TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  The pale creature bowed. His large hood as always shadowed his face. White cloth lent him the aspect of a starved wraith, exacerbated by the fingertips snipped from the fine silk mesh of his gloves. He would avoid untoward stains as he practiced, the affectation an odd contradiction for a man who adhered to the shady side of his profession. His knurled hands trembled with evident eagerness as he unveiled his bronze offering bowl and unsheathed his sacrificial knife. Mouthing his incessant, ritual prayers, he raised the bone blade like a flaked shard of ice.

  'Jeriayish, not now!' Sulfin Evend's concerned gaze stayed fastened on the Blessed Prince. Through this terrible hour, divine duty could wait. Though his Grace seemed himself, the inbred reflex of state poise apparently beyond reach of all pain, Lysaer's stripped heart betrayed otherwise. The man just made a bereaved father still reeled in wordless shock. He deserved the humane consideration of privacy.

  The diviner-priest paused. His hooded head turned toward the Lord Commander, every draped fold in his mantle a statement of rigid fanaticism. 'Best that you leave.'

  Sulfin Evend held fast, a leashed tiercel poised on a perch. 'At Lysaer's order, not yours.'

  When the Divine Prince gave no gesture of dismissal to break their deadlocked wills, the priest minced a step forward. He placed the bronze bowl on the trestle next to the camp cot. 'I know Cerebeld's news.' His thin lips flexed downward, their wax pallor touched gilt by the ragged flare of the candle. 'Our hunt for the Spinner of Darkness is too near consummation to let up for the sake of a mortal tragedy.' He kissed the bone knife, and murmured, 'Lord Exalted?'

  Lysaer stirred, moved, his arm offered as though by rote. Dragged by its own weight, the gold-embroidered cuff tumbled back. The blood-flecked binding underneath offered the uneasy testament that such rites had grown frequent as an addiction.

  Assured of his authority, the priest closed his jittery fingers over the royal wrist.

  Lysaer jerked back, sparked to sudden offense. 'Leave me!'

  Jeriayish huffed with exasperation. 'But Cerebeld's priests need to know—'

  Cat fast, Lysaer spun in recoil. His forearm raked the trestle and sent the sacrificial bowl flying. The clangor belled through his raised voice as the vessel clashed and rolled across the field armor laid in readiness over his clothes chest. 'I said leave!' His cool presence shattered. Lysaer stood, the humanity in him a towering force that cried out in raw pain for reprieve. 'For the sake of my son, who has died for his people, Cerebeld's priests can wait for an hour.'

  Jeriayish narrowed his eyes. The knife still held poised in his persistent grip, he accused, 'If you take any pause to grieve as a father, your Alliance forces from Etarra and Darkling cannot respond if the enemy turns or doubles back in midflight.' He advanced again, already dismissing the Lord Commander's watchful presence behind him. 'You risk much. Let one boy's death allow Arithon of Rathain to escape, and all of mankind will remain in bondage to the powers of Darkness!'

  Sulfin Evend witnessed the shift at close hand: saw the bastard's dread name trigger recall of the Light's divine purpose. Prince Lysaer's living flesh struck a tensile pause, reforged by a power beyond bearing. His eyes flared, just once, as though racked by mute protest. Then paternal need became smothered out, pinched off like the hapless flame on a candle. What welled up in place of that natural grief was ice chill, as fixed in its purpose as any steel blade whetted for bloodletting combat.

  'I know precisely where the Spinner of Darkness makes camp.' Each consonant was edged glass, and each vowel, a note of undying conviction. 'We are that close, I can feel him, each breath.' Lysaer regarded his shrinking priest, his magnificence the forged beacon of altruistic inspiration. 'I require no man's impertinent reminder to fulfill the task laid before me! While the enemy lives, I can have no peace. His evil is a thorn in mind and flesh, a gall that won't ease until his demonic spirit has been cleansed from the world and consigned to its final damnation.'

  Struck dumb by the price a man paid to be god sent, Sulfin Evend shuddered. His sharp intelligence and courage fell short, to endure the scope of such sacrifice. Nor did he possess the sheer, hard-core will to suppress his earthborn humanity. He laid his light hand on the hilt of his sword, humbled as never before. The concept that Lysaer had once scraped his knees in the carefree innocence of boyhood seemed unreal. His fertile mind failed to imagine the crucible that could mold a child to mature with the heartless strength to endure such a burden of inflexible responsibility.

  As Jeriayish stumbled a quailing step back, Lysaer struck with a hammering fist and crushed out the dribbled stub of the candle. Even amid freezing darkness, his driving will made itself felt. He was welded force, both template and channel for the cause of divine purpose. Such power could reshape men and cities, and as surely, the destiny of Athera herself. 'We march inside the hour. Before dawn, as we pause to refresh the horses, you'll be given your chance to cast a divination to satisfy Cerebeld's priests.'

  The diviner bowed and fled, too cowed to grope after his offering bowl. His scuttling retreat through the tent flap just missed collision with the squire called in to assist with the royal armor and surcoat.

  'Go!' bade Lysaer s'Ilessid to the stilled presence of his Lord Commander. The change in his manner posed a terrible dichotomy. No shadow of the bereaved father remained in those enameled blue eyes. First eclipsed, and then canceled, grief stood demolished, flesh and bone become the drawn sword of dedicated ferocity. 'Rouse the camp. Have the men armed and ready to ride out at my order.'

  Late Winter 5670

  Crossing

  Jieret crumpled, caught by his liege's quick grasp before he crashed onto cold rock.

  'Brother, damn you, bear up!' Lungs on fire with the need to draw breath, holding Jieret's limp weight crushed into a slump against his shoulder and neck, Arithon quartered the ground. He retrieved the stone pipe, left-handed. Still holding his throat closed, he managed to stoop and empty the bowl of white ash. Poisoned smoke whirled around him. He staggered, off-balance. The dragging burden of his liegeman all but felled him as he ground the spilled embers under his heel. Wary as he was of the last, wisping fumes, close proximity itself posed grave danger. He was still flicked into reeling dizziness by the taint of the volatile oils ingrained in his caithdein's hide clothes.

  Yet Arithon dared not chance the moment to invoke more prudent precautions. He snatched up the guard candle from the north quadrant, thrust the flared flame toward the face he held cradled at his shoulder. Eyes of gray hazel stared up at him, sightless. The pupils stayed black and distended.

  'Daelion show mercy!' Slid to his knees, Arithon bent, the bronze head eased to rest against his thighs. He tightened fierce fingers in Jieret's red hair, spun to fine white at the temples. 'Don't surrender. Not without showing some fight!'

  No response; Arithon cupped the slack features of the man who had spared him Desh-thiere's triumph, who had, under the cold sobriety of given orders, broken his crown prince's will to preserve an integrity that, for need, must outlast s'Ffalenn compassion. He pressed his cheek close, listening for a faint trace of breath. The hair reeked of tienelle and smoke. The flesh sprawled, inanimate as death.

  'Daelion's bane on me, Jieret. Not this,' the whisper a stripped plea that did nothing to rouse any sign of vitality.

  Head bowed, eyes tight shut, Arithon steeled his jagged nerves. Then he dealt the stilled face under his hands a sharp slap with his uninjured hand. 'Aletier!' Awake! he cried in Paravian.

  Jieret jerked, a spasm of reflex that did not touch the eyes, still sightless and wide in the flickering glare of the candle.

  Arithon pinned the strong wrists hard to the stone, ready for what must follow. He held the man down with all his fierce strength through a harrowing fit of convulsions.

  That moment, a slight noise intruded, where the winter gusts howled through the gap in the boulders. A spattered grate of footsteps crossed the loose gravel and ground to a frantic stop. 'Merciful Ath, was that Jieret's screa
m?'

  Then the damning, split-second assessment, as whichever scout had arrived caught sight of his chieftain, bucking and thrashing under the pinioned hold of a sorcerer who gave no civil answer. Instead, he spoke words in fluent Paravian over what seemed a struggling victim.

  'What have you done?' Steel screamed from a sheath. 'Is this how loyalty is answered by a prince undone by Desh-thiere's curse? By unspeakable acts of black spellcraft?'

  'He is alive!' Arithon refused the overriding instinct to look up, face around, and address the new threat at his back. Though the voice of the scout was not one he recognized, the lethal combination of fear-blinded rage framed a timbre his Masterbard's ear must acknowledge. In the white heat of crisis, he cleaved to one truth, that he feared for his liegeman's life more.

  Nor had his efforts brought about a recovery. Jieret's struggles subsided again into the torpor of unconsciousness. Arithon locked his hands, both the sound and the wounded onto the younger man's shoulders. He refused to relinquish the gaze of sightless eyes. 'You hear me, Jieret! I'm with you, each breath.'

  'What have you done to him?' Studs grated on stone as the scout pressed through the cleft and fully entered the cavern. Touched by the dying glow of the embers, his upraised sword skittered hellish reflections across the shadowed rock walls.

  More scuffling steps arrived from behind. A bass voice burst in, breathless, 'I heard Jieret scream. What in Sithaer has happened?'

  'A curse-born atrocity.' Checked by shocked fright and agonized betrayal, the first scout edged aside. 'See for yourself.'

  The scene he exposed offered no shred of contrary testament. A fool could not miss the pungent scents of rare herbs, or fail to measure the items laid out for ritual spellcraft. Caught in the flickering flame of the candle stub, a prince who should have been prostrate with valerian knelt over their chieftain's felled form. The fresh wrap on his hand showed a spotting of scarlet, as though his blood had been let with deliberation. Jieret's ginger hair spilled in disordered waves over Arithon's unsteady forearms, as though he had engaged some ugly ritual of dark magecraft to revitalize himself in exchange for the life drained from his liegeman's slack body.

  The newcomer drew steel, shaken to terror, and unable to refute grim conclusion. 'Why would his Grace kill, unless driven by the curse?'

  'On my life as your crown prince, I am in my right mind.' Arithon bent, his ear pressed to Jieret's chest. No faint sound of breath; frantic, the Shadow Master snapped, 'Find Theirid. He knows. He'll explain.'

  But the plea might as well have fallen on deaf ears. These were the Companions, the child survivors of Tal Quorin who had grown up motherless. Alongside Earl Jieret, they had shared the terrible burden of ensuring the next generation, most of them orphaned themselves, but more desperately cherished by grief-stricken fathers whose families and wives had been slaughtered. Each one had seen sisters broken and violated by Etarra's campaign of butchery and wrought fire.

  Mere boys, they had piled stones on the grave cairns of their parents and siblings, while the crown prince those massacred kinfolk had died for slipped away in unremarked anonymity. Arithon to them was a figure of hearsay, not seen since, for whose sake their chieftain was wont to depart for months upon dangerous courses of travel, and for whom Caolle had taken his death wound upon foreign soil.

  Panicked to uncertainty, the first scout declaimed, 'Theirid's gone on patrol.'

  'Then send for him!' Unable to listen undisturbed, Arithon straightened. He laid chilled fingers against Jieret's throat, his urgency a dammed-back scream as he felt the fast, thready pulse turn ragged under his touch. He gathered himself again, slapped the flat of his hand down hard on his caithdein's motionless chest.

  'Breathe, Jieret, damn you, man! Don't fail me and quit.' To the clamor of outrage arisen as more men packed like wolves in the cleft, Rathain's prince said, 'Stand down! Let me finish what's started!' If he failed to act swiftly, the chance would be lost, to bind the unmoored spirit of the man back into his flaccid, drugged flesh.

  'Your chieftain is alive,' he repeated, emphatic. 'I beg you, don't meddle through ignorance!'

  'Then rise on your feet!' interjected a third voice, the bark of impatient authority surely Braggen's. 'Prove what you say. Draw Alithiel against us. If your cause is just, if you're not possessed and lying, the Paravian starspells will waken as surety.'

  Arithon jerked his head in stripped negation. 'I don't have my blade. Jieret took charge of her. Even if he hadn't, the sword would not waken. Not unless I fought you in earnest. That won't happen. Can't.'

  Continuously busy, the Shadow Master set his crooked knuckle against the skin above the bridge of Jieret's nose. Schooled by Elaira to know healing arts, he applied steady pressure on the meridian point which stimulated the central nervous system. Under his ministration, Jieret's limp form shuddered. His chest heaved as he dragged in a hoarse gasp of air.

  Eyes closed in flooding gratitude for that tentative sign of reprieve, Arithon sought once again to placate the distrustful Companions. 'I'll raise no weapon against you. Charter law binds me. By my oath to Rathain, sworn on my knees before Steiven, you are my charge to protect. Over the steel of your fathers, I pledged you my service as crown sovereign, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath.'

  He sang out a note pitched to a clear F, then pressed his ear flat against Jieret's torso. If the heartbeat had steadied, the lungs under his ear screamed like an overstressed bellows. Arithon chafed the chieftain's slack wrists, then grabbed his chilled fingers and massaged the palms on the line that revitalized the diaphragm. He spoke as he worked, his tender inflection at unnatural odds, forged on raw will and concentration. 'Brother, don't let go and fall into the darkness. The light shines. I'm with you still. The nightmares you suffer are not real.'

  Yet if the unseen torment of the mind posed the more terrible enemy, the immediate threat enacted by living men in the grotto was perilously still unfolding.

  Braggen snapped first. 'By Ath, no mouthing of law can excuse this!' Ox shoulders tucked, he charged forward. Gravel grated, churned underfoot as other scouts surged at his heels. Their bared swords were leveled in rigid hands, their faces torn by a volatile mix of worry and vindication.

  Arithon whirled like a cornered fox. 'You must not cross the circle!' His voice cracked to alarm. 'Heed my word! You tempt dangers you cannot possibly imagine. A mistake made now with the best of intentions could kill your chieftain, or worse, draw in the might of our enemies.'

  The quandary stopped thought, that he could not stand against the scouts' surge to take him without leaving Jieret abandoned. Split second in decision, he rejected his own safety. If breaking the ritual circle drew notice, there would be no respite from the bloodbath to come without a live chieftain to restore the frayed chain of command.

  Arithon stayed unmoved on his knees, as the blundering rush of his well-meant opposition scuffed across his exactingly drawn rings of protection. Metal spoke first. The drawn swords contained iron, whose grounding nature razed holes through the set frame of his intent. His bard's gift picked up the high, thin whine as the first line of laid energy sundered. By that sign, he knew: the wards had been active. Whatever questing power had been engaged and probing his sealed defenses, no barrier remained to deflect its hostile presence. The price of that misstep could not be measured; its penalty would fall in the future.

  He cradled Jieret's head between his fixed hands, disregarding the vehement sting of the hurt palm too recently cauterized. His patient touch neither jostled nor flinched, even as the turbulent press of the men scattered the joined remnants of his precautions to oblivion. He disregarded the rough hands which bore in and touched pricking steel to his sides and his back, with Braggen's, most fierce, at his throat.

  He raised his chin, adamant; kept his voice vised to calm, keenly aware the least note of upset would lend spin to the nightmares that pinned Jieret at the rim of Fate's Wheel.

  'Fetch me Sidir or Eafinn
!' Arithon swallowed, the sweat at his collar painted in glistening streaks. 'They served at my side at the Havens. Entrust them to judge me for falsehood.'

  Braggen spat. 'Eafinn's gone, killed by scalpers last spring. Sidir's sent to Caithwood to guard Jeynsa.'

  Hedged by the nervous pressure of six swords, Arithon grated, Then wait here for Theirid!'

  'What, and watch Jieret die, sucked dry of life to fuel some spell brought on by Desh-thiere's fell purpose?' Braggen shivered, caught aback by the appalling courage of Arithon's adamant passivity. 'The High Earl said himself, he'd drugged you unconscious with valerian. If you were innocent as you claim, and had worked no dire spellcraft, you wouldn't be up on your feet!'

  Shaken, bone white, cranked under stress to the limit of breaking, Arithon battled for hold on his stressed self-control. His effort drove him to the blank-faced, withdrawn concentration of the trapped beast, who gave over all struggle to husband its drive for survival. Rathain's prince held, obdurate, to his preferred course. Jieret's welfare came first. His touch on slack flesh remained gentle and steady, until the wrenching dichotomy of his pose seemed unnatural; as though flesh and bone were not man, but demon, inhumanly bound to a purpose beyond the compass of human frailty.

  'Mercy, for Jieret's life!' The care in his hands struck sharp contrast to his words, a masterbard's peal of command. 'I have no other proof to offer as bargain!'

  'For your life?' Braggen said. High emotion suffused his saturnine features. 'To stay my hand, liege, show us sane common sense. You need do no more than stand aside!'

  Amid that locked tension, Jieret's breath caught and faltered. Arithon moved to lend succor, caught short by the bristling thrust of Braggen's sword against the pit of his neck.

  The green eyes blazed then, sparked to desolate fury. 'Then betray your clans! Render Caolle's death useless! Break the trust of my caithdein, and cut me dead in cold blood. But beware if you murder. Jieret will be lost. For his sake, I will have given you my life as the last Teir's'Ffalenn. Dharkaron Avenger stand as my witness! If I die at your hands, I will have crossed the Wheel in unbroken service to all my feal liegemen of Rathain.'