ‘Such bald-faced effrontery!’ Selidie murmured. ‘He won’t escape consequence, this time.’ The back of one hand pressed to her mouth to mask a spasm of sickened distaste, she chose not to qualify which male offender had provoked her scathing comment. She might have condemned the hand of the killer, or the ferocious cleverness of the plan that had engendered first provocation, or even, the Sorcerer masked in the form of the eagle who steered his willful course through the carnage.

  If Davien was her malefactor, he showed no concern. A powerful wingbeat drove him beyond the crest where Earl Jieret was presently being bound hand and foot by his Alliance captor.

  Neither man had come through the conflict unscathed. The obsidian mirror showed singed clothing and livid weals where exposed skin had scalded to blisters. Jieret squinted and cringed, as though blinded. The grate of the embedded bolt in his shoulder drove him near witless with pain.

  Sulfin Evend fared better, since his placement at the moment the light bolts had struck had set him at the nexus of the spell that released Arithon’s contained shielding of shadow. His immediate belongings had not escaped. The wooden stock of his crossbow had subsumed to hot coals. His horse was cooked meat for the crows. The scrying mirror flung back his ripe curse, spiked with his pedigree Hanshire accent.

  ‘Ah, excellent, we can hear them.’ Selidie’s triangular smile showed teeth, and her view of the glass, a hungry cat’s fascination.

  ‘Why not just kill me?’ Earl Jieret provoked in a forced gravel whisper. ‘I won’t walk one step, though you force me, and I’m too awkward to pack on your back.’

  ‘You’ll be dragged, then,’ Sulfin Evend snapped, surly as he discovered his spoiled boots, holed through by hot ash and cinders. ‘Death here and now is too tidy for you, Red-beard. You’ll taste the fire and sword as a sorcerer, but before that day comes, we’ll be bargaining. Let’s see what value you bring as a hostage to reel in the Spinner of Darkness.’

  ‘Wasted effort,’ Jieret insisted, broken off by a grunt of taut pain as his enemy rolled him onto his back, then looped his tied forearms with a half hitch. ‘His Grace of Rathain is far beyond reach, and unlikely to return as your sacrifice.’

  ‘So we’ll see.’ Sulfin Evend adjusted the drag rope over his shoulder, then leaned into the burden of hauling the chieftain behind him as deadweight. ‘If nothing else, there are merchants in Etarra who would pay in gold coin for the spectacle of your execution.’

  Selidie clapped her hands in sharp glee. ‘Oh, excellent! We might see this bait taken.’ She gave the Highscarp peeress’s blank look the contempt of her explanation. ‘If Elaira breaks down and frees Earl Jieret, she’ll disarm the new threat to Prince Arithon. But then we�
��ll have Rathain’s caithdein bound to us under a Koriani oath of debt. We, and not Lysaer, will hold claim on the pawn to draw in and trap the s’Ffalenn bastard.’

  ‘Should we trouble?’ Despite the chill in the fireless chamber, the peeress found her palms sweating. ‘The wretched royal bastard’s already doomed, set to flight like a rabbit in Daon Ramon.’

  ‘But you’re wrong,’ Prime Selidie contradicted. A fair spider centered within her spun web, she stroked the enamel face of the scrying glass with eager satisfaction. ‘The Master of Shadow has become this world’s most powerful bargaining chip. Take him, and we’ll break the Fellowship’s will, then wrest our order free of the compact.’

  Late Winter 5670

  Hostage

  Earl Jieret endured the jouncing, rough transit, too dazed with pain to separate the scrapes of sharp rocks from the raking gouge of razed roots as the Alliance Lord Commander towed his captive bulk over the gulches. If the thorns of furze scrub and briar ripped him bloody, the burns inflicted by his grazing encounter with Lysaer’s light bolts overwhelmed every other sensation. The raw flesh of his face raged and stung as though put to the torch. Each slight breath of wind, even the wan spill of winter sunshine, hazed his seared skin and lashed up a flood of bright agony. Faint from shock and blood loss, Rathain’s caithdein bit back shredding screams as the bite of the crossbow bolt grated and lodged deeper into the bone of his shoulder.

  The rare patch of iced snow left him scratched, soaked, and gasping. No horror of war had ever savaged him like this. The few times he blacked out, the mercy was brief. Through spinning, patched senses, his awareness ebbed and surged back into brutal, clear focus. The unending blindness did not lift. The ghastly realization undid him, that the conflagration must have spoiled his eyesight. Scouring tears welled through his shut lids like white lye, beyond any power to subdue.

  Hope died, that he could find any reprieve. The death that might save him lay pitifully beyond reach. Jieret struggled, dazed as a fish on a line. Exhaustion drained him. The unbearable interval ground on and on, filled by the abrasive buffet of wind, the unending barrage of his agony strung through by the chink of Sulfin Evend’s roweled spurs.

  The cessation of movement brought no relief. Vertigo made the ground seem to heave underneath him. He lay, sick and panting, while hearing delivered snatched fragments of speech that his paralyzed mind could not fathom. More helpless with misery than any man born should endure and still keep breathing life, he sprawled limp. Every muscle felt pulled, and each tendon, flayed bare. Pain mantled him under a suffocating blanket, until the pressed weight of his suffering drilled his skull like a sieve and scattered his thoughts like spilled water.

  Then hands grasped his clothing. He was propped partly upright. The explosion of hurt left him heaving and stupid. The world spun, with his body soaked clay, nipped and tugged by demonic fingers. Cold kissed his skin, then the tip of a knife blade probed like a ruby-hot poker.

  ‘No choice,’ snapped a voice. ‘We’ll just have to tend this.’

  His shoulder was pinned in a grip like locked shackles. He flinched and whimpered, too wretched to choke back his animal screams as the buried steel bolt was cut free of the muscle, then the flange of the point pried from its wedged seat in his collarbone.

  The brutal round of cautery that followed half killed him. For time beyond bearing, Jieret lay on his side, heaving and panting and broken past sanity by the stink of his own seared flesh.

  Footsteps went and came again. Ruthless handling pried his mouth open. A tin cup rapped his teeth. Ice-chilly water slopped into his mouth, bitter sharp with the taste of ashes and the rusted tang of rinsed blood; evidently he had bitten his tongue, unawares. He choked; received a pounding slap on the back that cleared his throat and forced the unwilling reflex to swallow.

  ‘Dharkaron’s black vengeance!’ he gasped through the ache as the cold reamed a pit in his belly.

  ‘Damned well not!’ snapped the Lord Commander in his clipped, Hanshire accent. ‘Light as my witness, you hell-spawned demon, I’m going to see that you live.’

  Jieret lay limp through the jostling discomfort of bandaging. Even without sight, he was astute enough to recognize an expert field dressing. The last chance extinguished, that he might pass Fate’s Wheel by the grace of inept treatment and wound fever.

  ‘My liege, forgive,’ he implored as his senses revolved and slid over the brink, into spiraling darkness. Hindsight blistered with undying shame, that he had not thought to turn steel on himself and take the clean end that Arithon’s last words had pleaded.

  * * *

  Jieret drifted in and out of pain-soaked dreams and brief periods of blackout sleep. When he woke, stiff and aching, the gnawing cold told him full night had finally fallen. The wind had shifted. Rising gusts from the north wore the keen scent of storm beneath the pall of charred brush. A crisp dryness burned his nostrils, clear warning of impending snowfall. Still bound hand and foot, he lay on his side. A wool blanket mantled his throbbing shoulder, soaked in the heat thrown off by a nearby campfire. To judge by the lessened sting to his skin, his burned face had been eased with grease salve, and a wet cloth swathed his light-scalded eyes.

  Hearing informed him he was not alone. Another casualty moaned and shivered to his left, apparently delirious with fever. To judge by the oaths spat in flat Hanshire accents, the Alliance Lord Commander disliked his role of nursemaiding disabled prisoners.

  Jieret heaved in a taxed breath. Though his parched larynx felt lined in ground grit, he made a rasping effort at speech. ‘You could simplify matters, and just cut our throats.’

  ‘Sithaer’s demon minions!’ came the ripping reply. A deadened thump shook the ground, as though a saddle or horse pack was cast down in a burst of irritation. ‘I don’t like spooning gruel, and I won’t have your lump-head barbarian opinion concerning the fate of your betters!’

  Made thick by discomfort, Jieret took a moment to unriddle the cause of the Hanshireman’s pungent language. ‘Oh, that’s rich.’ He wheezed, unable to stifle his barked laughter. The fit was short-lived. Aggravation wakened the ache in his shoulder and seized up his laboring chest. When the spasm unlocked, he resorted to words, which hurt just as much. ‘You couldn’t be suggesting that your daisy-faced godling has collapsed from overexcitement?’

  ‘Let him hear you say that, he’d clip out your tongue!’ The flint snap to Sulfin Evend’s response gave rise to a revelation.

  Jieret understood, with bleak joy, that he was not helpless after all. Amiable as the shark set at large among fry, he prodded, ‘Why? Should s’Ilessid fear my voice? Or did his fair coloring mislead even you? Surely you know the sordid truth.’

  The clink of Sulfin Evend’s spurs hesitated, as though he froze between steps.

  Into the dawning suggestive pause, Jieret punched out his surgical riposte, ‘No one told you that Lysaer s’Ilessid is half brother to Arithon s’Ffalenn?’

  A hard, disturbed silence, filled by the wail of fell winds, then the sickbed whimper of the invalid alongside, who had to be Lysaer, stricken prostrate by massive overuse of his gift. Presupposing that backlash had inflamed the s’Ilessid to an imbalanced state of high fever, Jieret goaded, ‘You never heard that Avar s’Ffalenn got his son on the mother of your Blessed Prince?’

  ‘Bastard! Pirate’s get!’ A riled disturbance as blankets were tossed off, and the invalid rose to the baiting. ‘My mother’s shame and a sorcerer’s game piece!’

  Sulfin Evend’s growled oath entangled with a scuffle, as he leaped to wrestle his royal charge flat. Lysaer’s enraged words emerged through the fracas, deranged and deadly with spite. ‘What is the man, but the cursed seed of an enemy bred and born just to gall my royal father to blind rages?’

  Jieret suppressed a wicked thrill of glee. ‘Ath’s truth! A blood kinship exists between your false avatar and the one you name Spinner of Darkness.’

  ‘No kin of mine!’ snarled Lysaer in delirium. He fough
t, cursing Sulfin Evend’s restraint, all the while railing in affront, ‘What is the s’Ffalenn wretch but a criminal condemned for the wreck of a fleet? His damned sorceries, you know, were what sent me to exile!’

  ‘Not divine calling, after all,’ Jieret agreed.

  ‘Stop this!’ A heaped pile of faggots overset with a clunk, hard followed by a commotion across the fire pit.

  Then a rasp of loose stone bespoke lightning movement. Jieret was slammed down by a clout that skewed the bandaging over his eyes. Stunned dizzy, he battled the fingers that clamped in sharp effort to silence him.

  ‘Want a gag for your pains?’ Sulfin Evend ground out. He mashed his victim’s burned face to the snow. ‘You’ve caused his Exalted Grace undue distress with your slander.’

  Still vigorous, Jieret twisted his head and jerked free, then gasped on a scraping breath, ‘Ah, I see! His exalted self might not care to discuss family history when he’s flat on his back, sick and raving. A delicate quandary. Would the trade guilds still pay for his war camps and diamonds, or will they decide to expose his grand cause as a fraud?’

  ‘Clan cur! You blaspheme!’ Sulfin Evend used expert force and manhandled his barbarian antagonist facedown on the frost-hardened ground.

  ‘Do I?’ gasped Jieret, though his mouth filled with slush and the gritted tang of mulched leaves. ‘Princess Talith learned better, during the weeks she spent in Prince Arithon’s company. Perhaps that’s why some well-placed jackal in Avenor’s high council made certain she fell to her death.’

  ‘She was a suicide, and already condemned. Her conviction for adultery and high treason stand as a matter of public record.’ An unpleasant, short skirmish saw Jieret’s maimed shoulder slammed down, then ground beneath the mailed weight of Sulfin Evend’s bent knee.