TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  'For you, I refuse nothing.' Hands crossed in formality at his heart, Arithon knelt, sovereign prince to sworn liegeman. 'Take my royal oath, I'll swear lifelong friendship with Jeynsa. Accept with the understanding my mage talent is silenced. Unless that fact changes, there can be no certainty the blood tie will be joined the same way.'

  'No matter.' Throat locked by a sudden, fierce rush of emotion, Jieret coughed. 'From you, my brother, one word is enough to assure your honest intent.' He rested content, the paralyzing weight of his apprehension lifted from his broad shoulders. 'Do what you will. I am ready.'

  That affirmation of absolute trust made the next step most difficult to complete. Arithon broke away, green eyes too bright. He steeled his unsteady nerves. Veiled light from the embers imprinted his slight frame, swathed in crude hide and patched furs, the uninjured fingers pressed to his face, fine boned as a master's engraving. For a struck moment, he could find no words, until the wealth of his bard's gift ceded him lines from an ancient epic. 'By the grace of such subjects, great kingdoms exist.'

  Then stillness became an insupportable trial; further thought weighed too grievous to bear. Resolved to grim purpose, the Master of Shadow bent to his herb stores and tipped crushed leaves of cedar on the coals. While the fragrant, white smoke coiled upward and billowed, he snatched up the birch twig and traced a ceremonial circle within the enclosed stone of the grotto. He joined the scribed line, with Jieret and himself set inside. Eyes shut, he whispered a Paravian invocation. He blew a breath to the east, stepped a quarter turn in place, then lit the candle stub to the south and set it upon the perimeter. Faced due west, he traced a rune symbol in water; northward, the same, but with earth.

  Nor was his face peaceful, or his speech unstrained as he enacted the ritual that called elemental forces to stand guard. Where once, he would have seen the fine blaze of light that affirmed each stage of his conjury, now, he performed by blind rote. The absence of response, the blank vacancy of senses that once had exulted in the layered intricacy of Ath's creation remade each dance step of form into punishment. The tears spilled and ran; the matchless voice faltered, seared by a fire of remorse only three living spirits understood.

  Asandir had first measured the scope of the loss, six years after Tal Quorin. Dakar, as well, had shouldered the unendurable whole, on the night of grand scrying that had shaped the tactics whose failure had seen thirty thousand dead at Dier Kenton Vale. None else but Elaira, who knew Arithon's true heart, could have foretold the bleak anguish brought on by tonight's reenactment.

  Earl Jieret, as forced witness, shared the shocked revelation: the true price meted out for the clan lives spared from the sword in Strakewood Forest. Like the scant few before him, he watched Arithon lay flat his defenses. The focused purity of intent softened the severe s'Ffalenn features, left them exposed to a child's stripped wonder of expectation. Then the moment of crux, when a lifetime's honed talent launched in flight, and failed to cross through the veil. Base matter stayed obdurate. Sealed vision froze all the world's dazzling majesty to the drab planes and angles within range of self-limited eyesight.

  Nor could the lamed spirit vised in the breach shield his bared will from the harrowing. Arithon's vulnerable longing transformed, remade on a breath into ripping loss outside grief or tears to describe; as though light itself lost its luster to limitless darkness, or a dreamed, perfect pearl dimmed to crude gravel at the mere brush of a hand.

  Arithon drew in a tormented breath. His face, his whole posture seemed wracked out of true, as though the living heart had torn out of him, and Ath's gift of life made his body a prison pinched out of songless clay.

  That moment, Jieret would have begged sky and earth to be anyplace else on Athera. He had seen scouts die of lacerating wounds, but not suffer such agony as this. The bitter understanding sucked him hollow with dread, that no mortal who touched the core of grand mystery could emerge from the crucible unchanged. Any subsequent break in connection left a scar which cut deeper than transient hurt to the flesh. Hard on the heels of unwanted recognition, he knew drowning fear, that he had agreed to embark on that journey without any grasp of the consequences. He had never glimpsed the irreversible sorrows, if tonight's course of expedience succeeded, and he survived the first trial of initiation and cast his conscious awareness into the unseen realms past the veil.

  Too soon, Arithon s'Ffalenn knelt before him, his regard a set mix of flint determination and empathy, and a lit spill in his trembling hand.

  Just as racked by regret, Jieret accepted the offering. He raised the stone pipe, packed with the tobacco that had been soaked in an infusion of crushed tienelle leaves. 'Whatever may come, keep your safe distance from the fumes as you promised!'

  Stripped to sincerity, Arithon said, 'On that point, I won't bend.'

  Amid myriad risks, untrained use of tienelle might prove the most unforgiving. Though spiked tobacco was too mild to be lethal, Jieret received warning: the herb's myriad poisons would induce a withdrawal of sickness and cramping. The bystander who breathed tainted smoke could succumb. Arithon could not transmute the effects, reft as he was from his mage talent. The bard's art he offered to guide Jieret's progress relied on his voice, and even slight nausea would stress the control he required to sustain an exacting, true pitch. Beyond physical ills, the herb's visionary properties would unshutter the gates of the mind. Every damaging event held in memory would break free, an unbridled reliving too virulent for conscious awareness to grapple. Under such influence, the Mistwraith's geas might emerge in full force and smash the ties binding sanity.

  Lysaer s'Ilessid and the Alliance were too close at hand. Any such misstep would invite a swift fall to disaster.

  'Don't dwell on distractions,' Arithon cautioned. 'They'll only unbalance you. As you ease into trance, you don't want to fall into the reflected morass of your fears.' He retreated to the side of the circle by the cleft, where the influx of fresh air would sweep off the narcotic.

  Jieret settled against the support of the boulder. Flame fluttered as he lit the pipe. A curl of blue smoke stung his nostrils. Even weakened, the tienelle bit swiftly. An answering frisson shot a flash-fire reaction the length of his overstrung nerves. He whispered a final plea to Ath's grace, that his lineage should stay safe. Then he set the stem to his lips and drew in a lungful of smoke.

  The scent overwhelmed him, acrid and keen as the cutting winds of high altitude. His thoughts jerked, and then eddied, tugged as the first, wild rush of expansion combed through the lens of his senses. His hearing exploded. The smallest sounds magnified into a whirling barrage of raw noise. Jieret gasped, flicked to vertigo, as his skin went on fire. He felt every current of breeze stroke his flesh, while the plain weight of clothing bore him down like prolonged suffocation.

  'Steady, hold steady,' Arithon encouraged, his voice a cool current of calm through a lit conflagration of air.

  Jieret forced a grip on slipped courage, sucked down another breath. The smoke ripped, as it passed. His throat and his windpipe felt lye-stripped. His eyesight dissolved into rainbow sparks, while the merest sigh of the draft pummeled his eardrums like thunder.

  'Arithon, I feel lost.' This experience held none of the spiraling, smooth uplift he recalled from his journey with Traithe.

  The reply came back mangled as hearing imploded. Jieret gasped, the frayed cloth of his mind sucked down and tumbled by the raced flow of blood in his veins. The sensation of the bare stone at his back raised a sleeting, bright tingle, distinct as a silver-tipped hail of needles. His awareness floundered, broken winged as a bird encased in a skull of cast lead.

  'Arithon, blessed Ath, I'm going to go mad.' Jieret cringed as his note of raised terror stormed back, an onslaught of echoes that hurled him into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of chaos.

  The bard's voice returned reassurance. 'Take in more smoke. One more breath, maybe two, and your physical senses will stop overloading and shut down.'

  Before panic set in, that such
loss would unmoor him, Arithon gently clarified. 'You'll still feel, still hear. But instead of responding to substance through flesh, the inner eye of the mind will begin to perceive through the range of higher vibration. The true sight of mages, Jieret, will be found as a tapestry wrought of the colors that lie beyond visible light. Don't sink into fright. Relax, let the tienelle raise you.'

  The stone pipe weighed like poured lead in the grip of stump fingers. Silver smoke swirled a ghost serpent's dance on the drafts. Beyond that fascination, the deep waters beckoned, twined with the whispers of family and friends gone beyond Daelion's Wheel.

  'My sister,' Jieret whispered, drawn into the cold by the shimmering image of a girl child's fire-seared hand. 'Edal?'

  A note sang out of nowhere and speared him. Sound shattered the dangerous allure of the shadows and razed the dead spirits from the smoke. Snapped back to himself, Earl Jieret found the stone pipe still lit in the welded grip of his fingers. He forced the hot stem between his numbed lips. Weeping for grief and the rags of old anger, he inhaled another draft.

  Pain followed breath and set hooks in his heart. He felt upended, then dangled, hung like a gutted carcass of game on the prongs of a headhunter's hatred. The air wore a luminous mist of red blood, alive with the faces of enemies. Seized by a lust to rend and kill, Jieret shouted. The need for a sword in his hand cut like pain, an exquisite, fine agony that promised him ecstasy, once he gutted the brute Etarrans who had slaughtered his family in their march up the banks of Tal Quorin.

  'Jieret!' Arithon raised true song. His clean line of melody tore through blind rage like a clarion cry in white light. Into that breach, a stream of fast words quenched ugly memories to quiescence. 'Beware. Before you discern mage-sight, you will perceive thoughts as form. Your own mind can spin traps and pitfalls. Don't bow to illusion. Stay calm. Touch the earth. Stone itself will help ground and center you.'

  Jieret forced in a whistling, taxed breath. He was running vile sweat. The tienelle fumes made objects seem to startle and flash, as though form was remade into shapes of self-contained movement. His head felt cracked open. His addled perception leaped and recoiled like whiplash, too volatile for plodding reason.

  'Steady,' urged Arithon. His calm soothed and anchored. 'The key is to stop thinking, stop remembering. Your personal beliefs will just serve to bend and distort the fine energies. Just be. True sight cannot be imposed from within. You must allow. Invite higher order to manifest what is.'

  'Merciful Ath, I'm not made for this,' Jieret ground out in tight protest. One glimpse at his hands showed his scars as fresh wounds, welling bright scarlet by firelight. The blood there was other men's, shed with his own. He had no means to tell if the Sight was past reliving, or prescience.

  'Your stroke must kill cleanly,' exhorted Caolle. His irascible shout seemed much too alive to arise out of fragmented memory. 'Miss your mark through an opening, your enemy will rally. Best way I know to wind up stone dead before you can sire a child to continue the name of s'Valerient.'

  'You are more than your past, brother, more cherished than your bloodline,' Arithon broke in, insistent. 'Love and worth are not measured by adherence to duty, but for a friend's generosity of spirit.' When his razor-clear note of gentleness failed to settle, he insisted, 'Here. Let me show you.'

  But Jieret heard nothing, drowned as he was in the hardships imposed by his ancestry. Jeynsa's face filled his sight. Her hands clasped his shoulders, pleading. 'Father, just come back.'

  Jieret opened his lips to ease her distress, then screamed as a shock like cold steel lanced his flesh. His vision exploded through showers of light, then sucked through a riptide of darkness.

  Late Winter 5670

  Loss

  The wind hissed over the iced vales of Daon Ramon. Its snarling passage through low brush and briar beat a whipcrack refrain, thrumming the tent's guy ropes and slapping the loose ends against the taut drum of pitched canvas. The drafts found their way through the weave of wool blankets. On winter campaign, the cold nights became a marathon of bitter endurance. For the men in Lysaer s'Ilessid's company, encamped on the wild vales between the old Paravian way and the serpentine loops of the River Aiyenne, the grinding misery of discomfort was not the least problem. Here, the fourth lane flowed over the land, swelling to meet the ancient nexus at Caith-al-Caen, where age upon age of Paravian dancers once summoned Athera's living consciousness into a quickened presence. The currents of the mysteries still ran near to the surface.

  The timed powers aligned in each pebble and stone tumbled in spate with the sun tides. Midnight, dawn, sunset, and noon, the flux could break with stunning force into the unwary mind, seeding burning, bright dreams, or awakening visions like tapestry woven from light. Where a mage-sighted talent, or persons of clanborn descent, might discern the searing beauty of the spirit forms bled through from the past, those ordinary others confined to five senses suffered sharp nerves and jumpy behavior. Seasoned veterans startled at shadows, chafed raw by the constant reminder that unseen powers stalked every move attempted by breathing, warm flesh.

  At dark phase and full moon, a man could go mad, simply trying to sleep.

  Sulfin Evend posted guard over the Divine Prince himself on such nights, unwilling to trust the wits of the sentries allotted that duty by roster. Always, he stood his turn of watch unpartnered. Though allotted a bear rug under sheltering canvas, he preferred not to rest, but perched on the box that contained the sunwheel seal and the chart cases, a sword's length from his sovereign's bedroll. His presence was that of a hooded falcon: too stilled to seem dangerous, and cloaked in a stalker's unobtrusive quiet that melted back into the shadows.

  Royal birth had long since accustomed Prince Lysaer to having his privacy shared by crown servants, loyal men chosen for deferent silence and sophisticate, steel-clad discretion. Yet since the hour he had stood against Shadow at Tal Quorin, he insisted on sleeping alone. That night of full moon, under gauze snowfall and torn clouds, he sat wakeful, as loath to retire as his vigilant Lord Commander.

  He occupied the tent's only camp stool, a chart of Rathain unfurled over his knees. His head was propped on an informal hand, long fingers with their splintering flare of gemmed rings shoved through his corn-silk hair. He was not drowsing. Sulfin Evend had enough past experience with Koriathain to discern the subtle difference. Despite the wayward, fierce currents of lane force that surged across Daon Ramon, the Blessed Prince had slipped into a light trance. Persisting through several disrupted attempts, he had managed to establish communion with his High Priest at Avenor.

  The candle lamp, burning, cast an aureole over his elegant shoulders. If the surcoat he wore was no longer stainless white after long weeks in the wilds, costly elegance lingered, a marble tableau picked out by the shine of gilt braid where the flame light wakened reflections. As Sulfin Evend watched, those golden sparks flickered, then shuddered to jarring motion.

  Lysaer shot straight, his indrawn breath sounding coarse as a tear in cloth.

  Sulfin Evend twitched not an eyelash. With every nerve in him already primed for instantaneous action, his speech kept its laconic character. 'Bad news?'

  The Exalted Prince released knotted fists. He masked his face behind his spread hands, elbows braced on the chart, which buckled under his careless pressure. Unsteady enough to display his fine trembling in the shimmering flare of his diamonds, he announced, 'My son is dead.'

  A pause. Sulfin Evend waited. His war-trained tension uncoiled, since no overt peril threatened life and limb within the pitched tent in Daon Ramon.

  A drawn moment later, Lysaer looked up. 'Kevor.' No tremble of inflection; his voice still struck blank from shock, he elucidated, 'Burned to a cinder with the field troop, apparently dispatched to hunt down Khadrim.' The eyes on his Lord Commander were an open, dilated black, rimmed in gemstone azure. Yet their depths reflected a wound so deep, thought could scarcely encompass the recoiling agony. Lysaer fought for recovery, as awareness mapped the impri
nt of a loss beyond any rational acceptance.

  Staring, locked, at that intimate profile of raw grief, Sulfin Evend felt himself speared by transfixing chills. As long as he had served as the Alliance Lord Commander, he had never once glimpsed the depth of his prince's humanity.

  'Kevor's gone!' Lysaer gasped. Disbelief strained his words to a whisper. 'My son, taken before he could achieve his manhood. He'll never find the mature stature, now, to heal the blight that Shadow and Darkness laid like a curse on his birthright.'

  Sulfin Evend possessed the quick mind of a strategist, no boon in the crux of this moment as he found himself made the voice for Lysaer's tormented conscience. 'You could never permit that boy to know how much you cared for him.' The bitterest price, paid by s'Ilessid for the toil of a thankless, divine service. 'As the Light's given arm to defend the innocent, you dare not love.'

  Though the cold ran through flesh and branded, bone deep, Lysaer admitted in searing simplicity, 'What can be done? That is my fate.' Behind the fire and passion, a hopeless measure of pain underpinned the framework of autocratic sovereignty. Few men had ever seen past the mask. That privileged handful had all been struck down, Sulfin Evend realized, touched into ripping epiphany. They had died in the wars fought by warped sorceries, at the hand of the Spinner of Darkness.

  The s'Ilessid prince regarded his helpless, clamped fingers, now cradled upon the inked vista of Daon Ramon Barrens. As though the creased landscape stood surrogate for the violence wreaked on his spirit, he added in beaten sorrow, 'Any tie of the heart, no matter how guarded, might fall into binding use by the enemy.'

  The moment of bludgeoned vulnerability was ill omened, for the hour when Alliance field troops closed the cordon to take down the Master of Shadow. Nor was interruption any more welcome, as coarse canvas scraped warning, and the door flap slapped open. A blast of chill air billowed into the tent, snapping the ties on the pennons. In strode the stick-thin, obsequious seer Sulfin Evend regarded with instinctive, bristling distaste.