Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Ships had burned; men had died in steel and fire, but only because overriding aggression had mistakenly caused frightened captains to turn in attack on each other. Arithon had not done willful murder. But the razor’s edge of awareness borne away from the poisoned crux was that, so easily, he could have …

  Then tumultuous emotion dropped into eclipse as the juxtaposed layers of images resolved down to one, stamped into pristine clarity: Elaira felt Arithon’s warm palm cup her cheek. His other hand stroked wisps of hay from her hair with a touch of unnerving tenderness. Dream and longing merged into resolute form: he was there with her, all of him, self laid bare in the vital charge of a moment’s restructured symmetry. Elaira was Koriani, exactingly trained to interpret the nuance revealed by a face. The contact purloined through the Maze of Davien exposed the intimate feelings replayed through a man’s being. This time, the empathic link wrought in Merior lent her the leverage for full understanding. Not the shading of conjecture she expected, evinced by the subtle tensions reflected in carriage and expression; instead, the unveiling took her by storm as the door between two separate minds opened without clouding pretense.

  Arithon s’Ffalenn was mage-schooled to evince the exacting self-discipline of mastery. He lived and breathed, attuned to a reflexive state of rigorous mental clarity. Therefore, the bolt of fierce passion that shot through him scribed its response on his vulnerable heart. He resisted the hitched breath, let the feelings flow in unimpeded. His spontaneous reaction, by conscious design, became wholly turned inward, self-questioning.

  Never denied, that surge of attraction raised no marring defense. Not even a whisper of rejection arose to reflect signs of conflicted interest.

  Elaira now shared his stunned self-acceptance. Merged with his thought by the powers of the maze, she experienced the wonderment permitted to flower, spontaneous in beauty as a wild rose surprised into bloom out of season. She sensed Arithon’s unflinching acknowledgment of her being as total and real, then followed his untrammeled review of probability. S’Ahelas farsight perceived the potential of a love profound and deep. Arithon found a joy beyond trifling attachment in Elaira’s insightful wry humor. The magnetic allure posed by an enchantress who clearly saw through to his core framed a rarity demanding his absolute honesty.

  The Maze of Davien unveiled the grand depths. Because the connection might be lastingly real, respect for the independent woman she was invoked Arithon’s considered restraint. He would take measured pause before he unleashed the heedless, sweet rush of desire.

  Here, as in the past, they met interruption. The Koriani initiate assigned to keep lane watch broke through the delight of enchanted discovery.

  ‘Sithaer’s furies, not now!’ Elaira had cried then, venting frustration with a shockingly filthy epithet.

  Arithon’s response, ‘I beg your pardon?’ showed contrite confusion, that he might have caused her inadvertent distress.

  ‘You did nothing,’ Elaira repeated in memory, the moment charged with crystallized dread for an upcoming round of harsh consequence. As emotionally volatile, her current awareness cried out to explore the exposed intimacy of Arithon’s reminiscence.

  The absence of barriers posed seductive temptation. Elaira longed for nothing but to let instinct rule, her being and Arithon’s granted the unprecedented opening to meld into seamless accord. The honeyed promise of union beckoned her onward, forgetful of caution or danger.

  A thorn prick of warning snagged her impulse short. Jerked back from the dizzying brink, appalled to discover how narrowly close she had come to unmasking her illicit presence, Elaira seized on the grace of her beloved’s past flush of confusion. She spun subtle barriers using new knowledge gained through her study with Ath’s adepts. In the split second before the Teir’s’Ffalenn recovered his mage-schooled aplomb, she masked her incursion behind a delicate circle of concealment.

  For better or worse, she now shared his fate. No course remained, except to endure the trial of Davien’s Maze alongside him. If Arithon won free, no harm would befall. If he faced defeat, she would be there to offer him Selidie’s tainted bargain in last resort to spare him his life.

  Time unreeled. Joined in lockstep with Prince Arithon’s experience, Elaira encountered the raised powers of Alithiel, when he once drew the sword against an attacking Khadrim in the heights of the Thaldein passes. At his side, she experienced the blade’s weighty history, and with him, ached in bone-deep longing for escape from the yoke of royal destiny. She burned with his need smoldered like banked fire, to pursue to fulfillment his endowed aptitude for music. She knew the fast silence of Althain Tower, and as Dakar before her, lost her breath to the consummate, tuned edge that Arithon evinced in his handling of mage talent. She saw the true depth of his gifts brought to bear through the hour he had ceded his resource to Fellowship use to suppress an outbreak of venomous methspawn.

  For the first time, since Merior, she grasped the full scope of his sacrifice at Tal Quorin. No moment was given to measure the pain. Time was granted no stay in the maze.

  She wept Arithon’s tears, watching the spirits of unicorns dance on the bare hills of Caith-al-Caen. As his heart bled, she tasted the whiplash of irony, as he suffered the hurtful brunt of Rathain’s shattered legacy at Ithamon. Amid the ruined walls and the ringing, bright purity of the towers raised by the Paravians, she heard his scathing rebuttal of crown heritage, hurled down like a gauntlet to Asandir.

  There came no release. The days unreeled, autumn to winter, in brute labor and windy turbulence, as Arithon twined his birth-born mastery of shadow with Lysaer’s command of light to drive the Mistwraith into captivity. The adroit touch he used to weave mage-sighted conjury into the limitless fabric of spun darkness could not do other than leave her awestruck. Since his teachers at Rauven had never made an issue of him as a prodigy, Arithon used his gifts quietly. His rapport with the deep mysteries carried a forthright acceptance that moved Dakar to fury, and Asandir to well-guarded respect.

  The result was a living masterwork. Grazed by scalded air as Lysaer’s light bolts sheared aloft, buffeted by ripping gusts and chill as the mist slammed and cracked against an ink bulwark of wrought shadow, Arithon tempered the dark with fine spellcraft, spun to a precision that seemed outwardly effortless. Inside, he stifled the cry of his heart. His free spirit yearned to throw off the constriction of the crown rule that awaited at Etarra. He transmuted the bitterness, day after day; rejected the urge to wield his gift in raw violence to release his tied rage and the pitfalls of maudlin depression.

  Through the exhaustive reliving as Desh-thiere was subdued, Elaira suffered Arithon’s stress as the mage-sight he was born and raised to entrain jarred against the countercurrents of savagery inherent in any joined field of conflict. Since Karthan, Arithon had struggled to assimilate the hard lesson of tragic experience: in blood, he had learned the demands of high kingship could not be reconciled with the clean strictures that founded grand conjury.

  The Maze of Davien forgave no uncertainty, glossed over no slip or incompetence. Arithon was dealt forced review of smashed dreams, the prismatic linkage of cause and effect replayed to the least stinging nuance. The visions laid bare the warp thread and the weft, as thought and emotion spun out the choices that sourced his personal experience. Though Elaira kept her shielded presence well grounded, the buffeting journey left her winnowed like chaff threshed in the wake of a squall line.

  Nor did she have warning to brace for the moment when, in the throes of his labor to restore open sky, the Prince of Rathain detected the subtle presence of her own personal signature.

  Appalled, Elaira first presumed her masking protections had slipped. As she reached in struck panic to seek out the breach, Arithon’s mage-sight identified the source: no error on her part, but a separate event within the context of his past.

  Unstrung by relief, Elaira belatedly recalled the fragment of gossip taken from Traithe, that Morriel Prime had once contrived to dispatch Lirenda into a sc
rying trance as her cat’s-paw. The bald-faced attempt had been made to pierce through the Paravian wardings the Fellowship had entrusted to stand guard on affairs at Ithamon. The Matriarch had engaged the Skyron aquamarine, then used its recorded imprint of Elaira’s unconditional, new love to garner admittance through the sealed rings of ancient defenses. Thrilled to wicked fascination, the enchantress now observed the course of events as the brazen ploy unfolded. She savored the piquant, inside awareness, that the foil to mask the Prime’s covert prying had been tried without knowledge of Arithon’s mastery.

  A mistake that wrought backlash: the Teir’s’Ffalenn maintained too keen an awareness not to realize the touch was no passing thought of his own. An intrusion set on him from outside, then, not necessarily unwelcome except that the sense of an irreconcilable imbalance lifted the hair at his neck. Trained reflex responded. Arithon set the intuitive imprint of Elaira’s presence in Erdane against this moment’s spurious contact. In splintering clarity, he saw the paired template of experiences did not match.

  This touch of caressing, sweet tenderness was not based upon innate potential, but sprang from the aroused passion of a woman entrained by response to him in return.

  Stunned yet again by the striking precision of Arithon’s compassionate insight, Elaira recalled: in strict fact, her acknowledgment of an emotional attachment had resolved days after their fateful first encounter, when a formal Koriani interrogation had forced her to examine the issue in depth. Indeed, her conscious acceptance of Arithon as beloved had never surfaced throughout the scene in the hayloft.

  That hour in Ithamon, bristled to forewarning, Arithon traced down the intrusive contact. His rage towered as he grasped the bloodless framework of Morriel’s manipulation. Beyond question, he would permit no such meddling interference. Nor would he accept the implied violation, that Elaira’s feelings had been shaped and used as a tool, without her informed consent. His testing probe measured with blinding speed, weighed the range of harmful probabilities, then extracted the tacit word of collusion which ensured that the Mad Prophet would turn a blind eye. Still charged to wild fury, but not uncontrolled, Arithon shaped his rejection. He revised the guiding intent behind the forces of shadow held poised to receive Lysaer’s next inbound light bolt.

  Each stage of enactment, from reflexive reaction to a genius command of fierce impulse, Elaira witnessed the mapped artistry of Arithon’s rebuttal. She saw the charged powers raised to rip another breaching tear through the mists deflect in mid-course, to wreak havoc on Morriel’s construct.

  Nor did the maze allow one shred of quarter for the effects of constrained vindication. In simultaneous rebound, Arithon experienced Morriel’s pall of alarm, for an upset arranged by a dazzling intellect she could not raise the spontaneous innovation to counter. As merciless in interconnected detail, the break in the Prime’s unilateral competence became the hook that engaged Lirenda’s twisted fascination with Arithon’s character. The defense meted out in Elaira’s behalf ripped past secure barriers, feeding the needy insecurity that drove the former First Senior’s voracious ambition.

  One moment’s vengeful facet of brilliance, dispatched from Kieling Tower in Ithamon, became precursor to a dark future.

  Elaira surveyed the changed landscape of repercussions, aghast at the brutal scope opened up by the maze’s expanded vision. She watched, in stark heartbreak, as Prince Arithon shuddered to the chill shadow of his own making: that Lirenda would not accede to strength in a man she could not use spelled force to control. Her lurking fear must now evolve as blind hatred, lending impetus to her insatiable drive to seek outright domination. The lashing round of verbal humiliation she received from her distressed Prime further hardened Lirenda’s denial. The latent love already stifled by terror, her vulnerable need to embrace pure compassion and rekindle the light of her lost self-acceptance was unlikely to find the gentle redemption a bard’s gifted touch might perhaps one day have awakened.

  The maze was a lens that unmercifully exposed: a branch in Arithon’s life path slammed closed, more of his cherished freedom of movement irrevocably rendered forfeit. Tumult and tragedy, as the barb of satisfaction chosen that fateful, past moment at Ithamon presaged the unconscionable abuse of a herdboy named Fionn Areth …

  Arithon paused, wrung to gasping remorse. The next step forward would not bring reprieve, or the next, as the coils of Desh-thiere were bound under seal and ward. Victory here would but lead to further imprisonment. Ahead loomed the upheaval surrounding his crown oath at Etarra, then the first breach of his inviolate will under the curse of the Mistwraith. That fracture of self would birth all the horrors of Tal Quorin, and the ultimate loss of the prodigious, sighted talent that stood as his raised shield against Morriel Prime’s deadly enmity.

  In the dark of the maze, Arithon uttered his threadbare plea to sustain. ‘Move, damn you! No fear can be worse. It’s just a reliving. The fiendish embellishment is nothing but truth, and truth, of itself, does not kill.’

  But conscience could, and had, in this place, where Kamridian s’Ffalenn had died screaming.

  Elaira held fast, her empathy crushed silent, as her beloved mustered his strength and mastered another step forward …

  The sequential impressions raked like cut glass, as Asandir arrived on the scene and exchanged brisk words of chastisement. Arithon retreated to seek solace in solitude. Alone in the ruin, he was hounded first by Ithamon’s endowment of haunts, and next by his half brother’s misguided effort to seek his counsel in private. The hour wrought consequence: the Master of Shadow, too ridden by anguish, and Lysaer, too ignorant to realize the perils of speaking outside, on unwarded ground. The Mistwraith launched a vicious attack and caught them defenselessly exposed.

  Elaira shared the bursting crisis firsthand, as Arithon raised talent to counter. She tasted his rank fear as his efforts to set wards became jangled; each construct unbound before his seals could be joined into stable completion; tearing breaches that erupted across his fixed barriers with no more finesse than a chalk line erased by the feet of a trampling multitude. Although Elaira had been born on Athera when the mists still enveloped the sky, she had never sampled the nature of Desh-thiere’s underlying malevolence. No record existed, for what she beheld in the maze-wakened stream of Arithon’s recollected experience. The nightmare terrors that surrounded and tore at him had no form. They expressed through no framework of flesh. Pure spirit, they swirled, fragmented faces with leering, fanged mouths, and empty, vicious, starved eyes. Hands plucked, one touch seductive and insistent, and the next, raking with claws to rip life essence out of the aura. The wraiths were not one, or a dozen, or a hundred, but a mass mind too vast to encompass. Teeming millions of entities had fused over time, awarenesses knotted and tangled into a vortex of virulent hatred. Their amalgamate presence was malice distilled, a more dangerous net than any spider could weave to entrap its diet of hapless small insects.

  The influx Arithon strove and failed utterly to grapple was a massive gestalt, cognizance loomed into an insatiable thirst to consume and assimilate life.

  Elaira shuddered to acknowledge the colossal misapprehension, that Morriel Prime, and after her, Selidie, had neither understanding nor experience to measure the broadscale threat posed by the entities the two princes had subdued at Ithamon. Koriani lore held no concept to encompass the malevolence, live and seething under ward beneath Rockfell. Otherwise, no Prime would dare the audacity to meddle, or play Arithon as a live pawn in their age-long struggle to disband the Fellowship’s compact.

  The horror defied description, as Desh-thiere’s attack sidestepped Arithon’s invention with alarming speed and agility. Its lancing, swift contact stabbed like needles of ice, razing through spell-wrought shielding with numbing force. No work of man seemed enough to counteract a barrage of such sustained ferocity.

  Demoralized by what seemed an inevitable slide toward defeat, Arithon still fought. He ceded no ground. His mulish, inventive resistance served brea
thtaking rejection to the overpowering force ranged against him. He would not stand down, though every barrier he raised flashed to ruin like spark-touched lint. Against landsliding despair, the Master of Shadow held to his obdurate belief: that an avenue to stave off annihilation must exist. The intelligent complexity of Ath’s creation was not bound by limitation. Some untried combination of wards must be possible to wrest back the chance for salvation. He clung to hope, mustered bare-handed resource for as long as he could stay upright.

  More than his own life lay at risk. Lysaer had collapsed. Arithon dared not break, lest the half brother slumped in his arms become the shared victim of his incompetence.

  Yet against the brewed horde of Desh-thiere’s wraiths, one man’s self-determined refusal to yield was the wish of a feather exposed to a gale. Arithon felt wrung through. He reeled, milled under and hooded by probing darkness. His lost senses were buffeted by incomprehensible movement and noise until his knees gave way underneath him. He sought to cushion Lysaer from harm as he swayed and lost his balance. Then agony sliced through and splintered his mind to a thousand glittering fragments.

  Just as trapped by the maze’s projected reliving, Elaira heard Arithon’s harrowing scream resound through Kewar’s sealed passage. For a moment, elusive, something of cold purpose flicked and passed like a snake through his mind. She felt it questing, gathering, absorbing his core being with a ransacking turn of intelligence. Then a crackling force of purple-white light snapped down like a shining cleaver. The shadowy presence retreated, its tainting influence there and gone without trace.

  Elaira grasped after the memory, concerned an impression of vital importance had somehow escaped her awareness. But she lost the ephemeral sense of its essence. The encounter receded, unformed as the shimmer of heat lightning glimpsed and then lost into distance.