Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘You can mope and wait for a ship till you rot!’ Jorey yelled, ‘but your pirate father won’t come for you! By now, he will lie with another mistress, and she doesn’t want you, either.’

  But Arithon expected no brigantine flying the leopard of Karthan. Instead, he longed to be gone, just disappear. Become wet and still as the stone of the landing, inert until the thundering brine rinsed out the shame of being a child abandoned. The wish burned, focused into a savage intensity as Jorey’s next pebble stung the small of his back. Arithon bit his lip and wanted with all the balked force of the tears he had no safe place to shed.

  His gift of shadow answered. Avar’s bastard son felt the inward surge of his talent, but not, this time, to bring darkness. His whetted desire to fade into stone, to be not seen, re-formed through his latent, raw power.

  Jorey’s shrill shout of surprise brought Arithon to his feet. He stared at his cousin’s flushed, frightened face, and exulted: he realized some unforeseen twist of worked shadow had let him grant his own wish. He had turned invisible. For the first time, he saw his big, loudmouthed cousin shaken to white-faced uncertainty.

  That moment, the dammed-up emotions burst. Balked rage and grief flooded in with the unstoppable force of the tide. Arithon saw red for the countless times he had suffered Jorey’s prodding taunts. Always, before this, he had been too small, too afraid to stand up and fight back. Thoughtlessly spurred by his own wild hurt, Arithon picked up a sharp flake of granite and threw.

  His aim would strike true, he remembered, and Jorey would bleed. But now was not then; he did not stand as a three-year-old boy on the sea-drenched landing at Rauven, but as a man grown in the Maze of Davien, under the roots of the Mathorns.

  In the cavern of Kewar, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn gasped as the stone hurled in childhood hammered his own exposed forehead. He felt the hot blood streak down his adult cheek. In intricate, exacting detail, he experienced Jorey’s wild panic; all of his cousin’s confusion and pain, as the boy took to his heels in screaming distress. No longer the enraged, invisible child, Arithon became the victim of his past action. His heart raced in fear, while stone after vengeful stone cracked around him, and he stumbled up the winding stone stair, skinning his shins and his knees.

  ‘Stop!’ he gasped. ‘Enough.’

  None heard. The reliving did not end until Arithon had suffered the sting of his final, thrown pebble, and wept the last drop of his cousin’s hysterical tears. He was not released until he understood, heart and mind, that Jorey’s cruelties stemmed, every one, from the fear that one day, his own mother might succumb to a fever. She could waste and die just as horribly as Talera, and he, himself might be left with no home and no loving comfort …

  Arithon s’Ffalenn recovered full awareness of himself on his knees, in the shadowed deeps of Davien’s Maze. The stone underneath him was no weathered stair, but inland granite cut to a mirror polish by the dauntless spells of a Sorcerer. The corridor of Kewar stretched ahead with no turning, its darkness alive with the too-vivid specters of a past summoned back in reliving. Arithon straightened. He climbed back to his feet, his pulse still unpleasantly pounding, and raised shaken fingers to his sore brow. Yet no gash met his tentative touch. The scar he experienced was impressed on his innermind, damning proof of a bygone brutality that now lashed him to poisoned remorse.

  The inexorable knowledge he could not turn back forced his unsteady step forward …

  The beautiful dyed carpets that graced Rauven’s lower halls did not soften the high-tower aerie where the high mage kept his study, or the cramped, book-lined chamber he liked to use to dress down his errant apprentices. Mak s’Ahelas preferred floors of bare slate, which could be easily marked with chalked ciphers, then scoured with sand when his constructs required a ritual dispersal. Led onto that comfortless space by his aunt, then left there to face his due reckoning, Arithon stood shaking in salt-damp clothes.

  Small fists clenched together in rigid dread, he endured while the deep, dark eyes of the high mage surveyed him without quarter.

  Mak s’Ahelas had been tall, forbidding, his hands with their thin, blue mapwork of veins as starkly cut as chipped marble. His presence commanded the silence. If his black robes breathed the haymeadow scent of sweetgrass, the air when he moved shed a charge of pent power, and sometimes, the unnerving, raw tang the wind wore after a lightning strike.

  ‘Boy,’ he said finally. ‘Arithon. You have broken the tenets of responsibility and used your talent to cause harm to another. Have you anything to say?’

  The child held his ground like a frightened deer, eyes wide and black with distress. He shook his head, scarcely able to speak for the terror of having displeased no less than the high mage himself. ‘Nothing, grandsire.’

  ‘That is well, boy.’ The high mage stepped in front of the lancet window. Backlit by the glare of the afternoon sun, his stern features dissolved into gloom. ‘No excuse can absolve such behavior. Are you sorry?’

  Arithon raised his chin, the move an open defiance; so slight. But the gesture was truthful. Mak s’Ahelas took note. He waited, cat still, to see whether his daughter’s wayward offspring would also be tempted to lie.

  On that day at Rauven Tower, the youngster had spoken no falsehood. In defense of his cousin’s torment on the stair, he had said no word at all to his grandsire.

  Yet his grown counterpart in the Maze of Davien did not feel the stricken shame of the child summoned forward for his misbehavior. Instead, Arithon experienced the helpless, stifled pain of the high mage, who had looked on in love, but dared not show mercy.

  Not to a boy born to such immense gifts.

  A grandson alone, newly orphaned, understandably angry and hurt, but one with an unmeasured talent and intelligence. Though Mak s’Ahelas felt his heart twist, he had forced himself to stand firm. Wisdom must come before kindness on this day. However he ached to gather his daughter’s child into his arms, he recognized the pitfalls that too often destroyed the prodigiously gifted.

  To give way, to cosset this wayward child might allow his tender burden of grief to sow the first seed of cruelty. Young Arithon’s resentment must not, at any cost, be given the false foothold of adult indulgence. First and foremost, as high mage, the s’Ahelas patriarch could not condone a misuse of wild talent, one just exploded with formidable force, into startling, spontaneous development.

  Aching, his throat tight, and his face a mask of severity, Mak s’Ahelas addressed his grandson. ‘Arithon, today you have transgressed the first law with your talent. If you can cause harm to another, then it follows, you are also strong enough to learn the respect such gifted powers are due. You will begin your training with the apprentices this moment. Report to Master Krael. Tell him you have broken the prime stricture of restraint. You will say I expect him to treat with you as he would any other boy under his charge.’

  ‘Grandsire,’ said Arithon, his whisper twisted with wrenching apprehension.

  The boy left to do as he was bidden. Yet reliving did not end as the high-tower door clicked shut upon his departure.

  The power of Davien’s spelled maze reached back into time, spanned the space between worlds, and raised a subsequent scene, when Master Krael had stormed into the high mage’s study, appalled to unprecedented outrage. ‘Your grandson is three!’ he cried in appeal. ‘How can he stand up to the course of study expected of boys who are ten years of age, even twelve? The solitary contemplation you’ve commanded for today’s act of cruelty just last week left a girl of fourteen in hysterical tears! Mak, forgive me, but Arithon’s mother just died. Give him the time he needs to grieve! If you don’t, let me say, you risk breaking him.’

  ‘Then break him!’ Mak s’Ahelas rammed to his feet, faced the window to the sea to hide the pain that ripped him bone deep. ‘Better that than to see the boy mocked as a bastard, tormented by peers, and poisoned through by the vengeful misfortune that gave us his birth! He is the most gifted child ever born to s’Ahelas lineage! D
o you realize what that means?’

  Master Krael’s censured silence allowed he did not.

  The High Mage of Rauven hardened himself against the weakness of humane argument. ‘I’ll say this just once. My grandson starts his apprenticeship. If Arithon’s talents are ever to reach flower, then he must learn, and learn now, how to handle his rage. Or his born gift of shadow will lead others to fear. If that happens, he will never in this life find his balance. Let him languish and train older, and the spontaneous opening he provoked this morning will lead to another, tomorrow. He will realize the prodigious extent of his gifts. If he grows more resourceful, even his teachers will be forced to shy off! He will become the embittered victim of loneliness, and no one I know has the bare-handed strength to reach through if that boy should build walls against us!’

  ‘No, please no,’ Arithon s’Ffalenn begged as a man; yet the maze permitted no respite. As a three-year-old orphan, he reembarked on the arduous course of his training under the mages at Rauven Tower. A small child among boys, he was compelled to adapt, to react, to stretch and engage his born talents without causing harm, until the taunts of his older peers taught him how to respect himself. All over again, he endured the harsh lessons, the disciplines tempered to engage his inner awareness and make him seek his own truths. He must not be swayed by the other apprentices’ mocking laughter, or their scorn, or their envious fear as he groped through his sorry mistakes. On his own, under solitary discipline, he created his first measure of success.

  The study he completed for harming his cousin was no punishment, but a teaching of ruthless expedience. Confined by himself inside a small room whose walls were spelled mirrors, Arithon could not rage at Jorey without seeing his own fury reflected; then behind that, his pain, then the puppet strings of fear, breathed to life by his secret terrors. He could not run from himself, or throw stones, or cast blame, but only arrive at the weakness ingrained in his innermost being. Trapped in abject misery, the young child threw tantrums. He beat his fists until he bloodied his knuckles, but could not run or hide to find surcease. No one came to offer him comfort. The mirrors that reflected endless views of himself forgave no cover of illusion. At tender, young age, Arithon endured day and night in confinement until he faced his own hate and fear, and learned to temper the loneliness and grief that were his undying companions.

  Yet as the reliving unfolded and cast forth the tempestuous bursts of infantile emotions, Arithon did not retaste the salt of his tears. He did not experience the anguish of boyhood hurt and confusion.

  Instead, the Maze of Davien gave him back that child’s raw screams, as they touched on the sore heart of his grandsire. An old man bereaved, who had just lost his daughter. The sole legacy she left was her bastard, begotten by Avar of Karthan as an act of rage and defiance. Yet the pirate king’s relentless compassion had transformed her ill-starred act of rebellion into spontaneous love. In agonized loss, Talera had left the man, had come home to her father to give birth to her son inside warded walls at Rauven.

  ‘To keep them both safe,’ she had said, weeping in the high mage’s arms, while the brigantine flying the leopard banner had scudded hull down over the seaward horizon. ‘Let my s’Ilessid husband empty his treasury sweeping the wide seas. His revenge will elude him. Had I stayed on Karthan with a newborn child, Avar s’Ffalenn would be bound to the shore to defend us. He knew, as I did, the cost in shed blood would lead his people to ruin. Such a war would grant Amroth’s king the outright gift of a sitting target.’

  Talera’s deathbed fever had left a boy too gifted for a grandfather’s coddling. For each night young Arithon cried himself to sleep, Mak s’Ahelas had listened, and wept also. Alone in his high tower, pacing slate floors, he had matched tear for tear, aching, knowing, that to answer the need of his lonely old age would destroy the independence of mind such a rare talent required to fledge.

  ‘You will not praise him,’ he commanded Ornison, the benevolent master who instructed the child of five to weave his first chain of spelled ciphers.

  ‘Your grandson’s good!’ the kindly mage protested, set aback by the admonition. ‘Didn’t you see –’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s good! And indeed I saw.’ Mak s’Ahelas did not relent, though he bled inside for necessity. ‘He’s strong-minded, as well. Not being blind or deaf, my grandson certainly knows how well he achieves. Leave him free! Let him make his own comparisons, and hard as it is, allow him to choose for himself how to handle them. Don’t insult his intelligence! Arithon will not thrive if he’s trained like a dog, good boy this, nice boy that, until he loses his way. Don’t blur the distinctions that lead him to seek his own happiness.’

  ‘But he has no father, no mother, no family!’ Ornison argued, his laughing humor shocked still. ‘Who’s left to take pride in his progress?’

  ‘He has no family,’ the high mage agreed, leaving his vantage at the seaside casement. The brass loops of the armillary reflected his haunted pacing as he resumed his unbending diatribe. ‘That’s Arithon’s greatest setback, one he must rise to overcome. Praise will draw on that weakness most powerfully. He’s an unformed boy! He’ll seek to please you, then bend his opinions to earn your favor. Just to feel less alone, he will lose the ability to listen to his innate inner balance. How will he, how can he ever manage to master the vast scope of his talent if he forgets how to think for himself?’

  ‘I had not thought,’ Ornison confessed, chastened, his dough features sagged to distress. ‘Of course, the boy will be managed as you ask.’

  The High Mage of Rauven withheld his approval, bound by the tenets of merciless wisdom. Black-robed, gaunt, and silent, he observed from a distance, while the boy learned the harsh lesson to act for himself, to see and discern through clear eyes, the shifting template of his evolving belief unbiased by outside opinions. That course of teaching alone would let Arithon develop the clarity of mind he required to stay the difficult course of a mastery so gifted, the mages who taught him at times could not hope to keep up …

  Looped in the spelled coils of the Maze of Davien, Arithon s’Ffalenn suffered his childhood twice over: once for the solitary boy he had been, and again for the High Mage of Rauven, who, unseen, unheard, had cherished each brilliant stride of his grandson’s achievement. Yet he could let no man or woman see his care lest he spoil the boy’s developing consciousness.

  Fragments of recall broke and receded, bright-edged and vivid as experience. Arithon tasted the dust and sweat of the tiltyard, again, as Rauven’s one-eyed swordmaster made his slender, boy’s hand hard with callus on the grip of a practice stick. In sharp, twofold echo, Kewar Tunnel re-created the bruises of learning, alongside the sharp sting of each blow he had dealt his opponents in the course of rough sparring.

  Again, he relived the banged shins and scraped knees in the trials that strengthened his developing mage-sight, when he had been asked to cross room after room mazed with obstacles masked under darkness. Once he commanded the more subtle landscape of his delicate, inner senses, he endured testing of more punishing exactitude, when self-trust had been paired with live danger.

  Again, he relived the tense, panting terror of the hours he had drilled with bare steel in the black pit of Rauven’s dungeons. He was given no torch to augment his senses. In blank, dusty darkness, the master at arms drew his blood, cut him day after day, until he learned to retune his perceptions and maintain that heightened state of awareness by ingrained reflex.

  He learned archery, then accepted the blindfold again, and loosed repetitive arrows. His task was to sense the grass target through mage-sight, then progress to shooting down thrown knots of rags until he could hit them, ascending or descending, or strike them on command at the tip of their arc before falling.

  Again, he relived the pranks he had played, the tarts filched from the kitchen to the cook’s fist-shaking dismay, and the redoubled workload laid on the baker’s boys brought by dishonest indulgence. Arithon shared the distraught anxiety of the searchers,
the night he had gone wading for shiners at low tide, and foolishly cut himself off on a rock when the rip currents roared in. He grew older, stung by remorse for the least word of thoughtless unkindness. He gained skill with his fists in the fights provoked by those peers whipped to rage by his quick mind and his excellence, until the day came when the hurt he inflicted overtook the scuffling bruises received. Such times, the Maze of Davien rewove recall: his opponent’s blacked eye became as his own with exactingly unbiased restitution.

  His past came alive, each act of misdeed accounted. At odd intervals the compassionate drive of s’Ffalenn birthright wove a net of resilience to shield him.

  Fledgling birds he had nursed to first flight, a deer he had healed of a broken leg, the elderly seeress who had befriended him – all walked at Arithon’s side. Their protection of him in return lent some measure of mitigation. He retrod his own footsteps to ten years of age, when the high mage himself instilled the lessons that readied the mind for the perilous initiations that opened the keys to grand conjury.

  Past warnings reechoed with the resonance of summer thunder. ‘Before you access the gateways that cross through the veil, before the quest of the spiritwalk, where you link with the forces that weave Ath’s creation, you must comprehend the raw impact of your mind. Every thought creates shape. Every feeling, no matter how passing small, precipitates the spin that unleashes event. To tread the way of power, you must waken the intense self-awareness that permits you to clear and harness the stream of your inner being.’

  Again, Arithon stepped across the tuned rim of the circle laid down by his grandfather’s hand. Yet this time, the trial that led him through the nethermost pit of his fears was not guided. At Rauven, the high mage had steadied his past steps. His wise presence had stood as bulwark and shield to guard against youthful uncertainties. Firm admonishments had steered each misstep through the quagmires of imbalanced thought, and the entanglements of false beliefs. On Athera, alone in the Maze of Davien, Arithon s’Ffalenn performed the same trial, stripped naked.