Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Muster your front-rank officers! Do it now!’ Lysaer shouted. ‘Light bless whatever instinct you followed. I think your best tracker’s just flushed the Spinner of Darkness himself.’

  ‘The bastard’s unmasked?’ Bolt upright in one bound, Sulfin Evend strode over the discarded arrows and snatched up his damp surcoat and cloak. ‘Where? We’ve got trouble if he’s already north of the trade road.’

  Undaunted by that possibility for setback, Lysaer seized the officer’s horn from the weapons rack by the tent flap. ‘That’s rugged country, but the passes are snowbound. The Master of Shadow surely can’t cross the divide.’ Jewels flashed to his frenetic haste as he thrust the horn into Sulfin Evend’s reaching grasp. ‘Sound the alarm. You’ve got three companies of my crack Etarran troops, well seasoned at harrying clan scouts. Cut off the hills to the Instrell coast. We’ll drive the criminal to the ground in high peaks. He won’t slip through, I can sense his position, and we hold Red-beard captive, a bargaining chip to effectively muzzle his allies.’

  ‘Well, keep a tight guard on him!’ Sulfin Evend cracked back as he shouldered head down through the tent flap. ‘The Mathorns are known as a bolt-hole for raiders. If I’m still in charge, then the field scouts ride point. Damned if I’m going to spearhead a foray doomed to march into a trap.’

  ‘Forget torches,’ Lysaer said, too driven to abide the delay. ‘Tonight, we’re not going to need them.’

  Earl Jieret’s clear sight tracked the pair’s progress beyond the command tent. Cast adrift by the raven, he experienced the freedom of a discorporate spirit. His expanded awareness of the mysteries revealed the aligned pull on the elements as Lysaer s’Ilessid tapped into his birth gift.

  The effort held none of the trained master’s subtlety. A willed state of mind punched a vortex within Lysaer’s auric field. Light flowed from the aperture framed by his hand, two threads of harmonic resonance pulled from the grand chord and bidden to manifest as white fire.

  Earl Jieret extrapolated that Arithon’s grant of shadow might draw from a power akin to the raven’s: the negative absence of kindled energy that accessed the spectrum of unborn possibility.

  But speculative thought had no chance to flower as the Blessed Prince burst the night with his display of raw force. Stars and moonglow became utterly blasted away by the whiteout, coruscating explosion. Every man in camp was slapped to full alert, dazzled blind at their posts, or else wrenched from sleep by the crackle of stress-heated air that fountained off Lysaer’s closed fist. Horses surged and plunged on the picket lines. Voiceless tracking dogs clawed at the bars of their cages, distraught to shivering anxiety.

  The upset was not limited to animate life. Granted the scope of a sorcerer’s sensitivity, Jieret saw plants and mosses recoil from the untimely flare, their diurnal rhythms and patterns of seasonal dormancy cascaded into imbalance. Stone resounded to the stressed shift in vibration, and disrupted harmonics shrilled a jagging flare through the gleaming web of the lane’s flux.

  A ghost print drifted in overlay, unveiling the altered course of the probable future: within a matter of hours, the brute sinew of war would snarl Daon Ramon to moiling conflict. Rathain’s caithdein arose in response, and awarded the land his last service.

  He touched awake the enduring part of himself reflected within each facet of Ath’s creation, and offered the gift of his conscious voice. By direct intent, Jieret ceded the inanimate world the measure of his self-expression; yet his comprehension of grand conjury lacked detailed depth. He failed to realize that his blood pact with his liege would also involve the ties of a crown prince sworn to safeguard the realm under sanction by Fellowship Sorcerers.

  Air spoke first, a cry on the wind to stun the listening mind for its aching expression of sorrow. Stone resounded, adding notes to the chord, until the ground underfoot rumbled with building vibration. The upwelling wave swelled and suddenly flowered into a peal of spontaneous harmony. The struck tone sustained. Through its belling tumult, the shrill shouts of the Etarran officers rousting the men sounded thin as the cheep of young birds.

  Sulfin Evend attempted to reimpose order by blowing the brass mouthpiece of the ram’s horn. Yet the tone that emerged was not the bull bellow his seasoned troops knew and expected. As Jieret’s impetuous grasp of the mysteries opened a tear in the veil, the ancient past bled into the present, and irrefutably tangled. This trumpeting blast resounded across time, overlaid by the mightier flourish from the dragon-spine horn of a departed centaur guardian.

  Then, in a feat that smashed credibility, that call became answered by its echoed twin. The response arose from the desolate hills beyond the camp’s guarded perimeter.

  Men snatching up weapons glanced into the night, the rushed pace of their muster blunted by creeping unease. Lysaer brightened his flare of wrought light. Illumination leaped skyward. The dazzling geyser burned back the darkness, and wakened a flurry of movement.

  Daon Ramon’s array of Paravian ghosts now gathered to answer the land’s injured cry of distress. Armed men quailed before them. Seasoned headhunters convulsed into huddled knots or took to their heels in confusion.

  No less stunned, Sulfin Evend dropped the ram’s horn from shocked fingers. The bronze-capped end clashed at his feet, all unnoticed. Blunt reason rebelled against what his eyesight recorded: that one of the specters was not a pale wisp of spirit light. He stared, with Lysaer beside him no less stupefied, as the apparition his horn blast had summoned strode boldly into his war camp.

  The Ilitharis Paravian towered above the scurrying humans. Even the stout trio of mounted sentries were dwarfed, as they wrestled their shying horses in a courageous attempt to oppose him. The centaur came on, his advance undeterred. His staid pace carried him into the swords upraised and slashing to gut him. As though he were smoke, he passed through the spears, then the impediments of cook tents and guy ropes. Yet he was not any mere figment of illusion. Lysaer’s bursting shower of light utterly failed to dispel him.

  ‘Mercy upon us!’ the lance captain screamed.

  For the centaur came on, as though solid matter held no form and no substance before the wild majesty of his presence.

  Maned and bearded in leonine splendor, he had chiseled, teak features countless seasons had weathered to angles. His antlered head was crowned by a circlet of oak, the leaves autumn gold, with new acorns in clusters that gleamed like peridot jewels. His torso was bare, his adornment simple: bracers of scaled bronze on his forearms, a starburst medallion of worked turquoise on his chest, and a great sword in a russet-leather harness. He also carried a double-headed axe slotted through a braided thong loop at his shoulder.

  His imposing appearance first obscured the queer fact that his cloven hooves left no track.

  ‘Look, he’s not real.’ Lysaer’s gesture encompassed the paste of slush and merled mud, bearing only the blurred imprints of heeled boots.

  ‘Illusion, perhaps,’ allowed Sulfin Evend. He rubbed his eyes hard, and still, his unruly knees remained turned to water by an awe that shattered his intellect. ‘Has to be.’

  Beside him, the Blessed Prince clamped a desperate grip on his crumbling state of composure. He stood his ground by ingrained royal bearing, his stance like rigid marble. The sheer effort taxed him. His breathing came shallow and quick, as he wrestled the pull of emotions beyond the pale of prior experience.

  For if the creature who invaded his camp was a sending, or some other ephemeral fetch, neither cold steel nor light carried any power to banish it. As the centaur approached, the actinic brilliance fell on him without inconvenience. He was not blinded. On the contrary, his arrival made the very air burn bright gold, the halo about him not unlike the shining emanation that marked Ath’s adepts in dark places. For the Ilitharis Paravian, the effect was intensified, a blaze of fired glory to kindle the heart and lift the mind into rarefied ecstasy.

  The unleashed dazzle of Lysaer’s gifted might seemed diminished against such refinement, a display crude as
candle flame before the grace that walked in the guardian’s presence.

  Fully armed veterans backed away weeping. Other men crumpled to their knees and covered their abashed faces. The bold few still holding the front ranks were wrung faint. More than a few cast themselves prostrate in terror. Others were driven out of their senses by a radiant, pure beauty beyond reach of their wildest dream. The mounted sentries dropped their lances, ashamed, as the horses beneath them gentled to listening stillness. First one, then another, raised nickers of greeting.

  The Ilitharis viewed them like lost little brothers, his massive fists crossed in salute at his chest, and his nod of acknowledgment regal. His fetlocks of gleaming, flaxen feathers unsullied by snowmelt or mud, he halted foursquare before Sulfin Evend and the light-bearing form of Lysaer s’Ilessid.

  His massive size overshadowed them. Tall though he was, Lysaer’s burnished head reached no higher than the centaur’s muscled equine shoulder. Nor could his pale brilliance outshine a coat the color of shelled autumn chestnuts.

  Lysaer drew himself straight to issue a challenge, and found that his voice had failed him.

  The centaur did little more than gaze downward, his eyes the flecked green of moss on rinsed granite. ‘I speak for the land of Rathain, and these hills of Daon Ramon, which are not open to trespass. No seal has been granted, and no marker stone has been removed to give mankind the right of free passage.’

  ‘Illusion, just illusion,’ Sulfin Evend muttered, over and over like a litany. He stayed erect by main force, and clenched his loose bowels, while his quivering skin broke into drenching sweat. Whether the reaction was due to a figment of spun spellcraft or some sending tricked out of the past, the Paravian apparition overwhelmed him. Mind and war-trained discipline escaped him. Sulfin Evend squeezed his eyes shut, too wrung with nerves to close his hand over his sword grip.

  ‘But I am not illusion,’ the centaur rebuked. Touched into sympathy by his saddened reproof, the stone underfoot sang aloud. ‘Yet the fact that I do not fully stand in your time does not alter the truth.’

  Not the words themselves, but the tone behind them ripped Sulfin Evend to tears. With a terrible mercy that probed through his deepest reserve, and laid bare his vulnerable self, the centaur resumed his address. ‘Beware what you spurn, son of the sons of a daughter, who was stolen away from her birth-born heritage in Westwood. My form is a parallel echo from the past, no less real than you are, in Name.’

  Through an effort not a man in the camp could have matched, Lysaer s’Ilessid held firm. His will hammered steel, he recovered his voice and his shielding armor of outrage. ‘Your kind have passed from here,’ he said in peremptory dismissal. ‘Return whence you came, before you are sent with a banishing!’

  The Ilitharis Paravian turned his antlered head. He regarded the s’Ilessid, not with contempt, but with a compassion that held even ugliness sacred. ‘Outcast,’ he Named him.

  As Lysaer s’Ilessid stiffened, incensed, the centaur’s grave speech wrought a binding to silence all protest. ‘Mourn the day,’ the creature abjured in fierce sadness. ‘In formal judgment at Althain, you once received sealed renouncement of your right to Fellowship intercession. Remember the choices that compelled that harsh step. For Paravian law is not revoked, or even held in abeyance. Mankind walks here by the grace of the compact, while the Sorcerers yet guard that trust. They have oathsworn your half brother to uphold Rathain’s charter, and for shame!’

  Where a lesser man would flinch, Prince Lysaer endured, light raised aloft in denial. Mortal clay before unearthly magnificence, he staunchly refused to stand down.

  Arms outflung, the centaur tipped his bearded face to the sky, as though in appeal to the stars and moon to soften that act of rejection. ‘You have raised an armed force, and cajoled with smooth lies until a kingdom’s born subjects would hunt down and murder the crown prince who stands as their sovereign! Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn serves the land’s justice, and I am come as the voice of the soil your unclean warring would desecrate.’

  ‘The Master of Shadow has become the sworn servant of evil!’ Lysaer insisted, his conviction a drawn line of defiance. Although his pale skin was running with sweat, he flourished his beacon in challenge. ‘Stand aside, or believe this, I will march despite you.’

  ‘Stand down,’ urged the centaur. He did not threaten, despite his vast strength, and the leashed power of the mysteries that rang through his being like mute thunder. ‘Be yourself, son of Talera.’ In kindness, he exhorted, ‘Abjure your clinging need to hide behind vanity and acknowledge the sorrows set on you by Desh-thiere’s curse.’

  Lysaer lifted his chin, head tipped back, that he could meet and sustain the direct gaze of the Ilitharis Paravian. The effort cost, terribly. Sulfin Evend, beside him, had long since given way to a power beyond mortal knowing. Disbelieving, he watched his Blessed Prince shoulder the contest: to stand naked before that mighty a presence and maintain the flawed frame of human identity.

  Lysaer possessed inborn stature; had been raised a blood prince of a noble and time-proven lineage. Since childhood he had learned to place personal needs behind the demands of his people. Only once had he lost himself, to Talith’s love. He had weathered the sacrifice and the mourning, his priorities rigid as he realized his care for her had forged a weakness his enemy might use to break him. He put her aside, had survived in separate torment all her days and through the grief left by her dying.

  The marring devastation, the deep pangs of remorse, he had kept masterfully hidden. No one saw the dreams that stole in uninvited, ripping his sleep into silenced torment. None shared the tears he dared not shed, even under the cover of darkness. His servants were bidden to leave candles burning, not due to the curse, or his hatred of shadow, as common hearsay supposed; but because any moment of unobserved privacy threatened to shatter the bulwark of his integrity.

  Before this hour of trial, Lysaer had faced down Fellowship Sorcerers. He had withstood even the sublime blandishment found in an enclave of Ath’s adepts.

  But this night’s confrontation was inexpressibly worse. As though all the scars of his past had torn open, the pain became fresh and still bleeding. Under the centaur’s regard, a man saw himself mirrored, each excoriating detail a crippling blow to the unquiet heart. Lysaer reexamined every base longing. He faced his known flaws, but magnified beyond bearing. Every loss, every tortured regret, even the branding burden of the thousands of lives cut cruelly short in his service bore him down until he felt crushed under shackles and chain.

  The wounding horror of the unadulterated truth would have reduced him to sobbing shame had the visitation been fashioned to break him. But the great centaur’s wisdom saw past limitation. His purpose knew nothing of punishment.

  Against the raw balance of personal shortcoming, Lysaer s’Ilessid was shown its shining opposite: himself washed clean of all stain. The Ilitharis Paravian reached out with both hands in forgiveness. His steadfast promise extended the offer of an unconditional redemption. One step forward, one touch of the mystery contained in the creature’s free majesty, and Lysaer understood he would be enfolded by the limitless peace of Ath’s welcome.

  He would transcend his mortality and receive instantaneous release from all suffering. Bend his neck in submission before the shining grace the Paravians carried, unsullied, and he could arise reborn. Wearied flesh could be shed like an outworn sleeve. The dark knots of subterfuge, his suffocating web of entangling choices could all be unraveled at a stroke. Unimaginable longing consumed him, to be uplifted on wings of white light. This being might bear him past the bounds of the veil and grant him the untarnished recall of a lost paradise.

  One word, and Lysaer could reclaim a beauty that eluded the language of dreams.

  ‘Come home,’ invited the centaur, and bespoke him by Name. ‘Be reunited with the limitless seed of mankind’s original heritage.’

  The temptation to accept became overpowering. Even the Divine Prince’s unmatched ded
ication could scarcely withstand the assault. His pale features twisted, ripped to punishing torment, though his wide-lashed blue eyes never wavered.

  Still present, still a permeable awareness laced through the cloaking night, Jieret s’Valerient’s unmoored spirit bore witness to the confrontation. He could not be unmoved by the lordly magnificence of the apparition his summons had drawn from the far past to speak as his voice. Nor could he spurn the grim strength of s’Ilessid, warped by Desh-thiere’s geas, and the ironies sprung out of conflicted character that maligned his royal nature.

  Sulfin Evend wept outright. Locked into sympathy, battered by the struggle parsed out in the suffering draw of each breath, he sweated in shared pain as Lysaer s’Ilessid sustained that stripping exposure. Brute endurance robbed every pretense of privacy. Here stood no Lord Exalted, no avatar, but a man whose most inviolate secrets became ruthlessly plowed to the surface. Alongside his sundered affection for Talith, other specters arose to revile him: a mother’s betrayal that cast him to exile and a lifetime of binding commitment; a wronged young woman wedded for expedience, and a son lost to deadly danger too young. Within Lysaer’s being each separate tragedy had branded its wretched mark.

  Divine purpose had never reduced his humanity. Lord Commander and caithdein shared the same understanding as they saw him labor through shattering distress. Again and again, with no hope of redemption, the prince who stepped forward in humanity’s defense had offered himself as a living shield without regard for the cost to himself.

  The prospect seemed impossible, that a mere man could resist the centaur guardian’s gift of ecstatic peace. Braced for total loss, Sulfin Evend masked his face with mailed hands. He could do nothing, only try to shut out a capitulation he lacked the staunch courage to witness.