TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  He might see Arithon's body, torn bloody and fallen, or worse: the dark passion of Jaelot's guardsmen. Their behavior would not be pretty as they gave free rein to their ideological Alliance doctrine. Too likely, townbred men-at-arms would satiate their terror of the dark by exacting full measure of maiming torment on the hide of their s'Ffalenn victim.

  Bathed in clammy sweat, and chilled to the bone by the hounding north winds, Dakar forced back his ravening doubts. He wrapped himself in his mantle, closed his eyes, then unreeled a line of questing thought through the vast sky arched overhead. In full daylight, he needed the Name of one star, risen high on its course toward the zenith; with that fact in hand, he must determine the precise moment the same body would cross the azimuth meridian. A Fellowship Sorcerer's majestic, poised mind could encompass an ongoing tapestry of consciousness that placed him as one point, knowing, in connection to all other awarenesses, seen and unseen. As an apprentice spellbinder, the Mad Prophet's skill was less facile.

  Earthbound in the five senses of his mortality, Dakar, like the worm, had to grope. He turned his mind inward. Mental static subsided. He held firm until his consciousness stayed contained, a stilled pool against which the mage-sense that tracked the unseen could cast its refined reflection. Listening, Dakar cast a tactile thought into the bottomless well of the sky.

  By rote knowledge, he tuned out the disparate voices of everything else: the whistle of the wind, and the rattle of storm-beaten fir branches. Their sounds in the ear were no less manifest than the voice of their being, that strand of aliveness that, interwoven, formed the fabric of all Ath's creation. Each spun thread held Name, and could be marked and traced through the realms of existence that lay open to mage-sight. A star, in that context, sang in chords of exquisite complexity. Each made itself known, an explosive, exuberant play of energies, forming and unforming in the fire dance pavane that interfaced matter and light. A pure cry of high frequency, a star's existence formed a gateway through the veil of the mysteries. Their identity crossed outside of imposed time and space; as the mind of a man might, when exactingly trained to know the elusive byways that stepped his awareness beyond the dense limits of five senses en fleshed.

  Each star's patterning was self-aware, distinct in personality as no other. Dakar sifted, and puzzled, and sorted with precision. At length, he picked out the grand harmony of the constellation arisen to position overhead. Then, in a second pass, infinitely more taxing, he refined his perception to isolate the one star that would best serve his need. He must find it by Name, then make himself known in return, to exchange the requisite permissions. All this, he must do in the span of a moment, joined at one with the heavens that turned to the spin of Athera upon her grand axis.

  A jab in the ribs knocked him rudely from trance. 'Merciful maker! Now of all times, how can you slip off to sleep?'

  Dakar snapped open offended brown eyes. Fionn Areth stood over him, the tin basin brimming with snow clods. Rather than risk receiving the load in a cascade over his head, the Mad Prophet scrambled upright, hand clutched to his side where the young man's boot toe had rammed him. 'I wasn't asleep, you idiot goatherd!' Wrung by savage dizziness, he clasped mittened hands to his temples. 'Obviously, you've never seen a sorcerer in trance state.'

  The disastrous shock to his nerves ebbed away. While his wheeling senses resettled into the sluggish couch of his body, Dakar held fast to the Name for the star he had garnered, rising barely minutes away from the overhead peak of its passage. The snow in the basin must be melted by then. Otherwise, he would lose his opening to scry. Too ugly, the chance his effort would be wasted. What use, to summon help, if Prince Arithon's predicament had already been ended by sword, then a pine torch, touched to a pile of faggots.

  'Set that basin heating over the coals.' The Mad Prophet pawed through the rumpled mantle wadded over his lap, relieved to recover the silk-wrapped packet unharmed in the scrip at his waist. He had always disliked working spellcraft with an audience. Since the antagonism seeded by Fionn Areth's ignorance set him on edge all the worse, he diverted the young man with chores. 'Scrounge out a burned twig or a sliver of charcoal. Something I can use to scribe out a protective circle.'

  Next, Dakar swept off a flank of raised rock, if not level, at least with a reasonably flat surface upon which to work the ceremonial array for a star scrying. He accepted the snowmelt in the basin, aware of the sun, climbing the arc toward winter noon. More seconds fleeted by as he spat on singed fingers, then tried again to grip the charcoal Fionn Areth had just raked from the firebed.

  Breath plumed from his lips, streamed white in the cold as Dakar invoked a Paravian blessing to honor and hallow the ground.

  'We always begin with the circle,' he explained, drawing the figure around the aligned basin. Fionn Areth watched, huddled beside the heaped coals for their warmth, or perhaps for their illusion of security. Larger worries eclipsed the concern that the venison pot had boiled dry. 'Next we mark off the cardinal directions, then intercede for cooperation from the four elements.'

  Fionn Areth frowned as Dakar scratched the symbols for each point, beginning with air, at the east. 'How can you tell where due north is, precisely?'

  'So you would also, if you learned to listen.' Like a vulture hunched underneath trailing cloaks, Dakar drew runes for south, west, then north on his circle. 'A good many clansmen are gifted with that awareness from birth.'

  A pause, while the wind screamed and gusted. The water in the basin puckered, then hardened under the onslaught. Dakar swore, flung the charcoal aside, and scooped out a glassine fan of new ice. He would have to work swiftly. Should the water freeze over, he would lose his moment. Noon and midnight offered the most propitious times to craft an efficient scrying.

  'This,' he said, stripping the tie from the silk, 'is a shred from a bandage once used to bind up a gash Prince Arithon made to seal an oath of truth for his caithdein. Understand, and clearly, it is my limitation that demands the use of an artifice.'

  Asandir would more simply visualize Arithon's face, and by an unfailing recollection of detail, invoke a tie to his presence. A musical talent might sing in trued pitch and engage the harmonies of his Grace's Name. Since the Mad Prophet's froggy vocals would lose in a contest with a rusty hinge on a post, he resigned himself to crude methods and tore off a thread from the spotted linen. 'Just so you know the old trace of blood in this cloth will not empower this spellcraft, but only serve to hold its alignment to Arithon.'

  Of course, there were subtleties beyond time to explain. Dakar cupped the ripped swatch of thread in his hand, guarded in hope that the blood pact once sworn between prince and caithdein could be used to touch Lord Jieret as well. Arithon had still wielded his mage-sighted talent when he had sealed binding friendship with the Earl of the North; and Jieret had inherited the s'Valerient gift of Sight. Dakar knew, as he followed each step in due order, that the rite he enacted would cast an array of hidden ramifications. By the Law of the Major Balance, each conscious act affected all others across the greater breadth of Ath's creation.

  Invocations by grand conjury crossed outside the veil, past the warp-and-weft barriers of time and space that wove the world known by the senses. Spoken language fell short of description. Subjected to Fionn Areth's critical attention, Dakar fumbled to impart how a precisely tuned thought and intent could dissolve the mind's perceived boundaries. For today, he must free the reflective properties of water, and bring the element to respond to the rarefied vibration called down within the protected circle.

  The Mad Prophet inscribed the linked chain of Paravian runes that ruled water. Next, he asked the requisite permission, and marveled, as he always did, as the surface smoothed over and acquired the mirror-bright sheen of pooled mercury. While Fionn Areth exclaimed, nervous and amazed, the Mad Prophet tipped his face skyward. 'Sun and star will cross the meridian, here, and fix our place of reference. This won't be easy to comprehend. But all event, past and present, is in fact simultaneous outsid
e the bounds of the veil. For scrying, we have to establish a beacon point, a site of response for the natural forces that spell and rune will channel in answer to match our framed template.'

  Dakar spoke the incantation to invoke the star, linking her portal to the one just created by circle and water. Then he cast the stained fragment of cloth into the basin, and waited the unbearable, agonized interval leading into the moment of noon.

  Sweating with tension, with no second chance if he fumbled the timing, Dakar held his breath while, stubborn as any set bloodstain, the rusty clot in the thread slowly soaked through and dissolved. Mage-sight detected the delicate, smoke haze as the energies unwound in release, the trace magnetics of Arithon's identity dispersed and then imprinted into the volatile essence of water. The juncture of spellcraft reached consummation as his signature frequencies and the star's, overhead, resolved into vertical phase.

  'Now!' Dakar whispered. Hope raised a flame of fierce expectation, as in response to relentless finesse his drawn rune lit to hazed phosphor, then drifted above the basin. Upon that actualized charge of prime power, the spellbinder invoked the sworn permission granted by the Shadow Master for the sake of protection and safety. Dakar followed with the Paravian command for the heightened awareness connecting spirit and flesh. 'Tiendar!'

  If Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had not crossed Fate's Wheel, if he still breathed, incarnate, the star as it crossed the arc of the zenith would conjoin with his living self. A reflection would appear within the spelled water, unveiling his location and circumstance.

  Response came, not the blank darkness Dakar most feared, but a vista of snow-clad landscape. The Mad Prophet knew the stony, rising ground, where the hillcrests cut the wind-raked sky like the etched rims of broken crystal. The site lay near the ruins of Ithamon, amid Daon Ramon Barrens. There the spell-marked water in the basin resolved a fleeting image of armed men wearing Jaelot's colors. Several conferred in a tight-knit group. Others posted a nervous guard over a bound and unconscious prisoner. Dakar received the alarming impression of bloodstained snow. The twist of black hair masking Arithon's face was snarled to his scalp, whorled into a clotted scab.

  Overhead, in the Skyshiels, the sun reached station, climbed to the peak of its arc. That selfsame, meshed second, the flux of the noon tide peaked and cascaded down the fifth lane.

  A burst of white light blasted off the spelled basin. The poised rune became immolated. Flash-burned, near blinded, Dakar howled an oath. His rank language entangled with a peal of wild sound far above range of mortal hearing. Yet to senses not mage-gifted, that cried note of alarm rippled across air and matter, a deep, belling toll that stirred and shook the bedrock roots of the mountains.

  'What's happening?' Fionn Areth shot erect in dismay, his nape roughened to sudden gooseflesh. Hand grasped to his sword, he frantically glanced right and left while the diminishing shudder of low-range harmonics shivered the stone underfoot. 'Merciful Ath! What harm have you called down upon us?'

  'No harm. Nothing demonic. Put away that fool steel, you're not going to be threatened!' Dakar spat a final, furious epithet, hands pressed to the ringing shell of his skull to damp out the lingering, persistent vibration still ranging through his mage-sense. When Fionn Areth's sword instead turned point first and threatened to skewer his neck, he shouted in exasperation. 'A plain scrying never initiates energy. This was a passive spell, drawn upon feminine principles and run through a cipher of noninterference! The event that just happened was not the effect of anything done by my conjury.'

  Fionn Areth bore in until the trembling tip of his blade rasped the unshaven skin of the Mad Prophet's throat. 'Well, prove that.'

  'I can't. This once, why not just believe me?' Dakar shut his eyes, snapped to ripe irritation: at least when he had suffered the same treatment by Arithon, the s'Ffalenn prince's hand did not shake. His word was no lie. Rank fool that he was, pressed by haste and concern, he had simply neglected to use common sense, or recall Asandir's basic teaching. He should have remembered the obvious step to account for his current location.

  'Well, mountains don't quake for no reason, as my granduncle would say in Araethura.' Fionn Areth retorted. When Dakar's stiff silence gave him no choice but to kill or back down, still in ignorance, he sheathed his steel. Arms crossed, feet planted, he held his ground, while the fat prophet rubbed his chafed skin in scowling, ungrateful relief. 'Why should I believe the forked tongue of a sorcerer?'

  'Spellbinder,' Dakar groused in correction, then grappled the steel-shod spike of a headache to form a coherent answer. 'We're due east of Rockfell, placed on direct line with the ley which crosses the Paravian circle at Ithamon.'

  The herder's hard stare and blank face showed he failed to see the connection.

  All but yanking his beard in martyred impatience, Dakar bit back his curses and qualified. 'When Arithon received his due sanction as Teir's'Ffalenn, a Fellowship ceremony linked his spirit in a vow of dedicated service to the land. The force that just upset our scrying was Rathain's very heartrock, responding to the distress of its threatened crown prince.'

  'I saw Jaelot's guardsmen in your spelled water,' Fionn Areth admitted. Thawed enough to relax stiff ideals and his death grip on harebrained histrionics, he stood down, his stout hand released from his sword grip. 'They'll surely kill him.'

  Dakar massaged his aching temples, as though gouging pressure could wrest more detail from the wisp of ephemeral memory. 'Not right away. His captors appeared too scared foolish to act. The petty officer in charge has sent for his captain and strong reinforcements. That could buy delay, perhaps until tomorrow morning.' He hesitated, pricked by the disturbing hunch something else of importance eluded him. Yet pursuit of that thought led him nowhere. A mental blank wall encompassed his mind, and no prompt stirred his latent prescience.

  Fionn Areth regarded the suspect water, slowly freezing in the tin basin. 'Is that it? His Grace just dies? Nothing more can be done with your vaunted powers to help?'

  'From here? No.' As though the appeal had not shown a stunning volte-face concerning the use of strong magecraft, Dakar shrugged. 'I was never the most gifted of Fellowship apprentices.' Where before knowing Arithon, he would have hedged, now, he just stared at his boots. 'The sad truth is, I never reached mastery.' This, despite the embarrassing centuries of Asandir's thorough instruction.

  Shamed by past failings; not about to be criminally careless twice in the course of one day, the Mad Prophet attended his botched construct. He took strict steps to effect proper ritual, not speaking until he had released the hung remnants of his disrupted conjury.

  While the wind bit cold through the thin, winter sunlight, Dakar rewrapped the stained scrap of linen. His care denounced fate, that within hours, the man whose blood had once soaked the cloth might be lost beyond reach, his spirit passed over Daelion's Wheel to lay down the harsh burdens of this lifetime. Savaged by regret, that a friendship whose depths had yet to be plumbed might end with such brutal finality, Dakar pitched the iced water from the basin.

  Fionn Areth looked on in dull misery. Contrary creature that he was, his brooding would be sourced in a sudden resurgence of guilt.

  The Mad Prophet saw, and gentled his attacking frustration. All hope isn't lost. Do you set faith in prayer? Then beg whatever powers will answer that the resonant cry you sensed from Ithamon will call in the attention of the Fellowship. Sethvir, at Althain, will act if he can. He may already have dispatched a Sorcerer. Last I heard, Traithe was camped in the mountains south of Forthmark. The eastern spur of the Kelhorns will resonate to the fifth lane, and despite his crippled strength, he still interprets speech out of stone very clearly.'

  Yet as the Mad Prophet gathered himself and arose, he dared not voice the fullest extent of his fear. Speaking dread thoughts only lent them the more impetus, and allowed them more chance to come true. Yet avoidance could not banish the unpleasant facts: with deadly surety, the distress cry broadcast by the hills of Daon Ramon must raise the Kor
iathain to alert. They would plumb the cause and discover Arithon's current state of helplessness. Other Alliance enemies who employed the mage-gifted against Shadow might sense the disturbance as readily. If they knew the old lore well enough to recognize Ithamon's affirmed linkage to the oathsworn heir of Rathain's royal line, they would muster and converge on the site with self-righteous zeal and armed war hosts.

  Midwinter 5670

  Winged

  On the winter white verge of the wood lying northeast of Karfael, an old hedge woman with bundled owl feathers laced through her hair slips past the royal guard and grasps the bridle of the young prince's palfrey, pronouncing, 'Your Grace, Teir's'Ilessid! In Ath's blessed name, I am come to grant you the gift of a luck charm to ward your royal person from danger . . .'

  High over the snow-covered hills near Ithamon, a golden eagle spirals in upward flight, and when he seems no more than a fleck drifting under the vaulting of cloud, he wings south and westward, his sharp eyes surveying all that moves across the sere Barrens of Daon Ramon . . .

  Farther south, in an upland valley in Vastmark, a Sorcerer pauses in traverse of a shale slope, his head turned in surprise as the raven launches from its accustomed perch on his shoulder: 'You've been summoned, little brother? Then fly with my blessing, and pass on my news to Sethvir . . .'

  Winter 5670

  VI. Clan War Band