Dakar tugged a snarl of hair from his mouth, his rude stock of oaths an inadequate quaver as three muzzled mounts bore his small party of fugitives irrevocably into the unknown.
Ten paces ahead, his unsettled senses ripped back into clarity. As if an eyeblink had remade the landscape, the vista ahead showed seared trees and sterile dust, charged in a flat tang of ozone. Currents of wild energy flicked over riled nerves. The Mad Prophet found his teeth set on edge, and his vitals clawed with unease. The interlaced spells which defended this border threw off a debilitating resonance. Leaves shriveled as they unfolded from the bud, and trees became stunted, shedding skeletons. The blight on the land fed Dakar’s disquiet; he knew of the Fellowship’s aversion to cause harm to anything growing.
Yet in this place, that dearly held tenet had been broken with stark and appalling violence. As if this circle of spelled seals confined something unworldly that would not respond to the kindlier magics wrought out of natural forces.
The air wore the musk of seared earth and dry rot. What sky glimmered through the clawed fists of bare branches loured under blank haze, unblessed by the face of sun or moon.
Dakar attributed the eerie, flat murk to the proximity field of the wardspells. He glanced behind. Felirin found courage in lilting gentle nonsense to his horse. Arithon had shaken out of his stupor enough to gaze about. His features might seem as blank as chipped chalk. Yet the man who held his intimate trust could unmask that expression and discern the agonized frustration of a master driven sight-blind to mage talent.
“Keep close,” Dakar warned. Exhausted as he was, and unfit to ride point, the others were plainly in worse state. Felirin’s wrapped hands fretted and fumbled to maintain a grip on his reins. If hazard threatened, Arithon could scarcely stay erect in his saddle. Which perhaps was as well; Dakar had a nasty stab of intuition that the black sword, Alithiel, should not be drawn in this place.
Its uncanny, bright power framed too stark a contrast to the shadowy forces he sensed, laced into queer, subliminal eddies by the blameless stir of their passage.
That disturbed awareness was torn short as his mount balked with a jarring snort. Dakar curbed its rank fear. He peered ahead, wary, then gasped in outright awe.
The sere ground gave way to an expanse of polished granite. Ancient, quarried stone was veined in tangled strata of obsidian and milk quartz, and incised with grand arcs and figures scribed across with Paravian runes of glowing silver.
“You’re wise to be jumpy,” Dakar cajoled his timid gelding. “But I’m the best chance you have to stay breathing. Throw me off, you’ll end up as fly meat.”
He dug in his heels, to no avail, until Felirin’s more willing gray thought to pass him. The bay’s competitive nature reasserted with a bounding start forward. Dakar swore and snatched mane as his horse clattered onto the massive, smoothed block, the mare at its heels, her breath sucked in fast, nervous snorts. The unease of the animals was justified. The array underfoot was centaur work, each dressed stone fitted seamlessly into the next with matchless and uncanny precision. The charged coils of power in the joined ciphers made living skin burn and tingle in waves, and threatened a ranging headache.
Dakar could take no measure of their strength. The magic knit here reached beyond mortal senses, mighty as time, as stately as the steadfast turn of the earth, and wrought on a scale to strike terror through his armor of knowledge. Through a shrill, singing dizziness, the spellbinder counted the eight seals for banishment. His horse skittered over the directional, six-sided figures for safeguard, matched to the cardinal points, and vectored above and below. These stood laced through by ward after ward of containment. He identified an’alt, the configured symbol for infinity, stamped over and over in ribboned light. Other runes he did not recognize at all, but the force in them struck like blades of ice through the thick leather boots in his stirrups.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the rune for safe-crossing aligned with so many ciphers to annul power,” observed Arithon, ridden up on his sweat-draggled mare.
Dakar swiveled in surprise. “You can read these?”
“Only some of them. My grandfather’s library at Rauven was limited. ” Arithon frowned through a fallen thatch of hair, more than weariness making him haunted. “The resonant harmonics I can hear through my bard’s gift are dissonances, all. Not what I’d call reassuring.”
Then, with no warning, the paved expanse ended. The horses crabstepped off a razed edge in the stone and into a rustling growth of forest. One heartbeat before, no trees had been anywhere in evidence. To the rear, the rune ring had vanished away into shadowed, random avenues of oaks. The spellbinder took that for an ominous sign. The guarding sigils at the portal had sealed the way closed behind them. No return course was possible by the path they had entered. If another safe exit to known territory existed, they must endure whatever perils lay ahead and unriddle the grimward’s dire mysteries.
“Ath, where is this place?” Felirin gasped. “No timber of this size grows on the Korias Flats.”
“Well we aren’t there anymore,” Dakar ripped back, testy as he bludgeoned his upended senses to gain the full use of his mage-sight.
Yet a discipline which should have responded like reflex escaped his effort entirely. Trained access seemed blocked. He could trace out none of the underlying patterns to this forest’s vibrant energies. The too-sharp barrage of his unrefined vision rattled him down to the pit of his vitals. Sight framed an impossible discrepancy. The foliage of these giants grew out of phase with the season, cinnabar and gilt with the fireburst palette of autumn. The maples, the beeches, and the crowned, ancient oaks soared aloft in vaulting splendor.
No such stand of primal forest should exist inside the fifty leagues separating the grimward’s location from the old tracts the clans held in Caithwood.
Dakar withstood his craven impulse to rein in by tugging his beard with brisk worry. “We’ll need to make time. There’s no guarantee we’re not still being pursued, if those guardsmen were fools enough to follow us.”
But the terrain itself thwarted haste. No paths cut these wilds. While the party of riders ducked vines and low branches, their mounts picked their way in uneven steps over ground laced with roots like snagged rope, and through hollows where stones were deceptively quilted in moss deep and lush as a king’s robe. Felirin marveled in monologue under his breath, as though he sought to commit such strangeness to verse. Arithon curled on his mare’s crest, fists crushed to his forehead in pent-back, dazed misery, leaving Dakar to tax his bewildered wits and effectively function as guide.
He soon discovered the impossibility of keeping straight bearings through a grimward. The place was possessed by bewitching strangeness. A man might choose an opening between two pillared oaks, only to find his steps redirected him ten paces further to the left, and on through a different byway altogether. What passed for sunlight shone a pale, lambent gold, with ruled shafts slanting through glades of stippled shade. Maintaining a constant sense of direction should have posed his trail-wise party no difficulty, except the unnerving tricks of the landscape mazed and bemused the awareness.
While Dakar puzzled to unravel the anomaly, Felirin broke off his ongoing composition. “Whatever sort of magery’s afflicted our senses, we seem to be traveling in a circle.”
“Spiral,” Arithon corrected, half-muffled through folded fingers. His speech seemed almost drunkenly slurred, the inflection lapsed back to the antique dialect of the splinter world of his birth. “Don’t you hear? A harmonic resonance patterns this existence that guides the placement of each footstep.”
“What?” Dakar swiveled to stare, startled enough to ignore the branch which slapped his exposed side. The surprise seemed unfair, that Arithon had observed more than anyone else while apparently lapsed into a stupor. A tug on the rein stopped his gelding, while the Shadow Master’s mount followed suit by dumb instinct.
Felirin halted his gray, his plain, honest face charged to wonde
rment. “Masterbard,” he murmured, “in truth, Halliron’s teaching unveiled your true destiny. My life has been spent in devotion to music, and yet, my ear can’t detect this nuance you speak of.”
Sunk as the Shadow Master was in discomfort, his precise sense of language never left him. Caught back in reflective speculation by one word, Dakar twisted aside to pursue inquiry. “Existence?”
Like a child in creased clothes jogged out of a dream, Arithon straightened. He blinked unfocused green eyes. His hands ran hot sweat where he changed grip to the saddle out of shameless need to stay upright. “Don’t say you hadn’t noticed the landscape is unstable. ”
“Damn you!” Dakar resisted a hysterical laugh. Through the trees to the right, he had just glimpsed a broad, grassy plain. Beyond lay a skyline edged in mountains whose shattered white peaks belonged to no range in Athera. “Why not use your boot and kick me awake? I’d be eternally grateful.”
But this time, the victim was too spent to counter that lame attack of sarcasm. His painstaking effort to order plain thought became a trial to witness. Felirin politely averted his gaze, while Arithon sought to translate impressions with comprehensible clarity. “I might add that the earth where your horse treads is anything but solid ground.”
“Well, try the next riddle with an answer at the end.” The Mad Prophet looped his reins in the crook of one elbow and massaged his pounding temples. His balked effort to plumb the phenomena by mage-sight had left him high strung and dizzy. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear my talent’s gone blind and dead as your own.”
An hour spent immersed in furious thought had left the spellbinder no whit the wiser. Here, the sparkling energy ties which laced the very substance of creation did not follow any pattern laid down by natural forces. The aberration chewed him hollow with dread, that the trees, the moss, the very sun on lit leaves remained dense and elusive to mage-sense. Petrified to plumb the extent of his helplessness, Dakar shrugged. “If I could accept the impossible, I’d say nothing in this place has an aura.”
Eyes shut, Arithon snapped off a nod. “You’re surprised? This reality isn’t alive by any founding law of Ath’s creation.”
Dakar bridled to hear his foreboding confirmed. “However can you know?”
Too stressed for impatience, Arithon said, “I still have my bard’s ear. The vibration of this existence is not myriad, but seems to be loomed from one thread.” He labored to qualify. “The song of its being does not change register, not for a tree, or a rock, or an insect. Since the shadows as well won’t answer my gift, I have to presume they’re illusions. The logical end point is scarcely reassuring. We must be traversing a path through a dream.”
A chill splashed over Dakar’s moist skin. “Save us all, don’t say that. If that’s true, somewhere there must be a great drake, still alive and sleeping.”
But Arithon had retreated back into dazed silence. The bay mare bore his suffering weight, hunched and half-senseless in the saddle, leaving Dakar floundering and alone with his terror.
The warning strictures remonstrated by Asandir posed a fearful array of hidden pitfalls. Their small party dared not disturb any aspect of symmetry in this unworldly place. To take even apparent life, or to strip so much as one green branch would cause a strand of continuity to shift resonance. A balance would change, demanding harsh forfeit, and no power of mercy might spare the offender from the fate of that unknown consequence. Whatever fell power enacted this sphere of illusion must not be aroused to the presence of trespassers.
“As you love life, walk softly,” Dakar entreated, aware the least act could distress the loomed pattern of integral consciousness surrounding them.
Their footsteps were now guided by a force of unknown magnitude, and retreat of any kind was impossible.
Felirin alone retained the brash whimsy to flirt with poetic phrasing. “Will we or nil we, we’re drawn toward the center. I wonder what we’re going to find?”
“Something Asandir never spoke of, even on his good days.” Fed up with the minstrel’s feckless temperament, Dakar let fly out of pique. “Take great care you don’t snap any twigs.”
For whatever unearthly pocket this grimward carved out, they had no choice but to grapple its uncanny mystery headlong.
The first time the apparent season changed, Felirin cried out in shock.
Dakar gawped and inhaled the frizzled ends of his mustache. His perception had not lied. The leafed autumn wood had transformed at one step to the cobalt gloaming of winter twilight. Low, rolling hills lapped away to a snow-clad horizon. Treeless, the crests wore mantling drifts like honed cleavers. The wind snarled and gusted. The breath Dakar drew to indulge in rank curses sieved cold like spilled mercury through his lungs.
The forest was gone as if expunged from existence, and the new vista offered no shelter. Too exhausted to bolt, the horses shivered and stamped, their labored exhalations trailing white plumes against the deepening purple of dusk. The stars blazed overhead like chips in
black ice. No moon arose to diminish their splendor, nor did the constellations form any pattern familiar to Athera.
Arithon volunteered his sparse comment through a pause to share the brandy the innkeeper’s wife had tucked into the provisions in the saddlebags. “I know this sky. The stars were never so bright, but on Dascen Elur, ships’ masters navigated by these same constellations.” He passed the flask on to Felirin, and added, “I wonder if our thoughts could be bending the dream?”
“Then you recognize this plain?” Dakar swiped off the ice crystals lodged in his brows, too dispirited to show disappointment as the Master of Shadow shook his head.
“This landscape doesn’t match my memory of Dascen Elur. At least, no landmass encountered by my father’s ships seemed this wretchedly desolate.” Arithon’s voice seemed leached of all feeling as he qualified. “Even on those barren archipelagoes where families mined salt from the silted lagoons, scrub thorn grew on the high ground.”
Worried afresh by the lifeless flatness to the Masterbard’s expression, Dakar attempted to hold his gaze and measure the depths of his internal despair. But Arithon refused even that slight contact, his mouth a taut line of strained nerves.
The small party pressed on when the brandy was finished. Felirin rode with his eyes shut, lips working, perhaps in a verse from some ancient ballad, or in prayer to Ath. Huddled in his singed cloak with both hands swathed and poulticed, and his pert scarlet tassels shredded to threads from unkindly fire and hard usage, he seemed a tatterdemalion beggar left witwandering in the night.
Dakar pondered their changed surroundings, not a bit reassured that the sky overhead seemed to match Arithon’s recollection. He had never thought to ask Althain’s Warden whether dragons had flown past the Worldsend Gates. That fine point might come to matter dearly in the future. If in fact the great drakes had not cached the memory of these far-off stars as a backdrop for their present-day dreams, then trouble would shadow the chances of their mortal survival.
The danger could not be discounted or ignored, that this disjointed frame of existence might prey upon human thoughts, then manifest their dark contents. If such linkage occurred, then Arithon’s shattered equilibrium could couple with Felirin’s penchant for foolhardy fancy and brew up an unconscionable risk. The chance was too frightening, that the impassioned knots of subconscious pain might weave themselves into the loom of the uncanny forces that clothed this alternate reality. If so, the unimaginable guilt held in check by a blood oath could unleash, all unwitting, a murderous, tormented revenge as a subjective nightmare of horrors.
Shaken stark silent, Dakar sketched a sign to avert the ill thought, that the grimward’s effects might come to magnify Arithon’s despair. The best-willed intent to repress a death wish might twist free of constraint and remanifest in this place as a parallel act of self-punishment.
Through the pound of his heart, Dakar leaned across and spoke directly to Arithon. “Use your mage training. Wrap your mind in
to silence, and don’t for a second drop your guard.”
The Master of Shadow opened tortured green eyes. “Ath save us all, I’ve already done so.” He cast a weighted glance toward Felirin’s turned back.
For of course, the free minstrel owned no such schooled discipline to lock down the unrestrained play of the mind.
Dakar chewed his lip. He knew illicit lore, had knowledge of sigils to force the will and bend a man’s acts through the use of sheared lines of power. Such craft broke the Law of the Major Balance. Eddies of recoiling damage could backlash on both the victim and wielder. Yet here in this place, such a safeguard might mean the difference between life and death.
Left cold to the bone by the bent of his thoughts, even granted the impetus of a terrible expediency, Dakar startled to the sudden restraint of a hand on his wrist.
“Don’t, Dakar,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn. His shackling grasp did not loosen. “I thought the same once on the banks of Tal Quorin. Believe me, no stakes are worth such a cost. I’ve lost direct access to my mage talent as a penalty, and would give any price in my power to reverse that decision.”
Dakar swallowed, undone by the leveling force of an honesty he could not match. Nor could he restate the horrid, cold fact, that the harmonious continuity of Athera yet hung on the thread of Prince Arithon’s life. “If need warrants, even you cannot stop me,” he said finally.
The hold on him released in an unspeakable surrender. That act, and the numbing silence that followed ran against every tenet of fight in Arithon’s character. An ominous sign, with no joy in the victory, that Dakar held such sway over a friend whose innate strength had always outmatched him. “I’ll hold my decision,” he temporized, to no avail.
The Teir’s’Ffalenn had retreated past reach behind the stone mask of his training.
Very quickly after that, all concerns became moot before the raw cruelty of the elements. Gusts bit through every inadequate layer of clothing. Horses could not withstand such punishing cold without rations of grain and fodder. Half-shed into their sleek summer hair, they were already suffering. Nor did the queer, bending track through the gloaming permit a retreat by retracing their steps into autumn. Concerned that Arithon and Felirin were left in more fragile condition than he, Dakar insisted that the pair ride double on the gray and share the warmth of the drover’s cloak between them.