Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Spider still as she bided in wait for the gathering power to peak, Selidie savored the rapture of her unbridled anticipation.

  Once the Betrayer lay at the order’s mercy, she could seize the Named imprint of his consciousness. Given that template, she could then craft the specialized sigil to rule him. His formidable power would become hers to milk. With Asandir absent, and Sethvir laid low, the Prime Matriarch would stand unopposed. She could unleash the old knowledge she guarded. Within the next minutes, she would claim the sure leverage to free the Koriani Order and lead mankind back into ascendancy.

  The Waystone reached resonance. Embraced by a pall of silvery light as its field of charged forces surrounded her, Selidie closed and sealed the last link that enabled the squared circle of entrapment. Then she spoke the name of Elaira three times over the prime sigil of command.

  The summons crossed the barriers of time and distance. Reaction was instantaneous: Elaira’s spirit was netted in by main force from her far-off sojourn in Daon Ramon. Selidie sensed the moment of contact; felt the spelled directive cast its taut mesh over the enchantress and the Fellowship Sorcerer that folly had tied into partnership.

  The Great Waystone heated against Selidie’s clasped hands. ‘We have him!’ she crowed as the sigil clamped down, its barbed hooks deeply set into her hapless quarry. ‘May he well rue the day that his kind bound our sisterhood under the compact!’

  Without the bone and flesh of a body, Davien would have no foothold to anchor him at the instant of flux.

  The crystal’s charged matrix served as ladder and gateway, spanning the axis of existence. Selidie kept watchful contact, light fingers tracing the pulse as her array of keyed spellcraft thundered to enable the threshold opened within. Inside the holding, split second of recall, she grazed against the full awareness of the Sorcerer’s being. Davien’s presence loomed vast, power chained into knotted complexity beyond mortal thinking to grasp. He was leashed might and lightning, dark unknown and gold light, a conscious pavane of moving energy, the essence of which strained away through her grasp like blown smoke.

  ‘No!’ Stunned by the sense of his substance eluding her, Selidie cupped the Great Waystone in a convulsive grip. Already hot, the stone lit to burning, polarized in return by something that did not bleed away as Davien’s awareness departed. Along with Elaira’s oathbound spirit, the Prime detected a packaged bundle of energies. She could not tag its signature. Its presence was a puff of movement and air, an impression half-formed as a spell weave of runes caught up like a burr in the transfer.

  The Prime received warning, but no time to react. Before thought could respond and snap the connection, the fragment of malice the Betrayer delivered lodged inside the sealed well of her trap.

  The Waystone rang like a bell. The inbound vibration raised a standing wave that could not be damped at short notice, tuned as it was into phased resonance with the prime cipher of command. To force the calibration awry was no option. The interlocked currents would turn lethal with imbalance. Only through controlled care and a ritual sequence of steps could the power be bled off in harmless dispersal.

  White ice under pressure, Selidie stamped down rattled nerves. She could outface this crisis. Strong enough not to be hazed into panic, she uttered the first cantrip to discharge the prime cipher.

  Too late; already a silver jet of possibility erupted within the circled square. Then the tendril became manifest. Orange flame licked up the silver legs of the tripod and engulfed the Waystone still clasped between the Prime Matriarch’s hands.

  Singed to blisters, she yanked back, then cursed the thoughtless speed of brute reflex.

  The lapsed contact had broken her rapport with the jewel. Cut off from access, she had lost her means to steer the amethyst’s roused might to quiescence.

  Although the disbanding of the prime cipher had granted Elaira’s spirit an immediate release from the summoning, the crafted lines of the construct to imprison a Sorcerer still glowed on the hardwood floor. The eightfold sigils of binding remained fully active, a ranging force laid down with all but indelible potency.

  Selidie cradled reddened hands to her breast, her curse a cracked note of frustration as she encompassed the scope of expanding dilemma. The Waystone’s raised matrix was linked to the spells. She could not breach their warding from outside to quench the fire, which was real, a ridiculous crudity kept fueled by wax polish and blackening walnut parquet. To intervene would unleash the Waystone’s raised field, inviting an uncontrolled backlash that would kill every enchantress caught within range. Nor was delay feasible. The flames nipped and crackled, hot enough to shatter the great amethyst. The jewel’s loss was unthinkable, a blow that would cripple the order’s best strength and destroy an irreplaceable reservoir of stored knowledge.

  ‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear strike us all to perdition!’ Selidie howled in black fury. The ignominious simplicity enraged her, that the Betrayer should have balked her bold play with no more than a commonplace firestorm. Not only was the Great Waystone at risk, but the building heat of the conflagration was melting the dark wax that defined the eight ciphers of containment. Another minute would see the wards breached from within, likely seeding a spiraling holocaust.

  Prime Selidie fell back upon crude expedient, and snatched the silk stitched with the ninefold sigils of imprisonment from her sleeve cuff. Cast the cloth over the Waystone, and its ties to the construct would be cut. The wards in the silk could withstand its raised power. Wrapped and pulled to safety, the stone could stay masked, the forces of backlash held in abeyance until the irritating threat of the fire spell was resolved.

  Driven frantic as she snapped the folds from the cloth, Selidie called instructions to the four seniors standing as anchors. ‘Scribe a fresh circle! We’re going to need a new set of wards laid down underlaid by the forces of water!’ The construct would close a catchframe of containment and stay the spread of the flames. ‘Act swiftly!’

  Within a scant second, the wax ciphers binding the original squared circle were going to puddle and give way, spilling who knew what chaos of Davien’s to the caprice of the four winds and beyond.

  Selidie cast the unfurled cloth over the dark facets of the Waystone. The licking blaze snapped and ignited the hem, then flared up the gauze-thin silk. Selidie cried out as the sewn copper sigils liquefied in the heat. A searing rain of metallic droplets pattered over her wrists and hands. Scalded, she gasped out a whistling breath as the ephemeral cloth wisped to ash.

  ‘Maker preserve, we’re in trouble now,’ wailed one of the watching enchantresses.

  ‘Be silent!’ Weeping tears for the setback, shaken with pain, Selidie wrestled to center her distracted mind. Disaster beckoned. She had less than a heartbeat to act. No choice remained, no choice at all; she must surrender burned hands to the fire and reforge her snapped link with the Waystone.

  Once she harnessed the amethyst’s matrix, she could wield its empowered focus. The construct for containment and Davien’s sent spell could both be doused at one stroke.

  But she had to subdue the roused Waystone first. Already lashed into unbridled resonance, the jewel would strike with instantaneous force. Its assault would be unrelenting. Selidie would have no moment of preparation, no interlude of testing quiet in which to compose her riled nerves. Worse still, she must distance every distraction. The risk was unilateral. She could not divide her resources, even to set the most basic protection to safeguard her unshielded hands.

  While she battled the Waystone, the fire would burn her. In peril of her very survival, she must yield no thought to the horror, must stand unmoved by torment. Fail in rigid discipline, and the spite in the amethyst would claim her. Personal consciousness would be dragged under and shackled, a living imprisonment more final than Daelion Fatemaster’s damnation.

  Too many of her predecessors had been lost in times past, never to see rescue or recovery.

  Not courageous at all, but ruled by the gauntlet of duty, Prime Selidi
e spread trembling, blistered fingers. She thrust her arms through the fire, screaming out her raw fear. Then, her dread vented, a hold like cold death clamped over her traumatized mind, the Prime Matriarch groped for the Waystone.

  Eyes closed, consumed by unflinching purpose, Selidie refused to acknowledge the stink of her own charring flesh. The actinic flare of outraged nerves reamed her through, then became stripped of meaning by the bared lash of her will. She held herself shuttered. Entombed in a bastion of self-imposed calm, all her focused resource pitched to wrestle the Waystone’s ferocious peril, she blundered toward her objective. Her weeping skin made contact with a searing hiss. Now wedded to the amethyst’s deadly, dark facets, she would either immolate herself, or wrest out an avenue of yielding surrender through which she could impose dominance.

  Crowded, battered, pummeled by the maelstrom of the stone’s viciousness, she lost all thoughts but the one that secured her self-identity. Time lost cohesion. She could not stay the onslaught to know whether the wax sigils had melted, or if the squared circle had breached. All details became immaterial: whether her hands became crisped to the bone did not matter, or whether the great amethyst would shear into cracks and shatter to fragments from heat stress.

  Nor dared she acknowledge the gibbering cries of lost primes, their ghost presence turbulent about her as they mocked, or gabbled their insane advice. Slaved consciousnesses, all, they were part of the Waystone’s imprinted core, a storehouse of past wisdom and historical detritus, evolved into sentient malice.

  As crystal, the amethyst could not access itself; insatiably hungry, it craved to add Selidie’s awareness to its purgatory of trapped spirits. Those assimilated human thoughts and emotions provided the enlivening seeds, enabling its matrix to evolve through interactive conception.

  Selidie resisted the siren cries. She deafened her being to the melting enticements that promised her pleasures unimaginable. She faced down the threats, arisen like dragon’s teeth, that browbeat her resolve with vistas of limitless pain. She broke through the clamor of illusions insisting her autonomy had been broken in defeat.

  Obdurate, Selidie braced through the ordeal. Exposed, stripped naked by the shot arrows of a thousand barbed energies, she held fast. Her stance must be strength, without desperation. Inner balance must prevail in the face of rank chaos, though earth itself should give way and crumble under her feet. She must not think, must not feel. Lose her grip on resolve, and the grinding mill of the Waystone’s stewed rancor would sweep her under. She resisted as rock, hammered and smashed and pummeled by currents that wore at her reserve with the blind rage of a cataclysm.

  Damned faces streamed by, claiming to be mother, father, sister, or brother. Selidie kept her true memories wrapped silent, abjured all temptation to refute the snared spirits. To acknowledge them at all, even as impostors, was to trip and fall into a morass of hostile energies that would flay her. The Waystone’s pack of captive spirits demanded, then howled. They tore with tooth and nail, hurling fragments of ancient spellcraft in their effort to wrest her spirit from its housing of breathing, warm flesh.

  More patient than the most cold-blooded predator, Selidie maintained her beleaguered pocket of calm. She resisted the falsehood, that the scope and force of the conflict had hurled her beyond time. Centuries, or mere seconds, the elapsed interval must not matter. If she succumbed to any small thread of distraction, she would become lost forever.

  Then the opening presented. Her inner sight picked up a split-second rift through the snarling legions of ghosts. Into that breach, she rammed the first sigil configured to rule the Great Waystone. One axis of four stood cleared of obstruction. Given that foothold, that abatement of ranged power, the Koriani Prime oriented her awareness within the dark heart of the sphere. Riding on spatial instinct and the hardened reserve of experience, she tapped into the amethyst’s matrix, then lashed back, her will focused diamond, and her mastery unerring. As the other three sigils swept chaos before them, she achieved the stunning release. Unified peace descended as the crystal opened in limpid surrender.

  Her senses rushed back. Slapped blind and breathless by an onslaught of lacerating pain, Selidie maintained her trembling hold. She tapped the Waystone’s tamed focus to steady herself, then forced open smoke-stinging eyes.

  Restored to awareness, she crouched, bent and weeping over the charred wreckage of her hands. The fires beneath had somehow extinguished, a mystery she had no scrap of resource to pursue. From whatever source, the intervention had come too late to spare her from ruin. Blackened stubs of stripped bone, stuck with scorched meat and tendons, remained clamped with welded tenacity to the Waystone.

  The jewel was still hot. Smoke purled reeking wisps from the crabbed remnants of her fingers. Underneath, the heartcore of the jewel was uncracked; its facets still gleamed, the spiked core of the matrix glimmering with needles of poised force.

  Limp, all but broken, Selidie croaked the command to restore the grand focus to quiescence. As the jewel’s powers ebbed, then finally deserted her, she shuddered under the assault of a pain beyond all rational endurance. Overset by reaction and visceral horror, Prime Selidie tore her flaking flesh free.

  She would have collapsed, had two ranking seniors not rushed forward and caught her. Their trembling grasp shored her up, a staunch presence bracing her shoulders.

  ‘Come,’ someone said. ‘Let us get you away.’ Then, ‘Just lean back and breathe. Asya’s already gone to the sisterhouse. She’s bringing a third-rank healer to help straightaway.’

  Selidie dragged in a coarse, moaning breath. Through a nightmare of agony, she struggled for speech: how had the fires of Davien’s conjury extinguished? An inarticulate whimper rasped from her throat, weak as a newborn kitten’s.

  The seeress used her crystal, tapped her gift of empathy, and read her Prime’s balked intent. Her neutral voice answered and resolved burning need. ‘The Betrayer included a limiting rune. His fire spell dispersed by itself.’

  Which meant, all along, there had been no danger. Amid greasy smoke and the scorched waste of her wardspell, Prime Selidie absorbed the cruel truth: that the squared circle would not have been breached; nor would the Great Waystone have cracked under stress. Had she held back, taken one cool moment to weigh risks, she could have escaped with no further harm than a few scalded blisters.

  ‘Oh, mercy, my hands,’ she groaned through locked teeth. Her head lolled back, singed hair tumbled loose, as her attendants bore her up and assisted her tottering step. ‘Burned to the bone, and for nothing.’ She wanted to howl, that she had been wantonly crippled by tricks, the victim of her own cleverness.

  She understood Davien’s promise with Elaira had been nothing more than fiendish bait all along.

  Like a headstrong, green fool, she had succumbed to assumption, and treated with the Betrayer as though he was an unshielded spirit.

  ‘You know what this means,’ she gasped, excoriated by trapped rage and humiliation. Shocked, spinning on the verge of hysteria, she pulled up short, and cried out to the devastated sisters who tended her, ‘What in the name of Ath’s creation has this Fellowship meddler become?’

  As a discorporate entity, Davien should not have possessed the means to evade her laid snare!

  ‘Hush,’ soothed the seeress. ‘Never mind. Keep you still.’

  Another initiate burst in with soaked towels. Solicitous hands eased the Prime down on a cushioned divan and started the tender task of wrapping the seared bones of her fingers. Soon after, Selidie lost her last wits to the pain.

  A dimmed voice of protest funneled to her through a roaring storm of torment. ‘Mercy on her, can’t this wait for a posset?’

  Then at last, someone kind forced a rag to her mouth and muffled her mindless screaming.

  Back on Daon Ramon Barrens, naked to the skin, the Sorcerer Davien rubbed his hands down the lean, muscled line of his flanks. Then, bothered by the nagging pull of a cramp, he clasped his immaculate, artist’s fingers and s
tretched linked arms over his head. The flex of his lips held both sorrow and irony as he cast a glance eastward, and murmured, ‘My dear, the lesson was harshly unpleasant, but needful. You will certainly think twice before you wield the power of your order, or poke prying hands into Fellowship business again.’

  Supremely untroubled by the blasting wind, or by the last, wisping snowfall that dewed his pale skin and flecked spangling flakes amid tumbled, cinnabar hair, Davien closed his dark eyes.

  He dispatched a ranging thought to the east, and assured himself that Elaira’s spirit had returned without harm to her body. She would waken shortly in the hostel near Eastwall, secure within the adept’s sacred grove, and none the worse for her spiritwalk in Daon Ramon.

  Then, freed to attend to more pressing matters, the Sorcerer regarded the blanketed form of Earl Jieret, lashed wrist and ankle before him.

  Davien’s knife-sharp brows gathered into a frown. He bent, his questing touch light as a ghost’s, and ascertained the clan chieftain was unconscious. Pulse and breathing were regular. The caithdein’s condition was stressed, his body dehydrated from blood loss, but in no threat of imminent collapse. Faultlessly gentle, the Betrayer turned the man’s head. He straightened the snarled clan braid, then stroked the soot-streaked, snake locks of loosened hair from the chieftain’s cheek and forehead. ‘Brave one, take my promise, you won’t suffer alone any longer.’

  Last, his formed will made manifest as an intricate tracery of light, the Sorcerer imprinted the cipher to summon Traithe’s raven against the caithdein’s stilled brow.

  He added a whispered blessing, then finished, ‘Act wisely and well.’

  Davien straightened up. His flesh by now stung to a blush by the cold, he tipped back his head. The aquiline jut of his profile formed a stamped cameo against the black rock of the outcrop as a poised second passed. Then a soundless explosion of light ripped his male figure into formless static. The sparks winked and faded. In their place, an eagle shot upward, winging purposefully northward into the waning night.