TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  Two more hours remained before dawn. An ice flood of light from the waning moon threw shadow from the mullions in cut diamonds over his counterpane. Faint shouts echoed up from the courtyard. Then the door panel cracked, and his snub-nosed chamber steward peered past the jamb in fussed inquiry. 'My lord, you'll be needed. A galley from Tysan just tied up at the docks, flying sunwheel banners and bearing no less than a royal delegation.'

  'Royal? The Prince Exalted, himself?' Narms's mayor shot out of bed, while a gapped seam in the quilt exhaled a flurry of goosedown.

  Past the whirl of feathers, the house steward returned a blunt shrug. 'I'm sorry. The banners suggest so.'

  'Loose fiends and Dharkaron's Black Chariot!' An unannounced crossing in the depths of winter suggested a breaking disaster. Gruff even when fully wakeful, the mayor batted snagged fluff from his beard and hushed his wife's drowsy inquiry. 'State visitors. Ring the bell for your maid. We need to be dressed very quickly.' To his steward, he added, 'Have you heard what's afoot?'

  The pink, balding man bobbed his head like a turtle. 'Lord, the dock runner who fetched me knew nothing. The night watch hauls wood to light fires in the hall. There won't be time to rehang proper tapestries.'

  'Well at least the trestles were scrubbed since the feast,' the wife said in acid irritation. 'Royal envoys who don't send a herald ahead will just have to bear with inconveniences.' She shoved out of bed in her night rail, a handsome woman with graceful hands who marshaled her thoughts, blinking into the flare as the servant struck light to a candle. 'The kitchen staff will be baking the day's bread. Get someone to send them notice we're receiving, and tell them how many guests of state.'

  'I'll go, mistress,' the steward offered at once, then added, 'should I have the east-wing chambers refreshed?'

  'Wake the master of horse, first,' the mayor amended, one foot poked half into his hose. 'If this meeting's too pressing to bide until daybreak, I'm thinking we'll be dunned for fast couriers before anyone wants hospitality and beds.'

  'Yes, lord.' The steward ducked out, the door latch clicked shut with apprehensive care.

  'At least we didn't suffer this intrusion two days ago.' Prosaic, the wife pinned her smoky tangles of hair, then dug in the lacquered armoire for a wrap, and the best of her fancy lace petticoats.

  Stalled by a tangle snagged in his points, the mayor gave tongue out of habit. 'Our guild ministers weren't all puking drunk at the twelfth night festivities.'

  'No.' The honeyed agreement that made his wife indispensable at state functions preceded her wasp sting of denouement. 'But if your Divine Prince saw all the jewels on their wives as they tried to outshine the Etarrans, we'd find his marshals dunning our treasury. Or don't you think Avenor's come begging for funds, or armed troops, or else the grain stores to mount a winter campaign on barbarians?'

  'I don't know what he's come for!' Off-balance, the mayor jammed his stick shanks into his best pair of silk-slashed breeches. 'If you're going to speculate, have the good grace to wait until after I've clothed my shivering buttocks.'

  'You'll sweat soon enough, on your knees before royalty.' The wife's catty tongue showed no deference to station. 'Bowing to a blood prince was bother enough, before there were flocks of sunwheel fanatics, rolling cow eyes like he's god sent.'

  The mayor stretched a kink from the small of his back, startled to unwonted laughter. 'Say that to his Grace, I'll buy you new pearls.'

  'I'd rather warn the unmarried chambermaids to steer clear of shadowy alcoves.' Adrift in lace petticoats, with her ribbons undone, his wife looked up in snide interest. 'Gossip from Avenor insists his Exalted Grace hasn't bedded his princess since the hour his heir was conceived.' Through a frown at her husband, who snatched up yesterday's shirt for convenience, she added, 'That's sixteen years. If the s'Ilessid's kept his manhood to himself for that long, I agree with his priests. He's not human.'

  'He's not human.' the mayor affirmed, then bellowed, short-tempered, for his valet to roust up and lend help with the studs on his doublet. When the slug-headed servant failed to appear, the mayor kept talking, his elbows bent at ridiculous angles through his effort to loop rows of braid frogs on jet buttons. 'His Grace hasn't aged since I was a child, and he was presented as Prince of the West. That was before he forwent Tysan's colors for a mantle of white fox and diamonds.'

  'Oh, he's aged.' the wife argued, her sharp humor fled as she stepped to assist with her husband's disgruntled robing. 'Just look at his eyes. Hard as faceted sapphire, and too driven for pity.' A break, as she perked up his wilted lace collar, then, 'You want the gold chain and ruby pendant?' Without pause for his nod, she settled the massive links over his dove gray silk. 'Whatever the Exalted Prince asks you to give, don't commit the new recruits.'

  'What?' The mayor peered at his wife. 'There hasn't been heavy fighting since the Caithwood campaign failed to clear Taerlin's forests of clansmen.'

  'I know.' His wife spun away in a rustle of layered muslin. 'But things change. Whatever ill wind has blown in with that galley, no man of twenty should be sent out to die before the grass greens in the spring.'

  The mayor took pause, the squared links of his state jewelry dipped blood in the fluttering candlelight. 'You think the Master of Shadow's come back?'

  His wife plucked up her hand mirror. One glance, and her puffy eyes half filled with tears. She slapped the silvered face down in rare and explosive anger. 'Whyever else should we be dragged out of bed before dawn?' Discomposed by the thought of exalted state company, she rebounded to blistering irritation. 'If Avenor brings word of the Spinner of Darkness, the ill news of his reiving is just going to wait until my maid makes me presentable.'

  Chilled in stockinged feet, unsure how to manage the imminent concept of shadows and minions of evil, the mayor bent and rummaged through the bottom of the armoire. He fetched out the fanciest boots he could find, ones with velvet-lined cuffs and stitched patterns of seed pearls. 'I'll delay the proceedings by serving mulled wine.' He jammed a foppish black hat with peacock plumes over his short-cropped head, then sailed through the doorway, girded to balk s'Ilessid divinity and appease his wife's queer foreboding.

  The hall and the stairwell were darkened by night, the pine-knot brand in the lower vestibule burned down to a flickering cinder. The light would be refreshed at the dawn change of watch, as yet several hours away.

  Such lack of diligent guard was routine. Narms was no bastion of armed prowess, to draw the Divine Prince in a crisis. Its city maintained one dilapidated keep, without earthworks. Built over and around the site of an ancient Paravian sea landing, her wealth was guild owned, and invested into skilled labor. Through the centuries since the uprising, the crumbled brick quay overlooking the bay head acquired a sprawl of shanties and warehouses. Sailhands' dives lined the waterfront by the fishmongers'. The recessed cove of the harbor sheltered the industry of dyers and craftsmen, whose lifeblood was tied to town trade. Raw materials and goods came and left from the moss-crusted jetties built through the years after Rathain's last high king was slaughtered. The current garrison quartered only mounted men at arms, split into small companies to guard caravans. For the clan raids that plagued the land route to Morvain, Narms's south district offered a comfortable nest for fortune-seeking headhunters, who scoured Halwythwood for scalps that paid bounty.

  By tradition, Alliance interests made landfall at Narms, then passed briskly through to hold loftier counsel at Etarra.

  The mayor approached the entry to his great hall and discovered the royal delegation from the harbor already installed ahead of him. One leaf of the heavy double panel lay ajar. A spill of escaped light sliced the dimmed anteroom, strung through by the echoes of rapid-paced talk. The oddity shook him, that he felt estranged while underneath his own roof.

  Anxiety bit deeper as he reached the threshold, his short-strided footsteps unnaturally loud as he entered the cavernous chamber. The hearthfire newly lit by his guard captain did nothing to lift the dank chill. S
tone walls had been stripped of the star and moon tapestries unfurled each year for the solstice festivities. On a floor scrubbed bare of its formal wax polish, the replacement hangings of hunting scenes lay still rolled, not yet looped on the polished brass rods. The board trestles had been stacked by the wall during cleaning, except for the one set erect for the use of the surprise delegation from Tysan.

  That rectangle stood like a snag in the candlelight, bare of linen cloth, and surrounded by men whose steel-clad intensity raised a wall of unease at ten yards. Among six, on their feet, the seated man towered, his self-contained presence a mantle of majesty that seemed bred in the flesh and the bone of him. As always, Lysaer s'Ilessid held the eye like a compass drawn by a magnet.

  Golden-haired, cloaked in white, the s'Ilessid prince shone brilliant as diamond and pearl couched against the unadorned setting. The chair he occupied might have been a throne, not the tawdry furnishing the deerhounds had chewed to tattered hanks of burst horsehair. His innate nobility overshadowed his retinue, whose sunwheel tabards of gold and watered silk showed the sad creases ingrained by pack straps and sea chests.

  A glance showed the mayor his game plan was forfeit. The basket of new bread sent up from the oven lay cooling, untouched, on a footstool. The carafe of mulled wine had been shoved to one side, its spiced vintage spurned for the tactical map some churl had unrolled, and impaled at the corners with the wife's best stag-handled cutlery.

  'Prince Exalted,' the Mayor of Narms greeted in stiff courtesy.

  His court-style bow was acknowledged by the barest, brief nod, and a glance from ice-crystal blue eyes. Preoccupied, the unlaced cuff of one sleeve stripped back to expose his immaculate limb to the elbow, the fair personage of Lysaer s'Ilessid laid his wrist in the hands of the slender young man in the priest's robe. Still seamlessly focused, he finished his answer to Narms's worried captain at arms.

  'Yes. We know beyond doubt. The Spinner of Darkness has dared to return to the continent. His presence was affirmed well before the hour I set sail from Atainia.' A regal gesture invited the Lord Mayor to join his dazzling, close company. 'Very shortly, bear with me, we'll know where he lairs. My diviner will scry his location.'

  Admitted to the inner circle, the mayor surveyed the prince's minimal retinue. He recognized the lean grace and searing impatience of Sulfin Evend, Avenor's Lord Commander at Arms. Three other sunwheel officers in chain mail were strangers, even the headhunter whose muscled frame wore the acid-etched poise of a predator.

  Despite every evidence of prowess on the field, the seasoned men-at-arms gave wide berth to the effete priest. Set apart, that one wore the floor-length, sashed robe of a sunwheel acolyte. His six-strand chain of rank set his station one tier below High Priest Cerebeld. The gleaming gold sigil at the crown of his hood proclaimed his Light-sanctioned talent for augury.

  As a diviner, he was young, a bone-skinny celibate whose cleft chin and pale cheeks showed scarcely a dusting of beard. Hands slim as a woman's clasped the royal wrist, afflicted with palsy, or else made unsteady by high-strung nerves as he unsheathed a thin ceremonial knife. 'Your Exalted,' he warned in a sugar-toned tenor, then effected a quick, neat cut with the blade, knapped from a bleached human shinbone.

  Lysaer did not flinch. His arm stayed relaxed as the blood welled, and the droplets were caught in an offering bowl fashioned from glittering crystal.

  The priest kissed the wet wound, then bound it in silk. His carmine-stained lips intoned blessings to the Light in a whisper that rasped like filed steel through the sigh of the fire in the grate.

  Narms's mayor looked on, clammy with sweat, and bound to sick fascination. Before this, he had always thought of arcane blood rituals as tales told to threaten unruly children.

  Nor did the men-at-arms appear to relish their role as close witnesses. Some shuffled their feet. Others looked elsewhere as a basin of water was tipped into the offering bowl. Blood swirled in pink patterns, stirred by the bone knife. When the mixture blended to translucent pink, the diviner placed the vessel at the center of the tactical map. He floated a wafer of cork on the water, then rubbed a steel needle with a square of black silk until it acquired a charge. There followed another incantation, an invocation to divine Light, while the magnetized needle was arranged on the cork float. The construct revolved on its bed of stained water, then stalled to oscillation on a north-to-south axis. The strangled quiet magnified the rustle of the diviner-priest's silk sleeves. Finished praying, he cupped the fluid-filled bowl. Chain mail clinked in partnered response, as Sulfin Evend adjusted the lay of the tactical map. When the poised needle and the compass rose matched up in cardinal alignment, he reset the abused table cutlery and secured the curled corners of the parchment.

  The mayor strangled his self-righteous protest. Stilled as the men-at-arms, and as morbidly curious, he edged in to observe the proceedings. Tension heightened the senses. The magnified sound struck by every small movement cast echoes off stripped-stone walls. The puddled snowmelt tracked in from the street smelled dankly sharp, and the chill hung pervasive, as though the log fire in the hearth failed to cut through the cloth of a suspended reality.

  Faint as the draw of air through screened silk, the diviner's sped breaths, as his fluttery hands opened a pearl-inlaid coffer and drew out a filament of gold chain. He touched his smeared lips to the copper cone affixed to the end. Blood and spittle dulled its metallic shine as he deployed the timed weight above the map as a pendulum.

  'Prince Exalted, by the blessed Light of Truth,' he intoned. 'Ask. State your divine will.'

  Lysaer s'Ilessid regarded the spread parchment, his eyes honed to steel-edged purpose. 'Find the location of the Spinner of Darkness and show us his course of intent.'

  Around the plank trestle, the onlookers hung rapt as the diviner-priest bowed his head. His delicate hand ceased its trembling. Settled into a trance like carved rock, with pale eyes blanked into vacancy, he quieted the listening lens of his mind. Now made the clear conduit for Prince Lysaer's destiny through the ritual link of the blood magic, he allowed the unconscious deflections of nerve and sinew to drive the dangling pendulum. The copper weight rocked to quivering life at the end of its tether of chain. Its point danced over the parchment's inked landmarks as the priest of the Light swept its progressive arcs above the mapped features of Tysan.

  'Oh, come,' snapped Sulfin Evend, his annoyance a whip through awed stillness. 'We haven't just crossed Instrell Bay in dead winter to seek a quarry holed up on our back trail!'

  The priest sniffed, offended. 'The Master of Shadow is the get of a demon. As prime servant of evil, he could be anywhere.'

  As the Lord Commander drew breath to sneer, Lysaer s'Ilessid intervened with a glance. 'When the time comes for warfare, would you ask a diviner to sharpen your steel?'

  'Point taken.' Sulfin Evend backed off, thumbs hooked like talons in his sword belt.

  If his Hanshire-bred arrogance accepted dark practice in stride, the Mayor of Narms poised between welded fascination and the urge to give way to panic-struck flight. Despite creeping dread, he could not tear his gaze from the consecrated pointer tracking across the spread map. The transition struck him to a gut punch of fear when the random gyre of movement twitched into a smooth, defined swing. The diviner-priest tested, edged the chain gently northward. The arc slowed, died out; then disintegrated into unsettled shivers. Passed southward once more, the movement regained its east-to-west rhythm, as if questing the source of perturbation. Over the barrier range of the Tiriacs, along the western trade road, the copper weight's arc became agitated. Drawn across the inked site of the city of Karfael, it changed motion again, reversed in an arc toward Avenor. There, it settled at last to a rhythmically circular spin over Tysan's royal seat.

  'False reading,' the priest murmured. 'Blood will call to blood, foremost through the tie of close kinship. Your royal son will shortly be bound for Karfael, did you know this?'

  A dazzle of jewels marked Lysaer's drawn brea
th, as light nicked the studs on his doublet. 'He's fifteen years of age. Old enough to start cutting his mother's apron strings, I would say. Nor can a prince gain a ruler's discernment by staying too close to home. My garrison commander at Karfael is competent. If he can't be trusted to steer a headstrong boy from youthful high spirits and folly, we are lost before we ever raise arms against the true minion of darkness.' Through a smile of grave humor, the prince signaled for his priest to proceed with the scrying. 'Quarter the Kingdom of Rathain, if you please.'

  The priest moistened his stained lips. Seized in ecstatic trance, he wet his fingers with a freshened mix of blood and saliva, then reanointed the copper weight. The chain whined, disrupted. Like a hound pulled untimely from a hot scent, the weight thrashed and trembled in confused little jerks that zigzagged without clear direction. The diviner carried on with unruffled calm, in exacting, small increments, casting across every detailed feature of Rathain. When the forest-clad coves along Instrell Bay showed him no quiver of alignment, he combed over the wastes of Daon Ramon Barrens. Next he quartered the ice-clad peaks of the Skyshiels. There at last, the pendulum deflected, then thrummed into an agitated spin.

  'He's there! Oh, well done!' The Divine Prince shot erect. Shared excitement stirred through his men like a storm charge. Even Narms's mayor hung with pent breath as his Grace accosted his priest for more facts. 'Can you see where the demon is headed?'

  'He won't escape this time in deepwater ships. No. You will catch him landlocked and vulnerable.' The diviner-priest hovered over his pendulum and map, consumed by the command of his sovereign to glean every detail he could from his art. 'Since landfall in Jaelot, the Master of Shadow has apparently turned inland. He's cutting a path through the Skyshiel foothills, on an angle just north of the city.'

  'You know of the forbidden road that leads through that country into Daon Ramon Barrens?' Sulfin Evend supplied. 'Baiyen Gap was the ancient name for the pass. Copies of early Second Age record show the Paravian way running straight to Ithamon as the crow flies.'