TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  Arithon propped his lamed hand on the gelding's damp crest, eyes closed as he absorbed the tactful implication that the Sorcerer lacked means to see him to shelter and safety. Too proud to plead, he still showed a gratitude that wounded for its sincerity. 'That gelding carries everything I need to be comfortable. Thank you from the depths of my heart.'

  'Well, the officer who held him was foolishly negligent,' Luhaine excused, embarrassed that freeing a horse from a lead rein had been the best help he could offer.

  Conversation suffered a necessary lag, while the company of guardsmen swept jingling down the lane past the hedgerow. None seemed the wiser for the Sorcerer's intervention. Over the ridge, the farmer's yells entangled with the yelps of cowed mastiffs, until wind swept the outcry away.

  The reprieve did not buy this night any peace. Magnetic imbalance and building storm still spun their partnered refrain. The frenetic pull of raw force scoured the land like the tension of overcranked harp strings. Snow winnowed down like crosshatch in scratchboard through the weathered slats of the corncrib, while seconds fled, closing the interval left before midnight.

  Constrained by time, the Sorcerer dashed the hope that lingered, unspoken. 'In sad fact, I bring you no other good news.'

  Arithon straightened. Insight born of mage wisdom let him listen without questions until he received the raw gist.

  Luhaine stayed blunt, since quickest was kindest. 'There has been breaking crisis, and Dakar is needed. I must ask if you're willing to go forward alone.'

  'The setback won't come as a crushing surprise,' Arithon admitted, unperturbed. 'You know the Mad Prophet was sucking down gin to ward off a blind fit of prescience? To judge by the way he provisioned the packhorse, I expect he foresaw our escape to the coast would be forfeit.'

  No sense mincing words over outright disaster. 'That way is closed to you,' Luhaine affirmed. He was loath to reveal any more than he must. Against the tenacity of Arithon's enemies, more concerns would only serve the potential for fatal distraction. 'I've already called your caithdein to service. He'll await you in the black tower at Ithamon. Your safe haven lies there, but you must first cross the mountains. A company of headhunters will hound your back, whipped on by a Koriani geas. Can you manage?'

  'As I must.' All banal practicality, Arithon snugged his cloak hem between toe and stirrup iron. A hard snap wrenched a tear in the fabric. He worked the rent larger, then wrung off a strip to bind up his dripping sword cut. 'No, don't apologize,' he gasped through locked teeth as he knotted the ends in pained clumsiness. 'I already know you can't work a small healing. The flare would imprint in my aura. Since no tendons were cut, let's not give Lirenda's pack of scryers the free gift of a beacon to track me.'

  He looked up, doubtless warned by Luhaine's tacit stillness. What's wrong? Dakar told me he'd had a vision that Morriel Prime had stepped outside of her body. He presumed she'd passed the Wheel. Has she left a death curse? Did she somehow strike out in malice and upset your stewardship of the compact?'

  'Not yet,' Luhaine assured, relieved that the core of his business stayed obscured from the nuance of mage-schooled perception. 'Though you should be cautioned. The Prime Matriarch broke all law and precedent to arrange the transfer of power upon her succession. She caused a large-scale upset to Athera's magnetic lanes, a distraction made for the unprecedented purpose of claiming a young initiate in possession.'

  'She's succeeded? Ath's mercy!' Arithon measured Luhaine's reserve, black hair torn loose by the wind flicking the drawn line of his cheekbone. To the Sorcerer's refined vision, he seemed a figure spun out of Falgaire glass. More than the shock of physical exhaustion set his faculties under siege. His fresh separation from Elaira told deepest, left him heartsore and emotionally naked. Too bone weary, this once, to question just why he might be directed to seek shelter at Ithamon, he cast his net of logic too close and fixed on the problem nearest to hand. 'Of course, if the Prime Matriarch's abandoned all principle, then Dakar's protection must guard Fionn Areth.'

  Luhaine in hard wisdom chose not to expose the conclusion as fallacy. The s'Ffalenn prince faced a journey of terrible hardship to reach his fast refuge at Ithamon. Let him keep the false gift of his peace of mind and ride without fear that the wards over Rockfell were compromised.

  'I seek Dakar next with a list of instructions. Meanwhile, time is short. Align your flight with the crest of the midnight lane tide. The tonic effects of its passage should carry you into the foothills.' The image of the Sorcerer's presence flicked out. Behind him, he left the unmarked fall of the snow, and last words, whirled in the wake of precipitous departure. 'The flux will do much to offset your exhaustion. Ath go with you, Teir's'Ffalenn. Know the seals I have set on your two horses will bolster their stamina through the night.'

  * * *

  Six leagues to the southeast, Fionn Areth regained awareness, wrapped in a net of blazing pain. Too fuddled to groan, he felt as if his skull sloshed with acid and stewed all his brains into jelly. His body seemed just as abusively compromised. Jackknifed, facedown, and seized by sick vertigo, he attempted to stir. Wrists and ankles, his limbs had been snugly tied. Through scattered senses, he assembled the jangled impression that he lay tossed like a meal sack over a moving horse.

  His gasped protest drew no response.

  The horse kept on walking. The disjointed view through its scissoring legs showed blank snow lapped against wind-torn darkness. Through a brief, sweaty struggle, Fionn Areth raised his head. That effort bought him a lashing sting, as gouged brush slapped across his bare face. Somewhere beyond view, two voices engaged in unhurried conversation, one speaker a polished, resonant baritone whose accents belonged to a stranger.

  'The marker you seek lies fifty paces hence. Veer just a bit to your right.'

  'Thank you.' the Mad Prophet said, testy as his toe snagged on a tree root and wrenched him into a stumble. The gelding flipped its nose as the lead rein jerked taut. Fionn Areth almost missed the next line, jostled to the beast's broken stride. 'I'd be pleased if you'd tell me what caused the delay, since I sent asking help several hours ago.'

  A fir branch slashed back, dousing snow down the herder's nape. His yelp raised no sympathy. The unseen arrival, in flowery prose, gave answer to Dakar's question. 'Morriel Prime has stirred trouble beyond everyone's worst expectation. Her meddling hurled all seven lanes on the continent into magnetic imbalance. Sethvir's earth-sense was compromised. If you called, very likely he failed to hear. Worse, I've not come to help, but to ask your willing support on a problem of grievous import.'

  'You think I don't have enough on my hands?' Dakar urged the burdened horse up a rise, snagged aback by its fellow, who had sidled wrong side around a fixed tree trunk. That difficulty resolved through a tug and ripe language, the Mad Prophet resumed in the same vein of bother. 'This yokel herder is rescued from death, and what does he do? He bites the same hand that dragged his arse clear of the fire!'

  Another piled branch unburdened its load over Fionn Areth's strapped torso. His howl startled the horse underneath him to a jig that pummeled the pit of his stomach.

  'Oh, do stop your moaning, boy!' Dakar bit back. His snap on the lead rein hauled the beast up short. It balked, then resumed its belabored pace through the deepening snowdrifts. 'Given the fiends plaguing trouble you've caused, you're damned lucky to find the breath of life still in your body. If your prince hadn't spoken, I would have gifted the fish with a millstone tied to your ankles.'

  'I never asked to be saved by a criminal,' Fionn Areth ground out.

  The horse underneath him stopped as if jerked. Chill steel kissed his skin. The rag ties that secured him abruptly parted, and someone's brutal, intolerant push spilled him head over heels in a drift.

  Fionn Areth plowed upright, coughing up snowflakes. The gift of erect posture provided no boon. A cloaked, portly figure observed without pity as his bashed head spun him dizzy with pain. The ignominy sparked thoughtless temper. Fionn Areth surged to his feet with
bunched fists. His bandaged right shoulder hampered his swing. He lashed out, regardless, driven wild by injured pride and confusion. His blow whisked through air. Though the body he swung at seemed rotund as Dakar's, endowed with the same rooted obstinacy, his left-handed counterpunch passed straight through. He connected with nothing but an aching, dire cold that made his bones sting like struck glass.

  'Do you know,' said the Sorcerer, Luhaine, offended, 'just how high the price of your rescue might come to be worth?'

  'Should I care?' Shivering, Fionn Areth glared back. The apparition was a sorcerer. Nothing alive could mistake such a presence. The spirit regarding the herder in return was not patient, his stature restrained to a self-contained power that would stand down bared steel on a glance. Hackled by his own reckless fear, Fionn Areth lifted his chin. 'If I was a Koriani pawn before this, what am I now, but a plaything held captive by the fell forces of darkness?'

  'You are much less than that,' Luhaine pronounced in frigid correction. 'Just how much less, I hope by Ath's mercy your family never finds out. The Crown Prince of Rathain might well die for his choice to indulge your adolescent ingratitude. If he does, this world could lose sunlight again without any chance of reprieve.'

  That statement snapped Dakar's complacency. 'Not Rockfell!' He shoved off the gelding that butted his chest, ice melt and snow-flakes snagged in his beard, and his anxiety suddenly piercing. 'Luhaine, don't say the wardspells holding the Mistwraith have somehow been thrown into jeopardy.'

  'The very truth.' Image though he was, Luhaine shared the gravity of the old, leaning marker stone crusted with lichens at his back. 'When the lane tide crests barely minutes from now, the recoil set loose by Morriel's upset will dissolve Rockfell's outer defense rings. I must be well away before then. No one else could be spared to stand guard when the wards in the shaft go unstable.'

  'No one?' Cracked to shrill disbelief, Dakar tugged his cloak off a thorn. 'Where's Asandir?' Rocked by the scope of unsaid implication, he advanced on the Sorcerer who faced him. 'Ath, your field strength is compromised. That's why you need me?'

  'To travel to Rockfell with all speed, yes,' Luhaine admitted. His focus upon Dakar stayed too acute to spare second thought for Fionn Areth. 'You do understand.'

  Dakar shook his head, bludgeoned to blunt terror. 'How I wish that I didn't.' He stamped his feet, fumbled the lead reins, and regarded the horses' trusting stance as though their placidity could soften his appalled disbelief. No such escape could negate the harsh truths. The defenses containing the Mistwraith were wrought to a strength born of frightening complexity. Their locked rings of power crossed on both sides of the veil. Such duality by nature required the skilled work of two Sorcerers: one in a stable state of free spirit, and one who still walked incarnate.

  'Asandir's beyond reach, attending the emergency containment of Eckracken's haunt.' Luhaine's agitation shook the capped snow off the megalith as he delivered the shattering setback, that Sethvir's active resource became all that bound five other deranged grimwards to stability. 'To safeguard Desh-thiere's prison, we are left with a last, very desperate expedient: to stand a spellbinder as placeholder for Kharadmon to act through.' A stilled silhouette against the storm that roared through the tops of the fir trees, he measured Dakar's pained suspension. 'Given your help, the wards over Rockfell might be fully restored. The Fellowship asks for the partnered possession of your body, loaned for our use in free will.'

  'Why not choose Verrain?' Dakar begged, tautly sober. He had witnessed the working when Asandir and Kharadmon had last sealed those dire defenses. Even the memory of what he had glimpsed sickened him to the bone. Those ranging vibrations were laid counter to spirit, counter to harmony, a dissonance coiled and barbed to revile every last linking facet of life. That cutting, mindless edge of bound chaos transcended the bounds of mortality; crossed the safe limits of solid existence to challenge the weave of creation.

  Luhaine's stillness affirmed the stark fact the Guardian of Mirthlvain could not be spared from his posted vigil at Methisle. Why else would the Fellowship countenance the expedient of leaving Arithon s'Ffalenn unprotected?

  'No one's watching the star wards, either,' Luhaine said, a bald-faced admission that finally imparted the shattering scope of the crisis. He was no willing messenger, to lay this crux upon Dakar's unprepared shoulders. Morriel's plots had brought desperate straits, and a peril beyond speech to encompass. The Fellowship lacked enough hands to avert the appalling cascade of fresh damages. 'Khadrim fly and kill in Tysan, as well.'

  'Oh, you have my cooperation.' Dakar burst out, bitter. 'That's given. I'll act before letting the Mistwraith escape. Who wouldn't, knowing the price of its capture?' The dread in him stemmed from the wider concern that his scant resources might prove inadequate.

  Luhaine gave such uncertainty short shrift. 'Believe it, those of us who have tuned Rockfell's wardings all suffer the selfsame doubts.'

  'That's consolation?' Dakar crowded into the warmth of the geldings, wishing their straightforward animal contact could lessen the chills that speared through him. Between the shrilling, furious gusts, and the shearing hiss of thick snowfall, he sensed the winding tension leading the advent of midnight. Lane forces flared and shimmered along the edge of peripheral vision. The Paravian marker stone cast a pallid corona that razed through the veil, and roused his awareness to mage-sight.

  With solstice tide imminent, the Fellowship Sorcerer's need to depart pitched his instructions to urgency. 'Go to Rockfell by land. Take the route through the passes. I will wait there, holding guard, and Kharadmon will join us on your arrival.'

  'What about Fionn Areth?' Unvarnished disgust for the herder's welfare the bone that stuck in the throat, Dakar added, 'I gave Arithon my word I'd look after him.'

  Luhaine's cast image reflected no change, and yet his icy regard encompassed the Araethurian still standing stiff witness to what would seem an incomprehensible conversation. Too rushed to scold through a long-winded lecture, the Sorcerer made disposition. 'You are perfectly free to do as you please. Fare on with Dakar, and he'll keep his promise to Rathain's prince. Provided the problem at Rockfell can be solved, you can travel downriver to Ship's Port next spring, and reach your safe harbor at Alestron. Or you can set off alone, Fionn Areth. Should you take your own path, mind well: you will be disowned. Your liege's protection from that hour will become forfeit under my Fellowship's auspices. My personal seal will ensure the Teir's'Ffalenn never sees you this side of the Wheel. The sorry plight the Koriathain have set on you becomes yours alone to resolve. I'll take the onus of breaking the word of your death to Prince Arithon when the time comes.'

  'That will tear out his heart!' Dakar objected.

  But Luhaine had no mercy to spare for anything past bare necessity. 'Athera can withstand his Grace of Rathain's broken heart. She will never again bear the risk of his compromised safety. Remember that, herder. Prince Arithon's life is a singular thread that can bind this world back to balance. Why else should Morriel design for his capture, or Desh-thiere wreak ill for his downfall?'

  'He's a criminal,' Fionn Areth insisted, but softly, as though the ultimatum thrown to his discretion had sown a seed of uncertainty.

  'He's a prince under curse by a Mistwraith to kill, or be killed in turn, by his half brother.' Luhaine set the stress on each syllable for emphasis. 'All of his acts, then and now, must be counted a desperate act of survival.'

  'Half brother?' Fionn Areth glowered at the Sorcerer, confused. 'I never heard tell of any half brother.'

  'Lysaer s'Ilessid shared the same mother,' Dakar explained, brutally short. He could not ignore the spiraling build of the lane forces prickling his nape. 'You know nothing at all, goatherd. Only the lies the Alliance presents to make puppets out of the ignorant.' To Luhaine, he added, 'Go. Now! You must. The young man will choose. I'll meet you at Rockfell as soon as I may by crossing the peaks of the Skyshiels.'

  'Fare swiftly and well.' Luhaine's image dispersed, le
aving darkness and snow, and the bite of a wind sharpened with winter misery.

  The horses milled, restless. Their animal instinct sensed the tightening coil of the earth's rising magnetics. Dakar firmed his grasp on their lead reins, grateful a Sorcerer's wisdom had guided them to the sole nexus of balance within a radius of twelve leagues. The Paravian marker had been carved and set by the centaur guardians to channel the flux of the mysteries. Jaelot's townbred crofters had long since forgotten its meaningful connection. After five centuries of their unschooled husbandry, the network that once spanned the land like a star grid no longer remained intact. Patriarch trees had died or been cut, replaced by plowed fields and fenced pastures. Fixed stone was, thankfully, less volatile. Even marred in their settings, such ancient markers retained their dedicated purpose.

  To Fionn Areth, who might ask probing questions, or even renew pointless argument, the Mad Prophet gave stiff advice. 'I don't care if you ever believe another damned thing that I say. Just pay heed to this: lane surge is in progress. Any element in disharmony caught in its path is going to get flung straight to chaos. If you don't like that thought, put both hands on that marker stone. Then at risk of your sanity, stay put! When everything settles, you'll wait for my word. I'll say when it's safe to let go.'

  For a miracle, Fionn Areth seemed mollified. He assumed his place at the stone without protest, and even lent help with the horses. For a miracle, the two geldings lowered their high-flung heads. Calmed by his singsong Araethurian dialect, they eased off the lead reins that threatened to separate both of the Mad Prophet's shoulders.

  Dakar had no chance to express his thanks. Across half the world, the sun's disk reached the zenith. Midnight arrived at Jaelot's old focus, and the last solstice lane tide peaked in a rush down the conduit of the sixth lane.

  The channels through latitude wakened and sang, tuned into resonance by a masterbard's skills, engaged twenty-four hours earlier. The Paravian marker stone roused to the primal cry of the mysteries. Beneath the sweating palms of two humans, the torrent rekindled to fire the land's bounty licked through its interlaced carvings. As had happened for untold thousands of years, the quartz-ingrained granite resounded. The Mad Prophet was prepared as mortal flesh could be, alive as a boy when the Paravian rituals were still given active practice.