Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Arithon gathered his shaken nerves, forced his trembling legs to bear weight. Standing erect, he lifted Alithiel high overhead, using the brightened flare of the runes to survey his surroundings. As he first suspected, the archway that admitted him had erased, melded back into walls of wild stone. The layers were ribboned with ancient striations, where eons of fire and sediment had birthed their early formation. Arithon turned a full circle in place. No opening appeared. No crack broke the rock, not even a cranny to admit roosting bats or the wings of a night-flying insect.

  Yet the place was not sealed, despite seamless walls that appeared to entrap the unwary spirit who trespassed. At each move he made, Arithon sensed the rising tickle of power playing across his damp skin. The sword in his fist waxed brighter, second by second, until he was forced to shield his eyes with the back of his bandaged hand.

  ‘Mercy,’ he whispered.

  The pain was intense, knifing-bright light now joined by the low thrum of harrowing sound. The sword’s song brought no joy. Only a deep, deranging vibration that made his skull ache as though Dharkaron Avenger’s gloved fists boxed his eardrums with ringing force.

  Then came true movement, a concatenation of elemental forces ignited from nowhere behind him.

  Arithon spun. He faced a wide archway. The structure, with its queer, twisted pillars had not been there when he had examined that wall scarcely seconds before. Across a silled threshold incised with black runes, the sword’s glow sliced, muffled, through darkness.

  Where prior aspirants had wailed at the sight, Arithon held, braced and silent. No stranger to grand conjury, he had once commanded the veil of the mysteries, lifted. He had knowledge. A master’s training still structured his outlook, lending the wisdom to override animal instinct. He required no access to vision to realize he was fully ensnared by powers too vast to grapple.

  Warned as well by the blazing cry of his sword, he understood he must move ahead. Cringing thought would not save him. No hope would bring rescue; no chance remained to turn back. Far better to meet unknown sorcery head-on, than to be sought, or much worse, to be hounded along out of forfeited will to a fate magnified by raw fear. Arithon was too well seasoned by experience to succumb to self-blinded helplessness. Weakness that fled the spelled strength of aggression never yielded the slightest advantage.

  A Fellowship working of consummate genius, the Maze of Davien was unlikely to prove the exception.

  Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn gripped his sword in slick fingers and engaged a decisive step forward.

  Two torches sprang into crackling flame, set in black-iron sconces at either side of the archway. Their unsteady light spilled across the carved sill, revealing a high, vaulted ceiling. Another pattern of runes spiraled upward, their reverse image dizzying to the unshielded eye. Arithon wrenched his spinning gaze free, before his trapped mind tumbled senseless into the infinite. More ciphers were set in the walls past the arch, leading downward into a stairwell. The curving rows of interlocked seals had been formed in Paravian script, yet the language framed no words that Arithon knew. Under close scrutiny, they seemed to shine with blue light, too deep and dark to cast illumination, both there and not there, like the eruption of color caused by grinding clenched knuckles against the lids of shut eyes.

  Arithon advanced. His booted step echoed. The tingle of live energies speared through his flesh, and the sword in his hand whined and brightened. Who was the just enemy, if not himself? The prospect filled him with terror. Far worse, the alternative: that the construct of the maze held the basic, brute resource to bend Alithiel’s imbued virtues. Whichever case faced him, he walked a path of rank folly to believe he could challenge a ward of such potency.

  Rathain’s prince swallowed back his unease. His master’s discipline was all he had left. Shrinking back was not going to spare him.

  He braved the next step, and the next after that. Stark will brought him up to the archway. More torches ignited on the far side. Their snapping flame unlocked the dread way ahead of him. Shivering to suppress a nerve storm of alarm, Arithon crossed over the threshold.

  Alithiel screamed. Her wail of stressed sound razed down his arm, driving a cascading wave of vibration. The dissonance raised pain that knifed into his viscera and threatened to flay living flesh off the bone. Jaw clenched, sweat streaming damascened tracks down his temples, Arithon refused to give way. He did not sheathe the blade, though mounting discomfort threatened to derange his cognitive thought. He could not use mage-sight. Stripped of access to talent, he must cling to bare trust: Alithiel’s forging carried the sound-and-light chord of primal creation. The tonal harmony that had first Named a star had been laced through its steel by Athlien Paravian singers, then sealed by the dance of the mysteries called down by the graceful Riathan. The shrill peal of the sword’s voice became the only true gauge of the dangers aligning against him.

  Changing resonance as the Paravian weaving encountered the worked emanations of the maze provided some semblance of warning. Arithon could trace the ward’s waxing or waning. Left nothing else but his limited eyesight, he would have seen nothing more than a stair that led downward, and torches that bloomed into flame, lighting the passage of each forward step.

  Down, the stair spiraled. Torches blazed up, unveiling what seemed a limitless path to infinity. Arithon walked with Alithiel held upright, one forearm thrown over his forehead and face to ward off the hurtful blaze of the starspells. Raw sound reamed him through, and cast hammered echoes back off the rune-marked stone of the well. In time, the orange glow leached from the torches. Their unnatural blaze crackled as bright as the sword, glaring white against the stygian dark receding without end ahead of him.

  He forbore the temptation of meddling with shadow. To win through the maze, he must master its center. A divergent purpose might only exhaust him, or provoke a reaction as likely to set back or weaken him.

  ‘Never needlessly test yourself against a power of greater self-awareness,’ his grandsire s’Ahelas had cautioned. ‘You could incur a devastating backlash, at worst, as countercurrents seek equilibrium. If you did not lose balance, you still might lay open every part of yourself to fine scrutiny. That mistake could set a crippling limit upon every choice you make afterward.’

  Reliable counsel; yet even a high mage’s vested guidance carried small consolation. Arithon could not shake the undermining belief that he was a walking sacrifice.

  He descended until his legs throbbed from exertion, and the sword’s screeling vibration numbed out his mind and senses. The stair shaft delved into the roots of the mountain beyond any concept of depth. Arithon could not have described where he was; knew little else beyond the fixed choice that sustained his will to move forward. He anchored himself to the rhythm of his feet, stepping downward in endless progression.

  The stair ended. Unbalanced by the wrenching change as his boot slapped onto a level surface, Arithon flung out his bandaged palm to catch himself short of a fall. Unshielded contact with the rune-inscribed wall hazed his flesh like the kiss of raw fire. He recoiled, swearing. Dazzled by the sword, he squinted past his masking cuff and made out the outline of another doorway ahead.

  This portal was framed by two pillars, one black and one white, bearing more chains of spiraling ciphers, and the timeworn sigils representing the sun and the moon. The lintel above was not a keyed arch, nor did it have a guardian statue or gargoyle. The massive beam was a slab of razed granite, of post-and-tenon construction. Its crosspiece was carved. Through the searing glare thrown off his sword, Arithon made out Paravian runes twined into the symbol for infinity, etched above a ruled line of script wrought out in glowing blue characters.

  He labored to decipher their meaning, grasped that the words would be known to him. But Alithiel’s vengeful resonance burgeoned, risen to a torrent of punishing light and battering waves of shocked sound. The flux swept him under, tore him piecemeal and shattered him. He buckled at the knees, never felt the impact of his fall. The shrieking
chord of the Paravian sword’s resonance unwove his being and sucked him into a whirlpool of darkness.

  Hearing returned first. Cradled in velvet-textured stillness, Arithon came aware lying prone on smooth stone. A throbbing ache bespoke a bruised cheekbone. Opened eyes remained sightless. His limbs would not move. As though all his nerves had been stripped, he sprawled helpless, an inert mass of pummeled meat cased over a deadweight framework of bone.

  The uneven rush of air through his lungs suggested he was not totally paralyzed. Against looming panic, mage-trained discipline resurged: granted the tenuous continuity of his breath, Arithon created the anchor to define the rest of his being. He imposed reasoned will, smoothed down raging fear. In abiding calm, he affirmed the rhythm of life, inhale to exhale, until his mental clamor subsided.

  Sensation returned. His displaced awareness reintegrated with his body, a tingling surge that racked running tremors from head to foot. Rough return from a spiritwalk sometimes induced such reaction. Arithon kept on breathing, held himself quiet until the disturbance faded.

  He lay by the portal, awash in the chilly glimmer of light tracing the lintel’s inscription. His dropped sword was not far. The rune-worked length of the blade rested partway over the threshold, the dark sheen of spelled steel gone ominously quiescent. Tenderly careful, Arithon sat up. His shadow pooled underneath him, a darkness as void as the well of primal creation. Everything lit wore the silver-blue flare cast by the carved characters overhead.

  Leaving the sword, Arithon stood. He scraped back tumbled hair, raised his gaze to the twined runes that commanded the intangible reach of infinity. This pass, he read what was written there.

  The impact of meaning raised a transfixing dread that slammed him through, until he felt pinned on the shaft of Dharkaron Avenger’s thrown spear.

  ‘Siel i’an i’anient,’ the inscription read; meaning, ‘Know thou, thyself.’

  Stunned by recognition of just what he had challenged, Arithon understood how Kamridian s’Ffalenn had met tormented death in this place. He knew, as well, why Alithiel had wakened. No given cause in Ath’s wide creation could be so exactingly just: the enemy he faced in the Maze of Davien was to be the shadow within his own self.

  The truth had been evident, all along, plainly stated by the symbolic gryphons flanking the outer entrance. Mercy and strength offered the sole powers of deliverance for the trial which lay ahead.

  Preparation was impossible. No weapon could stave off the danger. To wait would only engender starvation, and deplete the resilience of courage and will into the turmoil of mental anxiety. By every wise tenet of his upbringing at Rauven, Arithon realized he must forge ahead. Yet the knife-edged range of consequence that move must entail robbed the impetus from firm initiative. He hesitated, shaken to clammy sweat.

  He fell back, yet again, on the words of his grandsire. ‘Arithon,’ the old man had said, when a mishap had half drowned him while learning to swim, ‘our fears play us like string puppets.’ While the high mage spoke, his brusque fingers had bundled up his dark sleeve cuff to dry a small boy’s disturbed tears. ‘There is no terror so powerful as the one never faced. That sithaer, that hell, must not rule your mind. The man who makes the water his friend is the master who breasts the current and learns how to tame it through partnership.’

  Then again, years later, as a callow apprentice, Arithon recalled the day he believed he had slipped and omitted a line of protection. A shadow of nightmarish force had slid cold and dank through his construct, and his splintering scream had brought his grandsire running.

  Mak s’Ahelas had not been as tender, that time. ‘Boy, your wards were well sealed! That terror was not outside, but in fact within. You encountered a reflection of yourself!’ The high mage bore in, overriding his grandson’s blustering claim that the threat just dispelled had surely been separate and alive.

  ‘Were you frightened, boy? Oh, then by all means, hide the fact. Shove it down! It will not be gone, but run wild and nip at your heels. You’ll have a lurker haunting your dreams. Your belief you are helpless now feeds its existence, and it grows, sucking off your self-trust. Now, that energy you’ve left to itself will evolve, unchecked, and yes, as you say, even kill. Not with teeth or claws, but by the much slower poison of leaching your innate free claim to existence. Though you go on and enact all life’s motions, you will be worse than dead. That fear never faced becomes a parasite that will not respect any ward. It will slide through the best-laid protection, unbanished, for you have given it leave by quitting the arena without contest. You cannot pretend you don’t know you were vanquished. The self cannot mask from the self and stay whole. Left to bide, fear will never relinquish its hold, but forever possess that lost bit of vitality you surrendered to endow it with being.’

  Far from his childhood at Rauven Tower, embroiled beyond help in the Maze of Davien, Arithon s’Ffalenn repeated the high mage’s counsel to breast insurmountable terror. ‘“Go back in. Die once. Let the fear be the part of yourself that does not survive through the crossing.”’

  Yet what bracing words would Grandfather Mak have advised for the wretched encumbrance of Desh-thiere’s curse? The spontaneous answer arose, fresh as the kiss of changed wind from the mind schooled to self-disciplined mastery. ‘Die once, and be done. Let Fate’s Wheel turn, quick and clean.’

  Stripped of false consolation or comfort, Arithon scrubbed his damp palms on his forearms. He sucked in a final, unsteady breath, bent down, and retrieved Alithiel’s dropped length from the floor. Spelled steel did not rouse. The blade remained black and utterly inert, even as he assayed a trembling, reluctant step forward.

  The Paravian characters scribed in the lintel flared brilliant white, and snapped out.

  Darkness descended, a pall of absolute jet that stabbed the eye to behold. Left to grope his way forward, Arithon sheathed his sword. Between one bold step, or two shuffling, short ones, he chose the first, and crossed over the darkened threshold ahead of him.

  A trace prickle of force shimmered over his skin, lifting the hair at his nape. The sensation raised a fresh sweat on his brow. No other sign of distress marred his person, where other mortal predecessors who had threaded the maze in willful self-conceit had been forced to duck, or crawl through that portal, or worm belly down in ignominious shame.

  No sconces flared alight on the other side. Arithon’s arrival roused a flat, directionless illumination that unnaturally threw off no shadow. He found himself in a narrow corridor. The walls were stone, still, but strangely polished. Their silvery sheen wore the same glaze of reflections found in a tarnished mirror. Other small changes rattled the nerves. Arithon found his wide-open eyes utterly unable to blink. Nor could he muster the self-command to stand down as he saw a living replica of himself approach from the opposite direction.

  He quenched rising panic, which urged him to run; resisted the impulse to unsheathe his weapon. To flee would just bind his consent for the nightmare to hunt him down from behind; to attack would certainly wound his own flesh. A bold forward step was the only option. Arithon advanced on his uncanny double, and the floor changed beneath: his leading footstep set him down at the heart of an intricate pattern inlaid into seamless obsidian. He recorded the flash-point impression of the quartered cross and circle of Daelion’s Wheel, the centerpoint cut by the diagonal slash that signified the axletree of fate. Then upending dizziness routed his mind. His senses reeled under a storm of wild power like nothing ever encountered in life, or the brutal, hard course of his training.

  If he cried out, his scream became swallowed. The mirror-smooth walls blurred, then shattered ahead of him. He saw his doubled image split asunder, repeated until he beheld himself as a multitude, face after face alike as his own, regarding him with accusation. Then vision dimmed. He discerned no surroundings. The surge of incomprehensible power withdrew, rewoven into a seamless webwork of insubstantial, poised force. The subliminal sense of its confining pressure lurked just beyond reach of his
outstretched hand.

  Given nothing, again, but his harshly rasped breathing, Arithon mustered a semblance of disciplined calm. He made his way forward, surprised by his own steadiness; and the featureless twilight around him balled up and gave birth to a scene from his childhood …

  Sunlight silvered the slab granite stair at Rauven those days when the westerly wind blew. The crash of the surf at the spring’s high tide showered over the landing. At three years of age, a black-haired boy sat huddled with his arms wrapped over his knees.

  ‘She’s not coming back, bastard,’ mocked his cousin’s voice from above.

  Arithon tucked his chin into his sleeve, eyes wide-open and stinging with spray as the waves crashed and unraveled themselves one after the next against the rock-studded shoreline. He would not close his lids. If he did, the unbearable memory surged back, of his mother’s remains cloaked in red flames, and the chanting of the Rauven masters speaking her spirit across Daelion’s Wheel. She had gone to Athliera beyond the veil, never to be returning.

  Water conquered fire.

  Arithon set his jaw. Perhaps if he stared at the ocean long enough, the hurt in his heart might wash clean.

  ‘She’s dead!’ goaded Jorey. Clever and blond as his s’Ahelas father, the older boy was already affirmed in his talent. He would start with the apprentices next year, the hour he passed his tenth birthday. ‘Do you hear, bastard? You’re not wanted at home. My mother won’t let you stay.’

  Young Arithon kept his fixated gaze on the sea, not turning to acknowledge the baiting. He knew his cousin would get angrier still, and probably throw a stone.

  The expected missile cracked on the stair, missing Arithon’s tucked form by a hairsbreadth. He flinched, but refused to take to his heels. Here he would stay, though the spindrift soaked through his clothes and the brisk wind set him to shivering.