'What have you done?' Luhaine repeated, though the gargoyle cast back a statue's blank silence, and in truth, he already knew, Clear as a spearcast, Arithon's flight would have led to the entrance to Kewar Tunnel.
'Mercy, brave heart,' Luhaine whispered, as wild with sorrow as the keening gusts that lashed over Rockfell Peak. 'Bitter, the hour that brought your Grace to shoulder Kamridian's trial, and woe to this land should your spirit fall short in the course of that sorrowful testing.'
As always with Davien, ethics tangled with necessity, until even the enlightened among Ath's adepts might be sorely beset to discern the fine line between meddling choice and the justifiable dictates of crisis.
Arithon struggling to survive passage through Kewar bespoke a crushing potential for tragedy; but against threat from Marak, Athera would require all the help and straw hope the Fellowship could wring in support.
'Fires of eternity!' Luhaine hissed in vexation as his presence shot aloft and veered west to resume his deferred passage to Althain Tower. 'Let me not be the one sent to tell the Mad Prophet if Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn fails his oathsworn charge to survive.'
* * *
Hound by the coils of Kewar's forged spells, Arithon mustered frayed nerves and committed another step forward. Behind, sprawled the corpses of Baiyen Gap, and the unburied dead from Jaelot and Darkling dispatched to their doom in Daon Ramon. He had shared their suffering struggle for last breath; had wept, as their widows in mourning. Exhaustion remained, a shuddering weakness that burdened his frame like dipped lead.
Ahead, he still faced the last battle by the Aiyenne, and the fates meted out to Lysaer's sunwheel companies as they closed to engage Jieret's war band. A few hundred casualties, when laid against the slain thousands undone at Tal Quorin and Dier Kenton Vale. Yet in Kewar, no loss by armed conflict was a pittance. Each bereaved mother and each orphaned child scored the heart with their signal patterns of tragedy.
Such sorrows could be endured, mourned in suffering, and finally atoned by forgiveness.
Less easy to reconcile were those clanborn fallen who had perished to break the Alliance's cordon. Braced for the savage toll wrought by their sacrifice, Arithon stepped into the maelstrom, and died.
He knew the eviscerating rip of the spring trap, and the mangling crunch of the deadfall. He was a horse, tumbling head over heels, a snapped foreleg snagged in a noose. He died of arrows, of quarrels, of cold steel thrust deep into shuddering flesh. He was the hot spurt of blood on cold ground in the screaming melee of battle. Clanblood or townborn, the battering shock brought an agony alike to the very bone. Arithon died, of a warhorse's battering hooves, of an axe cut that severed his spine. He fell, weeping, beside slaughtered comrades at arms, his croaked prayers to the Light left unanswered.
He was Eafinn's son, shivering out life facedown in a snowdrift, He was Theirid, lying maimed in thick brush, screaming to draw fire from enemy bowmen to spare other men pinned in a thicket, He was an officer from Etarra, choking on vomit in the thorny waste of a gulch. He was a widow sobbing in a sad, empty bed, then a child scourged by nightmares no pension in gold could restore a lost father to assuage.
Another step, his foot dragging with unreconciled dread! Arithon encountered Earl Jieret's untenable conflict. He saw mage-sighted conscience clash with brute will, then ached with remorse as an unfailing heart shirked the charge of a bloodborn heritage.
'Oh, my brother, forgive!' Arithon's apology scattered echoel down the confines of Kewar Tunnel. Yet the sorrows of Jieret's shame did not lift. The caithdein's dark destiny stayed excised to exposure by Davien's entangling spells.
Arithon shivered, arms wrapped to his chest, for an act beyond consolation. 'My brother, you have suffered my sorrow at Minderl Bay, but with no stalwart hand to uplift you.'
Unspoken, the useless, hagridden protest: that the man standing vigil beside the ninth acorn before Lysaer's advancing vanguard should have been Braggen, well hardened for war by his festering grudges, and unburdened by initiate mage talent.
The maze ceded Arithon no ground for the fact his tailor made orders had been spurned; that Earl Jieret had shouldered his fate by free choice, against the will of his crown prince, The Teir's'Valerient had already passed over Fate's Wheel. Now bound to stand as unreconciled witness, Arithon brazened through shrinking cowardice, one shaken step after the next.
Reliving burgeoned in lurid detail, and a crossbow bolt flew, striking Jieret high in the shoulder. A triumphant Sulfin Evend strode forward to claim the trophy brought down by his marks manship. Disregarding the fallen caithdein's croaked warning, he ground the frail shell of an acorn under his contemptuous heel. The shards scattered. A string of ciphered spellcraft unreeled and spread with the winnowing wind.
Jieret's full-throated howl of regret could not stay that unleashed construct.
Nor could Arithon's remorse, as spellbound observer, do aught to reverse the course of determined consequence. The diabolical impact of his own design bloomed over that sere, winter hilltop. Woven shadow and illusion invoked Desh-thiere's curse, whipping Lysaer to berserk ferocity.
Earth and sky rained white fire. The percussive blast of uncounted levin bolts sheared over the hapless landscape. The strikes hammered down, on and on in blind reflex, but brought no consummate release. Geas-roused passion would not answer to reason. No power of light could defeat the wild wind, or the blighting provocation of set banespells. The Narms field troop who marched on the strength of their faith were immolated where they stood. Arithon learned their Names to the last man, his flesh razed from bone in a shrieking deluge of agony.
Bound to their pain, Davien's Maze saw him burn through three hundred hideous deaths. In manyfold horror, he felt crisped skin blister, then blacken to paper, and peel. He could not weep through eyes torched to carbon. A throat choked by flames could not scream. Nor was the scope of his suffering confined to the late of two-legged humanity: Arithon was the brush, razed stem from root. He was the hare, and the deer, and the field mouse, torched as he foraged the sere thickets. Lashed by the terrible, indiscriminate ruin released by the sweep of his strategy, he endured measure for measure in destruction. No mercy was shown as Jieret's chains of rote spellcraft reaped a swath of wholesale slaughter.
Graven in mind and flesh, Arithon bore the furious brunt. As His half brother's attack recoiled in blind fury through the acorns imbued as his fetch, he was old stone, heat-split as the snowdrifts boiled skyward. He was the tortured disharmony of the land, raped by manic rage and the hostile misuse of the elements.
No recourse, for guilt, but to keep moving forward. Arithon lost count of his stumbling steps. Aware he must walk the full course of the holocaust, he held no saving hope. Dogged endurance must see him through. Lysaer's rampant fury added peril to hardship. As the wakened response of the curse clawed his mind, Arithon called upon mage-trained resilience and raised music to stave off insanity.
Each note that he forged was a victory snatched from the closing jaws of disaster. Through grief, through sorrow, through the horrors of scourged flesh, he must frame without flaw the ethereal chords extracted from Alithiel's grand harmony. The toll of such effort came at punishing cost as the screams of the dying and the moans of the burned unstrung concentration and poise. Time and again, he was forced to start over. In lockstep perfection, with no drift in tone, he reordered his mind and raised the exalted harmonics that dissolved Desh-thiere's geas-bent drive to shed blood.
The music itself laid him open. The suspension of unbridled joy shattered thought, set against a raw backdrop of violence. Arithon made his way, scorched to branding remorse for the choices his botched fate had presented. Savaged by inconsolable grief, he fought to bridge shattering dichotomy: while binding his cognizant mind to the sound that had seeded the glory of creation, he died: over and over, he fell, screaming other men's curses amid the base terror of war. Star song woke the earth. He was the lane energies flowing through boulder-strewn slopes, the spun force of magne
tics ripped out of true by hatred and ruin and strife. Remanded to peace by the keys of rebirth, the torn heart could not be reconciled. Let blood stamped the shadow of desecration on a land once cherished by unsullied majesty: the frost-silver grace of Riathan Paravians, running wild under spring moonlight.
Another step; another; Arithon pressed onward. Each cycle of death exacted its forced reckoning, until the one wound that could not be absolved. Kewar's maze forgave no affliction. As the last victim's suffering faded behind, the gnawing ache of the crossbow bolt remained sunk in Earl Jieret's shoulder.
'Mercy on us both, how did you survive?' Raked over the coals of his unresolved sorrow, Arithon saw Lysaer's Lord Commander crest the hilltop and bind Rathain's caithdein captive.
'Jieret, no! You can't have lived through this, not for me, not even for the sake of the realm!' Arithon braced himself, shaken, against Kewar's unyielding stone wall. The appalling penalty set on the next step hurt too much for his bruised heart to bear.
Memory blazed back, a lacerating truth drawn from one of Jieret's past arguments. 'What is left in this world after us, liege, but earth and sky, each bearing the imprint of our living stewardship?' The words brought fresh pain, graven with the straightforward affection the clan chieftain had shown during life. 'The legacy of your lineage must survive all our choices, and all of our failings, your Grace.'
Another fragment of recall surfaced, as sharply damning, from another dispute with Erlien s'Taleyn, affirmed as the steward of Shand. 'That's how it's given for caithdeinen to test princes . . .'
Arithon finished the stricture aloud: 'to lay down their lives, if need be.' First Steiven, now Jieret; wrenched to bristling abhorrence by his ties to royal birthright, the Master of Shadow reeled onward. Yet no cry of scorched conscience stayed the brutal reliving as the Alliance Lord Commander dragged his injured clan captive downslope.
Spurred on by his outrage, Arithon stayed upright. 'There are limits!' he accosted the spell-charged air. Yet if Davien was listening as hidden observer, no plea for succor was granted. The vision unreeled, showing Jieret's doomed effort to drive Lysaer and Sulfin Evend to disparity. Rathain's crown prince wept. Doubled with dry heaves, he watched Steiven's grown son lose his bold tongue to the knife.
'Avert and forgive!' Arithon gasped in wracked protest. The injustice stopped thought, that the maze shaped this trial with invasive disregard for an intensely proud man's guarded privacy. No worse humiliation could have befallen Earl Jieret. He would never have condoned such a legacy as this: a prince loved as a brother forced to experience the sordid ignominy of his suffering.
'Enough!' shouted Arithon. Surely, the Betrayer's shackling spells weighted the scales too severely. Sworn as Rathain's protector, a crown prince must answer for the welfare of his pledged liegemen. Yet the inhumane handling that brought Jieret's death had occurred outside choice, beyond reach of his royal justice.
Unrelenting, the bared truth rescinded his plea. At next step, Arithon received the heartsore reminder he had abdicated his will without reservation to a caithdein bound to serve the inflexible dictates of duty. Stumbling to meet the array of strict consequence, Arithon cursed the black hour his spirit had been drawn from his flesh and merged with the spelled steel of a sword blade.
He could beg no mercy for the whiplash reprisal bought by that act of submission. The sole route to survival must scribe its straight course through the nightmare of Jieret's captivity.
Arithon clenched his jaw, hackled to revolt. In self-honest reflection, he understood that his willed choice on the staircase had framed his consent to this challenge. Yet to endure the low drama of a friend's degradation abrogated the fabric of human decency. Warned that his path through the maze could not deviate, Arithon poised his inner awareness and reached, sounding the well of spell-textured silence above the range of natural hearing. He strained every limited resource of talent, seeking to access the vortex that aligned his course to the stream of past conflict.
He heard nothing; felt nothing; encountered no more than the mirrored image of himself, entrapped by the riddle engraved on the black-stone portal that admitted him. The enemy before him, behind, and against him was still himself, and no other.
Impelled by the blaze of a scorching, bleak rage, Arithon rammed his way forward. Helpless to intervene, he watched Jieret's flesh become cosseted coin, held for barter to draw in the proud clanborn. Brutality made a mockery of honor and cause. The price paid to enact a royal escape surely came at too high a cost.
'Was the future worth this?' Arithon gasped, as vision showed his caithdein dragged like stunned game off the back of a steaming horse. He shared shaming pain, every futile recrimination as Deshir's clan chieftain was installed in drugged stupor within the Alliance campaign tent. 'Would you have heeded my pleas by the Aiyenne if you knew you'd be trapped for a public maiming?'
For answer, a raven's spread wings rustled out of deep darkness. The tips of her primaries flicked Arithon's cheek as she passed to a breeze of sliced air. The sealed deeps of Kewar roiled like smoke in her wake as her passage tore open the gateway to Ath's greater mystery.
Arithon staggered, whirled into the exalted perception of mage-sight.
Expanded sensation unleashed his awareness. More than just light, he experienced heightened sensitivity to sound. The vast chord that arose from the heart of the mysteries came alive to his bardic discipline. He saw form rewoven as ribbons of light, orchestrated by waves of grand harmony. Stone yielded its secretive dance of wild energies. Arithon felt reborn into wonder, the reforged access to his lost mastery a gift that restored balanced strength.
Drawn past the veil by the guidance of the raven soaring ahead on stretched wings, the Master of Shadow understood his fresh insight could be nothing else but shared dream, derived from Jieret's past journey. This uplifting spiral of wild talent arose from the spontaneous unfolding of the caithdein's innate gift of Sight.
Once, before this, Arithon had perceived the land through a Sorcerer's eyes. A brief bond of shared resonance had let him track Asandir's refined survey of Daon Ramon Barrens. That reaching glimpse had shown rolling hills wrought in the silver-foil tracks of wild lane flux, the ephemeral fires that licked each swept summit underscored by the shining patience of bedrock. Deft touch had tracked the underground water seeping through the hidden strata of the earth, with the upwelling springs of the virgin flows like glistening spills of jet glass. The beauty had surpassed any language to describe. Arithon had traced the spirit-light prints of the fox, and known the huddled sleep of the hare. His mind had danced with the sylph currents of the wind, shuttled across by the combed streamers inscribed by the hunting flight of an owl.
Yet where his snatched insight from Asandir had parted the gateway to wonders, the gift of a raven and Earl Jieret's unvanquished determination carried the questing mind farther. Arithon was shown unity beyond human life, his crown prince's oath interlaced through his being like a webwork of sparkling cord.
He was the land, and the land was himself.
Individual as one wrapped thread in a tapestry, Arithon was aware of himself in the whole, and of Jieret's being, inseparably braided within the breathing miracle of his life: a joining of purpose made out of love, before oathsworn duty or loyalty. The clean grace of that partnership, shown in shining balance against the grand arc of creation, broke Arithon's rage, left him weeping. Brought to his knees by stunned awe and amazement, he knew a joy that shattered all concept of beauty; felt the limited bounds of mortality burn away, reforged in the fires of primal song and its higher octaves of infinite light.
Shown the unsullied splendor of Athera's existence, the glory of myriad consciousness interwoven on the tireless loom of the elements, a man who was crown prince could but bow his head and give way in exalted surrender.
Even blinded, even maimed for the cause of Lysaer's alliance, Earl Jieret had not been diminished as a man in any fashion that mattered. Beyond earthly life and transient flesh, his be
ing shone untouched, richly vibrant with the radiance of his character. The resented weight of a burdensome guilt that Arithon had begged not to carry lifted away like a mist.
'I forgive you the choice to change places with Braggen,' he whispered, each word delivered with tears of unadulterated sincerity. The release set him free. Braced for wracking loss, expecting the barren stone passage of Kewar Tunnel, Arithon dragged himself back to his feet and assayed another step forward.
Yet the vision that bared the true glory of the land did not dissolve at his back. Instead, the starred flow of the lane's pulse waxed brighter, raised to untamed exaltation. The rainbow shimmer shot through his reliving, transcending the thresholds of sound and light. The inevitable, plunging fall into bloodshed came presaged by refigured horror, as the intertwined ribbons of conscious life shivered to the blast of a war horn, mustering men to take arms.
'No!' Arithon slammed short, reviled by the lash of assaulted instinct. He refused the desecration, a clear-cut violation of Rathain's sacred balance that demanded a crown prince's appeal for redress. 'No more killing in my name, or for the sake of the old, feuding hatreds!'
Yet where spoken words could do nothing to heal the festering wounds of past conflict, Earl Jieret's freed spirit could act on the strength of his unvanquished free will. His courageous triumph would not go unsung, or become lost to the annals of history: for the act of humility that had admitted acceptance of his sorry part in the sacrifice, Arithon s'Ffalenn was granted the gift of observing his liegeman's last deed.
The land's tapestry blazed, raised and wakened by command of Jieret's empowered signature. His voice was the self-aware cry of his Name, shaped as a shout against silence. The sound reverberated through sky and earth, loud and full with the reclaimed resonance of a being whose vision discerned his ancestral ties to the chord of Ath's infinite creation.