TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (15 page)
Read TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate Online
Authors: Janny Wurts
Selidie regarded her disheveled wariness with a startling, frank gesture of kindness. 'You are linked to him, yes? At the outset, I ask for your help with a scrying. In exchange, I offer these safeguards. You alone will review the results. For my needs, you need share nothing except the fact of his death, or the word of his safe arrival at the ruin of Ithamon.'
'And if the issue is not black or white?' Elaira pressed. Distrust scraped through her strained fabric of hope, that the inevitable, unseen hook in the bargain must put her conflicted loyalty to a more punishing test.
Selidie answered without hesitation. 'By my oath on the Waystone, you are left free to answer his need at your personal discretion.'
Which gift was a dangerous boon. The master ciphers possessed by the Koriani Prime enabled Selidie to follow Elaira's every move; by extension, she would gain infallible means to dog Arithon's position at will.
The door latch jostled warning. Two servants in house livery entered in soundless tact. Both gave the unshielded quartz crystals wide berth. One cast a lace cloth over the claw-footed table set at Selidie's elbow. The other settled the tray of refreshments and poured steaming tea into porcelain cups.
'You're too thin,' observed Selidie. 'Why not make your choice after you've eaten some honey cake?'
'No blandishments.' Elaira had recovered the aplomb to strike back in wry humor. 'I'm no longer the starving street orphan who could be bought for the promise of bread crusts. S'Ffalenn princes have ever looked after their own, and your quarry has already proved himself as Torbrand's trueborn descendant.'
'His escape from Jaelot was no accident,' Selidie agreed, 'and you yourself honor his royal trust to the point where you won't accept bread crusts without the old-law bonds of honest friendship.'
'I'll have surety before cake,' Elaira insisted, her mettle steadfast under pressure. 'A hard ride up the coast would make anybody thin. I'll recover on gruel in a tavern, but
after
you've listed your terms of demand to offset my presumed gift of freedom.'
While Lirenda sucked in a breath of amazement, Selidie tucked her neat, coquette's fingers around the scrolled handle of a teacup. 'You should have been a merchant, the way you read nuance.' She waved the hovering servants away. Steam plumed against the dimmed fall of the tapestries as she spooned in a thick gob of honey. Her gaze stayed thoughtfully level, but not discomposed, as she savored a lingering sip.
'Merchants can't traffic in slaves or prisoners, under terms of the Fellowship's compact,' Elaira attacked. 'You need Arithon as your leverage to upset the old order, and to reach him, you plan to use me. I would have this over with.'
Selidie slapped down her cup. The furious chime of the spoon struck through silence, no less a warning than the testing tap of crossed sword steel. Robed in the Prime's mantle, and charged with the unsheathed power of her office, Selidie glared down with quicksilver eyes. 'Girl, you rankle! Don't expect I'll forgive your brash insolence. Hear your orders. Then decide what course you will take from this chamber. I will grant you the loan of a scrying quartz. You will use it to shadow the Prince of Rathain and report if he dies of wound fever. If he lives, you may engage your own powers as you will. I prefer him kept clear of Lysaer
s'Ilessid
and the armed forces of the Alliance.'
'No limits?' Elaira said, her voice rocked unsteady. The candlelight flared like chipped rust through her hair as she hung on the pause for an answer.
Selidie watched, snake still in her chair, while the steam twined the gloom like the half-coiled ribbons of a spell. 'No limits but one: if his Grace survives the winter, you will go to him when the thaws reopen the Skyshiel passes. You will attach yourself to his company and behave exactly as you please until such time as his life becomes threatened. Then, you will be free to intercede in his behalf. You have claimed we've forgotten our precepts of mercy. Let this prove you wrong. You are given my sanction to wield the power of the Koriani Order in the cause of Prince Arithon's life.'
'Merciful Ath, of course!' Elaira shot to her feet. 'With the usual condition
that he would owe us his personal oath of debt for our service.
Even the Fellowship must honor that stricture, no matter if the price we demand should seal his final downfall.'
Selidie inclined her head. 'We have never granted exception for royal birth or any other privilege of rank.' A brittle smile bent her lips. 'The choice remains yours, whether or not to offer your prince the option of our help. You are, as you see, the initiate best suited to carry out this mission. The only direct command you will bear is to stay involved with Prince Arithon's affairs.'
'A feat far easier said than accomplished.' Elaira drew a steady breath that laid bare the unyielding mettle of her character. 'If I don't go, I suppose you'd send Lirenda?'
'My ends can be served out of love, or from hatred,' Selidie agreed in poisoned logic. 'Which emotion will sway Arithon's fate in the straits of his uncertain future?'
'Love, of course.' Elaira shouldered the weight of that vicious irony, no less besieged by the dumbstruck antagonist who now looked daggers at her back. 'I have leave to start immediately?'
'As you wish.' Selidie raised the blank sphere from its tripod and gestured for Elaira to approach. An admonition followed as the crystal changed hands, too quiet for Lirenda to overhear. Then the audience ended. Elaira descended the dais and curtseyed, giving the ritual words of obedience. When she arose, her eyes glittered with unshed tears. Granted a terrible grace of reprieve, and the Prime's formal word to depart, she beat a tormented retreat and slipped through the outer doorway. The Prime's grant of choice held no triumph for her, but the promise of pain and a perilous, double-edged burden.
Prime Matriarch Selidie reclined in her chair, brilliant eyes closed through a moment of pleased relief. While the Waystone and the Skyron danced with the scintillant light of her ebullience, she said, 'That woman had the straight courage to refuse me. Our order's future may ride on the stunning, weak fact that she didn't.'
Lirenda cut in with acidic accusation. 'I have leave to speak? Such a love as she bears could well be strong enough to allow your chosen quarry to die.'
'Less willingly than hatred.' Selidie flexed the hand she had used to bond with the Waystone as though the stone's malice still seared an invisible burn through her flesh. 'You will learn in due time. The carrot wins better cooperation than the stick.'
Lirenda arose, a whisper of damp silk masking her stifled resentment. 'Where's the carrot, for me?'
'You were no invited witness.' Selidie met her opening advance with wide-lashed, malevolent challenge. 'Be most careful how you speak. I choose my weapons with meticulous care. When the last crisis breaks, Elaira will dance to the very same constraints that I'll use to break and scatter the power of the Fellowship.'
Lirenda tested Selidie's bitter thread of logic: that if Arithon provided a viable cipher to disrupt the grip of the compact, he must also be key to the world's future balance. Neither the Sorcerers nor Elaira would sacrifice Athera to deny mankind's rightful claim to seize dominance. A last, closing stride brought Lirenda to the foot of the low stair, her reflection overlaid in multiple imprint on the Alliance forces still marching through snow in the scrying spheres. 'I
thought you wanted the Shadow Master dead!
Or is his Grace of Rathain no longer a threat to Koriani continuance?'
Selidie plucked a slice of cake from the plate and licked butter icing from her fingers. 'He was a thorn in the path of Morriel's succession. That issue is ended.' She nibbled, amused, as she sensed Lirenda's probe for the crone now securely ensconced within the purloined flesh of youth. 'As you see, prime power has been transferred intact. The guard has changed. My predecessor is dead, her ashes dispersed by the rituals of due ceremony. Choose your stand on that matter very carefully.'
Lirenda regarded the creature before her with a lioness's glare and a loathing that curdled her blood.
'You
dare to warn
me?'
Challenged by an initiate who possessed eighth-rank training, Selidie must realize her unnatural state was transparently obvious. 'I'm amazed you have the bald-faced effrontery to allow me to live!'
'You weren't listening. I never, ever cast off useful tools.' Selidie shook out a napkin and whisked away a small blizzard of crumbs. 'Did you think you retained any shred of good standing to bandy high charges against me? The facts lie against you. Your ambition left enemies, particularly since you made no secret of your disdain for my novice incompetence. In Jaelot, you fumbled a major assignment. Prince Arithon went free. Tell me truth, sister.' The malice that flashed in those steel-rivet eyes held a chilling familiarity. 'Will your integrity survive the course of a formal Ceremonial Inquiry?'
Lirenda's skin rose to a violent flush.
'I thought not.' Selidie rescued her cooled cup of tea, tapping the gilt rim with a fingernail. 'Like Elaira, you must follow my bidding, even if that leaves you with lifelong penance, scrubbing floors in the Highscarp sisterhouse. Who listens to rancor from the mouth of the fallen? You are excused. Understand clearly just how low you have stooped through your weakness for Arithon s'Ffalenn.'
Trapped in the coils of her own indiscretion, Lirenda glared. Pride of upbringing choked her. Crushed under the wreckage of hope and aspiration, she found that Elaira's true spirit surpassed her. She herself lacked the insolent recklessness to cast fate to the wind for killing stakes. Her rage crumbled, impotent against the complaisance in Selidie's too-knowing regard. As Morriel, the creature had always danced her inferiors on puppet strings of indebtedness. Before her unprincipled act of possession had usurped a young woman's body, the crone would have measured and dealt with all setbacks that might steal her hour of victory.
Nor was her judgment of character inaccurate. Lirenda bent her head, unable to shoulder the shame of her outright failure. She could not follow through as Elaira had and stake the irrevocable loss of her awareness for the sake of compassionate principle.
Selidie's vile nature could not be exposed against the ruthless strength of a matriarch's hold on prime power.
Left no choice but to curtsey to the floor before her tormentor's false youth, Lirenda arose in smoldering capitulation and swept from the darkened chamber. Candles flickered and streamed acrid smoke in her wake. Their reflections flagged fire across the sere winter hills pictured over and over in the activated quartz spheres; and in the equally stony eyes of the impostor who wore the Prime's mantle on the dais.
The page boy flung open the paneled door to the corridor. Lirenda brushed past, well aware she had provoked a subtle and dangerous enemy. The cruel irony cut deepest: if not for the infamous Prince of Rathain, the Matriarch's chair would never have been tainted by the dark secret of immoral practice. Once, as entitled First Senior, Lirenda could have earned a legitimate succession from Morriel Prime without obstacle. But for Arithon's damning intervention and rogue cleverness, the wielded might of the Koriani Order should have rightfully fallen to her. With each step she took, Lirenda vowed Rathain's prince would be made to pay.
Given Elaira's permission to intervene, the geas driving Jaelot's captain could end in another failure. Arithon might survive his passage over Baiyen Gap. Lirenda ground her teeth, no less determined. Though ensuring his ruin demanded a persistence that lasted the rest of her lifetime, she would bide. The Master of Shadow would suffer the sting of her vengeance as long as he lived.
Winter 5670
Proving
Outside the barred door to the Prime's private residence, Elaira braced her back to the courtyard wall. She sucked in steady breaths of chill air to slow the raced beat of her heart. Around her, the sounds of routine industry filed an edge on her acid-stripped nerves. She could not shake her looming sense of disaster. The facts all converged, unremitting: in the white wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens, five cities dispatched armed companies on forced march to take down Arithon s'Ffalenn. Yet no pending sense of the world's smashed equilibrium ruffled the winterbound city of Highscarp. A silvery trill of horsebells jingled down the lane beyond the gate. A servant banged open a second-story shutter and slapped the dust out of a bolster. Overhead, an ice crystal scumbling of cloud diffused the pyrite gleam of noon sunlight. The gusts turned northeast and smelled of the sea, sure signs that a gale would rage in before nightfall. The high mountain passes would lie sifted in snow, while the ridges shed their cover of drifts like fumaroles of blown smoke.
Storm and heartache came in lockstep with her mind-linked awareness: Arithon s'Ffalenn was still crossing the Baiyen, the conditions he suffered soon to become an onslaught of unalloyed misery.
As cuttingly cold, to Elaira's bare hand, was the quartz sphere Prime Selidie had given her. The binding directive attached to its custody offered no chink for compromise. The new Matriarch had matched her most desperate move, and her wits still recoiled on the outcome.
'The bitterest enemy is myself, then,'
Arithon had once flung back when the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, had pinned him on a fine point of principle.
For Elaira, who loved him, flesh as one flesh, understanding of his anguish bore down without mercy, the razor edge of her predicament resharpened by Sethvir's past assurance
that she would be party to the Prince of Rathain's final salvation or downfall.
'Was
this
what you meant?' Her appeal to the Warden's earth-sensed awareness went unanswered, while the unkind wind off the bay tore her voiceless, and her knees refused to stop shaking.
'Oathsworn?' a boy's timid voice addressed, breathless. 'Initiate, do you wish a horse saddled for riding?'
Elaira stirred and regarded the young groom, her slate eyes still deadpan with shock.
The boy chewed his lip, then plowed ahead, gallant. 'The mare that brought you needs rest and feed. Should the house loan you a fresh mount?'
'Thank you, no.' Elaira pushed away from the wall, resolute as the first, unwanted decision snapped scattered thoughts back to focus. 'I won't be going anywhere I can't walk, but thanks for your gentleman's kindness.'
The quandary posed by her changed obligations presented a future fraught with bloodletting thorns. Where Arithon was concerned, she knew better than to trust Selidie's oath on the Great Waystone. Lirenda's warning concerning the new Prime had not been mentioned lightly. Wary of every unseen subtlety that might lurk to entrap her, Elaira chose to make her way without help. She dared not accept either post mounts or shelter from the too-open hand of the sisterhood.
'You have a mother? A family?' she asked of the horseboy.
His grin showed missing gaps where his lost molars grew in.
'Take this for their comfort.' She pressed a worn copper into the child's palm, offering the courtesy due from a guest stranger, and not an initiate sister whose order demanded unstinting service. Off you go,' she added, before he could shout his effusive gratitude. 'Fetch me the pack off my saddle, and see that the mare gets the rest she deserves.'
The delay to reclaim her belongings chafed at her ripe sense of urgency. Elaira gauged the entangling pressures that might offer pitfalls and setbacks. If she wished to forestall the obligations her low rank would allow the sisterhouse peeress, she must act now, before Highscarp's seniors discovered the Prime's grant of autonomy, or caught wind of her unorthodox assignment.
She descended the high road from the bluff on foot. Whipped by rising wind, she threaded between a cake seller's cart and two wagons and sheltered behind a smokehouse's woodpile. There, in brisk care, she bundled the burdensome scrying sphere into a silk scarf from her pack. Next, she counted her handful of coins, earned in the honest practice of dispensing simples and cough remedies in the wayside taverns. Two silvers, eight copper were scarcely enough to meet her critical needs. She would have to drive desperate, hard bargains to test the scope of the Prime's two-edged promise of independence.
As her first defined act to invoke that autonomy, Elaira tore off the bronze buttons she kept for luck, then gave her thick, purple cloak to the first beggar she found whining for alms in the street. 'Just turn the damned thing inside out,' she insisted, as the shivering creature fingered the distinctive color in apprehensive distrust of its Koriani origins. 'You'll stay just as warm, the lining's bleached wool, and no one will pay much attention.'
She asked for directions, found the common market, and spent her store of silver on a sturdy, used cloak of good weave that would be respectable once it was cleaned. From the smith's, for a half cent, she acquired a tarred leather bucket with a broken strap. The winds now were rising, and tasted of spume. Puddles wore glazings of rime ice. Like chalk marks under a poured-lead sky, gulls roosted on rooftrees and pilings and chimneys, breasts fluffed against inbound bad weather. Elaira pressed on to the dockside stalls, where seamy old women with crabbed hands and sharp eyes sold oddments of bone and glass jewelry, pomanders and luck charms, and the fish-scale talismans made to ward drowning prized by enlisted sailhands.
The ramshackle awnings cracked in the gusts. A shrill couple argued in the tenements overhead, while a dog pack nosed garbage in the gutter. Elaira perused tables of knucklebones and brooches, her flyaway hair tucked under her cloak, and her saddle pack guarded against cutpurses. Craftsmen and tosspots jostled their way past, and a street minstrel scraped jigs on a fiddle. At length, she found the item she sought amid a stall with tied bundles of cedar, and braided lanyards with hens' feet, and fiend bands of stamped tin and strung pebbles.
'Mother,' she said, 'I'm in need of your help.'
The old woman wrapped in faded plaid shawls perked erect, both eyes pearly with cataracts, and her arthritic hands clasped to her wash-leather satchel. 'Dearie, speak up. Henlyie's deaf as a post.'
Elaira smiled. 'I could whisper, and still you could hear me.'
The old herb witch blinked. She loosened a crabbed fist, and reached out, unerring. Her swollen fingers jinked the quartz crystal nested like a frost shard among her ragtag array of queer wares. 'Stone speaks, for you. How much can you pay?'
The ancient bronze buttons scored Elaira's clamped palm as she answered in trepidation. 'I can offer two coppers, and your pick of the rarest herbs in my satchel.'
Old Henlyie sucked a breath through gapped teeth. 'That desperate, are ye?'
Elaira shut her eyes, while the wind whined through the carved eaves overhead, and the thrash of the breakers against the seawall muttered under the boisterous shouts of the stonecutters on leave from the quarries. 'Mother, if you only knew.'
The old woman peered through fogged marble eyes, attuned to some cue beyond sight. 'Healer trained, are ye? Then ye know well enough, a true quartz will defend against lies and dishonesty. Go on, dearie. Take the crystal you need. Just give someone needy the eight silvers she's worth when you manage to mend your lapsed fortune.'
'Ath's blessing on you, mother,' Elaira replied. 'I'll see your kindness repaid tenfold.' She accepted the crystal, and left in its place a tin of her own spelled emollient, made to ease the pain of stiffened joints.
The old woman touched the tin, lifted it, and sniffed at the contents. A smile touched her face, easing the wrinkles pinched at the corners of her eyes. 'There's a boardinghouse with red shutters on Cod Street. The landlady there may let her attic for a penny, if you offer to attend the complaints of her guests.' The tin disappeared into the folds of the shawls, and a crabbed finger shook in admonishment. 'No, dearie. I have lodgings elsewhere, and no memory left for recording elaborate recipes. What meager craft I still practice is more suited to amulets, besides.'
'Then I owe you my heartfelt gratitude. Bless your days.' Elaira gathered the quartz and moved thankfully on her way.
Hungry, but in too much hurry to eat, she squeezed past the hawkers who sold bread, hot fish cakes, and sausage. The alley she descended led to the seawall.
The bay was a heaving cauldron of spindrift. Green, foaming breakers reared up, steep sides glistening, then hammered an uneven percussion of spray against the riprap that fronted the harbor. Wheeling birds landed in the sluice of the runoff, pecking for crustaceans stranded like jewels amid knots of jetsam and weed. Elaira braved the stripping brunt of the winds and filled her tarred bucket with seawater. In shrewd afterthought, she added a gleaner's harvest of kelp.
If she planned to earn bread treating quarrymens' pulped knuckles, she would need to replenish her tincture of iodine.
The owner of the red-shuttered boardinghouse was a vivacious grandmother whose shrewd glance measured the cut of her seal riding boots, then the quality tanning of the leather pack slung over her cloaked shoulder. 'One pence was summer rent,' she insisted, and held out her palm for two coppers.
Elaira gave in and paid her last coins, well aware hard-nosed bargaining would not prevail on a night with an easterly brewing. Her work required a roof over her head. Soup and coarse bread was included with lodging, and if she did not mind standing in line for the privilege, she could use the common washtub in the laundry.
'Just show me inside,' she answered, too chilled to stand on the icy stone step any longer.
The grandame regarded the brimming bucket askance, then grudgingly widened the door and admitted her. Elaira followed her shuffling step over worn runners of carpet, then up a servant's back stair. The attic landing led into a tiny room with a salt-streaked dormer window. The blankets on the truckle bed were moth-eaten, but clean. Beyond a washstand appointed with a battered tin cup and pitcher, the board floor was bare. Impressed by the size of the dust batts caught in the unswept corners, Elaira sincerely hoped the last occupant had earned her keep carding and spinning.
'Candles cost extra,' the landlady informed. 'Water's drawn from the crank well in the yard. Fetch and haul what you need for yourself.'
'Thank you.' Elaira stepped over the scuffed wooden threshold, cloak tucked against the drafts that sang through the gapped panes, and rippled the cobwebs over her head. Her breath scribed white plumes in the gray filtered light, and the basin wore armor-clad ice. She deposited her bucket of seawater and kelp, then latched the plank door after the landlady's departure. Still badly shaken, she scarcely cared that the garret room was unheated. Far worse, to try a course of questionable practice in the precinct of a Koriani sisterhouse.
'Dharkaron avert!' She was no small bit frightened by her plan to enact reckless upset to Selidie's expectations.
Elaira squared her shoulders, firmed quaking nerves, and raked the wet kelp from the bucket. She piled the mass by the frozen basin. Next, she unhooked the tin cup from the washstand and scooped it full of raw sea water. The tarred bucket remained under half-full, its handspan depth just sufficient. Elaira dug through her pack, fingers shaking. She removed the silk-wrapped weight of the scrying sphere. The dread burn of its active sigils of command cast a bone-chilling ache, even through layered cloth. In naked trepidation, on a pent breath of terror, she eased the veiled quartz into the saltwater bath in the bucket.
Sparks flew from first contact. A whine of released power threw off a hot wind as the sigils of binding tore asunder. Elaira jerked back a singed hand, while the water spat and roiled to the blast of unwound coils of energy. Crouched on her heels, her blistered hand cradled, she held on to hope that the quartz sphere could withstand the liberating force as the sigils dissolved without cracking.
'Be free,' she whispered in earnest encouragement. 'Let the spells of coercion be lifted.'
If the sphere had been loaned to help track Rathain's prince, she would employ her own skills, leaving no loophole for unasked assistance through the seals of a preset binding. There would
b
e no fertile ground for slipped steps, no avenue left for blind snares. The Prime's bitter bargain to guard Arithon's life would not be won upon hidden traps or sly trickery. By nightfall this
d
ay, Elaira avowed she would cast off all resource upon which to hang the obligation of her order's oath of debt. If the hour ever came when for wisdom and compassion she must claim her given option to betray her heart's love,
she would use her own power by free choice.
Though she die in the effort, she would shoulder a future that relied on naught else but the course of her cognizant will.
The steps she must tread held no recorded precedent. Each minute brought dreadful uncertainty. The quartz she had cast to its fate in the pail offered no safe reassurance. While it thrashed and rattled and shook through its passage to a cleared state of neutrality, Elaira sweated and hoped. The striking eruption of violence appalled her, as the virtue of salt water stripped out the yoked power of uncounted active sigils. Every instinct shrilled with alarm. The process appeared to be lasting too long. she had been a six-year-old child when the order's seniors in Morvain had inducted her for her talents. All her Koriani arts had been learned by rote, her specialized experience aligned for an herbalist's practice.