Arithon muffled his ears, to no avail. His bard’s gift woke him to empathy. Undone by fresh grief, he battled for callous will to tug free of beseeching fingers. He turned back raw suffering with unblinded eyes, shouldered ahead, and threaded his beleaguered way forward. Yet this time his movement brought no relief. The maze responded by raising another obstruction. The chasm that opened ahead of his feet was no less real for the fact that his vision could not perceive it.
Only the hollow whisper of air gave him warning, its sibilant consciousness picked out by mage-sight. Where the staid tones of earth should have spoken the deeper-toned language of stone, air described the lip of an unseen abyss. Arithon stopped. The jostling press of the maimed barged into him, threatening to stagger him forward. He must not fail to concentrate, even bled as he was by the abrading pull of emotion. Such pity might kill, if he lost firm grasp on the requisite balance to pierce through the veil of the maze.
A triumph of entropy, if he died for a tearful child whose existence was likely a spell-turned trap to snare him through moral integrity. Arithon grappled to silence the cry of his heart, while his nerves became slowly scraped raw. He felt strained and guilt-ridden, as though he ought to be able to disarm the snare that enacted such dreadful suffering. For mercy, he dared not even raise art through song, to ease even one grieving grandmother’s sobs. His swift, testing effort to call down a banishing recoiled in slamming backlash.
Arithon set his teeth, ripped off-balance as pain shot needles of fire down his nerves. He could not dispel such power as this. The mere effort to stay the sad wretches who pressed him wrung his senses to gray and left him dizzied by the searing scourge of a headache. Shoved a stumbling step by a man with a crutch and a woman with two whimpering children, Arithon confronted the horror of a death by cold sorcery that could conceivably extend past the veil. Should he pass Fate’s Wheel still bound by the maze, he might remain trapped as a wraith. Another few moments would see him pulled down unless he tried desperate measures.
‘Might as well choose damnation in style,’ he gasped through a shudder of nausea.
A mage of his stature could not hope to subdue the vast reach of the forces ranged against him. But through errant recklessness, and novel use of an ill-set combination of ciphers, Arithon could loose the powers of chaos to unbind. Once, at Tal Quorin, he had entrained such a spell and unmade a steel quarrel shot by a marksman to kill him. The impact had caused ruin on a scale unimaginable, and damaged the use of his mage-sight.
Wisdom argued against the repeat of that measure. To wreak an unmaking was a violation of Ath’s law, though the bounds of that stricture correctly pertained to the energetic ties that strung matter into formation. Davien’s Maze was no solid form, but an entrained mesh of spells worked through the stone of the cavern. In bold theory, the rune string to wake primal fire might be tempered. If Arithon directed that force to break nothing more than Davien’s lines of intent, only the linked continuity of the spell seals would succumb to annihilation.
Stone and natural flesh would be spared, but the driving ciphers that ranged their substance against him would fly into shreds and unravel.
Logic and theory might not hold true. Arithon had never pitted his mastery against a Fellowship Sorcerer’s grand construct. The audacity of thinking to meddle on that scale set his heartbeat racing with dread. Yet delay was no option. The crowding horde of injured spirits snatched and pushed him, their needy cries growing more desperate. The wrist exposed by his shredded sleeve already bore bleeding scratches. Though armed with Alithiel, Arithon saw peril in drawing the Paravian steel. These folk might have existence outside Davien’s Maze. If some sorry facet drawn from his future created their miserable plight, the cause he defended would not be just. The chance was too real that a wounding in Kewar might cause actual harm somewhere else.
Little use, to jab elbows and fists and push back. The packed mass of supplicants would just tear him down. Alone against many, he would become trampled, or shoved off the brink of the crevice.
Arithon sucked in a swift, harried breath. He must narrow his focus and shut out distraction, subdue the demons of sorrow and fear. Survive, and perhaps, he could make Davien answer for each of the horrors he witnessed. Yet first, he must banish all thought from his mind. The rune sequence he had resolved to engage was ugly and unforgiving. The chain could be dangerously swayed by emotion, lending a disastrous twist to its already pernicious function. He must become the blank page to hold contrary ciphers, lay each delicate stay of protection without slipshod error or omission. One mismatched seal set against a rune catalyst, and the wretched chain of spellcraft he fashioned would sour and turn in his hand.
No time to prepare. He dared not take pause to review his tight bindings, or test them for deadly mistakes. Jostled and pinched by imploring fingers, pursued by the wail of the damned, Arithon braced his beleaguered stance. He gasped out a breathless apology to Elaira, for the chance his attempt might buy failure. Then he enabled the last rune and tripped the release, unleashing a primal unbinding.
A roaring wind assaulted his ears. Sound exploded to pealing thunder. The flesh-and-blood specters surrounding him frayed into nothing, not real, their blemished bodies spun from who knew what arena of unconscious nightmare. Yet the forces his stopgap desperation had loosed did not subside to quiescence. The fires of summary annihilation never paused. Voracious, lent recombinant fuel by wild magic, they raged on and unstrung the structural stone supporting Arithon’s feet. He cried out as he tumbled, ripped to awed incredulity. All that he sensed had been nothing else but another spelled layer of the maze. Davien’s craft had encompassed an artistry that ran outside the pale of natural limitation. Nowhere had Arithon encountered an illusion that could replicate stone firm enough to support moving weight. Spinning in free-fall disorientation, he shrank to imagine the enormity of his challenge, or the wrath of the snake whose tail he had tweaked with such obstinate effrontery.
Yet Kewar’s creator became a moot threat if he fell as the victim of his own countermeasure. Around him, the edifice of Davien’s skilled conjury continued to whirl into discontinuity. The maelstrom battered mind and flesh with a fury that threatened dismemberment. No solidity remained, anywhere, no fixed point upon which to orient. Arithon found himself at a loss. He could have unknowingly opened a pit between dimensional reality. No sense of gravity supported him. The explosion of chaos that savaged his awareness adhered to no pattern or law.
He spun, stormed by kaleidoscopic turmoil. To grapple the incomprehensible mass was to risk being shredded to insanity. Shadow would no longer shape to his bidding. Mage-sight was snagged to distortion. No stay of reason could order the flood of bone-hurting, dissonant sound. Arithon grasped in vain for the discipline to steady his ragged breath. Random forces pinned him under assault. Within seconds the threads of his self-awareness became stretched to the verge of snapping. He battled the morass, sought to find his way back to safe refuge inside of himself. The explosive dissolution frustrated his effort to restore his core of identity. Hurled beyond reason, he lacked proper grounding to reestablish a separate awareness.
Every protection instilled by trained reflex seemed utterly blasted away. He had lost all the requisite ties to sensation that maintained his housing of flesh. A mote in a torrent, he would be swept away, flesh and bone razed to final destruction.
Denied other recourse, whirled past reach of help, Arithon decided to sing.
Music had thrown back incoherence, before. The living force of a masterbard’s art could break fights, even settle the raging insanity of mob violence driven to riot. Arithon fused his art to the scattered threads of his cognizance, found and formed the imperative notes to forge peace. He stretched past his limit, made his Named voice the honed blade of his naked desire. His straits were desperate. The measured progression of tempo became his last hope to restore the reflex that governed his breathing. The melody he built was an ancient Paravian round, severe in simplicity, five spar
e lines composed with a consummate, lyrical purity. Note for note, the innate balance of melody described the antithesis of disorder. Arithon matched breath and heartbeat to music, retuning the shattered seat of his being to the strict dictates of pitch and timing. He persisted, added refinement, until he was the song, and the song became the ruled line affirming existence. Whole in himself, but lost in the infinite, he had nowhere else left to turn. He would inevitably tire. No matter how determined, the singing must falter and diffuse, leaving his imperiled consciousness open to invasion.
Arithon s’Ffalenn rejected defeat. He mustered his resource with adamant patience. Walking the knife edge of grim desperation, he delved into his talent, spinning the web of his dreams into an artistry welded beyond compromise. From self-willed authority, he shaped his insistent command, that his surroundings submit to his cadence. He grappled with voice, shading tone with emotion. He subjugated uncertainty. On the memory of the centaur guardian’s love, he denied fallibility, then uplifted the dragging pull of the dark with the fires of clear inspiration. He tamed light by harmonics, steered dissonance to resonance. Line by line, he imposed his masterful will. Note for note, he bound the unleashed energies of Davien’s Maze to replicate the multiple parts of the round.
The harshness became tempered. The untenable, nerve-rasping wall of raw sound yielded to softening, then gentled. Sweet clarity emerged as pure, rounded tones that converged to the dictates of harmony. Arithon sang louder, notes that soared and dipped like a needle through cloth, quilting the unmoored forces of chaos into the wheeling dynamics of his melody. Stepping through measure for overlaid measure, he augmented the range with his mind. He reforged random motion into burning chords that danced to his bard’s ear for subtlety.
In time, five-part harmony soared and took flight, tight as plaited gold through the misaligned shards of rushing noise and burst rainbows.
Arithon wove the grand cipher of peace. Casting off sound as though song were a lifeline, he extended the dictates of self-imposed discipline to the shapeless morass surrounding him. Riotous color gradually ceased its disjointed gyration. Sound spiked the first suggestion of form, like ring ripples caused by a pebble cast into a tempest. Arithon bound the circle. He sang the center point to secure his anchor. To the burgeoning dance of orchestrated sound, he reforged dimensional geometry. Step by slow step, each stage affirmed by the templates of established harmony, he laid down the cardinal cross to restore the foundational stance of the elements.
Arithon smoothed out the last whine of dissonance. He ordered the final bleeding breach that blurred color out of alignment. As the power of his art built toward a crescendo of scintillant harmony, he stumbled, restored to himself, but undone at last by exhaustion.
He had burned himself dry, given until no reserve remained for recovery. Weak as a babe, he sprawled headlong amid the consummate form of his construct. As song died on his final wisp of spent breath, the pattern held strong, self-sustaining. Above him, within him, as solid structure beneath, the beauty he had spun from raw chaos crested and achieved the rarefied pinnacle of balance.
The thundering force of its presence stopped thought. For one awestruck instant before strength gave out, Arithon laughed, consumed by ecstatic victory.
Then his last spark of consciousness flickered and went dark. Oblivion swallowed the undying perfection he had plucked from the weave of Davien’s perilous artistry.
Spring 5670
Match
Awareness returned, a slow flooding warmth with no harsh edge of stone-enclosed darkness. Yet the habit of caution became ingrained reflex when a man had been hunted too long. Arithon s’Ffalenn opened his eyes to a tapestry hanging. The intricate, stitched floss showed a forest just turned, twigs and branches alive with diminutive sparrows and the dusky brown plumage of thrushes. Candles burned. Their mellow light glazed a knot carpet patterned with stylized beasts sewn in the colors of autumn. Several bronze-studded chests lined the wall past his feet. Wrapped in a state of intoxicating lassitude, Arithon noted he lay on a couch. Piled down pillows supported his head, their loomed softness unreal after unending months of open-air flight and privation. The coverlet over his body was wool, expensively lined with raw silk.
The cosseting folds wrapped his limbs like a dream of long-forgotten comfort. Arithon languished. His drifting thoughts still rang with the echoes of the grand harmony he had laid down to dispel his unbinding conjury. Restfully settled, he had no wish to move. The imperative ache of desire all but broke him, to cling to the beguiling sensations of peace without concern for the danger. The prod of wise caution seemed unwontedly cruel. Too much to expect, that such quiet could last; this was Davien’s Maze. Safer to roust slackened faculties and begin the necessary task of unmasking the thorns behind this cocooning pitfall of luxury.
Someone had apparently taken his clothes. His sword had gone missing with them. Arithon found it an effort to care, far less to muster suitable concern. Exhaustion waylaid him. Heavy eyelids slid closed. If the cozy security he now experienced shaped another of Davien’s traps, then he must regretfully succumb. He lacked the active will to resist the battering demands of more hardship.
Someone’s baritone chuckle answered his thought.
Slapped alert by the sense of an alien presence hanging poised at the edge of awareness, Arithon shot tense. A firm hand restrained his sharp thrust to sit upright.
A male voice of polite, velvet consonants observed, ‘Your royal Grace, you have smashed through every illusion Kewar’s maze has to offer.’
The touch lifted and freed him. The speaker resumed, his tone of asperity shaded toward a derisively faint self-amusement. ‘If you know peace, the reprieve has been earned. My works never foster the illusion of triumph, only the deserving reality.’
Arithon turned his head, awake now, all his languid ease ripped away. With guarded alarm, he surveyed the being who sat, stilled as forest oak, on a felt hassock next to the couch. The face revealed in the fallow flood of the candle showed mild reproof, directed inward as well as toward the wayward royalty installed amid cushions and blankets. Russet hair salted white at the temples lay swept back, tumbling in roguish disorder from the Sorcerer’s broad, wedged forehead. The nose was narrow and straight, flaring into the cleft creases that framed an inquisitive mouth. The chin was clean-shaven, the lean jaw, ascetic. The deep-set, dark eyes regarding him back stayed well veiled in cynical shadow.
‘You are Davien,’ Arithon tested at length.
The Sorcerer raised his brows with corrosive interest. ‘Has my portrait been removed from Althain Tower?’
Arithon met and held that striking, sharp stare. ‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘But when your name was spoken, the reference held you as discorporate.’
The artisan’s hand in Davien’s lap recoiled into a fist. ‘So I was,’ he admitted, his short bark of laughter alive with private amusement. Just as suddenly, he was struck thoughtfully sober. ‘Yet who can set limits on determined creativity? I disliked the state intensely.’
He surged to his feet, his charged carriage spilling a tiger’s fraught energy. The clothing he wore suggested the same, hose and doublet of walnut-dyed wool neatly bordered with ribbons of gold-and-black interlace. His waxed, outdoor boots had linings of sable, turned back in neat cuffs at mid-calf. As though circling wit goaded him to lithe movement, the Sorcerer paced end to end on the carpet.
Arithon looked on with stalking fascination. Here was none of the self-contained power of Asandir; not the wise patience of Traithe, or the vast, ranging mind behind Sethvir’s daft air of distraction. Davien seemed a force of spring-wound energy. His neat, mercuric steps reflected a mind that would question, and question again, discontent with the static answer. Arithon wondered whether the isolate centuries of retreat stemmed from deep-seated bitterness.
At that musing thought, Davien stopped and spun. ‘I bear my colleagues no malice for what happened.’ His lined features alight with innuendo and a paradox whetted
thin as a razor, he shrugged. ‘Quite the contrary, though I maintain that I broke the monarchies for a sound cause. Since time will stand as my final spokesman, I choose to reside here in Kewar.’
Arithon pushed erect and swung naked feet to the floor in piqued effort to break the Sorcerer’s fixation with the bent of his private thoughts. Davien’s inquisitive gaze tracked each move as he stood. No objection arose as he retained the coverlet, its masking warmth mantled over bare shoulders, the heaped folds at the hem draping the scars that disfigured his ankles.
‘I have been watching,’ the Sorcerer observed. ‘You make the mighty of Athera more than a shade nervous. You and I are a bit too much alike to give anyone full peace of mind.’
This time, Arithon himself flashed the smile of provocative insolence. ‘So I was told by Dakar.’ After the shortest, agreeable pause, he added, ‘The comment was meant as an insult.’
‘Is that so?’ Davien snatched one of the pillows aside and sat on the vacated couch. He did not laugh this time as his hands came to rest, the long fingers adorned with a cast-silver ring nested into his lap. ‘Insults show truth, more often than not.’
‘And flattery covers the deficit?’ Arithon did not disparage by qualifying his question, but waited, arms folded, the coverlet spilled to the floor in the unwitting majesty of a high king robed in state, arisen to administer crown justice. Davien’s quick intelligence could be trusted to know he referred to the maze, and the delicate issue of whether his late experience had been a cleverly wrought fabrication.
Davien’s stillness turned suddenly profound. ‘Did you look at your hand?’
‘Healed,’ Arithon allowed. He had already tested the scar. No marring damage stiffened the tendons; his skill on the lyranthe would stay unimpaired. Yet whether the Sorcerer had noticed how narrowly close that discovery had brought him to weeping, no sign showed. ‘The centaur’s touch perhaps wrought a miracle?’