TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  Throughout the winter, while gales spun snow like smoke off the bleak upper scarps of the mountains, Elaira had seized on the rare opportunity to heighten her craft. Now ripped by a shiver of gut-deep unease, she wondered whether the lure of such learning had caused her to shelter too long.

  'The passes through Eastwall are icebound anyway,' the lay brother pointed out in response to her gnawing uncertainty. Settled as pooled rain in his slate-colored robes, he resumed his interrupted task at the trestle, weighing packets of herbs on a balance scale of antique, verdigris bronze. 'No one can pass westward by land until spring.'

  If his words implied other means of travel existed, Elaira's agitation foreclosed her usual curiosity. Chilled through her fleeced-leather leggings and wool smock, she huddled in full sunlight, sipping watered honey and herbs in fraught silence and strained apprehension.

  At length, the promised adept ascended the tower stair in spry steps. He burst into the stillroom, a willowy old man clad in flowing white wool who shed radiance like autumn sunlight. The silver and gold ciphers stitched on his hood scattered the chamber with small rainbows and ambient reflections. 'Your prince is unharmed,' he assured without query, his olive-skinned features crinkled with laugh lines. 'Nor is he endangered, at present.' Aware his raised hand could not stem the tortured rush of Elaira's questions, he smiled. 'Come along. You can see for yourself. One waits for you beside the sacred spring. As you wish, you might ask him for help.'

  Elaira abandoned her perch on the window seat and replaced her emptied flagon on the trestle. 'Another adept? But I thought your Brotherhood didn't use power to act.' If her question was impertinent, she hoped the old man would forgive. Words could not express how profoundly distressing she found the prospect of a return visit to the spring.

  'Your visitor is not one of us,' the elder chastised as he held open the door. He watched closely, assured as her color returned in the icy draft of the stairwell. Though no crisis could warrant a white brother's intervention, he kept stride alongside Elaira, guarding her fragile state of balance throughout the winding descent.

  'Well, what might befall the Prince of Rathain while I visit the spring in your grove? How do I know I won't fall unconscious like I did the first time?' Breathing the thin, icy air in swift gulps, Elaira balked on the lower landing. 'I awoke three days later, and still can't recall where I went.'

  The adept paused also, a scintillant presence who chased the deep gloom from the base of the stairwell. Patience stilled his gnarled hand on the latch that fastened the outer doorway. 'Brave lady, you must walk alone in this matter. Our creed will permit nothing else. The spirit your need has drawn to our hostel has been known in the past as a meddler. Yet he in his wisdom would be first to agree: only you can decide whether to go, or to stay. Free choice remains yours. You can embrace or refuse congress with those forces called into the fate you create by your actions. This arrival is yours, though its cause and effect may lie outside the scope of your present understanding.'

  Elaira swallowed. The awareness bore down, that time taken to ponder the adept's abstruse counsel might deliver an unforseen cost in grave consequences. 'Lead on, brother.' Of all things she feared, the unforseen at least held the potential to defer the paralyzing despair of rank helplessness. 'I may as well take the easy plunge into hot water. Whatever I've called here, I'll find strength from somewhere to face it.'

  The adept nodded, tripped the latch, and ushered her into the sun-washed glare of the courtyard. 'You have a true heart. The power drawn in by the cry of your need would be most unwise not to grant you every due measure of respect.'

  * * *

  Arrived at the end of the marble loggia, the adept stopped and bowed. 'Lady, at this point I must leave you. Proceed on your own as you choose.'

  The black-stone pillars loomed just ahead, darker than midwinter night. The uncanny patterns incised on their surface flared and glittered, randomly bright as the rainbowed glints chipped off of sun-caught diamond. Elaira surveyed the threshold between. From two steps away, the archway led into what seemed an innocuous cupola, apparently lit by unseen skylights cut through the dome overhead. The high polish of the tessellated marble floor appeared impeccably solid. Yet Elaira had learned to grant no credence to the untrustworthy illusion of eyesight. To advance was to cross an invisible boundary and forfeit all earthly experience.

  Suddenly unsure, she drew breath to ask questions. But the adept had gone, unseen and unheard, leaving a silence as sealed as a tomb. Turn back, and he might reappear to escort her. Ahead resided the heartcore of a mystery beyond mortal understanding. Threatened by sudden, rushing vertigo, Elaira reached out to brace herself; a mistake. The carved patterns altered the very nature of substance. Her touch met a riling, sharp tingle of energy, as though her hand had dissolved into stone to the wrist.

  Her startled outcry cast back no echoes, an eerie anomaly in this place of groined ceilings and high-gloss marble floors.

  No choice, but to go forward alone. Heart pounding, Elaira regrouped her frayed nerves. She closed her fingers around the three coins worn for luck since her childhood days as a street thief.

  'By Ath, prince,' she muttered. 'Whatever scrape you've fallen into, you'd better pull yourself clear before we all find ourselves entrapped into debt by my order, or worse: waken some dire power better left undisturbed like the sleeping dog out of proverb.'

  She stepped forward, resolute. Just as before, her senses betrayed her. The transition that dissociated both space and time closed down without seam or bias. She emerged through the arched portal into the sweet mildness of a midsummer night. A forest glade surrounded her, moon-washed grass dipped pearlescent with dew. The shadows cast by the soaring crowns of the trees lay as deep as razor-cut velvet. A fountain burbled over white stones, juddered with star-caught reflections.

  Against the silvery fall of clear water, a man's figure stood out like a displaced fragment of autumn.

  Expecting her, he arose. The burnt orange and sienna cloth of his doublet rustled, a flame backdrop for his fox brush hair, streaked at both temples with white. He was clean-shaven. Neat in movement, fastidious in each detail of dress and grooming, he had peat-dark eyes, and a presence of ruthless, clear focus as he greeted, 'Elaira anient?'

  Jarred as much by his soft, smoky baritone as by the queer, Paravian phrasing, Elaira responded with a startled question. 'Why call me "the one"?'

  'For truth.' He gathered her hand in long fingers, his touch warmly confident. She noticed a ring inset with citrine, and a trifold insignia of crescents that flared to a mercuric flash of caught moonlight. Up close, his angular features showed dichotomy: the enigma of a secretive presence, touched by a smile that was electric, and brimming with inquisitive curiosity.

  'Sorcerer,' she whispered, her perception alive to the leashed power in him, an unstated air of subtle command shared by none but the Fellowship. Revelation burst through, couched in shock like a dousing of ice. 'Ath above!' Elaira gasped. 'You could be no less than—'

  'No!' His interruption came sharp. 'Have a care. In all caution, let's leave that identity unspoken.'

  He released his grasp, not before she had encompassed the impression of flawless flesh and bone vibrancy. 'You are quite the master of convincing illusion.'

  'Am I?' Fleeting bitterness sliced through, self-defined as his stance in cool grass. While he sat at his ease once again on the piled white stone rimming the lip of the spring, his eagle's gaze tracked her, unswerving.

  'Only a fool would respond to that sort of baiting question.' Pragmatic under the bearing assault of the Sorcerer's observation, Elaira advanced. 'Everyone said you were rendered discorporate.'

  'Truth,' her controversial visitor allowed. He laced his long fingers over his knee, his posture nonchalant, and his honesty a dagger of sly insolence.

  His bottomless depths and his well-masked emotion stayed opaque to her highly skilled training. Elaira dipped her hands into the chill fall of the water. She manag
ed to ignore his probing regard long enough to splash her hot face. The dousing eased back some of the hollow uncertainty wrung through her displaced equilibrium. She straightened, blotted damp hands on a skirt that breathed an herbalist's blend of dried lavender and birch root into the breezeless quiet. 'Why have you come here?'

  He raised both eyebrows, not surprised, but for emphasis as his raking gaze held her. 'Your directness blisters. Are you always abrupt as Dharkaron's cast spear?'

  She regarded him back, unmoved by provocative rhetoric.

  His quick laughter burst through then, spontaneous and sultry as heat lightning. 'Your order might think you a troublesome burr, but I take delight in your company. You asked for guidance, remember?'

  Smiling, he waited for her stiff acknowledgment, as she recalled the mental sigil she had sketched in wild panic when the flooding darkness had overwhelmed her awareness.

  'Therefore, I came with an invitation. Like the fresh breeze, you might accompany me on a flight of reconnaissance.' He extended a lean-fingered, beautiful hand, his palm at ease and turned upward. 'Would you care to pay a visit to Daon Ramon Barrens?'

  Elaira fought past the tight fear in her chest, and finally managed strained speech. 'You know what happened to Prince Arithon.'

  The visitor's moment of levity faded, not into the withdrawn graveness of Traithe. This Sorcerer towered with an incisive confidence that a lesser presence might misinterpret as braggadocio, or worse, an affronted, bristling challenge. 'Nothing occurs on Daon Ramon Barrens that the stones of the earth don't bear witness. Their secrets are plain, to those willing to listen.' He stood once again, his hand still extended. 'Yes, I know of Prince Arithon. His fate is unfolding. Come along. If you care, you can observe and perhaps even share in the outcome.'

  'If you promise I'm not making a mistake,' Elaira said, her words a wry prayer as she clasped her chilled fingers over his in tacit acceptance.

  'Oh, life itself's a mistake.' murmured the Sorcerer whose past acts had earned him the title of Betrayer.

  He returned a warm squeeze, his pleasure a gift that touched the heart for its mischievous spontaneity. Then the moment ended, too brief. The masked flux of power within him unfurled, demarked as a terrifying ring of forged purpose that commanded a rippleless silence. Centered in a storm without tumult or movement, form and flesh whirled away. His shape as a man re-formed on a breath into feathers and wings, edged in a haze of gold light.

  Elaira felt her awareness netted up and enfolded. Gathered into a hold as implacable as steel gloved in trappings of velvet, the seat of her consciousness became snatched from her body. Pale moonlight dissolved. The random melodies of the springwater receded as she arose into air, at one with the eagle whose powerful downstroke lifted, then hurled her up and out of the glade, and into the icy winds of high altitude . . .

  Under the pallid, cerulean sky, the hills of Daon Ramon wore snow rime like snagged silk around weathered rims of bared rock. Experienced trackers avoided the crests, where no cover grew to mask movement. Such country became a commander's nightmare. Knives of fragmented flint studded the frost-burned mosses and nestled amid the wind-raked tangles of gorse. The low country between ridges cupped a warren of deer paths, unreeled like string through the peat bogs and hummocks, with their winter-dried tassels of grasses. Stands of dense brush welcomed no man's passage. Witch hazel and brambles choked the throats of the gullies, an intertwined mat loomed by years of wild growth that hid fox earths and badger setts. The veteran headhunters who led Lysaer's strike force were wily enough to shy clear. Past forays through the barrens had taught them the untrustworthy ground was snaked through by streamlets gushing into the Aiyenne's looped coils. A horse could break legs, and a man, twist his ankles, where the fast, hidden currents ran armored with thaw-rotten ice.

  That left the pitched ground of the slopes, flayed bare by the winds, or else piled with the leavings of storms, drifted snow the day's sun softened to silver-point lace, refrozen by night to filed iron. Rugged as their mapless territory, the clan war band wore leggings of boiled elkhide and rode range-toughened ponies with thick skin and well-feathered fetlocks.

  Townborn pursuers who lacked the advantage of stout leathers drew steel and hacked through obstructions. Their zeal stayed unblunted. Whipped on like hounds on the scent of close quarry, they wrapped the scraped legs of their horses in flannel. At night, resigned, they plied needle and thread, for the obstinate brush tore the stoutest loomed canvas to tatters.

  None petitioned to turn back. They ate hardtack, shot deer and hare as they could, and cheerlessly cursed the land under them. Amid their dour ranks, all memory of the golden, wind-rippled grasslands had faded away into legend. Only stone, sleeping under the raced gusts of wind, retained the imprinted glory of past Ages. Apparitions and ghosts were all that remained of the Paravians who had once danced to raise the mysteries to grand harmony. Long gone were the days when their rituals called down the lightning-struck fires that cleared the hills of rank growth and renewed the exhausted soil.

  Chafed more than he liked to admit by that lingering presence of history, Sulfin Evend completed his morning review of the company under his command. He found the men fighting fit. Despite the arduous weeks of chapping cold, buffeting gales, and a desolation fit to break sanity, they kept their faith. Triumph lay within reach. Dismounted at noon to water and grain horses, they picked clinging burdock from their kit. Others, just returned from the rigors of scout duty, wistfully discussed sharing beer in the celebrated taverns of Etarra.

  Under Lysaer s'Ilessid, their force rode in readiness. No matter the past scores of death and disaster, this specialized strike force was made the forged weapon to hunt down the Spinner of Darkness. Rathain's last prince was their charge to reap; s'Ffalenn lineage would die, unmourned as the haunts of the ancestors who lurked like caught cobweb amid Ithamon's razed stone and smashed bastions. Each man had trained in rigorous preparation for the field that would bring the just fruits of their victory.

  Sulfin Evend enjoyed no such cocky surety from the post of commanding authority. He had remained at the Divine Prince's right hand, his night sleepless. Long after sunrise, when Jeriayish's mad face still ran with tears of rapt bliss, Prince Lysaer had ordered the raving priest bound and silenced. Sulfin Evend attended the distasteful task himself. The issue raised by the uncanny defection was far too sensitive to entrust to even his most stolid officer. Unsettling enough, that the priest stayed unfazed through the course of uncivil handling. Rumpled and subdued in his soiled white robes, he crooned into his gag, trembling in witless, transported ecstasy as Lysaer's strapping squire bundled him onto the back of a docile horse.

  Sulfin Evend clenched his jaw and smothered irritation. Bred to Hanshire's tradition of liaison with Koriathain, he knew of no arcane binding that should leave the priest shaken so thoroughly out of his senses. Whatever queer force his blood scrying had encountered, one instant's contact had destroyed his right mind,

  A Fellowship Sorcerer might wield such power. Under the pallid sky of Daon Ramon, Sulfin Evend slammed his fist into the palm of his left-hand gauntlet. He barked orders to ease and water the horses, then mounted himself, prepared to ride out and collect his reports from the front line of headhunter trackers. Taciturn face turned into the east wind, he strangled his doubts. Whether or not his proud company held the mettle to destroy the demon Prince of Rathain, faith had blinded them, utterly. They had gone too far to turn back.

  The barren land guarded its secrets too well. He saw no trace of enemy movement. Chilled by more than cold, feeling exposed despite his battle-honed weapons and chain mail, the Alliance Lord Commander swept the mottled folds of the hills. Emptiness met him. The morning advanced, with the wind-scoured flanks of the ridges persistently vacant. The front-rank scouts had encountered the hoof marks of unshod ponies, but the troop's sharpest trackers could not reach an agreement. One insisted a scant few clan horsemen had recrossed their own tracks. The other argued a larger for
ce had split into flight in small groups.

  The mishmash of prints on the streambanks revealed no clear line of pursuit.

  Amid frayed uncertainty, the chief headhunter from Narms met setbacks with squint-eyed suspicion. 'Red-beard's no fool. He won't make mistakes.' Deshir's war band knew the lay of this country too well, old knowledge refreshed through the years of Etarra's purging campaigns. Dour as the briar-scarred gelding he sat on, the bountyman spat in contempt. 'You want the harsh truth, friend?'

  His measuring glance matched the Lord Commander's taut quiet with worldly understanding. 'I worry we haven't seen any traps. That's unlike any clanblood bastard I've scalped, not to leave nasty pitfalls or garroting snares, or slip nooses that trip a man's horse by the fetlocks.'

  'We've kept the slinking vermin too pressed,' Sulfin Evend dismissed, though the prick of his instincts belied such a pat explanation.

  'Better hope so.' The headhunter scratched at his greasy black hair, then dug in a spurred heel to forestall his horse, which bared yellow teeth at the Lord Commander's wiry gelding. 'Me, I'd be worrying what other mischief Red-beard's plaguing fiends've brewed up.' That said, he reined his irritable mount volte-face to resume his delayed patrol. 'Sure as fish swim, I'd say that gibbering priest didn't cast off his faith for anyone's natural causes.'

  Double the scouts who ride in the skirmish line,' Sulfin Evend cracked back, too trail-wise to stew over morbid fears and formless, circling supposition.

  Done, then.' The veteran headhunter took his leave, too pragmatic to say if the change had settled his own store of reser-vations.

  Through the interval while the main company with Prince Lysaer ate trail rations on the sheltered side of the crest, Sulfin Evend lingered on the hilltop. A searching, sharp sweep from that desolate vantage did not shake his recurrent suspicion that he did not ride alone.