TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  Cerebeld cupped each separately summoned awareness within the stilled vault of his mind. Then he opened the channel that rode with him, always, through unstinting dedication to the Light.

  The fervent call of Avenor's High Priest rode the failing, last shadow of night. His appeal bridged the black waters of Instrell Bay, and, searching beyond, touched the aura of Lysaer s'Ilessid.

  Cerebeld immersed in the bliss of divine presence, no longer aware of the body before his draped altar in Avenor. The yawning abyss of human need, all his limiting fears of mortality fell away as he slaked his insatiable thirst for the sacred and became recharged with uplifted purpose. The Divine Prince was spark to his unfired clay. Through self-surrender, his yearning spirit escaped the torpid separation of the flesh. All dread of the Dark, and all terror of sorcery receded; lips parted with unconscious ecstasy, Cerebeld tapped into the radiant source of his avatar's strength. Abandoned to a fervor that bordered obsession, he basked in the diamond-pure stream of Lysaer s'Ilessid's just presence.

  His tranced mind experienced the same agitation as his Exalted Self paced the plush carpets in the Mayor of Narms's private guest suite. Quivering now, enthralled in joined vision, the High Priest sent dutiful greeting. 'Exalted Prince? The hour is come to place the arrow of your will into the hands of your servants.'

  The reply returned by Lysaer through the link resounded with pleased satisfaction. 'My command calls for war. The minion of Shadow has dared to turn west through the Skyshiels.'

  Dropped prostrate before his altar, Cerebeld savored the intimate surge of impressions, then responded. 'Your priests stand ready at Etarra and Morvain. The one bound for Jaelot is stranded in Darkling. He is prepared to act for you there. Shine the Light of your presence through me as your conduit.'

  From the distant, closed privacy of the guest suite at Narms, the Exalted Prince raised his hand. Cerebeld trembled. Expectancy exploded to peak exultation as Lysaer s'Ilessid called down power and engaged his divine gift of light.

  Seared through the eye of his inner mind, Cerebeld rocked to the surge of blind bliss. Primal pleasure burst the fragile template of identity, until Lysaer's voice rang through every chamber of his opened mind. 'Let the forces allied against Shadow arise and muster to arms! The minion of Darkness has returned to Rathain. He travels over the Baiyen from Jaelot, no doubt to lair up where the sorcerous powers still bind the old keeps at Ithamon. For the weal of the land, our duty is clear. We must launch a forced march across Daon Ramon and close ranks in strength to stop him.'

  At Avenor, the High Priest let the message channel through him with all of its deluging glory. Unmoored by the blasting passage of pure Light, he was the nexus point, fulfilled by the dictates of Lysaer's urgent purpose. The current coursed through him, aligned to arouse three other human vessels also pledged to eradicate Darkness . . .

  * * *

  In Morvain and Darkling, amid shadowed bedchambers, two priests of the Alliance snapped out of sleep, touched by the dazzling burst of divine vision. The summons resounded with Lysaer's command to rise to arms and converge upon Daon Ramon Barrens. Wakeful, in Etarra, the third priest fell into a spiraling seer's dream, spun on the airy crochet of the smoke that curled off a lit stick of incense. Swept head to foot with delirious joy, he embraced the clarion call of the Light. Through his office, the Exalted Prince's will would be done. Etarra's garrison would march south with all speed to pursue the minion of Darkness . . .

  * * *

  The Light ebbed, then dwindled, then died. Sprawled prone on the pillow before his altar at Avenor, Cerebeld shuddered in release. As always, the limp aftermath caught him defenseless. He bit back a cry, ripped to desolation as his mind was cast into separation.

  By now, he knew there existed no remedy for the dimmed prison of mortal limitation. He could only endure, drawn onward by the obdurate steel of his faith. One ritual to the next, he breathed for the moments when the exalted presence entered and claimed him as instrument.

  At length, he gathered himself and arose. He felt hollow, diminished, a lackluster shell that stepped through the motions of living. Dry duty sustained him. The needs of the faithful required teaching and guidance. Their prayers must be led by rote. Amid the drab, puppet players he ministered, Cerebeld moved like the addict, perpetually craving the next golden dawn, when his being could rise and rejoice once again in communion with divine rapture.

  Winter 5670

  Solstice Moon Fortnight

  In the Kingdom of Rathain, the trade cities of Etarra, Darkling, and Morvain hear Cerebeld's chosen priests speak the word of the Light calling for the Alliance's faithful to muster; while on the eastshore, mounted couriers leave Narms bearing news of Lysaer's arrival, and exhorting the surrounding town garrisons to join the campaign to run down the Shadow Master in Daon Ramon Barrens . . .

  In Baiyen Gap, caught critically short of supplies since the demise of his supply train, Jaelot's bespelled captain berates his sergeants rather than bow to the quandary of defeat, 'Every man present will fare on half rations! A third of the company must continue to advance. The rest will make camp and butcher horses for sustenance until a forced march back to Jaelot can arrange for another pack train to relieve us . . . '

  En route to Karfael, the royal patrol dispatched from Avenor receives a southbound courier bearing news of Khadrim attacks deep in Westwood; warned of the terror and death newly suffered by the region's trappers and farm hamlets, young Prince Kevor refuses safe return to West End, and claims his heir's right to ride at the fore, alongside the field captain's banner . . .

  Winter 5670

  IV. Prime Successor

  The eighty-league ride up the Eltair road from Jaelot to the city of Highscarp offered every discomfort of winter travel to the tight-knit party of enchantresses summoned for audience with the new Prime. Posthouses were few and scattered, and at this season, packed to the rafters. Day or night, the heaving waves of the bay shed chill spume, whipped on the biting east wind. Progress suffered the caprice of changeable weather. Ragged clouds and fair sky warred in crazy quilt patterns, brewed into fogs and wet snowfall as the air off the warmed, southern currents of the Cildein met the ice-honed fronts from the north. A steady onslaught of storms funneled through the Skyshiel summits, howling with shrill fury down the gorges; or they raged inland off the whitecapped bay and unburdened their tropical moisture.

  As tangled were the contentions chafing the oathsworn ties of Koriani loyalty. Each enchantress bound to the initiate's purple held a different view of the Prince of Rathain's late escape. Cadgia's circle of seeresses accepted the failure with stoic good spirits, the event just another professional setback to crimp the cogs of higher authority. For Elaira, withdrawn into worried silence concerning the fate of two fugitives abroad in the Skyshiel wilderness, the affray kept its bittersweet edge of snatched victory. Whatever accounting awaited in Highscarp at the hand of Morriel's successor, her heart's love still anchored the core of her private thoughts.

  Lirenda vacillated. Her porcelain-fair features flushed to rage when discussion touched upon Arithon, or else chilled to an ice-sculpture mask of balked hatred as she choked on the rags of her shame. Once past the jolting news of Morriel's death, the disparate facts sifted down to a core of disturbing suspicions. Lirenda wrestled her reservations concerning Selidie's abrupt accession alone, while the winter rigors of the Eltair coast rankled her fastidious taste for silk clothes and comfort and cleanliness.

  The days passed like punishment: over roads that softened to muck in the hollows and open-air campsites left trampled by the uncouth livestock tethered on their way to slaughter. Those rare nights spent under a roof offered poorly washed linen, and smoking hearths, and stifling taprooms jammed with boisterous drovers, and bearded, swaggering caravan guards who played dice, roared jokes, and pinched doxies.

  On a blustery morning twoscore days past solstice, the travel-worn group of enchantresses drew rein before Highscarp's gatehouse. Lirenda was win
dburned and aching tired, wrapped like the rest in mantle and gloves that reeked of woodsmoke, wet horse, and the turpentine bite of the evergreen boughs that had served her as last night's bedding. The uncivilized journey had revised her priorities. Vengeance-bent hatred of Arithon s'Ffalenn could wait on her need for a bath.

  'If you're primed for hot water, we're facing a setback,' an intrusive voice broached from the sidelines.

  Lirenda turned her head, fixed her smoldering gaze on Elaira, who rode with her hood blown back. The gusts played havoc with her bronze plait, streaming tendrils of flyaway hair and snagging the ends into elf locks.

  Nonplussed by hot glares and glacial silences, Elaira raised her eyebrows. 'Look. Over there.' She pointed toward the swarm of beggars jostling for coin in the lee of Highscarp's outer keep, most of them missing hands or a foot from mishaps working the quarries. 'See for yourself. That's one of our initiates giving alms at the city's main gatehouse. She's looking our way. What will you wager? I say the Prime's scryers have already broken the news of our arrival. Whom do you guess they'll call onto the carpet for the privilege of the first reprimand?'

  'You might pretend to an earnest concern.' Lirenda's fist tightened without thought on the rein. Her mount, in sharp protest, shook its wet crest. A spray of fine droplets snapped off its mane, laden with gravel and ice melt. 'Brute beast!' Lirenda blotted her face with her sleeve, then added a silken warning.

  'The new Prime may not prove so lenient toward the weakness you bring to our order.'

  'But I have no regrets.' Elaira attacked in stripped candor. 'If I must suffer for my part in Jaelot, the price will be well worth the outcome. Why not join the company of the damned with good cheer? At least bet that chunk of grade amethyst in your cloak brooch. If you forfeit your dignity, you'd have a stake to enliven the sordid end play.'

  Yet if Lirenda envied her younger peer's gift to find humor amid life's adversity, the haughty set to her lips did not soften. Nor would her cynical silence relent, even as the initiate by the gatehouse abandoned her clamoring circle of beggars. Red-faced from the cold, she threaded a no-nonsense course through the traffic and accosted the sisters from Jaelot.

  'Enchantress Elaira!' She delivered her unwelcome summons across the clattering rush of guild couriers and the tumult of oxcarts laden with ale casks and firewood. 'You are called to appear for immediate audience before your Prime Matriarch.'

  'At least there'll be no tortured waiting.' Elaira reined her brown gelding aside, well braced for her hour of reckoning.

  Drawn to a halt, with her mounted peers bunched into a staring knot amid the pressed flow of commerce, Lirenda waited for the message that would see her included. None came; her presence was dismissed along with the sisters ranked under Senior Cadgia.

  The novice gave Elaira the street address where the new Prime had established her residence. 'Go at once,' she commanded. 'You're expected. One of the orphan boys under wardship will receive your horse in the mansion courtyard.'

  A flock of gulls flew, tumultuous as tossed paper against the stirred clouds held over from the last snowstorm. Elaira's eyes tracked them, perhaps coveting their freedom as she parted from the safe circle of her peers.

  While the brave line of the bronze-haired initiate's back disappeared into the gatehouse, Lirenda raged, her bitterness charged to sheer disbelief as further instructions were delivered to Cadgia, and a stable was appointed to provide for the company's post horses. In obvious haste to escape the stiff gusts, the Prime's novice messenger made closure. 'The rest of you are asked to take lodgings at the sisterhouse. The peeress in charge will make use of your services until the Matriarch calls general assembly.'

  Dealt an unprecedented, blanket dismissal, Lirenda sat dumbstruck. Around her, the chatter of her peers rang as meaningless as the incessant cries of the gulls. Unguided, her mount trailed after its fellows through the ox-drawn drays dragging slabs from the quarries, their high, iron wheels grinding over iced cobbles and past weatherworn drivers wrapped in fringed rugs, cursing every other party inbound along Highscarp's stone causeway.

  The catcalls, the pithy challenge of the guard through the wind-torn snap of the mayor's banner arose as so much patternless noise. As an eighth-rank initiate, set apart by her years of advanced training, Lirenda felt sealed into glass-walled isolation. Her fall from administrative privileges to the meniality of charitable service seemed a punishment of nightmare proportion. Cast beneath the lowliest scullion who had served on her parents' estate, she might be required to nursemaid orphaned infants, or treat scabrous beggars, or spoon-feed demented old women in the poor quarter. The ignominy rankled: as a candidate set apart for prime training, she had disdained to mingle with the low-rank initiates. The banter, the breathless laughter, the back-and-forth quips exchanged in the scullery, and the chapped hands she would earn in the laundry poured like venom through the shreds of her dreams and ambition.

  'I'm going with Elaira.' she announced, her outrage driven bone deep by a background of wealth and privilege.

  'Your name was not called,' Senior Cadgia reminded.

  'I don't care.' Lirenda pitched her horse into a headshaking trot.

  Cadgia turned in the saddle, her round, kindly features transformed from asperity to disbelief. 'Lirenda, that's folly!'

  But the demoted enchantress shook off well-meant warning. Impulse had solidified into mulish resolve. She could not accept ruin in gutless defeat, falsely masked under virtuous acceptance. Lirenda jabbed spurs to her tired mount, determined to narrow the lead Elaira had opened ahead of her.

  The massive, carved gate arch loomed and then swallowed her, its dank shadow bleak as her mood. By the time the wan daylight found her again, more foraging gulls had taken wing from gleaning the fish-market midden. Their shadows flicked a street jammed by workaday masses, a teeming press of patched umbers and saffron, with no trace of Koriani purple.

  Elaira had passed beyond view. Set under the threat of the new Prime's authority, she would move unseen through the crowd. Her wary, street urchin's self-reliance reflexively grasped that anonymous cover for protection.

  Lirenda cursed for the inconvenience.

  Highscarp was riddled with twisting allies where a lone woman on horseback might vanish. Its massive breakwater skirted the foothills, a labyrinthine fortress grafted into the headland where the northbound combers thrashed into a granite coastline. The battlements were eyries that buttressed the sky, and the ramped eastern wall bore the brunt of the gales, hoary with moss between the repairs from the macerating wear of riptides and equinox storm surge. Highscarp endured, though the sea often triumphed. In a bad year, the pilings of the galley wharves became skewed and tumbled like matchsticks. Slate roofs capped by hammered lead rimmed the land, an anvil against the percussive onslaught of rough weather.

  The cobbled streets Lirenda traversed smelled of fish-oil lamps, and raw turpentine, and the astringent fumes of the resin men boiled to make varnish. Here, the relentless siege of the sea was given brash challenge: backdrop to the thud of gray breakers, the dauntless clang of steel mauls, as skilled masons dressed blocks from the quarries. Nor was grace forgotten. From the striated mountains due west of the city came the opaline granite once used to lay floors in the palaces of the old high kings. Before them, the great centaurs had mined the veins of white quartz for the dolmens they chiseled with patterns to mark the lands held unspoiled for the mysteries. If the nurses' tales whispered over cradles held true, the innermost halls of the citadel had been carved before First Age history, by drake packs laired in the ledged rock.

  Certainly the thoroughfares were narrow enough to suggest such ancient origins. At each crossroads and turn, Lirenda was balked by piled-up snow, street stalls swarming with commerce and stopped carts, and racing urchins playing a northcountry game with flat sticks and a stitched leather ball. By the time she clattered into the walled courtyard and dismounted before the Prime's residence, a whistling boy groom had already led Elaira's unsaddl
ed horse to the water trough. Minutes slipped past while the animal was stabled. Lirenda slapped her slack reins in her gloved palm and fumed throughout the delay.

  The house the Prime chose for her quarters commanded the view before comfort. The gabled front wing hugged the rim of a bluff, the patterned terracotta tiles of the entry chilled under the shade of the watchkeep. Gusts off the bay snapped Lirenda's thick mantle. Her tucked-up hair suffered, the frayed ends lashed into tangles. Regarded askance by the squint-eyed servant who shuffled to answer the door, she demanded to share the Prime's audience on the impetus of aristocratic breeding.

  The servant gave back a draconian glower. Lirenda waited. Her imperious foot tapped. Cowed by her scathing arrogance, the servant sniffed and led off through the hush of a wainscoted hallway. Rich carpets were pooled with marigold light cast by oil lamps hung on brass chains. At home in an atmosphere tanged with the citrus of polished linenfold paneling, and admiring the beauty of claw-footed furnishings with vine-patterned ivory inlay, Lirenda surmised the new Prime had invoked some well-to-do merchant's oath of debt.

  The massive, carved doors to the salon were not locked. Since the servant balked at tripping the latch, Lirenda was left the irrevocable choice of whether to proceed or turn back.