TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  No time to prepare. He dared not take pause to review his tight bindings, or test them for deadly mistakes. Jostled and pinched by imploring fingers, pursued by the wail of the damned, Arithon braced his beleaguered stance. He gasped out a breathless apology to Elaira, for the chance his attempt might buy failure. Then he enabled the last rune and tripped the release, unleashing a primal unbinding.

  A roaring wind assaulted his ears. Sound exploded to pealing thunder. The flesh-and-blood specters surrounding him frayed into nothing, not real, their blemished bodies spun from who knew what arena of unconscious nightmare. Yet the forces his stopgap desperation had loosed did not subside to quiescence. The fires of summary annihilation never paused. Voracious, lent recombinant fuel by wild magic, they raged on and unstrung the structural stone supporting Arithon's feet. He cried out as he tumbled, ripped to awed incredulity. All that he sensed had been nothing else but another spelled layer of the maze. Davien's craft had encompassed an artistry that ran outside the pale of natural limitation. Nowhere had Arithon encountered an illusion that could replicate stone firm enough to support moving weight. Spinning in free-fall disorientation, he shrank to imagine the enormity of his challenge, or the wrath of the snake whose tail he had tweaked with such obstinate effrontery.

  Yet Kewar's creator became a moot threat if he fell as the victim of his own countermeasure. Around him, the edifice of Davien's skilled conjury continued to whirl into discontinuity. The maelstrom battered mind and flesh with a fury that threatened dismemberment. No solidity remained, anywhere, no fixed point upon which to orient. Arithon found himself at a loss. He could have unknowingly opened a pit between dimensional reality. No sense of gravity supported him. The explosion of chaos that savaged his awareness adhered to no pattern or law.

  He spun, stormed by kaleidoscopic turmoil. To grapple the incomprehensible mass was to risk being shredded to insanity. Shadow would no longer shape to his bidding. Mage-sight was snagged to distortion. No stay of reason could order the flood of bone-hurting, dissonant sound. Arithon grasped in vain for the discipline to steady his ragged breath. Random forces pinned him under assault. Within seconds the threads of his self-awareness became stretched to the verge of snapping. He battled the morass, sought to find his way back to safe refuge inside of himself. The explosive dissolution frustrated his effort to restore his core of identity. Hurled beyond reason, he lacked proper grounding to reestablish a separate awareness.

  Every protection instilled by trained reflex seemed utterly blasted away. He had lost all the requisite ties to sensation that maintained his housing of flesh. A mote in a torrent, he would be swept away, flesh and bone razed to final destruction.

  Denied other recourse, whirled past reach of help, Arithon decided to sing.

  Music had thrown back incoherence, before. The living force of a masterbard's art could break fights, even settle the raging insanity of mob violence driven to riot. Arithon fused his art to the scattered threads of his cognizance, found and formed the imperative notes to forge peace. He stretched past his limit, made his Named voice the honed blade of his naked desire. His straits were desperate. The measured progression of tempo became his last hope to restore the reflex that governed his breathing. The melody he built was an ancient Paravian round, severe in simplicity, five spare lines composed with a consummate, lyrical purity. Note for note, the innate balance of melody described the antithesis of disorder. Arithon matched breath and heartbeat to music, retiming the shattered seat of his being to the strict dictates of pitch and timing. He persisted, added refinement, until he was the song, and the song became the ruled line affirming existence. Whole in himself, but lost in the infinite, he had nowhere else left to turn. He would inevitably tire. No matter how determined, the singing must falter and diffuse, leaving his imperiled consciousness open to invasion.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn rejected defeat. He mustered his resource with adamant patience. Walking the knife edge of grim desperation, he delved into his talent, spinning the web of his dreams into an artistry welded beyond compromise. From self-willed authority, he shaped his insistent command, that his surroundings submit to his cadence. He grappled with voice, shading tone with emotion. He subjugated uncertainty. On the memory of the centaur guardian's love, he denied fallibility, then uplifted the dragging pull of the dark with the fires of clear inspiration. He tamed light by harmonics, steered dissonance to resonance. Line by line, he imposed his masterful will. Note for note, he bound the unleashed energies of Davien's Maze to replicate the multiple parts of the round.

  The harshness became tempered. The untenable, nerve-rasping wall of raw sound yielded to softening, then gentled. Sweet clarity emerged as pure, rounded tones that converged to the dictates of harmony. Arithon sang louder, notes that soared and dipped like a needle through cloth, quilting the unmoored forces of chaos into the wheeling dynamics of his melody. Stepping through measure for overlaid measure, he augmented the range with his mind. He reforged random motion into burning chords that danced to his bard's ear for subtlety.

  In time, five-part harmony soared and took flight, tight as plaited gold through the misaligned shards of rushing noise and burst rainbows.

  Arithon wove the grand cipher of peace. Casting off sound as though song were a lifeline, he extended the dictates of self-imposed discipline to the shapeless morass surrounding him. Riotous color gradually ceased its disjointed gyration. Sound spiked the first suggestion of form, like ring ripples caused by a pebble cast into a tempest. Arithon bound the circle. He sang the center point to secure his anchor. To the burgeoning dance of orchestrated sound, he reforged dimensional geometry. Step by slow step, each stage affirmed by the templates of established harmony, he laid down the cardinal cross to restore the foundational stance of the elements.

  Arithon smoothed out the last whine of dissonance. He ordered the final bleeding breach that blurred color out of alignment. As the power of his art built toward a crescendo of scintillant harmony, he stumbled, restored to himself, but undone at last by exhaustion.

  He had burned himself dry, given until no reserve remained for recovery. Weak as a babe, he sprawled headlong amid the consummate form of his construct. As song died on his final wisp of spent breath, the pattern held strong, self-sustaining. Above him, within him, as solid structure beneath, the beauty he had spun from raw chaos crested and achieved the rarefied pinnacle of balance.

  The thundering force of its presence stopped thought. For one awestruck instant before strength gave out, Arithon laughed, consumed by ecstatic victory.

  Then his last spark of consciousness flickered and went dark. Oblivion swallowed the undying perfection he had plucked from the weave of Davien's perilous artistry.

  Spring 5670

  Match

  Awareness returned, a slow flooding warmth with no harsh edge of stone-enclosed darkness. Yet the habit of caution became ingrained reflex when a man had been hunted too long. Arithon s'Ffalenn opened his eyes to a tapestry hanging. The intricate, stitched floss showed a forest just turned, twigs and branches alive with diminutive sparrows and the dusky brown plumage of thrushes. Candles burned. Their mellow light glazed a knot carpet patterned with stylized beasts sewn in the colors of autumn. Several bronze-studded chests lined the wall past his feet. Wrapped in a state of intoxicating lassitude, Arithon noted he lay on a couch. Piled down pillows supported his head, their loomed softness unreal after unending months of open-air flight and privation. The coverlet over his body was wool, expensively lined with raw silk.

  The cosseting folds wrapped his limbs like a dream of long-forgotten comfort. Arithon languished. His drifting thoughts still rang with the echoes of the grand harmony he had laid down to dispel his unbinding conjury. Restfully settled, he had no wish to move. The imperative ache of desire all but broke him, to cling to the beguiling sensations of peace without concern for the danger. The prod of wise caution seemed unwontedly cruel. Too much to expect, that such quiet could last; this was Davien's Maze. Safer to
roust slackened faculties and begin the necessary task of unmasking the thorns behind this cocooning pitfall of luxury.

  Someone had apparently taken his clothes. His sword had gone missing with them. Arithon found it an effort to care, far less to muster suitable concern. Exhaustion waylaid him. Heavy eyelids slid closed. If the cozy security he now experienced shaped another of Davien's traps, then he must regretfully succumb. He lacked the active will to resist the battering demands of more hardship.

  Someone's baritone chuckle answered his thought.

  Slapped alert by the sense of an alien presence hanging poised at the edge of awareness, Arithon shot tense. A firm hand restrained his sharp thrust to sit upright.

  A male voice of polite, velvet consonants observed, 'Your royal Grace, you have smashed through every illusion Kewar's maze has to offer.'

  The touch lifted and freed him. The speaker resumed, his tone of asperity shaded toward a derisively faint self-amusement. 'If you know peace, the reprieve has been earned. My works never foster the illusion of triumph, only the deserving reality.'

  Arithon turned his head, awake now, all his languid ease ripped away. With guarded alarm, he surveyed the being who sat, stilled as forest oak, on a felt hassock next to the couch. The face revealed in the fallow flood of the candle showed mild reproof, directed inward as well as toward the wayward royalty installed amid cushions and blankets. Russet hair salted white at the temples lay swept back, tumbling in roguish disorder from the Sorcerer's broad, wedged forehead. The nose was narrow and straight, flaring into the cleft creases that framed an inquisitive mouth. The chin was clean-shaven, the lean jaw, ascetic. The deep-set, dark eyes regarding him back stayed well veiled in cynical shadow.

  'You are Davien,' Arithon tested at length.

  The Sorcerer raised his brows with corrosive interest. 'Has my portrait been removed from Althain Tower?'

  Arithon met and held that striking, sharp stare. 'No,' he said carefully. 'But when your name was spoken, the reference held you as discorporate.'

  The artisan's hand in Davien's lap recoiled into a fist. 'So I was,', he admitted, his short bark of laughter alive with private amusement. Just as suddenly, he was struck thoughtfully sober. 'Yet who can set limits on determined creativity? I disliked the state intensely.'

  He surged to his feet, his charged carriage spilling a tiger's fraught energy. The clothing he wore suggested the same, hose and doublet of walnut-dyed wool neatly bordered with ribbons of gold-and-black interlace. His waxed, outdoor boots had linings of sable, turned back in neat cuffs at mid-calf. As though circling wit goaded him to lithe movement, the Sorcerer paced end to end on the carpet.

  Arithon looked on with stalking fascination. Here was none of the self-contained power of Asandir; not the wise patience of Traithe, or the vast, ranging mind behind Sethvir's daft air of distraction. Davien seemed a force of spring-wound energy. His neat, mercuric steps reflected a mind that would question, and question again, discontent with the static answer. Arithon wondered whether the isolate centuries of retreat stemmed from deep-seated bitterness.

  At that musing thought, Davien stopped and spun. 'I bear my colleagues no malice for what happened.' His lined features alight with innuendo and a paradox whetted thin as a razor, he shrugged. 'Quite the contrary, though I maintain that I broke the monarchies for a sound cause. Since time will stand as my final spokesman, I choose to reside here in Kewar.'

  Arithon pushed erect and swung naked feet to the floor in piqued effort to break the Sorcerer's fixation with the bent of his private thoughts. Davien's inquisitive gaze tracked each move as he stood. No objection arose as he retained the coverlet, its masking warmth mantled over bare shoulders, the heaped folds at the hem draping the scars that disfigured his ankles.

  'I have been watching,' the Sorcerer observed. 'You make the mighty of Athera more than a shade nervous. You and I are a bit too much alike to give anyone full peace of mind.'

  This time, Arithon himself flashed the smile of provocative insolence. 'So I was told by Dakar.' After the shortest, agreeable pause, he added, 'The comment was meant as an insult.'

  'Is that so?' Davien snatched one of the pillows aside and sat on the vacated couch. He did not laugh this time as his hands came to rest, the long fingers adorned with a cast-silver ring nested into his lap. 'Insults show truth, more often than not.'

  'And flattery covers the deficit?' Arithon did not disparage by qualifying his question, but waited, arms folded, the coverlet spilled to the floor in the unwitting majesty of a high king robed in state, arisen to administer crown justice. Davien's quick intelligence could be trusted to know he referred to the maze, and the delicate issue of whether his late experience had been a cleverly wrought fabrication.

  Davien's stillness turned suddenly profound. 'Did you look at your hand?'

  'Healed,' Arithon allowed. He had already tested the scar. No marring damage stiffened the tendons; his skill on the lyranthe would stay unimpaired. Yet whether the Sorcerer had noticed how narrowly close that discovery had brought him to weeping, no sign showed. 'The centaur's touch perhaps wrought a miracle?'

  'How fast you are to belittle yourself.' Davien's accusation was not made without kindness. His dark eyes stayed candid as he continued to measure the wary survivor sharply drawn against the flame hues of the tapestry before him. 'Everything you experienced was real. All of the miracles were wrought by your merit. When you have privacy, check for yourself. Your access to talent is not spun from a dream. Can you stand in my presence and not trust that?'

  'I could sit, fully clothed, with my weapons returned,' Arithon remarked, too spent to shepherd his temper. 'Is this awkward? Unlike Kamridian, I refused the convenience of death?'

  Davien's spare features showed evil delight. 'Do you know you are the only man, ever, to master the first trial of the maze who had the harebrained audacity to challenge me? You ask, is this awkward? For the Fellowship and the Koriani Order, the issue's beyond any doubt. For myself, I would sit entranced at your feet, sword or not. I have full respect for your outrage, Teir's'Ffalenn. It's your talent that's frankly unsettling.'

  Arithon lost his breath, taken aback.

  The Sorcerer's laughter rang out, fluid as springwater tumbling through sudden sunlight. 'Oh, my wild falcon! Can you fly, and not know? You are probably the most gifted individual ever to try the influence of the Fellowship of Seven.' Perversely confounding that blistering sarcasm, Davien raised a congenial foot and slid the felt hassock toward Arithon.

  'How does that signify?' Far from relaxed, Rathain's prince conceded and sat.

  'To the Fellowship? Endowed as you are, they would never dare to approach you. Dakar's no liability. Despite his excesses, his idiot vices, and his ungovernable passions, he will achieve the stability of diamond, though a thousand years may be needful to mold him.' At once gauntly brooding against rich autumn hangings and the shine of bronze fittings on the clothes chests, Davien propped his chin on his thumb. 'Ah, but you! Yours, the one quality no teaching can bridle. Men call it arrogance. Koriathain see pride. But a Sorcerer looks deeper. What you have is an unequivocal self-honesty rooted in a poet's perception.'

  Arithon tightened his death grip on the blanket, flushed to find himself under dissecting discussion.

  'My revenge. You delivered your satire, first,' Davien stated, artfully bland. 'Since you can't fight me naked, I'll say what I think.' His regard seemed to savor his victim's red face as he resumed his prodding discourse. 'Given certain conditions, such developed sensitivity could subject you to pressures no human being should be asked to endure. You would react exactly as you did today, and bid Dharkaron Avenger's Five Horses take the hindmost. No power on Athera could sway your course. In violation of the Law of the Major Balance, you could only be killed, which sets the stinging thorn in the rose. To marry you with wisdom, you would have to be inflamed until you mastered your rebellion. The Fellowship would never cozen such risk. They can't. The brute conflict might shatter th
e compact.'

  Arithon cut through the diversionary rhetoric. 'Then as Teir's'Ffalenn pressured to accept the high kingship, surely the explosion would be contained. I can't smash the world's order while burdened under crown duties. Your impressive list of my threatening tendencies ought to be kept neatly hobbled.'

  Davien's assault remained bluntly direct. 'My colleagues would say you owe a debt to Rathain.'

  Arithon dropped the pretense of light sarcasm. 'And you think otherwise?'

  'Well, you are the issue of generations bred to rule.' Amid the unrippled fall of the tapestry, the tiny songbirds seemed trapped, unable to break from their vulnerable, perched stillness and explode into lifesaving flight. The Sorcerer seated before them seemed more like the wolf than the fox. 'Deny that you bear the stamp of Torbrand's lineage, or that the gifts of s'Ahelas were not passed on at birth, through the errant grace of your mother.'

  Arithon swore, the fire that spiked his glance a dire warning. 'Is this why you lured me? To settle the unfinished work of the rebellion, here and now? Then try. I'd fight you naked. I've never liked being the target for other people's principles. You could have predicted I'd resist to the end.'

  Pillows went flying as the Sorcerer drove back to his feet in nettled amazement. 'Has the whole world gone mad? What do you and Luhaine believe? That I would bloody my hands as your self-appointed executioner?'

  Perhaps not the wolf; Arithon shivered, touched by a frisson of unwonted empathy through the lens of his Masterbard's gift. Sensitivity tossed him the sharp revelation, that small birds were caged for their inventive singing. A Sorcerer of peerless genius and vivid creativity had passed hundreds of years, sealed into a self-imposed isolation under the roots of the mountains. His motives would not be simplistic.