Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Disaster for Athera, should he not ferret out the precise range of tonality that once tamed such raging torrent. Mortal man, and alone, he must reclaim the ancient ritual the Paravians had enacted in dance step and song. Somewhere, amid dissonance, Athera herself must recall the fired glory when the old races had walked the earth in strides of pure light and shaped the lanes into pealing renewal.

  Arithon held. Mage-schooled to brace himself calm through adversity, to divorce mind and heart from the physical turmoil of pain, he endured, though the lane forces flayed him. A dust mote in a cataract, he cast off his fear, let himself be tossed by the vast power of a planet. His musician’s ear encompassed its voice of raw turbulence, but found no more meaning than an insect might, flung headlong down the throat of a gale.

  Tumbled, unraveled, flensed thought from flesh, Arithon forced his stance passive. He persisted, though every born instinct urged him to shrink in retreat. Through the eye of an instant, his whole being become a savaged rag. His inward self felt raked into needling agony, and his awareness of body became a flayed remnant dragged through a bed of flint gravel.

  He sustained. The inherited grace of Halliron’s wisdom became as a spar in the storm sea: ‘You will find an intelligence expressed in all sound. Mastery lies in the ability to divine that spark, then to effect a creative translation.’

  The strictures instilled by the Archmage at Rauven yielded supporting insight: ‘Since nothing in Ath’s creation is truly random, know a thing for itself. That uniqueness is the only signal truth you’ll ever touch. You must ever strive to lose your own barriers and allow the pattern to speak to you. No matter how obscure, no matter how far removed from humanity, existence itself affirms the presence of consciousness.’

  Arithon listened. He kept every inward barrier flattened, until the staid boulder beneath him and two clansmen’s staunch presence became all that anchored his place in the world. He tuned his receptivity wider, then wider again, until voice answered, and the stone of the mountain itself opened the path to retrieval. Granite possessed a faultless, long memory. It recalled the old measures danced upon the stations of equinox and solstice. From the veined rock, layered beneath the dell’s frozen soil, Arithon received the ghost imprint of the chord underlying the fourth lane’s magnetics. He picked up the tuned imprint that Paravian singers had once stepped out at Caith-al-Caen.

  That wisped fragment must source his inspiration, raw seed for an invention he had only the split frame of an instant to complete.

  His gift answered the challenge. A masterbard’s heartfelt search for trued sound took soaring flight, bearing those remnants of melody. Arithon rode intuition, entrusted his instinct to fill in the gaps. Were he bound to the physical limitation of rendering song on the lyranthe, he understood he could not do other than fail. At the crux, the interface of hand and wound string would have proved too clumsy and slow to draw half-sensed fragments of dream into full manifestation.

  Yet immersed in the unworldly stream of the mind, Arithon could respond on the fleeting breath of tuned reflex. He knew when the notes that he groped for were wrong; sensed the instant correction to any disharmonies running counter to the pattern’s completion. He saw in advance where the gaps became canceled by harmonics and misplaced resonance. Here, a fifth interval changed to a seventh raised an answering blaze of cleared light. Riding blind on a current of crystal tonalities, he reached, touched, shaped, and observed, until the grand confluence of the chord he sought to restore achieved its masterful glory within him.

  The raised fourth lane melodies reached stasis and blazed. Fired illumination and tuned power combed through the uprush of wild forces, and spun even Kharadmon’s watching presence to awe.

  On the trembling brink, with the sixth lane still cresting, Arithon stood on that platform of raised harmony and reached out, listening again. Desperation framed the bent of his guidance. To avert the disastrous break through at Rockfell, he must tune the fifth lane, and not stop there, but cast outward again. He must re-create in flash-point, perfect recall, the sixth lane chord he had once raised in song to enable the focus circle set under the mayor’s mansion at Jaelot.

  Yet the axis of extension unreeled too far. Arithon felt himself spread too thin, thoughts paled to the edge of attrition. His frail, human faculties were going to fall short. The overwhelming scope of the task was defeating: his talent, but one thread, when he needed the breadth of a loom to string the warp and weft of a whole tapestry. He sensed, in concept, how to close a bridging conduit, then call the aligned energies into the ancient channels and disperse them like a tonic across latitude. But the structure was too deep and complex for the mind riding on the wings of rushed thought and intuition.

  Given time, he could solve this! Despair all but tore him. The millisecond that remained before the flux reached full peak was too scant to raise and align the precise chords to consummate balance, and wed three parallel lanes into harmonic connection.

  ‘Arithon!’ Kharadmon cried out in appeal. ‘Call on your strength as Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince! There was power invoked by the oath you once swore at Etarra. The land knows your Name. Draw on your blood heritage! We all have no choice! You’ll have to reforge the connection!’

  At the Sorcerer’s encouragement, the flash-point memory resurged: of the hurried ceremony conducted under Fellowship auspices, affirming the s’Ffalenn right of succession …

  Under chilly spring sky, inside a walled garden, Asandir had gathered a handful of soil. The Sorcerer’s invoked blessing had laid a binding upon the Named Teir’s’Ffalenn, and a feat of grand conjury had transformed common earth into a silver circlet. Arithon had experienced a swift flash of heat at the moment the metal had been pressed over his brow. Yet the nature of the attunement had been too brief, too ephemeral to grasp at the time he had spoken the crown heir’s traditional acceptance …

  Now, pitched by fraught need, Kharadmon broke the seal that had blurred the full scope of that past initiation. ‘Prince, you have married Rathain through the element of earth! Call on that asset! Let the wisdom of that union guide you.’

  Such a move would assuredly reaffirm a commitment, and engage active ties to an unwanted royal ancestry. Yet Arithon saw no option. The cresting currents at Rockfell already hammered the first crack in the guarding ward rings. Stressed seals crumpled and burst. A rain of loosed lane flux laced sputtering static over the link bridging Kharadmon’s distant awareness. Luhaine’s effort to spin a remedial patch became swept away in the torrent. The Sorcerer who rode Dakar’s body flung himself into the breach; and a cataract grown too massive to stem carved onward. Its voracious charge ranged down the irrevocable chains of permission linking the Mad Prophet with Rathain’s prince.

  Contact touched the nerves like live fire. Arithon experienced a scouring agony that seared flesh and bone from within. Had the breath not been wrung clean out of his lungs, he would have lost hold, all awareness dissolved into shattering screams.

  Torment upset the tuned chord in his mind. The next instant would see him immolated by the rampaging conflagration. He fought back. Earth, beneath him, and the iced kiss of snow, became all that secured his stressed grasp upon human awareness. Against the sliding fall toward oblivion, Arithon called on the cast-iron discipline instilled by his grandfather at Rauven. He hardened his will, recaptured the stressed harmonies of the ancient Paravian melody. Pain, fear, raw terror itself were reforged by sheer will into a razor-point edge of aimed thought. Since the land afforded his last hope of deliverance, Arithon yielded to the claim of his ancestry. As affirmed s’Ffalenn prince, he embraced the staid calm in the bedrock spine of Rathain’s mountains.

  For a split second, the template awareness of his body merged into the pulse of the land. His sovereign oath bound him. He became, all unwitting, the living interface between Rockfell’s crisis and the greater territory set under his oathsworn charge to protect. Nerve and bone melted into ley meridian and mineral; and the lane flux, raging wil
d, leaped the gap.

  At Rockfell, Kharadmon’s last defenses tore asunder.

  In the Mathorns, Arithon screamed under the whiteout barrage as the lane flux roared over him, unchecked. Fire shrieked through his flesh, crested into a vast, searing wave. Its wild force flooded through him, into the tuned conduits his bard’s gift had reopened across Rathain’s winter landscape.

  Earth wailed in response, as the staid channels of the lanes stressed and flexed out of balance. Trees would burn, and fault lines flare up into boiling lines of loosed magma; except for one line of flung melody: the pavane recaptured from the mists of the past, where Paravians had danced the old rituals at Caith-al-Caen. The backbone of the hills there slept with the memory. Through the cleared lens of Prince Arithon’s gift, the chord resurged, and tempered the jagged flow of chaos to a resonant peal of held harmony.

  Ancient patterns held true. Age upon Age, their harmonics had tempered Athera’s magnetic flux lines into alignment with the consummate force of Ath’s mystery.

  Aware of himself as the sole point of catalyst, Arithon poured all that he was into the song he was given. His mind sustained the grand chord, while his ripped-open heart maintained the connection to his ancestral bond to the realm. He was wild earth; and flawed man; and consummate melody; a dynamic balance spinning in glorious triad over the raging void.

  Braided into the confluent harmony just retrieved, the land granted him knowledge of others. One by one, the songs of the lanes that crossed through his kingdom were surrendered like silken bridle reins into his trembling hands.

  Arithon added them. And lane flux responded to pitch, tone, and timing, exactingly meted out. The bard felt the diverted flow ease and broaden, tamed as its concentrated currents fanned out. Multiple channels absorbed their raw kick, force released into peace like calmed water. Under his cheek, the stone roots of the Mathorns rang out, their vibration lifted to resonance.

  He had no breath to laugh, and no mind to rejoice, as the link held, by his desperate, obdurate will, and by nothing less than pure miracle.

  Far off, at Rockfell, Kharadmon sank weeping to his knees. Sunk in flesh not his own, in tender remorse, he held Dakar’s burned hands clutched to his heaving chest.

  Beaten to wisped rags, the spirit of Luhaine knitted torn seals. Then he slackened his work, dumbly awestruck. He stilled to observe through discorporate awareness, as the lane channels raised across Arithon’s kingdom flared and burned, released to their glory of exalted healing. White light burst in showers across the sere ground. In cold soil, chilled seeds quickened, straining toward spring germination. Ermine mated, and wolves ran, leaping in revitalized ecstasy. Overhead, the vast vortices of storm winds dispersed. The whipped clouds of cyclone eased and settled. On the Eltair coast, and above the high passes of the Skyshiels, snowfall transformed on a breath into a sluice of warm rain.

  Across Daon Ramon Barrens, deer raised inquiring heads from their browsing. Perched hawks roused ruffled feathers and blinked. Other small creatures sunk in warm hibernation stirred and stretched, and dreamed of snowmelt and awakening. The roused lane forces played the chord of grand life force in purling light across latitude. Throughout Rathain, from the eastshore harbors to the coves of Instrell Bay, the iron grasp of an unnatural winter snapped, and at one breath, shattered.

  A suspended instant saw the winds dance, exultant.

  Then the noon crest of the equinox passed over Rockfell Peak. Its course left the patched integrity of the inner wards still intact. The guarded pit at its heart, where Desh-thiere lay imprisoned, maintained its ring of sealed silence. Where the course of the diverted currents had crossed, no harm to the mountain beyond a few craze marks of slag, and an array of scorched lines on dark rock.

  In the Mathorns, slumped under a mottled sky, Arithon received a last, fleeting impression: of Dakar collapsed, his fast, distressed breathing held stable by Kharadmon.

  Then the lane flux released him. His overtaxed senses shrank to a pinpoint, then spiraled away into unfathomable darkness.

  Arithon did not feel the anxious hands of the scout, shaking, and failing to rouse him. He remained, tumbled senseless, as the other clansman knelt at his side, exclaiming in consternation. The pair raised him from the snow with painstaking care. They settled him over the gray’s saddle and, in slow stages, bore him to the next dell, where a small spring bubbled beneath a thin screen of alders. Warmed and tended by his solicitous escort, he did not dream. Soon the first, stirring fevers of backlash stormed through his frame. He shivered, flicked over the high brink of delirium. His blank, opened eyes made no sense of the sight of the golden eagle who perched, unobtrusive and still, in the tree overhead to observe him.

  Far westward, a strained hour of wait reached its ending at Althain Tower. A faint flush of rose stained Sethvir’s hollowed cheeks where he lay, propped against linen pillows. The adepts who stood vigil maintained their posts to the right and left of his bedside. Then movement returned, a release of cranked tension marked by a long, soundless sigh as the Sorcerer stirred back to wakefulness.

  No one rushed him with questions. The lady smoothed out a crease in his blanket, while the younger man standing witness arose, found the striker, and lit a fresh candle.

  ‘It is accomplished,’ Sethvir murmured, his syllables slurred as he rose from the depths of a seer’s trance that had borne him far outside the veil.

  The adepts bowed their heads in the brightening flare of gold light. Man and woman, the pair gave silent thanks for the miracle: that equinox noon had passed over Rockfell, without seeding a widespread disaster.

  They waited, braced for the inevitable toll of wrought damage. The Warden presently opened his eyes, their unfocused depths the sheet-lace tinge of sea breakers, rolling shoreward at dawn in midsummer. Still diffused by an awareness spanned over an incomprehensible distance, Sethvir dredged up a thin whisper and pronounced, ‘You can stand down. Fate’s hand is averted. The peril posed by the equinox flux lies behind us.’

  ‘Blessed Ath!’ the woman adept intoned, grateful. ‘Then your two colleagues and the spellbinder triumphed?’

  ‘No.’ Sethvir gave a fractional shake of his head. The wonder he had witnessed poured through in that moment, and lit him like light from within. ‘In fact, they failed.’ His gaze dropped, a suspect, moist brilliance masked behind closed lids and a snow-white veiling of lashes.

  ‘Then how?’ the young male witness asked, diffident, too awed to expect a clear answer.

  For a moment, the stilled chamber held no movement beyond the tremulous flicker of candleflame. Then Sethvir’s beard stirred; he smiled, shook his head yet again, this time in bemused, laughing wonderment. ‘Kharadmon called upon Rathain’s crown prince,’ he admitted. ‘A step of innovative genius, but bearing a frightening risk. Yet the bold step did not fall short. Arithon’s talents as Masterbard found expression through his sovereign tie to the land.’

  ‘Then he stood in the breach in his power as Rathain’s vested high king?’ the witness filled in, close to speechless before profound startlement.

  He received Sethvir’s patient refutation. ‘Not that. Arithon couldn’t.’ The Sorcerer mustered his patience and explained. ‘Our testy Teir’s’Ffalenn has never been crowned. He has yet to receive the ritual initiations of air, fire, and water, that attend a high king’s accession. Only the earth bond was made, by tradition, on the hour he was sanctioned as crown prince. The silver circlet marked his oath at Etarra, and sealed a union made with the land. The crux of event forced that rite to consummation. Rockfell was saved by that sacrifice.’

  Touched by the first, icy finger of doom, the lady adept ventured the difficult question. ‘Sacrifice?’

  Sethvir nodded, his wise features saddened. ‘His Grace called upon the Paravian ritual. He wakened three lanes through the tones of their primal song. Those flux lines now resonate to the Great Mystery in Rathain. Sundown and midnight, the cry of vibration cannot help but cross over latitude twice more, rai
sing the keys of renewal and healing. Athera may rejoice, but human misunderstanding will shape its double-edged sword of mixed blessing.’

  Comprehension dawned. Consternation raised a glance of dismay shared between the adepts. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had tapped his bright talent and birthright, and brought an unlooked-for reprieve. There would be green fields, where there might have been famine, and restoration of harmonic balance. But only in the kingdoms to the east. Lanes in Tysan and Havish had not been summoned into the dance, and there, the imbalance of Morriel’s wrought backlash would linger. The death grip of winter would not release in time to bring late-sown crops to fall harvest.

  The equinox would ride its course through two more crests and surges. As forests and wildlands, and the stressed forces of weather flourished and settled in rebirth, Rathain’s towns would be dealt a mixed blessing.

  ‘For today’s bright rising, a bitter price yet to reap,’ Sethvir allowed, and detailed the opening gist of his point through a shared sequence of imagery …

  In the city of Jaelot, for the third time, the active resonance of lane forces caused one of the guard towers to crack; the oak window frames of the Mayor’s mansion sprouted the shoots of green leaves, and a mad beggar in the square prophesied aloud to passersby that the guard company ridden into Daon Ramon Barrens had met death and ruin at the hand of the Master of Shadow …

  At Etarra, the staid brick walls trembled and shook as the foundation stone of the mountains screamed aloud. The sustained, belling note burst stoutly locked doors and caused the bounty gold in the treasury to flow molten inside the locked vaults. ‘Battle!’ the sunwheel priest exhorted the guild ministers, who gathered in chattering fear. ‘Call the garrison to arms, for there will be a clash of force in Daon Ramon between the dark powers and the Light …’