Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Stand me down at your peril,’ he had said in ultimatum to Dakar.

  Across a gathering darkness, the words came touched through by a note to wring bone-chilling dread from the sensitized ear of a masterbard. Arithon quelled his first shudder of revulsion. He held, yet unflinching, while Davien’s spellcraft respun the threads of past nightmare. Again, as he had in the Riverton tavern, he angled his blade and attacked.

  Unable to ache, denied the expression of natural horror, Arithon watched his ferocious, trained talent slash into Dakar’s inept defense. Bound to his right mind by the test of the maze, he endured the breathless entreaties the Mad Prophet cried out in stressed effort to snag back his departed reason. No word touched his heart, no appeal wakened mercy. In reliving, he came on with bared steel, reduced to soulless savagery.

  Past and present entangled on that ripping crux. Feeling the clamp of Desh-thiere’s geas drawn like stitched wire through his vitals, Arithon forced himself still. The howling clang of unsheathed steel shattered hearing, strike after desperate, balked strike. He strangled back the gut impulse to recoil, while the murderous blows he had directed to wound shredded flung cloth, and splintered through marquetry furnishings. The battle raged, beyond stopping. All mercy stood forfeit. Dakar’s improvised, beleaguered defense seized on whatever object lay to hand, to be snatched up and thrown against the barrage of snake-fast lunges.

  Present time self-control came at lacerating cost. Mangled by the silenced cry of his heart, Arithon marshaled the harsh tenets of mage training.

  He would not break.

  The rampaging rise of his outraged pity must be ruthlessly deflected. Where he could not sustain the ache of distress, he narrowed his focus, fixed his sorcerer’s concentration on the minutiae of visual detail. Anything ordinary and innocent, to bleed off the impact of event; watch anything else that was not flying steel: here, the moving cloth of his shirtsleeve, or there, where direct avoidance was impossible, the rippling play of caught light, sliding over the polish of Alithiel’s inlaid runes. When the rasp of Dakar’s stertorous breaths broke through refined concentration, Arithon fastened his hearing around the harmonics cast off of belling, stressed steel.

  That stopgap diversion proved a mistake. The spelled seals of the maze would stand for no respite where a victim’s past action caused pain. Thrown into the expanded insight of mage vision by the powers of Davien’s artistry, Arithon was made witness to the stained shimmer cast through his aura. Still disbarred from direct use of his talent, he saw the scorching tendrils of hatred overmaster his being. In damning clarity, he discerned how his weaknesses made him the flesh-and-blood puppet to mow down any fool who balked his intent to kill Lysaer. Truth laid him bare: the workings that turned him had in fact been laid down through his own knowledge, and the rigorous trappings of mastery. Rauven’s learning had limits. He could not diffuse spells that learned strictures insisted lay beyond the reach of his resource. Nor could Fellowship power intervene, since the curse was no outside force. Its warping reflection stemmed from flawed beliefs, those personal shortcomings he had not faced, lacing their unseen cracks through his core image of self.

  A forced break to excise Desh-thiere’s influence would violate free will, also fragment the inborn integrity of the evolving spirit. Any being so abused would pass Daelion’s Wheel, reflexively crossing through death to restore its disrupted wholeness.

  Arithon grasped the diabolical irony. The insights of Rauven’s knowledge stemmed from Ath’s law: the self could not be made to disown the self. Desh-thiere’s works neatly strangled the avenues of growth and change that might set him free. The necessary step of claiming a flawed idea as his own, and thus acquiring the power to master it, had been set under seals by the curse to engender his own self-destruction.

  To snap its binding chain would inflict instant suicide, against his oath at Athir, and to the ruin of the enchantress whose innocent life relied on his continued survival.

  Stymied by the bitter fruit of his own brilliant talent, Arithon snatched to steady his rocked foothold on self-confidence. He struggled to settle his rising gorge, that he had helped author his own downfall. Desh-thiere’s geas was active, its coiling vigilance like trip wires strung to snag his unwary thoughts. The least flare of self-recrimination would signal rebellion, and call down immediate destruction. Arithon stilled out of desperate need. He let the raging despair rip him through without raising a whimper of protest. Limp and yielding before the disfiguring root of his own baneful evil, he watched himself dance in lockstep to the drive of Desh-thiere’s geas.

  Again, Arithon employed deadly, sharp swordplay to batter Dakar to a gasping standstill. The poisoned moment of triumph replayed: again, he watched the fat spellbinder burn his own life force in reckless extremity, a fool’s effort to stave off the ruin of a friend gone insane. Again, Arithon pressured to snap through the warded permissions given over in foresighted trust; and now the sole stay that harried his geas-bent course to attack Lysaer. Again, the explosion of balked fury, as he cut Alithiel downward to gut the Mad Prophet like a rabbit.

  ‘In Earl Jieret’s name, leave that spellbinder be!’ For unbearable horror, yet again, the unholy slaughter was deflected by the jarring stroke of a longsword wielded by Caolle’s steadfast hand.

  Cry mercy! Elaira was made to stand witness to this. She must share the inconsolable atrocity that had seen this tough liegeman destroyed. Arithon choked back his wretched self-hatred. Dragged through an exposure that left every nerve scraped over by glass-edged distress, he held on, made himself passive, though the lashing storm of raw shame battered at his heart like a cataract. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Only the venom of bestial bloodlust, which drove him to honorless slaughter.

  Nor was Caolle the soulless obstacle that the dross of curse-bound madness had once made him seem. Davien’s Maze unwound all illusion. Arithon, passive, suffered every stressed parry of his liegeman’s desperate defense. He heard each tortured breath. Endured Caolle’s whimpering gasps of rank terror, as the older man matched cruel blows with an unprincipled creature who was also his oathsworn crown prince. The last Teir’s’Ffalenn he would have to vanquish unharmed, for the sake of the clans’ future liberty.

  The struggle had been doomed from the outset. The veteran who had stood thirty years as Deshir’s war captain understood killing odds, had an uncanny, keen instinct for timing and battlefield tactics. Caolle’s strong arm was tiring. His fixed expression showed he had already reconciled the horrific recognition that a clean victory was not going to be possible.

  Arithon squelched his shuddering denial. Exposed by the maze, cornered and pinned down under Desh-thiere’s curse to the point where he dared not weep, he stayed still through the shattering moment as Caolle firmed the decision that let in the tragedy. His parries retreated from active defense. He did not fight to save himself, now. Only to bring Arithon down, in sacrifice buying the desperate hope that the curse’s fell grip might be broken.

  Caolle’s life, laid down in loyal crown service at the last, his oath of fealty acquitted to the man who must sire the next heir for Rathain.

  Reviled by the torment of facing the ugly finish, Arithon felt his self-control waver. Stroke by unmerciful stroke, the wound tension splintered the restraint that stifled him silent. How could he watch, and feel nothing at all, as his own hand struck Caolle down? How could he allow Desh-thiere’s geas its triumph, with no effort of token defense? How could he dishonor Caolle’s brave stand, without grief, without tears, without protest?

  Wrung white by a lacerating hurt he dared not birth into expression, Arithon held. Unblinded, passive, he relived the stroke that disarmed him. He allowed the ghastly, unbearable follow-through of his left-handed defense. Felt the stabbing thrust of his main gauche sinking hilt deep in the flesh of Caolle’s exposed flank. Where the choke hold of the curse had admitted only flushed victory, the flaying spells of the maze slammed him down with the full impact of terrible grief. />
  He held, burned and blighted by self-loathing. He held, unable to wrest solace from the assurance of Elaira’s survival. He held, riven through by revulsion, as the worst of himself jerked back the knife in sickening ecstasy. A twisted aberration owned by Desh-thiere’s obsession, he felt himself revel in the warmth of bursting, let blood that soon, very soon, would be Lysaer’s.

  Blistered by a wave of a corrosive triumph that would scar his self-image forever, Arithon fought. He battered back the cleansing fires of compassion, that insisted such a creature as he had become should not be permitted to live. His sworn oath at Athir slammed headlong against the heritage of his s’Ffalenn bloodline. He struggled, rejected the schism that had ruined Kamridian, but still felt his iron grasp slip.

  Hope died in that moment.

  Arithon saw, beyond recourse, that he was not going to win through. Laid open by empathy, then pummeled through that breach by his remorse for the profanity of Caolle’s murder, he sensed his cohesive purpose slowly shredding apart. All his love for Elaira was not enough. The forced state of permissiveness he upheld to protect her tore like tissue before the malevolence of his reprehensible past.

  ‘No, Ath no!’ the protest burst from him. Not to endure was unthinkable. Yet to live with the blight of the curse was atrocity. No one he cared for was safe from his hand. Like Caolle, each one might be sacrificed. Survive, and they died. Die, and she who was his heart’s only beloved would perish, her life extinguished for the craven cry of his mercy.

  Arithon screamed. Pinned at the crux, ripped apart by the irreconcilable halves of his nature, he found the torment too massive to bear. Though aware he was beaten, he still wrestled to stay his worst nightmare, unfolding.

  Frayed on the sword’s edge between past and present, he scarcely noticed Dakar’s coarse cry, relived from that fell night in Riverton. Arithon heard words, but scarcely registered meaning, until the Named phrase woke the Paravian starspell imbued in his black sword, Alithiel.

  The bright chord once sung to Name the winter stars scored the air like light unleashed.

  The explosion of pure joy smote against the breaking circle of his conflicted resolve. Bright ecstasy hammered that schism, smashed his already crumbling passivity to irretrievable fragments. He could not withstand this, the absolute purity of tone caught from the harmony that underpinned the majesty of creation. Snatched into celebration by unbridled bliss, Arithon did as any other mortal man must, when caught within listening range: he lost himself to the dance.

  While in the past, the hold of Desh-thiere’s geas became sundered, Arithon’s present self in the maze stayed under siege.

  He had yielded up too much raw resource, even if, stunned beyond breath and thought, he could have wrested his presence of mind from the exultant peal of Alithiel’s unearthly harmony. Whipped like a tossed straw between the black blight of the curse, and the keening sweet tones struck from the grand chord of the mysteries, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn lost his way. As he foundered, unmoored, he was able to frame nothing more than the gossamer wisp of one thought: that as the curse ground him under and bound him into slaved hatred, he would not go down as the Mistwraith’s consenting accomplice.

  On the brink of the fall, that glimmer of defiance opened a keyhole through time.

  A resonant voice rolled down Kewar Tunnel, exhorting an apprentice with fond clarity. Through rushing darkness, caught in a snap-frozen circle of calm, Arithon heard: and memory answered the summons.

  Once in the past, when his impossibly high aspiration had crashed in a fit of frustration, Halliron Masterbard had bestowed wise advice by the late-night flutter of candlelight. Softened into the fragrances of rose and patchouli, and the citrus-oil tang of the wood furnishings in the musicians’ gallery of a wealthy patron’s grand ballroom, Arithon recalled …

  ‘No, my dear man, that assessment’s not strictly accurate,’ the elderly bard had admonished in straightforward pique. ‘Your performance tonight never once fell short of perfection.’

  Arithon’s exasperated glance earned Halliron’s wry laughter. ‘In fact, such rigid polish fashioned its downfall.’ Standing, his veined fingers still straight despite his advancing years, the bard gathered up the fleece cover, intending to wrap his lyranthe. Yet his hint was not taken. He saw at a glance his scowling protégé was not going to take his defeat to an unsettled bed.

  Aching for his apprentice’s passionate disappointment, Halliron deferred his own weariness. ‘True art is not cut from the cloth of predictability. Rather, it’s an ephemeral brilliance snatched from the chaos of unformed inspiration. The ear for such nuance cannot be forged from mechanical practice.’ Sympathetic tawny eyes turned a chiding glance toward the young hand, snapping out scales in a soundless, sharp dance up and down the lyranthe’s fretted soundboard.

  ‘Arithon,’ the bard said in exasperated tenderness, ‘let go. You have to set trust in your inherent talent and goodness. You won’t find those treasures, berating yourself. Every musician who would unlock true genius must cast himself free of self-censure. Forget the literal truth. Throw away your belief that the wood and strings of your lyranthe are separate. The instrument must become an invisible extension, and your fingers, outside conscious awareness. When that threshold is crossed, all the physical barriers dissolve. What happens is like alchemy. The bard rises above matter. He flies on the clear insight of the mind and heart, and the body serves him as invisible conduit …’

  The gem-cut fragment of vision snapped out. Reclaimed by the tumult of reliving, Arithon awoke, his lost shreds of consciousness dashed over and over by the crested paean of Alithiel’s unleashed cry. He heeded Halliron’s wise counsel because he could do nothing else. The relived chord of grand harmony still fired his being into uncontrolled bliss, even as the locked jaws of the curse dragged his fading awareness of self into enveloping darkness. Wrung by mangling defeat, a part of him also stayed thralled to the Betrayer’s sealed spells, pinned as a captive observer.

  Past events still unfolded. Even as the ranging harmonics of the sword’s unleashed cry shattered Arithon’s compulsive insanity at Riverton, the clear vision of the maze showed the moment in acid-marked depth, recast to an intricacy without parallel. Tone for pure tone, Arithon witnessed the sequence: failing, he saw Alithiel’s outpouring rapture of sound shiver and snap the sunk barbs the geas had wound through his aura. He marked the precise resonance of the grand chord that disrupted Desh-thiere’s embedded seals: an effect very like the tuned threnodies for fiend bane that released inert objects from possession. Such lore had been given deep study in the course of his masterbard’s apprenticeship.

  Yet no moment was given to examine that finding. The maze demanded its due step ahead. While the last, binding coil of the curse sheared away from the past self embroiled at Riverton, Arithon lost all thought, all conscious grasp on the present. Again, he fell, transfixed by the stab of overpowering grief as reliving delivered the shock of restored wits, and the shattering discovery of Caolle’s bleeding, felled body.

  ‘Caolle! Ath’s mercy on me, Caolle!’ Again, he dropped to his knees, hands stained to the wrists in his feverish need to stanch the red spurt welling over the sunk steel of the knife. ‘Dharkaron strike me, it’s death I have dealt for your service!’

  Too disoriented to sort past from present, Arithon lost his last grip. Dakar’s blow to the back of his neck, redelivered in vivid force, hurled him beyond reach of all bearings. Sick unto himself, utterly consumed, he foundered. Stunned limp in the corridor of Kewar Tunnel, he was unable to command his revolted nerves or recover the will to drag himself upright.

  The maze, spell-driven, did not forgive. Unless Arithon regained self-command and moved onward, the broadscale vision of Davien’s crafted seals would relentlessly tighten its strangling grasp. Yet even one infinitesimal, saving grope forward might have been the impossible distance between earth and moon.

  Caolle’s last spoken words to Dakar filtered through, sharp reminder of damni
ng obligation: ‘Say to Prince Arithon, when the Fellowship Sorcerers crown a s’Ffalenn descendant as Rathain’s high king at Ithamon, on that hour, he will not have failed me.’

  Arithon stirred. His feeble effort strained to throw off the mantling weight of the darkness. If he failed here, he would dishonor far worse than Caolle’s charge to uphold his oath to the realm. Yet his last striving thought crashed into a wall of resistance.

  Racked across time, hung on the cusp between the grim past and the untenable present, Arithon encountered the curse, still aroused, its winding web closed upon him in final conquest.

  The absolute suffocation of defeat slammed him to reflexive recoil. Trapped like a caged, wild beast, he exploded in manic rage. Not again! The horror of Elaira’s peril was visceral. He would not yield, would not give himself over to usage. If Davien’s Maze released him alive, but possessed, he would not endure the desecration of taking the knife into his already bloodstained hand. No more, after Caolle, would he permit living madness to strike down another who loved him.

  Driven by instinct, his fury the elemental spark struck between hammer and anvil, Arithon reacted. If the grand chord of the mysteries belled out of ensorcelled Paravian steel could not be re-created by the human voice, he was a trained master. He could, as he had the past equinox in the Mathorns, encompass that fullness of sound within the rich discipline of his mind. Those tones above hearing could be fired through harmonics, driving raised energy into the far, upper registers where earthbound vibration became reclothed as light.

  Arithon slammed beyond inspiration, lifted himself on the wave of bursting epiphany. He was Halliron’s last legacy, and Mak s’Ahelas’s most gifted, born talent. The telling fact struck him, that the spellcraft invoked by the geas of Desh-thiere did not encompass the legacy of his combined heritage. Only his lore from Rauven had been suborned, a purloined store of knowledge that must have been garnered through the questing assault the Mistwraith had launched at Ithamon.