TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  'What's happening?' Fionn Areth persisted, the hair prickled erect at his nape by the proximity of Luhaine's distress. Jarred by the ill-suppressed climate of anxiety, he thrust out his chin in belligerence.

  'Potential trouble, on a grand scale.' Luhaine snapped. 'Bide still. You wouldn't understand all the ugly possibilities, even if we had an idle hour to explain.'

  Then you flatter yourselves! What makes you believe that I care in the slightest?' Fionn Areth straightened. Cloak clasped to his shoulders with stiffened affront, he withstood the buffeting turbulence shed by the discorporate spirit's irritation. 'Don't think I wouldn't rather be anyplace else but on a mountain in the company of Sorcerers!'

  Kharadmon's cat eyes narrowed. He stroked his beard with a tapered hand, his grin agleam with white teeth.

  Yet before he could deliver his pungent opinion on keeping the dull company of goatherds, Luhaine reappeared and barged in. 'Boy! If you want to leave Rockfell alive and claim your safe passage to Alestron, you'll need to stay balanced and vigilant.' He shook a finger, admonishing, 'This place doesn't serve mortals a kindly welcome. Dakar's business could extend for a number of days. During that time, you'll have no one to calm your panicky nature. Step headlong into trouble, and heed this as fact, you could quite easily die here.'

  As the herder braced up to take unwise umbrage, the Mad Prophet thrust back to his feet. He locked a warning hand on the young man's forearm, sorely tempted to deliver a drastic shaking to chastise such harebrained behavior. 'Trust me, we all wish we were someplace else.'

  Fionn Areth glared back, deaf to reason.

  Dakar dredged up his lost tact. Confronted by the double of Prince Arithon's face, he often forgot that this stripling's aggression was not heartset, but the reflex of Araethurian ignorance and no small measure of shrinking fear. 'If you're going to pick fights with Fellowship Sorcerers, listen to me, Fionn! The practice is dangerous, and brings no reward, as I learned from harshest experience.'

  Before Kharadmon proffered more inflammatory comment, or Luhaine snatched the opening to lecture, Dakar edged the young man to the sidelines. 'Just stay here. You'll witness wonders, not all of them pleasant. Try and remember we'll be free to leave once the wards over Rockfell are refounded.' Through gnawing urgency, and the rattled awareness that the equinox was too close to reliably promise success, the spellbinder strove to placate. 'That basic task has not changed. Only the stakes are much higher. Should you come to harm, I assure you, I'll be dead, and the Fellowship Sorcerers will have failed in their charge. Then address your fate as you can, for no haven on Athera will be safe.'

  Fionn Areth folded his arms, black brows knitted into the frown that foreran his worst fits of obstinacy.

  Dakar lost his patience. 'Perhaps Luhaine's past impression was right. Arithon should have left you in Jaelot to burn.'

  The spellbinder turned his back on the herder. Seized by a bone-deep tremor of trepidation, he shored up failing courage and presented himself to the Sorcerers.

  'I'm not ready,' he confessed with wounding honesty. 'Yet I see no option.' If his chestnut hair was unkempt and his clothing rumpled in hagridden disarray, he had inwardly changed: the last time the Sorcerers had required his help, Asandir had needed to drag him by the heels from the stews of drunken indulgence. Though dread for this assignment had not lessened one whit through three months of arduous travel, Dakar expelled a sharp breath. Upright on shaky feet, he led the commitment at Rockfell. 'You have my permission. Go forward.'

  Luhaine withheld from disparaging comment, and Kharadmon for once did not mock. They would not offer false platitudes. Better than any, the Sorcerers knew the perils an apprentice spellbinder offered to shoulder in their behalf. Nor could the works of a pending catastrophe be delayed for the sake of human discomfort.

  'You'll want to sit down.' Luhaine urged, a suggestion made in bald-faced regret. 'If your body convulses through the stresses of transfer, I can't help. Let's not risk a fall off the precipice.'

  Kharadmon's last advice was worse than disquieting. 'You realize your consent to this binding must be extended beyond your mortal survival.'

  Dakar swallowed, and ground past the husk in his voice, 'You destroyed your flesh once already in Athera's service. Should I be surprised I might share the same fate? You hold my consent. I suggest you step in, before I lose my last grip.'

  'And what, soil your breeches?' Kharadmon laughed. 'Well, don't bet I won't suffer the same lapse myself, if the critical muscle's as abandoned to flab as the rest of you.'

  Dakar opened his mouth, his enveloping anxiety flushed by stung outrage; and in that kindly moment while he stood diverted, the discorporate Sorcerer encompassed his unguarded mind like a numbing blast of chill wind. Kharadmon's massive presence flowed in, a building pressure not meant to cause hurt. Yet demands and necessity disallowed compromise. The expansion required by his entry nonetheless strained and stretched assumed boundaries, then wedged rifts through every fixated, limit lodged within the spellbinder's awareness.

  The Mad Prophet gasped. Seized head to foot by a tingling rush, he fought dizziness, the assault to his senses more potent than the inaugural burst forerunning a tienelle trance. The flux did not slacken as his flesh was squeezed full, but spilled over and flashed outward, respinning the unseen matrix of his aura until every nerve end felt flushed by a blast of raw heat. His body trembled, then quaked. Sight drowned, rinsed into delirious hallucination. Dakar reeled, unmoored, awash in a deluge of color and light that exploded the foundational patterns of cognizance.

  'Don't try to move,' Luhaine admonished. 'The changes you're sensing hold peril incarnate. To disrupt the flow for even a second will drive you to madness beyond remedy.'

  Dakar locked his teeth to stifle a scream of rank terror as emotions he never knew he possessed tore up from the pit of his stomach. He could not tell whether his effort succeeded. Hearing dropped out next. Felted in deafness, then cast adrift from the feel of the solid rock wall at his back, he panted to recover his breath. The air drawn through his lungs never reached his starved brain. He felt swathed in tar to the point where he could not escape the frantic belief he would suffocate.

  'Steady, hold steady. You're not close to dying,' Kharadmon's whisper bridged the maelstrom of battering distortion, but did little to allay the gibbering shadows of fear.

  'Steady,' the Sorcerer repeated. He touched something inside of Dakar's core awareness. When pressure and pain stayed his tacit probe, he gently asked for a word of permission.

  Half-lost to madness, Dakar yielded a response in beleaguered trust.

  Something snapped, sure as the thrust of a surgeon's knife cutting the thread of a cobweb. Dakar shuddered, his dread fallen into eclipse as he felt himself stripped of every reflexive defense. Ripped naked before the devouring unknown, he howled until he was emptied.

  He gave way, exhausted; and suddenly found himself deluged in light. Soft as the kiss of spring rain in renewal, the cascade poured intp the void that yawned through his ravaged being. The tenderness broke him all over again, that he could be loved and understood, despite his wayward flaws and his failures.

  'Kharadmon?'

  'I, myself,' the Sorcerer replied. 'Why should you doubt your own worthiness?' A reflection spilled back, of strengths and bright talents dulled behind the false tarnish of potent drink: the fears and detritus amassed through a lifetime spent in shrinking denial.

  Reforged in the crucible of Kharadmon's regard, the spellbinder released his self-doubt. Surrender claimed him for one fragile moment, and in the peace of that transient acceptance, Kharadmon asked again. This time as a friend addressing an equal, he requested permission to claim space, and share the seat of the spellbinder's physical consciousness.

  'Enter as you please,' the Mad Prophet invited, his third stage of consent given beyond any ties of duty or obligation.

  The exuberant influx took him by storm, a bliss so pure every tie of awareness came unraveled before limitless
wonder.

  Dakar felt routed and reamed, remade from within in ways that defied understanding. He had walked in the presence of Fellowship Sorcerers for most of his life, and apprenticed to Asandir for over five centuries. No experience prepared him. Gripped by an awe that blasted him senseless, he realized he had never come close to encompassing the masterful might of one such being, firsthand. The experience smashed through every veil of preconception, then lifted, and lifted his vantage again until the sensation of such rarefied height left him a stranger unto himself. He heard tones beyond hearing, pure and clear. Sound to make stones shout aloud for sheer joy, had man held the means to share comprehension; he saw color beyond light, and still failed to encompass even a fraction of Kharadmon's broadscale perception.

  Possessed by a will that might touch, and smash mountains, or turn thought and respin the vanes of a moth's wing, Dakar wept. 'Sky and earth, Kharadmon, who are you?'

  'Far easier to ask who I was in my past,' the Sorcerer replied, an echo arisen from inside his mind. 'Though if you delve into my deepest memories, you may come to wish that you hadn't.'

  Dakar encountered the core of a human awareness. But like the view seen through the wrong end of a ship's glass, the original persona had long since outgrown limitation. The peppery cast of the birth-born man held the seeds of some qualities he recognized, but vastly diminished, and set against the backdrop of a world nothing at all like Athera.

  Snatched glimpses streamed past, of sprawling cities with turrets of glass; a changed vista that encompassed cinders and rubble; then a red-haired woman of ravishing loveliness curled like a jewel amid lavender sheets. Dakar yanked back, singed to embarrassment. Chagrined, he realized that his contact with the Sorcerer lent him wide-open access to even the most personal memories.

  Dismay followed, that a similar encounter forged through magecraft with Arithon had altered his life ever after.

  'Oh, you'll be changed,' Kharadmon promised with caustic frankness. 'Like a glove that's been stretched to fit larger fingers, try though you might, you can't quite ever shrink it back to its former shape.'

  To bridge the abyss of Dakar's trepidation, the Sorcerer extended his forgiveness. 'The beautiful lady I once loved was Carline, and I don't mind sharing her memory. For the rest, don't worry. There won't be time to expose the lying flattery you use to inveigle your doxies. Since the precious creatures won't bed with ghosts, I've no use for the names of your favorites.'

  Since goading humor failed to stem the spellbinder's distress, Kharadmon laid bare his core of sincerity. 'I can't in good conscience suppress your awareness! That would demean the trust of your consent and cross the line out of free partnership. I won't break the Law of the Major Balance. Not even for the sake of securing Desh-thiere. Such use of your body would become an act of outright possession.'

  At that, Dakar rallied. Beneath the words, he had sensed the deep currents of a pain caused by losses too vast to describe, when whole worlds had exploded in conflagration. Kharadmon had experienced grief and guilt, raised to torment on a scale unimagined; and had been found by drake-dream, and granted redemption by the grace of Athera's Paravians. The experience had reforged his whole being, mortality shed like dross before flame.

  The branding echo of suffering remained, stamped into permanent recall. As eyewitness, Dakar experienced the gifted worth of Athera. He measured the scope of unbearable consequence, should his part at Rockfell fall short.

  'If you don't put scruple second, and those free wraiths break through from Marak, the fate of Athera will stand beyond salvage,' he told Kharadmon. 'That's a choice not worth living.' Impelled by the unequivocal truth, not his own, that recalled the wholesale ruin of fully inhabited planets, Dakar added, 'Get on with this. The equinox won't wait. Do as you must, before Luhaine starts to smoke with impatience.'

  'Brace up, then,' Kharadmon warned. 'One final adjustment remains before I can work through the matrix of your body.'

  A touch at the center of his skull became a tickle; then something physical gave with a snap, as though an invisible membrane had been cut, then peeled from the fabric of his awareness. A dammed-back river of potential broke free, and the isolation of his mind became smashed by a second cascading torrent of bright light. The influx was not gentle, or softened by the polite constraints of bonding friendship; this was a knowingness of unstoppable force, a marriage of self into self.

  This tide of beingness was his own Name, but loomed on a thread that extended far past the constraints of time and space. Dakar lost his grounding to Rockfell's staid peak. The flux that roared in to reclaim him raged on, stripping out reason and logic. Every template of mortal belief was hammered flat with no mercy, then reforged to support a near-limitless platform. Dakar screamed, unstrung by shock. The sound battered through him, a barrage that took form as senseless waves, endlessly tumbling outward.

  Then his eyesight cleared. Given no warning to preface the transition, Dakar sat and blinked, restored to an unnatural clarity that saw far outside the range of visible light.

  'How disorienting,' he gasped. The arm he propped to lean on was as tangibly perceptible as the refined layers of his aura. Stone cast an equally manifest energy field. Dakar stared, stupidly trying to sort through an interface of bewildering complexity. Objects and flesh were now overlaid with the energy lines that defined the tracks where light and air interacted. He saw himself melded, rendered at one with the dancing expanse of the sky.

  Eyes squeezed shut, or lids open, Dakar discovered he could not close down the broadened band of his altered senses. Awed once again by Kharadmon's equanimity, he said, 'Did you see this way before you were disembodied?' Nausea knifed through him. The spasm was swiftly suppressed by the Sorcerer's expert touch, more efficient remedy than his own crude impulse to clamp his teeth in set misery. 'How did you manage to know what was solid, and how do you steer without hitting things?'

  'Experience.' Kharadmon's reply issued through the Mad Prophet's own lips, inflected by his breath and voice.

  'Dharkaron wept!' Dakar cried, startled half out of his skin.

  He opened his eyes, beheld the intricate patterns of light and sound that was Luhaine, and jumped from riled nerves yet again.

  Before the other discorporate Sorcerer could proffer an involved explanation, Kharadmon finished answering the gist of the question. 'Some of the senses you're using lie outside the body. The brain still interprets. That's why the perceptions don't respond as you block out your eyesight.'

  Dakar glanced aside in searching anxiety, belatedly mindful of his forced promise to Arithon. 'Fionn Areth will surely think I've gone crazy, speaking with myself out of hand.'

  'The fool herder's out cold,' Kharadmon dismissed. A raised hand that moved beyond Dakar's volition indicated the young man, slumped amid a haphazard nest of rucked blankets. 'When your body appeared to be having convulsions, the young idiot lost his head. To quiet his shouting, Luhaine sent him to sleep.'

  With supreme tact, neither Sorcerer mentioned the irony: that the first time Desh-thiere had been sealed within Rockfell, Kharadmon had performed the selfsame service at need to quell Dakar's intrusive behavior.

  The disappointment struck, bitter, that the epiphanies of realigned awareness had not fully released the conditioned shortfalls of a lifetime. Neither age nor maturity quite banished the specter of past terror instilled by that earlier experience at Rockfell Pit. Dakar sensed the reechoed, questing touch, as Kharadmon mapped the source of his apprehension. He shuddered in discomfort, sweating for the residual memories dredged up for examination. Even the fragmented impressions he retained held the stuff of undying nightmare.

  'Try not to fight me,' the Fellowship Sorcerer advised. 'I can't help where you won't give your trust freely.'

  But to release ingrained fear without trained comprehension was to act on a leap of blind faith. Dakar knew the shortcomings of cowardice too well to stand on false comfort or illusions. 'I told Arithon once, I'm not a hero.'
r />   Kharadmon shrugged. 'You'll have to be, this time, no choice on the matter.' The mental query cast out to Luhaine sidelined his partner's contrary perceptions and his mishmashed muddle of uncertainties. 'How deep does the fracture run through the wards?'

  'You have to ask?' Luhaine released a vexed puff of breeze. 'Very deep. All the way down to the innermost ring.' He need not belabor the obvious point, that no saving miracle could buy them more time: the defenses could not be reworked soon enough to stave off the maligned currents of the impending equinox lane tide.

  'No choice then,' Kharadmon answered, laconic.

  Granted no pause to relapse toward self-pity, Dakar shared the paralyzing resignation: as a Fellowship Sorcerer who was also afraid lifted his spread hands and flattened both palms on the mirror-polished stone which concealed Rockfell Pit's outer entrance.

  For his opening, Kharadmon sent the presence of the mountain a formal greeting. He gave unflinching acknowledgment that Named who he was, and added a heartfelt apology for delays fallen outside his province to remedy.

  Next, with an attentive humility that raised Dakar to amazement, the most impetuous of the Fellowship Sorcerers stilled his perception and listened.

  A resonance reemerged through the stone, deep and slow, in bell tones rich with harmonics that transcended natural hearing. The voice had striking character. Dakar experienced Rockfell as never before, a being more distinctly defined than a man. The mountain was conscious on more levels than the animate mind could encompass. Its nature of inherent tenderness stunned him, a nurturing born of unsurpassed patience, and strength backed by an integrity that reserved no allowance for hardship. Rockfell was mineral, its structure a statement of everlasting commitment that gave of itself without boundary.

  Nor was the mountain without unique preference. Rockfell's record of service framed its steadfast pride. The lament in its appeal to Kharadmon was described in a detailed and poignant delicacy that shattered Dakar's preconceptions. He had always assumed rock was carelessly dull, its endurance rooted in obstinate bulk. The contrast tore him open, for the opposite held true: Rockfell's purview was no function of brute mass. It knew itself down to the tiniest fissure, even to the most delicate vein of formed crystal, whose miniature terminations would seem no more than a sparkle of dust to human eyes.