TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (5 page)

She had not righted one shred of the balance. Arithon s'Ffalenn still ran free. Ever and always, the cipher that damned was her drawing fascination for his royal gift of compassion. His triumph had fashioned her insufferable downfall, and
oh, she knew,
might easily do so again.

Lirenda clamped her fists in frustration. She was condemned to mediocrity, but scarcely helpless. If Arithon's wretched play on her heartstrings had destroyed her brilliant career, she had a lifetime left to exact her retaliation.

Two steps, three, her skirts snagging cobwebs from the staves of half-rotted wine tuns, Lirenda paused between strides. Miracle of miracles, amid avalanching setbacks, the tools for her use already lay in her hand.

Earlier that day, she had imprinted a sigil of command on the captain of Jaelot's garrison when the man's gruff competence had to be steered clear of her delicately plotted affairs. Yet the construct wrought at need on the street still remained fully active. Renew that one cipher of manipulative control, then key it to a geas of obsession, and Lirenda could draw the mayor's captain on puppet strings. Add a tangling net of spells, and Prince Arithon's flight could be hounded beyond reason and sanity.

The s'Ffalenn bastard would suffer for the snatched kiss that had condemned her to final failure. Lirenda vowed to seal his demise. How easily she could make him the beset hare in the path of a bloodletting hunt.

The idea took firm shape. A warm thrill curled through the enchantress's black rage. 'Oh yes,
your royal Grace,
you'll pay well for your ill-gotten freedom.'

Lirenda began by inscribing eight ritual circles to cloak her act in deep secrecy. The craft she invoked must not perturb the lane flux. Like the spider who stole from a rival's web, she worked outside strictures that governed her trained use of power. Rage snapped all restraints. In furtive steps, she laid down the sigils which ensured that the backwash of shed resonance would be absorbed within her own body. A few days of sick weakness would be worth the satisfaction of seeing Arithon s'Ffalenn hunted down like a forest barbarian.

Protections in place, Lirenda knelt by the vat last used for Cadgia's scrying. Welded to the cause of unvarnished spite, she caught the silver chain and cleared her spell crystal from her high collar.

'An,'
she whispered, the Paravian rune for one, which opened the first stage of ritual. She traced the primary rune of binding over the membrane of ice on the water, then added in sequence the chained string of ciphers that claimed a man's will beneath the threshold of consciousness. A breath through her crystal infused her sketched symbols. The construct pulsed active, shedding harsh purple light that could burn to blindness the eyes of the careless. Drawing from the passionate well of her hatred, Lirenda
l
aid the grand patterning, the weave of each strand and interstice as knotted silk over the maw of the vat. Fire was her natural element. The lit ruby lines of her sigil of summoning clashed into ice, scalding up whistling steam. Thawed water exploded to roiling froth, then flattened, subservient to her bidding.

The enchantress laid her dire work onto the blank sheen of its surface. Eighth-rank initiation lent her powers an edge her less-accomplished sisters would envy. She knew the forbidden lore; the annals of chaos, where natural force could be spun in linked seals to cause harm. Sign and countersign paired, each rune and sigil enchained to dark purpose, Lirenda raised a field of charged air over the mirroring water. Her will reigned supreme inside that masked space, and there, she pronounced a Name the ritual three times in summoning. An image resolved, showing the blunt, weathered features of Jaelot's veteran field captain.

An impatient man, sharpened with years to a deep-set, suspicious awareness, he handled his troops through exacting perception and a brusque, no-nonsense competence. A hard man to know, his trust was infallible. The barbed coils of a Koriani sigil of binding were going to require a specific opening to exploit.

Lirenda gave that hindrance no second thought. Like any born human, the man would have weakness. To an enchantress schooled in the high arts of observation, the seamed lines of the face formed a map of the captain's innermost character. His secrets could be gleaned through devouring survey, from the measure of resilience that sustained his vitality, to his most stubborn virtues, and his hidden pockets of vice. Each facet of self became hers to entrain in the tailor-made geas to drive him.

A flick of wrought power upstepped the spell's resonance. Lirenda surveyed the man's unveiled aura with its chiaroscuro imprint of personality. She unraveled each shadow, the petty dishonesties and shortfalls shot like mean yarn through the bright strands of courage and dedication. The unseen cords of bound energy let her interpret the bonds held between family and kinfolk. She sorted each diverse thread, the lesser ties drawn in friendship, or in strength, or in bullying authority, and gained private insight into the men who comprised the captain's command.

A half smile curved Lirenda's lips. Before her, the loom upon which she would weave her curse upon Arithon's destiny.

Quartz in hand, the enchantress entrained its spiraling axis as the focusing needle for her intent. She began stitching sigils and ciphers into the spell-summoned guard captain's aura. Ideas
w
ould seed thoughts, which would spin urgent plans, until the creature she claimed as her cat's-paw would rise and muster his troops, then press them to pursue the prey of her choosing.

Since Arithon's safest line of retreat would lie in the realm of blue water, she arranged sharp prerogatives to send Jaelot's troops to sweep the Eltair seacoast. North and south, they would quarter the flat ribbon of shoreline. Each smuggler's cove and wooded haven would be combed by sharp-eyed patrols. Reserves would be called up for active duty. Seasoned divisions would work hand in glove with the headhunters' league's best skilled trackers. Lirenda laid her linked seals like tight slipknots, ensuring which steps would be taken. Dawn would see a trained pack of hounds and mastiffs, backed by two companies of veteran field troops, set upon Arithon's back trail. Her victim would be driven due west, away from the bay, and into the Skyshiel uplands.

In winter, without resource, Rathain's prince would be coursed by hardened men who clung to his heels like the damned. If he escaped them, if he had the tenacity and cunning to survive the blizzards that raked the cruel wilds, he would find no rest and no respite. Lirenda twined layers of interlaced spellcraft to assure that his enemies would stay unshaken. No longer men, but instruments tuned to her scouring need for revenge, they would dog Arithon's trail past the limits of human endurance. They would press him through storm and ice and closed passes with the dauntless persistence of demons.

Against their harrying onslaught, Arithon would suffer exhaustion and frostbite and privation. Lirenda meshed her dark seals like linked chain. Black hatred ruled her. She would destroy his music. All the bright gifts of his s'Ffalenn heritage would be scoured away into mindless, animal instinct.

Until Jaelot's troops perished, expended like candles, they would not flag in the grip of the geas Lirenda spun through their commanding captain. They would dance their last steps to the tune of her passion, that Arithon s'Ffalenn would draw his last breath in desolate solitude. Let him rot without trace, unrecognized and uncomforted, on the wretched ground ruled by his ancestors.

Lirenda traced the last seal of closure over the construct imprinted in the vat. Moved by the venom distilled in her heart, she whispered her ultimatum. 'May you die alone, Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. Let your accursed seed wither, and your line finish, heirless. May your feal clansmen fall to woe while your bones become stripped by the crows in the peaks of the Skyshiels.'

Winter Solstice Night 5670

Delirium

Two hundred twenty-five leagues west of Jaelot as the crow flew, the Fellowship Sorcerer who served Athera as Althain's Warden lay stricken in his tower chamber. Stilled on his cot, tucked under the moth-frayed wool of the blankets he was always too harried to air, Sethvir lay like a wax effigy. His slack hands stayed crossed, his pixie-boned frame unmoved since the hour his colleague, Asandir, had laid him in repose before his pressured departure. Overtaken by crisis without precedent, Sethvir languished, his mind savaged by bursts of mental imagery, torn without order from the fragmented stream of his tie to the wounded earth.

While the magnetic lanes of the planet were skewed, the broad-ranging gift the departed Paravians had bestowed upon Althain's Warden remained whipped by the roiled flux. His earth-sense stayed deranged, a wildfire that raged and burned like loose rope snapped through his slackened grasp. Sethvir wrestled through sick, spinning senses to snatch the barrage of images back into cohesion.

Fleeting bursts showed him glimpses of Jaelot's armed guardsmen, riding head down against rising storm; in close haloes of candlelight, he saw Koriani seniors in purple robes and red-banded sleeves gathered in deep consultation. Lately given the news of the late Prime's succession, they would not yet know that Morriel's plot had upset the lane forces, a move aimed to cripple Fellowship resources and drive the first wedge through the compact.

Caught at the crux, while damaged wardspells came unraveled
across Mirthlvain Swamp, and packs of venomous methspawn stirred in their roiling thousands, Sethvir fretted behind his sealed eyelids. Predatory fish and venomed serpents might prey upon innocent lives; yet worse perils threatened. The most troubling could not be seen or touched, but lurked beyond the airless void that hung between distant stars.

Racked by sharp worry, Sethvir forced his innermind through a swift survey of the barrier ward raised to warn against an invasion of free wraiths from the dead planet of Marak. Left unguarded, the grand interstices of the construct glowed soft blue in quiescence. Yet the calm bought him no reassurance. Sethvir had no source for his gnawing concern. The circling fear chafed him, that the more evolved body of the Mistwraith left cut off beyond Southgate might move in and prey on the vulnerable world while Fellowship resources were engaged elsewhere.

Other fragmentary views showed winter's palette of snowfall and frost, and wild animals denned in hibernation. The events displayed no discernible hierarchy. The raging snarl of upset lane force had overstressed the tuned concentration Sethvir needed to refine broadscale vision, and sort the array of ongoing event that influenced the fate of Athera.

Since Morriel Prime's insidious machinations to mask her irregular succession, his Warden's perception had been whirled like a moth in a downdraft amid the spiraling disarray of the lane flux. Sethvir did not dissociate from the event, though he could have; too many guardian ward rings stood vulnerable to the effects of a magnetic imbalance. The most dangerous of these he held bound in check by direct, personal intervention. The drain of such effort bled his faculties without mercy, until tactile awareness of his body thinned to cobwebs. Moment to moment, he existed as a spark of naked will adrift on a scattered stream of imagery.

If a colleague now stood in support at his bedside, Sethvir held only the vague recognition that he was no longer alone. Words whirled between the smashed links of identity, the sound of struck consonants like flurried sparks whose meaning touched him in snatches.

'. . . no, he's not sleeping, but drawn inward.'
The gusty, lecturing tone was Luhaine's, the discorporate colleague first to arrive when disaster broke the past evening.
'His sighted vision made him the only one of our Fellowship with the resource at hand to map the full scope of the damage on the hour the lanes went unstable.'

Again, Luhaine qualified with a stone's endless patience.
'Yes, the lanes are retuned, now, except for the sixth, which sustains a remedial spell to guide it back to alignment. Since that stay should suffice, Sethvir's engaged elsewhere. He's bridging the seals that keep critical wards from unraveling . . .'

As though spurred by suggestion, a flicker of sight framed the fortress at Methisle, where tumbledown walls no longer contained the migration of venomous creatures unsettled by shifting magnetics. Through snatched views of roiled waters, and the rustle of disturbed reeds, Luhaine's measured phrases resumed . . .

'His earth-sense is undamaged, but wielded without his full cognizance. What you ask is not possible. No other among us can track the threads of meaning and significance.'
On a whiplash note of testy frustration, the Sorcerer responded to someone else present,
'Yes, in hard truth, the facts are discouraging. No. Please don't try. The Warden can't speak. His powers are spent past wise limits. The most accomplished adept in your Brotherhood could not grasp the scope of the problems he's stemming from minute to minute. Make no mistake! To disturb him at all could cast all of this world to disaster.'

Someone proffered a gentler reply, phrasing drowned under another cascade of disturbingly fragmented imagery. Sethvir and the rest of the Fellowship understood, the lynchpin of the world yet rested on the life of the last Teir's'Ffalenn.

Nor was that spirit safe, but driven to harried flight crosscountry, with an armed pack of guards at his heels. Sethvir's vision splintered through the branchings of parallel event.
He saw Jaelot's mayor ranting in targetless anger for the fact that the Shadow Master had slipped through his cordon. Then, in tied linkage, another view arose from north Tysan, of an ominous, damp stain that blackened the frost-silvered grasses where a stone basin had been recently emptied . . .

A chill swept Sethvir, even through trance, for the tangle of energies left in dissonant imprint bespoke traces of unclean acts.
In the free wilds of Camris, his sight showed him spilled water, paned over with crystalline ice and the sick, phosphor haze of spent blood magic . . .

The extreme sensitivity of Sethvir's earth-sense traced down that wisped remnant of energy.

'Lysaer
.'
he gasped in a tortured whisper. Unbidden vision expanded the connection. He beheld the fair coloring and chisel
-
cut face of the
s'Ilessid
prince. But the clean symmetry of Lysaer's features appeared subtly recast, hardened to the blind fervor of the Mistwraith's curse, which drove his headlong quest to destroy his half brother, Arithon.

'. . . without doubt
.'
Luhaine was saying in reassurance. 'The
s'Ilessid
is still in Camris. From there, he can scarcely pose a direct threat to his half brother on the east coast of Rathain.'

But that balance would change. Sethvir's earth-sense bore witness.
Cloaked under darkness, Lysaer
s'Ilessid
mounted a cream charger. His urgent, clipped speech exhorted an elite party of officers to ride eastward during the night.

The man named Divine Prince by Tysan's misled masses planned to cross the Camris plain to the coast, then make rendezvous with a fast galley. Once over the narrow inlet to Atainia, he would rejoin the road to Instrell Bay and board a trader bound for Rathain as early as the next fortnight.

'You
are called to serve!' Arms raised in impassioned appeal, the Prince of the Light addressed his veteran officers. 'I have received visions! Evil moves abroad as we speak! The Spinner of Darkness has returned to the continent. In Jaelot, innocent people have already suffered and died, victimized by his sorceries. I am charged by the Light to stand in defense. Ride with me! Lend your swords to bring down this minion of darkness, and be blessed in name for all time!'

'The Prince of the Light goes to muster his eastern allies,' Sethvir gasped, the words blurred into his caught breath, too faint to be understood. Against a blazing maelstrom of imagery foretelling blood and disaster, he cried tortured warning against the haze of raised voices around him. 'Master of Shadow . . . endangered . . .'

'Hush! Listen, the Warden speaks!' Cloth rustled nearby. The drafts sang of indistinct movement.

Sethvir wrestled the crazy quilt cataract of images that battered his mind beyond reason. 'Lysaer
s'Ilessid
knows . . .' He rammed his thoughts stable, framed intent like stamped crystal, and at last, transferred the gist of his desperate message.

While Sethvir sank back, Luhaine's staid presence assumed the task of explaining. 'Yes, we have news, an ill turn for the worse. The Mistwraith's curse does not rest while we're burdened. Lysaer
s'Ilessid
has discovered his s'Ffalenn half brother has dared to return to the continent. He'll muster for war on false grounds and religion. Yes, winter blizzards will slow him. But the pack of fanatics who have cast him as savior have resorted to unclean practice and dark augury. Word of the Shadow Master's presence will be sent on ahead. Sethvir foresees armed troops assembled in Darkling. Etarra has mustered for years against
t
his hour. The field commander there will set seasoned troops on the march, well prepared for rough country and cold weather. They may not move fast, but they'll be relentless once they know Arithon's position. Until the s'Ffalenn prince escapes back to sea, his life is going to stay vulnerable.'

A second voice questioned; Luhaine settled into exhaustive lecturing, but Sethvir lost the thread as his cognizance faded back into the tangling resurgence of imagery . . .

In the wooded foothills of
Tornir Peaks, an escaped pack of Khadrim flew on bat-leather wings, keening their shrill song of bloodlust. They circled a trade caravan bound for Karfael, stooped in attack, and shredded the drover's campsite. Armed guards died in flames. The screams of ripped horses and disemboweled men blended into the predators' whistles of quavering dissonance.

Sethvir sensed the bleak pain of the dying. Beyond sorrow, he curbed his flash-point anger that the clean-cut, new wards Asandir had just raised to hold the renegade packs in confinement had been utterly destroyed in the cascading flux of the lane imbalance. Morriel Prime had succeeded too well; the Fellowship was caught too desperately shorthanded to dispatch trained help to intervene.

A second scene flowered:
this one farther south, couched amid the ocher-brick towers of
Lysaer's restored capital ofAvenor. There, the subtle, secretive man appointed as High Priest of the Light sat awake and brooding by candlelight. In black jealousy, he pondered the name bandied in taprooms and wineshops across the city. In place of Lysaer, Divine Prince, the land's folk praised young Prince Kevor, whose bravery at the untried age of fourteen had quelled last night's pending riots. Fell portents had sheared across the clear sky, an ominous harbinger of evil to come at the hand of the Master of Shadow. Yet Avenor's unnerved people did not hail the Light, but instead drew their heart from the mortal courage displayed by the young heir apparent. . .

Sethvir had no chance to pursue the implications sprung from that startling twist. The unformed premonition of danger dispersed like blown smoke as his view of the high priest's sanctum whirled away. Shifted sight showed
a herd of dun deer, startled from grazing the ice-rimmed hummocks of the Salt Fens due north of Earle. The does turned raised heads, while a foam-flecked black stud thundered by, its rider charged to spell-driven haste. Upon his broad shoulders, the most perilous threat unleashed by the old Prime's plotting . . .

The Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, raced toward the grimward which confined the unquiet dreams of the ghost of the king drake,'

Eckracken. The torn guard spells he spurred at a gallop to mend leached at Sethvir's consciousness, a burning imbalance that frayed through ordered thought with the tenacity of flung acid.

Until Asandir arrived at the site and effected full-scale intervention, the tenuous grip of the Warden's stretched resources became all that stemmed those pent powers of chaos. He had held the line firm since the deranged lane force had snarled in backlash. The stopgap spells maintained at long distance throbbed to Sethvir's heartbeat, draining his core reserves of vitality. Each minute, passing, bled more strength from him. His competent grasp on his earth-sense ebbed, while the unchecked spate of images plunged his cognizant vision into frenetic disorder.

The Warden of Althain could scarcely harness the flow. His consciousness rode the slipstream of impressions like a leaf unmoored in a gale. All his last strength was engrossed in the ties, faint but ever-present, that cast lines of spelled force like webs of wrought light across the flawed seals of
not one, but six additional grimwards.
Eleven others he watched, wary, alert for the first, crumbling trace of attrition. The stakes were unforgiving if his vigil should fail. Just one broached grimward would upend the world's order. The wild resonance of drake-dream would unleash tangling chaos and unravel the ties that bound matter.

Asandir could claim neither rest nor respite until he had tested and repaired the seals binding each grimward under Fellowship guardianship.

Another flaw in the rings holding Eckracken's haunt spat a leaked burst of static. Sethvir sensed the discharge as a pinprick of pain snagged through the whole cloth of awareness. Sensation flowered at once into vision, of a sere, winter bog, windswept under the clouded night sky. Something more than mere wind ruffled through the dry banks of the reedbeds. Sethvir knew dismay. His earth-sense scanned those contrary riffles and detected a small swarm of iyats, energy sprites native to Athera that fed upon elemental energies. To mage-sight, the creatures appeared as a mad gyre of sparks, winnowed and whirled by the insatiable hungers that drove them. They normally fed on the natural forces found in falling water, tides, and the changing dynamics of weather. Yet the tuned spirals of refined spellcraft offered more powerful fare, and inevitably lured them like magnets. Their voracious appetites were already piqued by the interference signature of the ward forces, wobbling on the brink of release. If the iyats reached the site of t
he grimward ahead of Asandir, t
hey would cluster and sate themselves on the emissions let off by the lane-damaged ward rings. Like a yanked loop of knit, their feeding frenzy would unravel firm barriers into a draining breach.