TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  Early dread became whispers, spun to volatile fear. Surely this was the end. The Spinner of Darkness had worked his fell shadows and consigned his pursuit to oblivion.

  As the mutters swelled toward an outbreak of panic, the officers fought to stem ebbing morale and keep a sane semblance of order.

  'Are you ninnies and girls, to wail fear of the dark? No one's hurt. No one's dying. Have faith in the Light, for the dawn came again, even at Dier Kenton Vale and the maelstrom that beset the war fleet at Werepoint. We are numbers against one. This wall of shadow is doubtless no more than the work of a driven and desperate criminal.'

  Men huddled together. Some sang. Others prayed. In due time, the vortex of darkness thinned and lifted to unveil a late day ripped by storm winds and blizzard. The adverse conditions would not permit tracking, nor could spent horses be forced to bear laden packsaddles and riders. The company chose the sensible alternative, and made camp in a dale where a thicket of thorn formed a windbreak. They lit fires, ate a cheerless meal of stewed horse, while their officers conferred, and decided at length to proceed for Ithamon. They would join Jaelot's guard captain there with all speed as soon as the weather relented.

  'Better hope the Master of Shadow is ahead of us, bound headlong into our trap.' The sergeant slapped chips of ice from his mail and voiced his bitter conclusion. 'Else we'll be ordered to regroup and give chase when the storm clears enough to take bearings.'

  Yet the snow fell at sunset, and all through the next night, a horizontal barrage that layered the landscape like draped gauze, and battened the sky in fleece scud. The brushfires burned to coals, then steamed and went out, puddled to slush and dank embers. The next cheerless day, the wild tempest blew out to thin cirrus. A platinum-pale disk spat hazed sun dogs. East, against an enamel horizon, the looming peaks of the Skyshiels notched the view in ice-clad splendor, skirted in foothills of spruce.

  'Dharkaron's bleak vengeance!' the gaunt tracker fumed. 'We've drifted back eastward! Sithaer's deepest pits, we're so far astray we ought to weep as the butt of our enemy's laughter.'

  'Well, he won't laugh for long.' The chief headhunter pulled out his whetstone and dragged it, screeling, along the kept edge of his dagger. 'He'll find our sweet ambush at Ithamon soon enough. May the sword of the Light and Sithaer's righteous fires drive his accursed spirit past the Wheel.'

  * * *

  Arithon s'Ffalenn believed himself braced for return to the haunted ruin of Ithamon. Across the sparkling, snowy vales of Daon Ramon, under sunlight like shards of white glass, he had seen spirit and sinew put to the test. Surely the three decades elapsed since the Mistwraith's capture should have allowed ample time to address the scarred wounds that remained. Yet the passage of years had done nothing to soften the old pain, scalpel-cut to the heart. No mind trained to mastery could reconcile the loss, when misuse of grand conjury in defense of his feal clans had severed his access to mage-sight. If the agonized sufferance of such a blinding could not be, resolved, the cold burden of guilt could be borne. The stab of roused memory lay familiar and worn, like the ghost throb of a severed limb.

  Yet when Arithon crested the knife ridge of drifts that edged the dry bank of the Severnir, he found himself grateful for the misfortune of his shuttered talent. This pass, he would be spared the visioning dream of the ghosts that shimmered and coiled through the ruin. He would see no past kings pleading for the hope of a crowned heir bringing long-sought restoration. Their gut-wrenching sorrows and their cry for reborn grandeur now lay beyond reach, safely screened from mage-gifted senses by the barriers of unhealed affliction.

  Arithon would not be wrung by the tears of his bygone s'Ffalenn ancestors. Nor would he behold the searing grace of the Paravian spirit forms that sheared like bright flame through the mists.

  Yet if he escaped the echoed reflections of lost glory, he could not be spared the terrible desolation of the ruins themselves. The shattered stone walls, with their smashed carvings, still bespoke the bitter violence of the uprising. The memory of dead high kings still walked moss-grown battlements. The wild winds keened through the shells of breached keeps, stones laddered in stripped ivy and an aura of tumbledown majesty.

  Arithon pressed his exhausted horse northward, troubled in thought and memory. He had known these hills in the mantle of winter; had ridden, then as now, across crusted snow, with the parallel ridges carved out by gales turned the shot gold of damascened silk. A sky as lucent as aquamarine crystal reduced him to a toiling speck upon a spread tapestry of landscape. So many years since he had left this savage country in the trickle of spring thaws, savoring his last days of freedom after the arduous conquest of the Mistwraith, and before the inevitable, fated coronation that laid him under geas at Etarra. His half brother had gone mounted, pensive, beside him, while the chickadees in their solemn slate plumage had scolded over the sere fruits of last year's briars.

  As if no shed blood and no curse lay between, the birds sang still in the branches. The springs burbled through their paned ice in the dells, as if only seasons had changed, and no wars strained the cloth of world destiny. Arithon paused only to water his horse. Pushed to the bone-weary limit of endurance, he wished he had less time on his hands for the morass of solitary reflection.

  Too real, the chance he might fail in the mission sealed by his sworn oath to the Fellowship.

  He rode with his ears sometimes ringing with fever, the relentless ache of his wounded right hand slung in a pinned fold of his cloak. Under dressings he had been too hard-pressed to clean, a raw sore leaked pus where the traumatized flesh refused to close over and heal. His chin was a stubble of uncut, black beard, and his shirts stank of unwashed sweat. By day, the sun lit flash fires in his brain. By night, the fierce stars of Athera's vast heavens pierced him with limitless emptiness.

  He felt like a vessel sucked hollow of dreams, until the dread moment he chanced to look up to establish a routine bearing. His fate lay before him. Against the scribed ribbon of the horizon, he beheld the upthrust scarp of rock that bore Ithamon's ruin like the battered rim of a diadem.

  Just as before, the sight struck his heart like a blow, leaving him winded and breathless. No less poignant for the forewarning of memory, the eloquent testament of smashed lives and broken dreams in the stark, tumbled stone of the wreckage. Then the four towers arisen among them, still pristine in grace, pure as a cry amid the tumbledown battlements. The ruled fall of sunlight struck their facades, raising fine sound like the chiming tap of a bronze mallet against keys of crystal and glass.

  A man raised to the powers of a masterbard's art would have to be deaf not to hear. Arithon gasped, smote to the heart by that soundless chord of vibration. Four pealing notes, whose fifth register was absent, a void like a wound into darkness; for of four towers raised to anchor the tenets of virtue, the fifth one had been cast down. The King's Tower was crumbled, reduced to a weed-grown foundation on the hour a Paravian king had been murdered.

  Hunched on his horse, his fist crushed to wet mane, Arithon bowed his head, shattered. He wept unabashed. The nerve in him faltered, for what lay ahead. Though blinded to sight of the spirits, the practiced maturity of his bardic perception laid him wide-open all over again. There would be no escape. He would hear in song, pouring from broken stone, the bittersweet echoes of beauty and truth, cut down by violence and bloodshed. The call would sing to him, sinew and nerve, and shackle him to the future. As the last surviving s'Ffalenn prince, his was the born burden to shoulder the promise of crown rule and restoration.

  Never mind that the very thought of that role ripped him to mangling agony. The ruin sustained protest, endured against time. Its state of desecration could not alter its set law, or its ingrained fire of inspiration. Here, the unseated stones themselves rang to the foundational chord of compassion and undefiled mercy. That imprint waited with the blank patience of time, to be reclothed in its rightful, lost harmony. Arithon tasted the salt of his tears, reduced to abject humility. While he lived, It
hamon would never release its ancestral hold on the blood and the bone of him.

  Torn open, exposed against silver-clad hills, with the winter's harsh grip embossed foil on black rocks, and the wind a honed dagger to flay him, Arithon fought for the necessary courage to prod his thin mare forward. The ache in his spirit would not be assuaged, nor the guilt that rode at his shoulder. There were too many dead for his name, since Tal Quorin, then those casualties multiplied manyfold more, at Minderl Bay and at Vastmark. Those ghosts would bind him to the seat of s'Ffalenn sovereignty, and hound him to desolate madness.

  A more cruel moment could not be conceived, for enemy riders to sight him. Attached to the garrison men encamped by the ruin, the party of five had been sent foraging for game to ease the scarcity of supplies. Their shout of discovery from the crest of the next hilltop caught their quarry defenselessly vulnerable.

  Arithon snapped face around. Shot erect by dousing, shrill fear, he took in at a glance the ragtag black surcoats worn by Jaelot's city guard. He drew Alithiel left-handed. While the enemies who charged to kill drove downslope in a spray of burst snow, he reined his mount, staggering to meet them.

  Go back!' he pealed out, a cry that distilled his raw tumult of unanswerable pain. 'Ath pity your families, desist!' Through the trained timbre of his Masterbard's voice, the hills spoke in echoes to shiver the spine.

  Here, his blood tie as Rathain's sanctioned crown prince could not fail to be recognized. Where the current of the fifth lane sang through the kingdom's ancient heartland, the flux line itself bore the stamp of the Fellowship ceremony that had sealed his affirmation. The light striking off Ithamon's high towers peaked in resonance and burned, raised to a beacon flare of wild magic.

  Then that errant burst snuffed out like blown flame as Arithon clapped down a defense wrought of merciless shadow. Through a darkness to freeze living flesh to dry powder, he reined about and urged his horse to a stumbling gallop.

  Downhill he raced, toward his pursuit. To reach Ithamon, he must pass through them. His mare was too spent for a circuitous chase back through the open countryside. Heedless of bad footing, he forced reckless speed. The guidance that steered him was the jingle of mail, and the bewildered shouts of the armed men who blundered, equally blinded, to take him. If he held slight advantage for his trained grasp of sound, they were five to his one, and mounted on horses that were decently fed and well rested. Raked by thorns, slapped by branches, Arithon smashed through the gully. The heave of the horse's shoulders beneath him informed him of rising ground. Armored horsemen thrashed headlong down the slope. The shod hooves of their destriers struck red sparks from flint rocks, and their curses were all but on top of him.

  Arithon sifted the oncoming barrage of sound, the whine of wind sliced across someone's bared steel, and the jink of roweled spurs, and a bearded man's labored breathing. He angled Alithiel, braced to thrust as he passed, prepared for the shock as Paravian steel sheared into armor and bone. His worst risk, the chance the blade might bind fast, and tear from his grasp in the wrench as the maimed rider tumbled.

  One stride farther on, his mare misstepped, slid a foreleg on ice, and crashed sidewards. Arithon tucked into a roll before impact. He struck full force on his shoulder. The air slammed from his lungs. His grasp on the shadow screen lapsed for one second. He saw light strike through, flash in dazzling reflection off the bared runes of Alithiel, outthrust away from his body. Then the hooves of the enemy horse thudded over him, and a blow to the head sundered him into the yawning void of unconsciousness.

  Winter 5670

  Whitehaven

  Turned off the steep, winding road that climbed the North Gap to Eastwall, a left-branching goat track led to the hostel of Ath's adepts. The trail was narrow, a rough staircase of flint rock, hedged by the stunted firs that clung to harsh life at high altitude. Overhead, jagged summits scraped the roof of the sky, ripping the hems of the fast-moving storm clouds, or else capped by fair-weather ice plumes condensed from the sea-warmed, westerly currents that combed through the teeth of the ranges. The rare traveler attempted that route in deep winter, though the scouring north winds often razed off the drifts that mired the lower passes. Fewer still, the wayfarers who braved the upper peaks in solitude. The rigorous ascent in thin air could inflict vicious headaches and nausea, or spells of blackout faintness.

  At first, Elaira presumed she had succumbed to such wasting sickness. The sheet of glare thrown off white snow stabbed like knives to the brain, distorting her overtaxed sight. Then vision failed utterly. Her perception disintegrated as though a thousand hot pinholes suddenly let in the dark.

  She stumbled. Thrown to her knees, the enchantress grabbed Mindly to save herself from a tumbling fall. Sharpened edges of stlone gouged her shin, despite her thick hide leggings. As her outraged flesh recorded no more than the ghostly impression of bruising, she realized, through a split second of terror, that this, was no ill effect from thin air. Then the side of her skull burst and exploded, as if someone clubbed her full force with an iron-studded bludgeon. Her cry, as she dropped, was no call for help, but the name of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  Linked by the tie of awareness between them, she shared his cold, inert sprawl on the snow-clad ground of the barrens. Then that fragile impression shattered as a gentle hand clasped her shoulder.

  Vision snapped back into clarity. Elaira beheld a white mantle furred with a lining of snow lynx. Shining faint silver and fired gold, the garment was bordered with the stitched embroidery favored by Ath's adepts. Nestled within was a man as sunburned as old shoe leather, with a wire beard gathered into yellowed plaits tied off with chunk beads of amber. His voice, when he spoke, was poured honey, filled with a kindness that razed off the pain. 'Elaira?' The fact he knew her name was the natural extension of a perception schooled to reach beyond flesh. 'The hostel's quite near, just over the ridge. I can call for a litter if you feel too shaken to walk.'

  Elaira gulped in the searing, cold air, unable to frame a reply. Her mind unreeled again, still tethered to a field of stained snow under the wild sky in Daon Ramon. There, a dark-haired prince sprawled inert, haplessly thrown by his leg-broken horse. The crippled animal struggled nearby, downed in thrashing agony. A pack of armed riders surrounded the rucked snow. In glass-edged focus, she saw they were unable to approach farther without risk of battering by striking hooves. Then her tortured breath stopped, while the archer among them received the crisp order to string his, horn bow.

  'He'll shoot the mare,' the adept explained in swift sympathy, 'Nor has the eloquent hate of the Alliance served its own cause on this day. The name of the Spinner of Darkness now inspired witless fear. Superstition will buy a delay. The support at her shoulder was joined by a warm palm that cradled her splitting head. 'Bide now. Close your eyes. We'll have you to shelter in minutes.'

  Elaira fought out a gasped protest. 'I can walk.' The rage seared her, that the one useless gesture was the limit her power could offer. She was helpless, hamstrung, unable to raise so much as a prayer for Arithon's plight in Daon Ramon. If she still wore her quartz crystal, even had she ranged focused spells of diversions over such distance to spare him, she could not have done so without invoking a Koriani debt, for his life.

  Wisely, she had cut off such temptation beforehand.

  Nothing left, but to regroup scattered wits; through savagd grief, she must make her unruly body take charge and resume the burden of bearing her upright. Yet even that basic discipline failed her. Anguish blurted her heart's truth aloud, a cry torn from reflexive instinct. 'Ath's blessed mercy, they're going to kill him!'

  'Not yet.' The adept's sturdy grip helped her to arise. 'Listen. You'll feel him still breathing.' Yet before seeded hope could flower and buoy her, he added, 'I'm sorry, lady. Before you ask, no, our kind cannot intervene in ways that disrupt the fate of the world.'

  Elaira caught back a wrenching sob. Close as she had never been to being drowned by blind terror, still, she forced the grace to ease his co
ncern. 'Forgive me, I knew better.' She managed a step forward in spite of weak knees. Less easily, she stifled the ignominious need, to cast off respect and hound the adept to break faith with a round of tearful pleading.

  'You are far from helpless,' the white brother observed. Yet if her mean thoughts had touched his awareness, his counsel came sourced in compassion. 'Belief can imprison. You are not separate from Ath's creation. Though stubborn reason may insist you can't reach past the bounds of your bodily senses, your cries for help are heard, always. Each appeal is unfailingly answered. Your inner self extends beyond all constraint, though the outer eye, attached to the world, would impose its limited state of false order.'

  Now steadied enough to walk unsupported, Elaira crested the rise. Below her, nestled into the fold of the scarp, a confection of white granite and airy arched cupolas gleamed as though carved from delicate blue shadows and sunlight. The hostel of Whitehaven held a beauty to inspire the soaring flight of waking dreams. Caught by the throat as her pain dragged her earthbound, Elaira shook her head.

  I swore an oath over a Koriani focus stone,' she admitted. through the ache of the cold drawn into her lungs, she said, bitter, 'Is that not a binding constraint?'

  The adept regarded her, his expression benign, and his eyes deep as uncharted ocean. 'Does an oath chain your wishes? Your emotions? Your desires?'

  'Yes, if I act on them.' Elaira slipped on an iced boulder, and recovered. 'Prime Selidie wants Prince Arithon trapped under an obligation to my order. My freedom lies in my steadfast refusal to comply, unless my distress could draw the attention of a passing Fellowship Sorcerer?' When her wild-card suggestion raised no word of encouragement, she finished her thought out of obstinacy. 'They seem able enough to act as they please, unafraid of Koriani retribution.'