by Janny Wurts
‘You owe me no title, no sworn word of fealty!’ Arithon said, overset by the acknowledgment of rank.
The man’s breath spasmed, caught, then eased once again as the flawless phrases of melody resumed. He closed weary eyelids, still aware of the face of the bard, clear as stamped quartz under starlight. ‘Then is the kindness you offer an enemy a lie? Is such compassion not the land’s hope for peace, that may one day nurture my grandchildren?’ The tracker resumed, labored. ‘We marched for a false light. Don’t you see?’ The smile that eased his gruff face at the end smoothed over the lines pinched by trauma. ‘I lost my life for embracing delusion. But your death would have made me a murderer.’
Suffering passed into final peace. Arithon settled the corpse in the snow, then arose upon unsteady feet. Ahead lay the rock-strewn slope to the notch, where eleven more deaths would extract their toll of due reckoning. Behind, a fired brilliance of unsullied light, the centaur guardian awaited.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn regarded his hands, smeared with the blood of the Etarran tracker whose honest last testament had finally silenced his conscience. ‘What did that man see, on the moment he left us?’
‘That’s not yours to ask, or my will to answer,’ said the Ilitharis Paravian, his quelling, deep tone hushed with mercy.
Arithon bowed his head, at the last unable to disown his core self, or the unmasked face of his gratitude. ‘I accept absolution,’ he whispered, contrite.
He felt the radiant warmth of a touch at his back, impelling his final step forward.
‘Go in grace, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’
The reliving shattered. Blasted apart by the flare of burst spellcraft, Arithon caught himself short of a stumble as his boot sole came down upon Kewar’s unyielding stone floor. He cried out, disoriented. Through and through, like a sword’s thrust, he ached with the awareness: the centaur was no longer with him.
Better men, before him, had gone mad from such grief: high kings and clan chieftains, whose brief rule had ended when the lacerating toll of such parting drove them to unreconciled agony.
Arithon shuddered. Cast back to the obdurate dictates of training to bind closed the rifts in his being, he swayed. When his groping hand met no corridor wall to steady his spinning balance, for one draining heartbeat, he thought he had been torn, whole spirit from dissolute flesh.
Then flash-blinded eyesight cleared all at once.
The tunnel’s close confines no longer imprisoned him. Arrived in a doorless, five-sided chamber, Arithon beheld juxtaposed views of himself, the myriad reflections a mirror image of his snarled hair and torn clothing. His composite forms detailed each harried breath, each jerked move, from across a scribed circle incised with Davien’s intertwined spirals of runes.
Arithon shut his eyes. ‘Elaira,’ he whispered. Binding his love to the iron of his oath, sworn on his let blood at Athir, he regathered his will and kept his pledged word to the vanished centaur guardian. ‘I will choose to survive.’ Unburdened and gasping, too worn to contemplate what consequence might spring from the impetus of forward motion, he completed his final step.
No further reliving ripped his mind into visions. He had brought himself home to the center of the maze. Here, the multiple facets of himself were reclaimed, merged back into autonomous awareness by the empowered acceptance of humanity’s right to embrace the full impact of free choice. Quittance came as a tingling, sharp play of energy.
Spelled power fell away, of no more import than a gyre of spent sparks.
Utterly drained, Arithon regarded the jointures of polished black walls. Each unmarked one was lit by a sconce spiked with a burning wax candle. ‘I may be free, yet this trial is not over!’ he pronounced in a shaken voice.
When no listening presence answered his challenge, he gave way to need, sank to his knees, then curled up in shivering exhaustion. Within seconds, he fell into a blanketing sleep that, mercifully, brought him no nightmares.
Early Spring 5670
Challenge
Deep under the caverns of Kewar Tunnel, far below the polished corridor of the maze, with its spiraling arcs of carved spellcraft, a sealed cylindrical chamber nestled close as a secret within the heart of the mountain. The arched ceiling described a perfect parabola, a shape to refigure the least murmur of sound into cutting, razor-sharp focus. Walls and floor were drilled out of satin-smoothed marble, the raised pool at the center a masterwork fashioned by wayward, rogue genius and grand conjury.
No tool of man could enact such precision. The round ring of stone containing the spring had been carved without seam from veined bedrock. Its basin was inscribed with the overlaid lines of a faultlessly patterned geometry. Entwined loops of interlace and locked chains of ciphers became source and channel for a gyre of energies that flowed in perpetual motion. Virgin water welled from earth’s underground source, spilling a silenced, sheeting flow across that meticulous construct. The play of its current across spelled designs raised flares of electromagnetics. The rainbow outbursts waxed and subsided, a display not unlike winter’s dance of boreal light.
Here Davien the Betrayer had fashioned his sanctuary, a haven shaped for his personal use through his years of discorporate isolation. An enclosure without access or entry, except through the live signature of its creator, the rock chamber was not empty in the stilled hours before dawn. A spark of light burst out of the air at the focal point under the curved ceiling. Falling as though on a plumb-line descent, the illumination met the pool’s surface. Fire and water touched with a snap of conception, their merged forces birthing an image: of a dark-haired survivor lying curled on his side under the sweet-burning glow of five sconces.
Affirmation, at long last, that this Teir’s’Ffalenn had surpassed his ancestor’s failure. Arithon had mastered the first trial of the maze.
The unseen presence of the Sorcerer in the chamber whirled into cogitation. His activity cast no disturbed ripple across the image burned onto the water. Davien assessed the tucked form of the man, asleep across the grand axis inscribed on the floor of his Chamber of Midway. From Arithon’s soft breathing, to the slowed pulse of blood through the veins threaded under the skin, to the most minute change imprinted in his subtle aura, the Sorcerer’s survey missed nothing.
No doubt remained: the maze had shifted the balance.
Davien’s reaction was not relief, not triumph or gratitude, but the whetted steel edge of a relentlessly trained fascination. His declarative statement threw off flurried echoes, inside the cylindrical stone vault. ‘In truth, you are Teir’s’Ffalenn, a spirit worthy of crowning.’ Irony struck his tone to grained rust, as he weighed the trace spike of dissonance that arose in response to his use of that name. ‘Your Grace? You still object to that title, I see. How you would detest my acknowledgment.’
The first stage of the passage had been severe, as much could be read in the protective, motionless posture. Weariness blanketed a mind without dreams. A snarl of black hair masked the face, tucked behind sheltering forearms.
Out of delicate respect, Davien did not pry.
The interchange of events that transpired within Kewar Tunnel would stay spun in a dense veil of privacy. The grand arc of its wardings forbade outside eyes. Although his hand had fashioned the maze, Davien himself could not open the sealed record of Arithon’s trials inside. Despite his entangled, contentious history, the Sorcerer had never been known to sully the word of his given promise.
Though the stone of the earth by its nature retained the broad-spectrum imprint of energies, in Kewar, the patterns from Arithon’s passage had been promptly polished away. The tunnel’s vast and impartial forces reigned with unchecked authority. The walls of the maze would already be restored to a state of pristine blankness, cleansed and recleansed until no strayed wisp of nightmare could linger to disrupt the course of another aspirant.
By reflex habit, Davien checked his work. His outflung awareness seined through the layered stone where his conjury struck through the mountain, s
ampling the whispers that ran through the quartz veins.
Pattern and light came rebounding back. Davien froze. Stunned to stark disbelief, he sharpened his questing touch and received the same stunning result. A jumbled imprint of outside activity still rippled from Kewar’s sealed corridors.
‘Dharkaron’s blind vengeance!’ the Sorcerer exclaimed. Chamber and pool blazed up in white fire to the charge of his total astonishment. ‘How has the devil begotten the very devil himself?’
Spurred by bristling unrest, Davien extended his awareness. His care was meticulous as he marked and measured the scope of an unprecedented turn of event.
At once, he realized not one, but two other entities had managed to gain entry to Kewar. The sealed wards of guard had not been breached: each separate presence had been granted its access from inside the bounds of Arithon’s inviolate being.
‘The devil has in fact begotten the fiend!’ Davien snapped. He was scarcely relieved to discover his grand arc of spells still intact. The seals had not failed. No loophole of omission had seen their integrity compromised. If anything, the sigils for cleansing and erasure had accomplished their task much too thoroughly. The Sorcerer found himself confoundedly blind to an exchange that should never have happened; yet had, through a strikingly unprecedented turn of strength.
For a breathless half second, Davien almost chuckled. ‘Merciful mother!’ No doubt pompous Luhaine would fly into a rage if he saw how his worry had nurtured the snake.
No probe could recover the lost content of Arithon’s personal interactions. The stone walls were restored to blank realignment. The telltales that lingered had been retouched by the air, no more than a ghost imprint of the two vagrant visitors’ identities.
One had been a woman, her access seized through the gateway of dreams, and a love that bonded her Named being to inseparable partnership with Arithon. Davien ascertained, in one blasting, swift cross-check, that no lasting harm had befallen her. Once Arithon had released the entrapments of conscience, Elaira’s wandering spirit had spun free. She would slowly drift into waking return, well secure under the guiding wisdom of Ath’s adepts.
The other intrusion had been wrought by a force no Fellowship Sorcerer would have gainsaid. Summoned, living, that presence had crossed the veil by free will, straight out of bygone history.
Once Davien addressed the astounding loose ends and dispelled the residual energies, his awareness whirled back into singular focus, transfixed by the image set on display in the shimmering gleam of the rock pool. By now scarcely able to contain his exuberance, he resurveyed the spent form of the prince arrived in his Chamber of Midway.
‘Far from tamed, my bold falcon!’ Davien mused, entranced. ‘Unleashed, I see. You’ve shown us the strength to have mastered your past. The present is now yours. How will you handle your future?’
When Arithon awoke, the wax candles still burned without showing a sign of time’s passage. Either their flame had been fueled by spells, or else he had slept no more than a handful of minutes. That outlook seemed skewed by his sense of well-being. He sat up, not stiff, feeling thoroughly rested. Except for a lightness brought on by fasting, he was well poised and clearheaded. Beneath the stained dressing, his hand did not ache. Beyond a raffish growth of new stubble and hair caught in sorrowful tangles, he judged himself fit. A Sorcerer’s trial was no state tribunal, to be swayed by rough grooming or the disheveled state of a man’s trail-worn clothing.
Arithon stood and reviewed his surroundings, unshaken to find changes invoked as he slept. Of five featureless walls, four now contained doorways, each one matched to a burning sconce. The three standing open before him dropped away into featureless darkness. The last one was barred by a shut panel, marked with black ciphers, and a pattern spell strung with Paravian runes.
‘Three invitations and a challenge?’ Arithon asked aloud, his determination ironically amused. ‘Or else three temptations, and the proverbial double-edged puzzle? Lure the rash fool to rush to his death, or mete out a brute test, and perhaps reward the wise mark with bliss and long life. Or here, since we’re likely to rattle the querent, one might find an encounter designed to trip up the arrogant.’
The chamber gave back only silence for answer. No surprise; Davien’s works eschewed the obvious. Rathain’s prince flexed his hands, rocked by discovery that his meddlesome injury showed no trace of residual soreness. He considered a moment. Feet set in a swordsman’s alertly poised balance, he resumed speaking, affirmed in his conviction an unseen presence was listening. ‘Given my cozy experience with dying, I won’t dance. Not again! As the mouse with the tail well pinched by the trap, by strict preference, I’d rather cheat.’
No sound; no movement; yet the transparent air gained a charged sense of stillness, as though some invisible power had shifted.
A slight smile firmed the line of Arithon’s mouth. ‘You do hear.’ His eyes held a concentrated steadiness, the pupils wide set with the untamed dark preceding an ocean tempest. ‘Be warned. I am coming.’
He gathered himself, discarding his tight apprehension. Thrusting past his deep barrier of conditioned fear and his shrinking trepidation, he engaged the balance point of his mind, reached inward, and talent answered.
His access to trained awareness slid open. The wire-strung tension in braced shoulders loosened. Arithon settled. In gradual stages, he eased his guarded self open, allowing the ranging quiet beyond senses to deepen into the enveloping calm of the mysteries. Lost perceptions wakened. A retuned rapport with the elements embraced him. Then the powerful acknowledgment of his being returned, clear and bright as the flare of new light over an unsheathed sword’s edge.
Sharpened back to a state of potentized harmony, Arithon gasped through his own springing tears. If this was a dream, he wished never to waken, as the birth-born power he had schooled to high mastery settled back into his hands.
The uprush of uncontained, joyous relief nearly shattered his equilibrium. He held on, engaged the stern arts of his discipline, and steadied his mental balance. Gently, with the reverence of testing a wellspring after a punishing drought, he immersed himself into mage-sight.
The signature glimmer of mineral met him, patient as rooted endurance. The light-dance of energies that founded all form held its resonance, unchanged, throughout eons. Ripped to a shiver of unwonted delight, Arithon picked up the pure, tonal song that nurtured all being like the pulse of a mother’s heartbeat. His masterbard’s arts tracked his vision, partnered in light, unveiling a unified balance. Arithon felt his former limits expand, as smoothed granite yielded the heart of its secrets as never before. Such innocent trust framed a gift that both stunned and appalled him.
Acceptance followed. He would not deny his self-worth, or flinch back from bowing to his achievement. Kewar’s maze had reforged the foundations of his identity. Arithon touched the vulnerability of earth’s stone, and knew beyond doubt: he had earned gifted right to that guardianship.
Shaken though he was, as wildly touched by explosive exultation, he adhered to his chosen task.
He extended his awareness, tacitly testing. The chamber around him was actual stone, not some glib frame of illusion. The dark portals appeared blank, impenetrable to vision, sure sign they were held under warding. The shut door contained no detectable cracks. No breath of draft crossed its barrier. Even where the closed panel touched the stone jamb, his sweeping search found no seam. Arithon detected no shimmer, no resonance of altered energy. The chiaroscuro play of subtle frequency adhered to primordial patterns. The mineral planes spun their ordered, geometrical array, the sheen of earth consciousness shuttled within the sturdy lattice of mountain granite.
Arithon backed off, well warned that he tested a guard spell of binding, laid under masterful seals. Or else his review met a masking illusion, and no portal existed behind that closed doorway at all.
The restored gifts of mastery lent subtle means to explore Davien’s provocative riddle. Already set to unravel the veil c
ast over the Sorcerer’s creation, Arithon knew he must act before creeping dread undermined his determined initiative.
First thing, he summoned four streamers of shadow. The thin scraps of darkness called into his hands assumed form with unwonted reluctance, as though in this place, Davien’s wardings suppressed basic aspects of structural creation. Arithon refined his concentration, persisted. He annealed his decision in the fires of raw will, set his template of desire, then flicked a back-spinning twist of barbed thought through a rune to cut through obstruction. Fueled by invention, his crafted pattern of thought punched outside time, across space, and returned, slick as a hot needle through tar.
He divided that essence. With rune and seal, Arithon braided his ephemeral construct into the weave of his shadows. He attached a permission asked of the air. The completed formation of energy was minimal, and vengefully elegant, little more than a spell-charged field of awareness spearheaded into a geas of seeking intent.
Arithon paused once his work stood complete. Sweat sprang in drops at his temples. The fingers of his left hand cradled the fruits of his crafting, while the right, in stained linen, hung limp. ‘Fly true,’ he whispered. With fixed deliberation, he cast his first shadow down the portal immediately before him.
It encountered the match of his heart’s desire. The assault on the senses snagged his unwary mind and slid past his deepest defenses.
Desh-thiere’s curse was a memory, all bloodshed behind him. He could abandon both crown and sword without guilt and reassume the pursuit of his music. Elaira’s voice called him. Her open arms promised him peace, and the delights of unimpaired freedom. Together, they would build a bright future. Immersed in the rapture of her tender love, Arithon beheld a shared life made full. Together, they could study the grand confluence of the mysteries and raise a family of gifted children.