TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (49 page)

Gray, falcon's eyes swept the golden-haired prince in the blankets, meting out critical inspection. 'You're not fit to keep watch.'

Lysaer rolled onto one elbow and gave a suggestive shrug. 'Against what? If the Spinner of Darkness ventures this way, my inner guidance will warn me. Should barbarians ambush, the snow cover's too thick to hear their murdering footfalls. The horse will smell the presence of enemies before we do, and the fire can be left to burn out.'

'Sunrise can't be far off.' Sulfin Evend measured commonsense wisdom against the clamor of his strategist's instincts, and gave in. For far too long, he had battled the depleting fog of deep weariness. Since the gale was relenting, he appropriated one of the prisoner's blankets, then recovered his oak stick and recast the circle around his immaculate campsite.

Earl Jieret lay motionless as before, his form cut outside the ephemeral tracery, faint as a ribbon of lavender foil dropped glimmering over the snow.

'Now, we play chess,'
the eagle pronounced on a devilish frisson of pure joy. He did not wait for Sulfin Evend to lie down, but unfurled broad wings in the darkness and launched himself off his perch.

'Now, in truth,' echoed the Koriani seeress. Stationed in the Prime's private chambers at Highscarp, she tracked the same scene, avid as any huntress set after cunning winged prey with poisoned bait and a net. She stroked her quartz scrying sphere, teasing out the full range of its virtues, then scribing fresh sigils to fine-tune her surveillance to utmost, ruthless clarity. 'The
Betrayer has started making his move.'

As the night advanced, more than the sisterhouse peeress stood attendance on Selidie Prime. Now the chamber accommodated a joined ring of twelve seniors, already settled into deep trance where they knelt in formation on the wooden floor. Inside their linked circle, the parquet had been chalked with a massive array of twined sigils. Their combined force sustained an inner quadrant demarked by four more enchantresses, stationed at the cardinal directions. The least of these wore four bands of earned rank on her sleeves, colored scarlet to denote their administrative service. Each clasped an enabled quartz wand the length of a tapered candlestick.

Prime Selidie crouched at the center of the conjury, a gown of eggplant purple puddled over her slippered feet. Her blonde hair had been braided into a rope, laced with lavender ribbon. Immersed in a state of forbidding concentration, she completed the lines of an elaborately protected squared circle. She exchanged the white chalk for a black wax stylus, then laid down the eightfold sigils of binding at each corner. To the enchantress on vigil at the scrying sphere, she announced, 'The trap is almost complete.'

Reassurance came back, whispered through shadow grained with the smoke of burned herbs, and the more acrid bite released by tobacco spiked with a tienelle infusion. 'The Betrayer appears to be in no hurry.'

In fact, the seeress went on to explain, he had made ingenious use of Sulfin Evend's crude ward to evade infringing the Law of the Major Balance. Lysaer's Lord Commander had drawn the ring with intent to deflect an outside interference; Davien perforce had respected free will. The quartz sphere reflected his avian form, a gliding dark shuttlecock on the loom of the air. Each pass threaded spellcraft, knitting a clever veil of illusory affirmation that nothing untoward should transpire
inside
the rim of the circle.

Outside, the Sorcerer could do as he liked, beyond concern that either Lysaer
s'Ilessid
or Sulfin Evend should perceive his industrious activity.

'He's alighted on the outcrop above Earl Jieret,' the seeress gave dutiful report.

The coral curve of Selidie's lips showed delicate satisfaction. She crossed the last cipher, set the rune of ending, then laid aside the wax stylus. Flushed by the sped pulse of excitement, she arranged a silver, lion-foot tripod just above the rim of her construct. Last, she unwrapped the amethyst Waystone.

Its bared facets unleashed a flood of chill air, and the warning, charged scent of ozone. The bronze candlestand with its burning wick shot tangles of ruby reflection through the shadowy heart of the stone. Each movement reverent, the Prime settled the sphere in the wrought ring with its sigils of warding and guard. She fussed, bringing its central axis to alignment above the geometrical figures of binding restriction. She rotated the jewel widdershins in its cradle, testing and tuning its position by increments until she ascertained its optimum orientation.

Lastly, she checked: the silk scarf sewn with the ninefold copper sigils of imprisonment lay within instant reach, tucked underneath her left sleeve cuff.

The last steps were complete. Despite trained restraint, Selidie Prime shuddered to the raw thrill of anticipation. She embarked on a feat no Koriani Matriarch before her had ever dared to attempt. If she met success, within the next minutes, she would hold a Fellowship Sorcerer pinned under the power of the Great Waystone.

'Stand ready to anchor me,' she bade the four wand-bearing seniors awaiting, their even breaths settled in preparedness.

A final exhale, and Selidie engaged her own iron discipline. Her mind spiraled downward into deep calm. Eyes closed, she cupped her palms over the Waystone. The amethyst's cool surface became faintly clouded with moisture under her animal touch. Quiet settled, as though a sealed bubble surrounded her person through the eerie suspension as the jewel awoke to her presence.

That stillness deceived, the velvet glove concealing the knife. As always, the jewel's awareness
slammed active with no warn
ing, a buzzing wasp storm of rage that lashed through every sensitized nerve. Selidie endured, her resistance passive. Fear, and bright agony ripped past without foothold as the Waystone's barbed spite spewed like a maelstrom through her mind.

The flood tore at her, shrieking, a ferocious, seeking assault that pried to find foothold in weak
ness. Should the torrent breach
even a pinhole flaw, or hook
any chink of insecurity, Selidie
would be lost. Her consciousness would drown in that roiling, mad spate, bound hostage along with many another matriarch who had failed the stone's testing before her.

The jewel laid traps, offered false turnings and ambush; it lured and lulled, teasing her guard wi
th illusory bouts of quiescence.
As often as the Matriarch had t
hreaded the maze, no passage was
ever the same. Dewed with perspiration, she withstood blowl and blandishments, until the wave of the great amethyst's malice reached a crest. On the poised instant between flood and ebb, she threaded the precisely tuned sigils that suborned wild might into mastery.

Peace descended, a bursting jolt of pure ecstasy that never failed to stun the mind for the space of a heartbeat. Selidie smiled, ceded a focus of clear power that would act on the breath of her whim.

Her living palm wielded the poised axis of a force that could imprison the shade of a Fellowship Sorcerer. No talent on Athera could move to prevent her. Davien had betrayed his colleagues before. His seclusion within the caverns at Kewar had extended for centuries, a withdrawal so deep, his colleagues were unlikely to miss him. Selidie aligned the Great Waystone to the Prime's sigil of command, the symbol that held mastery over every initiate sworn to the Koriani Order. At her call, Elaira must answer. The Betrayer was discorporate, his sealed word a direct and binding attachment to his unshielded spirit. His promise to Elaira would hold him in linkage; and like the jessed raptor tied to a creance, the Matriarch could reel him in.

Her figured square with its sigils of confinement had been well laid to receive him. Selidie's smile displayed perfect, white teeth. Ripe for the challenge, she addressed the seeress, 'Davien's still engaged? Excellent. He'll be taken unaware. For safety, the moment has come to disperse your spells of scrying.'

Silk rustled across the hushed chamber as the seeress bent to her quartz sphere. Her raised hand overshadowed the scene it depicted, of the great golden eagle, landed in the soft snow beside the stilled form of Earl Jieret. Her traced cipher of release dispelled the connection. As the image faded, Davien's musing thought to Elaira bled through, a ghost's whisper carried across time and space as the contact dwindled,
'When this is over, you'll
j
ust have to trust me to safeguard the life of your prince . . .'

The connection is severed,' the seeress confirmed.

Selidie drew herself erect, then raised her right hand from the Waystone's chill surface. Eyes closed, her left palm still in contact, she extended her forefinger and traced the cipher of prime domination over the facet framed by her touch. The crystal responded. A spiraling wind of raised force filled the chamber, tuning the air like a soundless chord and lifting the hair at the nape to a clamor of instinctive warning.

Spider still as she bided in wait for the gathering power to peak, Selidie savored the rapture of her unbridled anticipation.

Once the Betrayer lay at the order's mercy, she could seize the Named imprint of his consciousness. Given that template, she could then craft the specialized sigil to rule him. His formidable power would become hers to milk. With Asandir absent, and Sethvir laid low, the Prime Matriarch would stand unopposed. She could unleash the old knowledge she guarded. Within the next minutes, she would claim the sure leverage to free the Koriani Order and lead mankind back into ascendancy.

The Waystone reached resonance. Embraced by a pall of silvery light as its field of charged forces surrounded her, Selidie closed and sealed the last link that enabled the squared circle of entrapment. Then she spoke the name of Elaira three times over the prime sigil of command.

The summons crossed the barriers of time and distance. Reaction was instantaneous: Elaira's spirit was netted in by main force from her far-off sojourn in Daon Ramon. Selidie sensed the moment of contact; felt the spelled directive cast its taut mesh over the enchantress and the Fellowship Sorcerer that folly had tied into partnership.

The Great Waystone heated against Selidie's clasped hands. 'We have him!' she crowed as the sigil clamped down, its barbed hooks deeply set into her hapless quarry. 'May he well rue the day that his kind bound our sisterhood under the compact!'

Without the bone and flesh of a body, Davian would have no foothold to anchor him at the instant of flux.

The crystal's charged matrix served as ladder and gateway, spanning the axis of existence. Selidie kept watchful contact, light fingers tracing the pulse as her array of keyed spellcraft thundered to enable the threshold opened within. Inside the holding, split second of recall, she grazed against the full awareness of the Sorcerer's being. Davien's presence loomed vast, power chained into knotted complexity beyond mortal thinking to grasp. He was leashed might and lightning, dark unknown and gold light, a conscious pavane of moving energy, the essence of which strained away through her grasp like blown smoke.

'No!' Stunned by the sense of his substance eluding her, Selidie cupped the Great Waystone in a convulsive grip. Already hot, the stone lit to burning, polarized in return by
something
that did not bleed away as Davien's awareness departed. Along with Elaira's oathbound spirit, the Prime detected a packaged bundle of energies. She could not tag its signature. Its presence was a puff of movement and air, an impression half-formed as a spell weave of runes caught up like a burr in the transfer.

The Prime received warning, but no time to react. Before thought could respond and snap the connection, the fragment of malice the Betrayer delivered lodged inside the sealed well of her trap.

The Waystone rang like a bell. The inbound vibration raised a standing wave that could not be damped at short notice, tuned as it was into phased resonance with the prime cipher of command. To force the calibration awry was no option. The interlocked currents would turn lethal with imbalance. Only through controlled care and a ritual sequence of steps could the power be bled off in harmless dispersal.

White ice under pressure, Selidie stamped down rattled nerves. She could outface this crisis. Strong enough not to be hazed into panic, she uttered the first cantrip to discharge the prime cipher.

Too late; already a silver jet of possibility erupted within the circled square. Then the tendril became manifest. Orange flame licked up the silver legs of the tripod and engulfed the Waystone still clasped between the Prime Matriarch's hands.

Singed to blisters, she yanked back, then cursed the thoughtless speed of brute reflex.

The lapsed contact had broken her rapport with the jewel. Cut off from access, she had lost her means to steer the amethyst's roused might to quiescence.

Although the disbanding of the prime cipher had granted Elaira's spirit an immediate release from the summoning, the crafted lines of the construct to imprison a Sorcerer still glowed on the hardwood floor. The eightfold sigils of binding remained fully active, a ranging force laid down with all but indelible potency.

Selidie cradled reddened hands to her breast, her curse a cracked note of frustration as she encompassed the scope of expanding dilemma. The Waystone's raised matrix was linked to the spells. She could not breach their warding from outside to quench the fire, which was real, a ridiculous crudity kept fueled by wax polish and blackening walnut parquet. To intervene would unleash the Waystone's raised field, inviting an uncontrolled backlash that would kill every enchantress caught within range. Nor was delay feasible. The flames nipped and crackled, hot enough to shatter the great amethyst. The jewel's loss was unthinkable, a blow that would cripple the order's best strength and destroy an irreplaceable reservoir of stored knowledge.