Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Inform the accused,’ said Prime Selidie above her, inexorable as Daelion Fatemaster, whose dispassionate decree dispatched all doomed men to Sithaer. ‘She will not be made witless. As eighth-rank, in these times, her high knowledge and training are assets that cannot be spared. Therefore, since her integrity is not to be trusted, her free will shall become bound over to me.’

  A ghastly spear of ice thrust through skin and bone, raw power cast out of the Skyron crystal as sigils were formed and the stone responded in tuned resonance. Lirenda felt all her bones turn to water. Yet she was not permitted to fall. Racked upright by the hold of spelled forces, she could neither move nor blink. Above her, the voice of her Prime tolled on.

  ‘No spell will the accused cast that does not move through my auspice. She will not speak, unless my voice questions her, or unless my instructions allow. If she ever departs from my presence without leave, her life ceases, her breathing and heart to be stopped. Since her post is to be at my side, day and night, she will act as my personal servant. So must it be.’

  The rune of ending slammed down with annihilating force, a closure like the knell of doom struck through Lirenda’s caged being. She found herself crying. The tears streamed down her numbed cheeks, splashing over her silk clothes and the violet sheen of the coverlet.

  After what seemed an eon, the Skyron aquamarine was drawn away by the peeress’s unsteady hands. The power of its binding did not ebb with its touch. Selidie’s wrought geas stayed fixed through live flesh, deeply set as the thrust of a sword blade.

  Lirenda’s fury could do naught but beat helpless wings against the slammed door of her mind. The finality crushed her, that this spelled enslavement was going to be permanent; the secret of Selidie’s unconscionable transgression would stay locked into oblivion within her.

  The centuries of life bequeathed by her longevity stretched ahead, framing a bleak and desperate future. Lirenda cursed the air in her lungs, then reviled her reflex to keep breathing. Through that moment, and the next, and the next after that, against the grinding purgatory of stolen years yet to come, the fall of Dharkaron’s Black Spear would have been a welcomed kindness.

  Instead, shaken hands caught her elbows, lifted, and resettled her puppet’s frame on a stool. Someone’s cool industry untied her wrists. Still, the sobs shook her, deep wrenching gasps all the more terrible for the fact that Selidie’s punishment throttled them vocally silent.

  Through her desecrated misery, Lirenda was scarcely aware of the bustle as two healers with the gray bands of charitable service returned to minister at the Prime’s bedside. Stepping past and around her, they attended the Matriarch’s cracked, ghastly hands. Their scolding distress over the folly of movement fell muted, lost into the shadows and scintillant light cast by the bright-burning candles.

  Then one of the healers bent over Lirenda. Her competent touch clasped one wrist and measured the imprisoned, fast race of her pulse. ‘She ought be given a sedative to settle the strain.’

  The Prime granted permission.

  A nearby clinking of glass, then the chill rim of a cup pressed against the condemned’s numbed lips. Unable to wince as the bitter soporific ran over her tongue, helpless to raise the natural objection that should have risen her gorge, Lirenda swallowed.

  Spiraling darkness arose, dense as felt. As she sank toward an oblivion that promised no respite, she heard Selidie’s formal address to the peeress, dismissing her from the role of Ceremonial Inquisitor. Then the page boys were given rapid instructions to see Lirenda’s clothing packed into trunks for an immediate sea journey to Forthmark.

  The choice made sense, Lirenda understood, sluggish thought fueled by the last, drowning flare of her embittered rage. The irony cut cruelly. Too late to fight, she understood why the dread sentence had not allowed mercy, or sealed her escape into the abandoned peace of the witless.

  Prime Matriarch Selidie had spoiled her hands. She therefore needed a highly trained proxy to enact the steps of her advanced conjuries. How bitter the rage for the price of her mishap, that all the power and young vigor of her body had been hobbled in one crippling setback. She had acted to ensure an uncertain future, in the face of disastrous setback.

  The comprehensive damage to her burns could not be assessed or remedied without exhaustive and expert help. The healers in Shand were the finest in the Koriani Order, and the only ones versed in the balanced use of opposing forces. Both the sigils of death and forced regeneration would be needed to restore any semblance of function to the Matriarch’s ravaged fingers, if indeed, the feat could be accomplished at all.

  Burning with smoldering, savage fury as she sank into the numbness of drugged sleep, Lirenda cursed the name of Rathain’s importunate prince. Had she never met Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, she would not be unstrung, or enthralled as the puppet for the cause of Selidie’s balked plot against the Fellowship Sorcerers.

  Late Winter 5670

  Elsewhere

  Beneath the spired stacks of Rockfell Peak’s cornices, as two specks against its laddered ice and the sweep of pristine snowfields, Dakar and an argumentative Fionn Areth make their last camp before starting their arduous ascent to the ledge where Luhaine awaits, preoccupied with sustaining the damaged wards guarding the Mistwraith’s captivity …

  In Ath’s hostel near Northerly, under the assiduous touch of the adepts, unguent-soaked bandages are unwound with care to reveal muscle and bone undergoing the start of a healing regeneration; and the lady adept weeps for joy, her face raised to her fellow attendants, ‘Ath bless, his young Grace has made himself whole in spirit. As he chooses, the body may follow …’

  At Avenor, immersed in his sundown devotions to the Light, Cerebeld sees Lysaer s’Ilessid reunite with the Etarran troops in Daon Ramon; yet the peace of finding his Blessed Prince safe sits uneasily on glittering shoulders, as, robes swirling, the High Priest paces the carpet, his thoughts continuously agitated by Princess Ellaine’s confounding disappearance …

  Late Winter 5670

  XI.

  Nightfall

  The heavy soporific Sulfin Evend had given released Jieret from black sleep by midmorning. He did not rouse at once. Scarcely conscious, he realized at length he was strapped to the back of a horse. The creature was moving. That fact seemed detached, a detail of little importance. He suffered the burn of cold winds and the deep ache of injuries at strange remove, as though the dense weight of his flesh-bound being belonged to another existence. The more vital part of himself that was spirit drifted still, unfettered and free.

  Enveloped by peace that reached past mortality, contained in that self-sustained state of winged lightness, Jieret dreamed. Merged with the air, his awareness unreeled over the land, guided in flight by a raven.

  The bird did not speak. In this hour, she did not offer symbols, or gesture at inked, parchment maps. On outstretched, coal wings, she skimmed on the wind’s breath, over the snow-clad hills of Daon Ramon. Rock and ice, the scenery glittered like damascened silver under the varnishing glaze of thin sun. The rough brush lay bejeweled, with the deer and the hawk, the winter owl and the hare, set as moving masterworks amid the vast breadth of the Creator’s interlocked tapestry.

  At odd moments, the brown pelts of the stags seemed recast in spun light, as if the ghost presence of bygone Paravians aroused to the touch of hoofed herds on the game trails. Other times the winds recalled the lost resonance of a centaur guardian’s horn call, whose belling harmonics had once sounded a paean of joy to awaken the slumbering stone in the outcrops. Past and present merged, a living dynamic that flowed in balance with the dance of four elements, wearing the changing face of four seasons.

  The raven was not bound to the ribbon of time. She had flown these skies in the Age of Dragons, and also knew the dark blank of the void in the era before the earliest formation of matter. Spirit bound to the enchanted bird’s course, Jieret followed her lead ever deeper into the layered realms of mage-sight.

  The limitles
s well of the creature’s jet eye held the language of wisdom, the silent unknown that encompassed all things. Raven flew beyond fear of death. She knew each crossing and gateway; she possessed the key to all portals. Peerless navigator, the stuff of the bird’s very self was wrought of primordial darkness. The black rainbow shine as the sun struck her feathers knit the shroud of Ath’s mysteries: all shape and form pooled as latent energy, the infinite source of the unbirthed potential that could, and had, formed whole, complex worlds at the mere flick of a thought.

  The raven flew, her wings bridging the veil, and Jieret followed. Sustained by the gift of his talent, he traced every twist and turn of her course. Through raven’s ears, he heard the speech of the air as the unbridled breath of dawn that gifted the listening mind with inspiration. He experienced the illumination of sun, moon, and stars, and felt the raw fire of passion that could wither or seed resurrection. The water in the streambeds channeled the flow of his feelings, and the love at the heart of him, raised and nurtured to cherish the land. In stone, he was shown the enduring commitment that shaped the firm dictates of will.

  Through the raven’s sight, Jieret beheld marvels: the lattice of energies sustaining all being and the strung flare of the lanes that balanced the currents of change. Passion, inspiration, love, and commitment, he tracked the spun forces within his core being. He forgot the slack body Sulfin Evend dragged north, lashed to the back of a horse. Form lost its priority. Thought and breath, desire and emotion, his clay presence was founded in transience. Granted the gift of raven’s perception, Jieret threaded the labyrinthine path across the next threshold. Ancient knowledge opened through that gateway of initiation. Like the soundless spin of a black feather, fallen, the first key to grand conjury settled into his outstretched grasp.

  Change bore him into a soaring lift of expansion. Rathain’s caithdein beheld the truth in the land embodied within himself, and himself, mirrored back in the body of the land; one cloth, and one thread, wrapped and woven upon the warp-and-weft loom of the elements.

  Raven’s knowledge recast all form as flux, vibration and energy cast into illusion as varying states of solidity. Set against the grand backdrop of the mysteries, the momentary present ran fluid. A mountain stood unveiled as a monument of promise; and a river, the expressed voice of emotion. Drawn into connection by the bird’s peerless patience, Jieret wept, touched by the purity of the joy that sourced the vast dance of creation. Suspended upon the primal chord of Ath’s mystery, failure lost its cruel sting. Death was rerendered as meaningless.

  Peace returned. For an hour, Jieret slept, dreamless, wrapped in primordial darkness. The swish of the raven’s wing strokes soothed his throbbing hurts, and the beat of its heart timed his breathing.

  He roused when hands shifted him off the spent horse. Sudden shock and raw hurt cut through like a blade and sheared off his access to mage-sight. Plunged back under the suffocating shadow of blindness, he first cried aloud out of loss, then with heartsore longing to kick free of the pain-ridden flesh that racked his senses and threatened to break him.

  No succor answered, only the vicious teeth of the troubles that bound him unwilling to life. By then, tenacious, his training took over. Forest-bred clansman, he would not give way to captivity with no show of fight. His mind could be dredged from the shoals of despair. Beleaguered awareness could be compelled to sift through the broken mosaic of impressions. By blistering discipline, against trying lethargy, Rathain’s chieftain recovered his bearings.

  Voices exclaimed over him, none of them friendly. Jieret sorted their tones of contempt, and their clipped Etarran accents. One man’s baiting comment concerning triced enemies raised gales of unpleasant laughter, then a companion’s rejoinder cut short by an officer’s reprimand. Boots sucked and splashed through puddled mud. Rough cloth sighed over metal. As the circle of detractors made way for another arrival, the wool-musty smell of their campaign-soured bodies admitted a shearing feather of wind.

  The breeze off the hills was not scoured and clean, but came burdened by the sweat taint of horses, oiled metal, and smoky cookfires boiling links of hard sausage.

  Set on unsure feet in the mushy snow, Jieret had no strength to reject the enemy arms that supported his upright posture.

  ‘No nonsense!’ cracked Sulfin Evend, nearby. ‘We keep him alive. That means tender handling and a healer.’ His impatient spate of orders faded and resurged, as some busy horseboy gathered slack reins and led off his lathered mount. ‘The barbarian will be housed under guard alongside the Blessed Prince. Yes, inside the captain’s campaign tent! Now move! You sluggards can’t see he’s in desperate straits? I want the man flat on his back, now, and cosseted like a sick sister!’

  Before Jieret could be hefted and slung across the most burly guard’s shoulder, a small fellow reeking of unguents and dried blood shoved declaiming into the press. ‘Dolts! Fetch a litter! There’s been an arrow removed from that shoulder, I’m told. Hoist him like that, you’ll rip the wound open. Sure as the Avenger’s Black Spear, that would kill him, low as he is with shock and excessive blood loss.’

  By then, the hooding blackness had started to spin. Jieret fought the rush of trembling weakness, then shuddered to the touch as hard fingers clamped down on his jaw. He recoiled into someone’s mailed fist, felt his clan braid caught and held as the inveterate camp healer examined his cloth-wrapped face. Hot breath brushed his cheek, thick with the odor of onions, as some henchman pried open his mouth and exposed the ghastly, maimed stump of his tongue.

  The din of the voices receded, became the shrill calling of gulls over a storm sea of surf. Jieret never noted the litter’s arrival, or felt the brusque handling that caught him short of collapse. Surrendered back into the peace of unconsciousness, he slumped against the townbred captors who eased his tall frame off his feet.

  He woke out of nightmare. Not yet fully aware, Jieret reacted on instinct, already fighting the new coils of rope looped over his ankles and wrists. A sharp grip caught his shoulder and wrestled him down.

  ‘If you thrash,’ someone snapped, ‘they’ll come back for sure and strap you down to the pallet.’

  Jieret turned his head right and left, the weight on his chest invasive as poured lead, and his breath tight and fast with desperation.

  The guard who pinned him flat on the ticking turned out to be rarely perceptive. ‘Relax.’ He flicked something limp as a tassel against Earl Jieret’s flushed cheek. ‘There, do you see? No one’s chopped off your clan braid, just yet.’

  On a groan of relief, Rathain’s caithdein subsided. His mouth had been treated with a salve of camphor and cloves. The astringent sting scoured the membranes of his nose, and caused his seared eye sockets to water through whatever numbing wash had been used to curb the incessant pain. His shoulder had been stitched and tightly rebound. The blankets spread over his scraped limbs were loomed of fine wool and, against every precedent, dry.

  Too spent to argue, Jieret settled back. His scalp thumped into the sandbags the healer had used to wedge his head still, a practice that suggested a hovering assistant, probably under instructions to force broth or possets down his unwilling throat. Since he had also been stripped of his leathers, he was grateful at least that indignity had occurred during his late bout of unconsciousness.

  The greater ache in him could find no relief. The maimed limits of his sensory perception and the confines of a wounded body now became an unbreakable prison. Jieret sprawled, bound and helpless, unable to express the towering rage that flared to each beat of his heart. The remedies dispensed by Lysaer’s camp healer had dulled the razor-sharp edge of his mind. He burned for escape. Beyond reason, he craved the climbing, high song of the stars and the moon, abiding within the realms of pure light that lay past the closed doors of his mage-sight.

  The slow minutes passed, every second prolonged agony. Time hung. The sentries posted at the campaign tent stamped their numbed feet. Outside, a man-at-arms upbraided a page for a sloppy job cle
aning his boots. The camp cook baked the day’s bread in his ovens, and soldiers complained of the grinding misery that passed for life in a field camp.

  Taxed into lassitude, Jieret gave way to the leaden exhaustion that made every slight movement a trial. Even discounting the stout, knotted cords, he doubted he could have mustered the strength to roll his battered frame over.

  ‘All right, then.’ The guardsman’s grip lightened up on his shoulder, then trustingly withdrew. ‘Keep on using good sense, my orders say I won’t have to call someone in to knock you down with valerian.’

  Blinded and tongueless, kept as Lysaer’s prize trophy, the clan chieftain harnessed the dregs of his resource and measured his current surroundings. Candles burned, expensive ones made from beeswax, though the rancid reek of commonplace tallow dips still clung to the canvas that billowed overhead. Oiled steel, goose grease, bark-tanned leather; one by one, he identified the scents attendant upon campaign warfare, and the stockpiles of a camp armory. The tent headquarters seemed spacious; probably had a partition, with the sleeping area curtained off from a trestle layered with tactical maps.

  To Jieret’s left, the varnish taint of ink and parchment bespoke a lap desk kept to write dispatches. Strained hearing picked up the muffled murmur of voices, then Sulfin Evend’s impatient query demanding to know in searching detail of the outlying patrols and deployment.

  The replies were perfunctory, given without excitement. Hide creaked, near at hand. Left to bored duty, the guard by the pallet presently unsheathed his knife. Jieret counted seconds to the whispery patter of scrolled shavings and breathed in the mild spice of birch.

  From the feverish shadows of memory, he all but heard Caolle’s disparaging comment, that a fellow who dared to pass his time whittling had better be a tried veteran carrying rank. ‘Someone who won’t find himself digging latrines for his idle amusement while on duty.’