TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  She paused, overcome. The crushing weight of the moment stalled thought. To enter the Prime's private sanctum, unasked, was to force her fate to a summary resolution. She could lose everything, sealing her plight to a lifetime of thankless servitude. The young woman now wielding Morriel's authority was a frustrating, unknown quantity.

  Of all senior peers in the Koriani Order, Lirenda alone had been raised to eighth-rank training. Her knowledge would not let her gnawing doubt rest: the new Prime's accession could never have taken the time-honored, legitimate steps. The vacuous chit who had stood as her rival never owned the deep strength, far less the arduous self-control to bear the accession to prime power. No measure of compromise existed behind that sand grain of irritable discrepancy: desperate, even dying, Morriel might have dared an unprecedented breach, casting aside untold thousands of years of uncompromised moral tradition.

  Either Lirenda lived out her days cowed by that flagrant rebuttal, or she dared confrontation here and now at the risk of her very survival.

  At the cusp, outrage drove her, and the wild-card threat, that Elaira's frank testimony over Arithon's escape might prove just as thoroughly damning. Lirenda seized her chance to wrest back her autonomy and brazenly opened the door.

  The panel swung into a dimly lit anteroom, curtained with tapestries in glowing Narms dyes. Dried lavender wafted delicate scent from elegant, cloisonne vases. The space appeared empty. Lirenda shed her mud-splashed mantle by the entry, startled by an unexpected movement in the corner as another travel-stained figure whirled to face the rustle of wool.

  'You!' gasped Elaira. Tension sharpened her carriage. 'Are you here to make certain I don't say too much? Or shall we agree to be allies in adversity?'

  Lirenda draped her stained cloak on a chairback, her eyes the pale amber of poured whiskey. 'Allies.' she responded, begrudging acknowledgment that Arithon s'Ffalenn had spun a common thread between their disparate stations. 'You don't trust me, I see. To prove my sincerity, I'll offer a warning. Throughout your audience, behave exactly as though you were examined by Morriel herself.'

  Elaira weighed this through a pregnant pause, her level brows hooked to perplexity. 'Should such a threat frighten me?' In her few past encounters, the deceased Prime Matriarch had treated her with fairness, and at times a grandmotherly sympathy.

  No chance remained to test Lirenda's statement. The inner doors opened, and a liveried, blond page boy called out in formal summons.

  Elaira squared her shoulders. Her snagged plait an auburn flame down her back, she clasped the bronze buttons sewn for luck into the lining of her mantle, then strode resolute through the doorway. She did not glance behind as Lirenda ran roughshod over protocol and followed her.

  Gloom enfolded the hammer-beamed chamber beyond. The bow windows with their breathtaking view of the bay were curtained in night-colored velvet. Nicked to gold by the flame of beeswax candles, velvet upholstery and damascened silk braid glinted from corners and lover's nooks. The furnishings were costly southern imports of Vhalzein lacquer and ebony. Carved tables and chairs wore graceful wreaths and the beardless faces of dryads. The carpets, with their twisted fringe borders, were the masterworks of skilled Morvain craftsmen. Glass and silver candlestands showed Paravian workmanship, eight centuries old, and exquisitely rare. Brought up to appreciate beautiful things, Lirenda curbed her wandering eyes and locked glances with the new Prime.

  Elaira had already curtseyed to the floor. Lirenda eschewed the same rite of obeisance, instead giving the seated Matriarch on the dais her insolent, tight-focused survey.

  Selidie wore silk the cream and lavender of spring irises, her supple, young limbs arranged in the austerity of a lion-bossed chair. The Prime's mantle of purple velvet with its nine bands of office had been pinned at her neck with a brooch of red gold and amethyst. Her pale, corn-silk hair was clasped in mother-of-pearl combs, not the diamond pins Morriel had favored. No question remained that she wielded the powers invested with the Matriarch's office. Her eyes watched all that moved, a sustained, nerveless focus as intent as polished steel rivets. A matched pair of ebony stands at her feet wore masked coverings, the ritual patterns of embroidered silk used to veil major focus stones. Flanking these, supported on beaten-ring tripods, were seven matched spheres of clear quartz attuned to the sixfold sigil for scrying.

  Lirenda let silent seconds elapse before speaking the traditional statement of service.

  Prime Selidie replied in a throaty, clipped alto, stripped of the sweet lisp affected before her whirlwind ascent to high office. 'Did you think I'd be amazed by your uninvited entry? My page has already set out a chair. You will sit. Keep silent until my interview is done, and initiate Elaira receives disposition and final dismissal.'

  A prime's direct order demanded obedience. Lirenda accepted the chair, her chilled hands clasped in her lap. Elaira was left standing alone before the dais, defenseless beneath the stripping regard of those surgically measuring gray eyes.

  'Come forward,' Prime Selidie commanded. 'We are private.' Yet if no ranking Senior attended her wearing the veils of Ceremonial Inquisitor, the exchange promised the razor-edged tension of an inquiry nonetheless. The outcome might easily invoke a trial, bearing stakes severe as the supreme penalty.

  The victim must wait in unflinching subservience while her Matriarch posed the first questions.

  'You are called to serve because Arithon s'Ffalenn is still at large on the continent.' Selidie paused, subtle in expectation.

  Elaira gave away nothing, her calm stance itself a statement of blistering courage.

  'There are factions marching who seek his death. You don't wonder how he fares in adversity?' Selidie leaned forward, extended an almond-fair hand, and tapped the crystalline arc of quartz spheres in sequence one after another. Power surged at her touch, waking the sigils of binding. The scrying stones flashed like turned mirrors with light, then resolved to display scenes of tight-focused color and movement.

  Even from the vantage of her seat, Lirenda recognized the streaming banners of town garrisons set on winter march across the bleak territory of Rathain. Etarra's exemplary zeal had responded with eight field companies five hundred strong. Burdened with massive supply trains, slowed by freezing storms, their creeping progress advanced through the desolate terrain of Daon Ramon Barrens.

  Another quartz showed Darkling's militia, armed men and laden mountain ponies breasting the chest-high drifts toward the foothills and the vale of the Severnir. The crystal adjacent displayed Morvain's bands of veteran headhunters moving apace through the deep glens of Halwythwood, where startled deer fled before them. Beyond all question, the three forces marched to a unified purpose.

  'Your prince faces bad odds.' Selidie tapped the fourth quartz in its stand. That one aroused to an actinic flash: spurred on by no less than Lysaer himself, Narms fielded a smaller, fast-moving force under the sunwheel standard. They marched the old way through Caith-al-Caen, while the raised blast of Lysaer's gift of light dispelled the gossamer forms of the unicorns' memories like so much torched silk before them.

  'The Alliance has raised the hue and cry, as you see. They converge on Ithamon, if trust can be placed in an estimation based on direction.' Selidie flicked the next-to-the-last sphere to life, unveiling the trials of Jaelot's pursuit through the haunted pass of the Baiyen. 'Why should Prince Arithon seek haven, do you think, in the ruin of his ancestral seat?'

  Again, silence answered. Chin lifted, eyes wide, Elaira stood in squared quiet, the weight of the mantle she had not removed almost masking her small tremors of dread. Surprised to unwonted admiration, Lirenda locked clammy fingers and awaited the next step in this perilous testing of wills.

  Prime Selidie stroked the last quartz in line with the chisel-point tip of her fingernail. 'Dakar the Mad Prophet is no longer free to play watchdog and royal protector.' The glass polish reflected her immaculate hand, as well as the travel-stained initiate held trapped in the lucent spill of candlelight. 'Elaira
?' Selidie cajoled with a cat's concentration. 'We know that the Master of Shadow is injured. When he raves, he tends to get careless.'

  'He mentions my name?' Elaira provoked in the faintest flush of first anger. She had little tolerance for playing the mouse before figures of higher authority. 'Or how else could you garner the foothold to find him?'

  Selidie straightened, the last quartz left blank. 'He's the stepchild of cleverness, just as you were never a creature of subtlety.' Fine silk slithered like the whisper of ghosts as she whisked off the coverings that veiled the faceted jewels on the stands at her feet.

  The first spat the glacial glimmer of pressed ice, no less than the Skyron aquamarine. The other, a faceted amethyst sphere, breathed an aura to raise the short hairs at the nape. Its surface seemed to drink in the light. Spindled glints at its heart flared to restless violet, alive with sullen rage and treacherous intelligence. Even from safe remove to one side, Lirenda wrestled the fear raised by the unshielded presence of the Great Waystone.

  Elaira swallowed, the rough flush left by wind drained into chalky pallor. She would beg no reprieve. Facing the instruments of terrible, raw power that could strip her mind of free will, she managed the fiber to stop shaking. Straight in defiance, she transferred a glare like an equinox gale on the Prime in her seat of high judgment. 'We have changed from an order of mercy to one that bends lives through coercion and force? How our founders would weep. Are, in fact, weeping. Or do their venerable memories not stand here as witness, imprinted into the same matrix jewels you invoke to enact your demands?'

  Which insolence snapped the Prime's patience. 'Be silent!'

  'I will not betray Arithon,' Elaira stated, blunt as nails in a suicidal challenge. 'If that's what you've brought me here to achieve, let me clear the least shadow of doubt. I'll cast off my vow of obedience, even welcome the punishment that makes final end of my love as your private weapon. Never again will I be the tool to gain leverage for Koriani politics.'

  Lirenda caught her breath, stunned. Against the Prime sigils, no sworn initiate held the power to keep personal secrets; Elaira had hurled down the gauntlet to compel her own immolation.

  On the dais, Selidie settled back in her chair. 'You will not betray anyone,' she rebuked in flat quiet. Her oval face gave no clue to her thoughts, the lucent flesh unmarked in youth, and the disciplined iron that showed no trace of emotion. 'I am no fool, to misread the strengths and shortcomings of any initiate bound to life service. I will not abet suicide. Nor will I ruin a valuable resource over a textbook adherence to propriety.'

  Shocked to naked retreat by the point-blank rejection of her tactical sacrifice, Elaira fell back on bravado. 'Swear, then.' Prompted by her razor-sharp instinct for survival, she added, 'Take oath on your personal crystal that I will never be asked to betray Arithon s'Ffalenn, nor coerce another innocent as crow bait to draw him into the hands of his enemies.'

  Selidie raised a silver-toned eyebrow. 'Is your trust in my office so diminished? I have forthrightly stated my case. You are too strong a will to be wasted.' Then, as Elaira failed to relax, 'Ah, I see.' She clapped petite hands, caught remiss. 'You fear a repeat of Fionn Areth's constrained fate.' Coquettish malice touched her coral smile as she said, 'Of course, you couldn't know that plan was Lirenda's idea.'

  But Elaira proved too wise to be swayed by the diversion of petty vengeance. 'Morriel's permission endorsed that mishandling.'

  'As a lesson, yes, to an eighth-rank enchantress who failed to unmask the true core of the test as a trap. In due course, Lirenda proved out the flawed weakness that disbarred her from the succession.' With a girl's catty shrug, that her subject of revilement was constrained to listening silence, Selidie cupped her palms to the glowering sphere of the Waystone. 'Did you know our great amethyst can record and enforce promises?'

  Elaira shivered, speared through by chills. The warning stopped breath, that this was no green antagonist who countered her moves like a predator loosed on a chessboard. 'Don't do this.'

  'I require your trust.' said the Prime, unequivocal. A freezing finger of cold stirred the air, then a ripple of malice clothed in stinging power, as the Matriarch engaged her will with the wakened might of the order's most perilous focus stone. 'For the record, in duration of my lifetime, bear witness to my word as Selidie Prime: initiate Elaira will never be forced to betray Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn in the interests of the Koriani Order.'

  Elaira shook her head, stunned. 'I need to sit down.'

  The closed chamber seemed to magnify stillness, until the pearlescent gleam thrown off Vhalzein lacquer furnishings seemed a lawless intrusion of movement. Selidie uttered no word. Her eyes the dense, polished silver of hematite, she stroked the dire amethyst back to quiescence. Dainty in grace, and butterfly fragile, she inclined her head in permission.

  A page pattered forward bearing a footstool. Blanched paper white and never more wary, the bronze-haired initiate groped, and caught shaky hands on the cushion. She let her knees give way underneath her. Lirenda's thunderstruck silence at her back endorsed shocking fact, that an oath on the Waystone would be held in trust by the Prime Matriarch's very life.

  Limp in the juddering light of the candles, Elaira braced her stripped nerves, too aware she fenced wits with an enemy who outmatched her every resource. 'If not to lay strings upon Arithon s'Ffalenn, why should you trouble to summon me?'

  'Why indeed?' Selidie loosed sprightly laughter, then dispatched her page to the kitchen to ask for a tray of tea and buttered cakes. 'Because the man is Dharkaron's own shadow to track. He's alone, and ill, and probably injured. If he's going to succumb and die in the Skyshiels, our world loses a powerful cipher. You offer the best link we have to trace him. Surely you share the same interest at heart?'

  Elaira considered this. Taut fingers laced on the crossed ankles of her riding boots, she scarcely winced as the grit of dried mud flaked onto the priceless carpet. 'You won't seek to claim full advantage of his weakness?'

  'Our order has no means to pluck him from the wilds of Daon Ramon, in any case. Not with five musters of Lysaer's armed allies beating the brush with drawn steel.' Selidie rearranged the sleeves of her mantle over the lion-carved chair arms. 'They wish him dead. We desire him living, but captive. You are offered the choice how you serve him.'

  'I would keep him alive, but not at the cost of integrity.' Elaira admitted without heat, though the knuckles she locked on damp leather bespoke the backhanded sting of the trap barbed and set to waylay her. 'Just what service are you asking me to perform?'

  Selidie regarded her disheveled wariness with a startling, frank gesture of kindness. 'You are linked to him, yes? At the outset, I ask for your help with a scrying. In exchange, I offer these safeguards. You alone will review the results. For my needs, you need share nothing except the fact of his death, or the word of his safe arrival at the ruin of Ithamon.'

  'And if the issue is not black or white?' Elaira pressed. Distrust scraped through her strained fabric of hope, that the inevitable, unseen hook in the bargain must put her conflicted loyalty to a more punishing test.

  Selidie answered without hesitation. 'By my oath on the Waystone, you are left free to answer his need at your personal discretion.'

  Which gift was a dangerous boon. The master ciphers possessed by the Koriani Prime enabled Selidie to follow Elaira's every move; by extension, she would gain infallible means to dog Arithon's position at will.

  The door latch jostled warning. Two servants in house livery entered in soundless tact. Both gave the unshielded quartz crystals wide berth. One cast a lace cloth over the claw-footed table set at Selidie's elbow. The other settled the tray of refreshments and poured steaming tea into porcelain cups.

  'You're too thin,' observed Selidie. 'Why not make your choice after you've eaten some honey cake?'

  'No blandishments.' Elaira had recovered the aplomb to strike back in wry humor. 'I'm no longer the starving street orphan who could be bought for the promise of bread cru
sts. S'Ffalenn princes have ever looked after their own, and your quarry has already proved himself as Torbrand's trueborn descendant.'

  'His escape from Jaelot was no accident,' Selidie agreed, 'and you yourself honor his royal trust to the point where you won't accept bread crusts without the old-law bonds of honest friendship.'

  'I'll have surety before cake,' Elaira insisted, her mettle steadfast under pressure. 'A hard ride up the coast would make anybody thin. I'll recover on gruel in a tavern, but after you've listed your terms of demand to offset my presumed gift of freedom.'

  While Lirenda sucked in a breath of amazement, Selidie tucked her neat, coquette's fingers around the scrolled handle of a teacup. 'You should have been a merchant, the way you read nuance.' She waved the hovering servants away. Steam plumed against the dimmed fall of the tapestries as she spooned in a thick gob of honey. Her gaze stayed thoughtfully level, but not discomposed, as she savored a lingering sip.

  'Merchants can't traffic in slaves or prisoners, under terms of the Fellowship's compact,' Elaira attacked. 'You need Arithon as your leverage to upset the old order, and to reach him, you plan to use me. I would have this over with.'

  Selidie slapped down her cup. The furious chime of the spoon struck through silence, no less a warning than the testing tap of crossed sword steel. Robed in the Prime's mantle, and charged with the unsheathed power of her office, Selidie glared down with quicksilver eyes. 'Girl, you rankle! Don't expect I'll forgive your brash insolence. Hear your orders. Then decide what course you will take from this chamber. I will grant you the loan of a scrying quartz. You will use it to shadow the Prince of Rathain and report if he dies of wound fever. If he lives, you may engage your own powers as you will. I prefer him kept clear of Lysaer s'Ilessid and the armed forces of the Alliance.'

  'No limits?' Elaira said, her voice rocked unsteady. The candlelight flared like chipped rust through her hair as she hung on the pause for an answer.

  Selidie watched, snake still in her chair, while the steam twined the gloom like the half-coiled ribbons of a spell. 'No limits but one: if his Grace survives the winter, you will go to him when the thaws reopen the Skyshiel passes. You will attach yourself to his company and behave exactly as you please until such time as his life becomes threatened. Then, you will be free to intercede in his behalf. You have claimed we've forgotten our precepts of mercy. Let this prove you wrong. You are given my sanction to wield the power of the Koriani Order in the cause of Prince Arithon's life.'