TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (50 page)

'Dharkaron's Black Spear strike us all to perdition!' Selidie howled in black fury. The ignominious simplicity enraged her, that the Betrayer should have balked her bold play with no more than a commonplace firestorm. Not only was the Great Waystone at risk, but the building heat of the conflagration
was melting the dark wax that defined the eight ciphers of containment.
Another minute would see the wards breached from within, likely seeding a spiraling holocaust.

Prime Selidie fell back upon crude expedient, and snatched the silk stitched with the ninefold sigils of imprisonment from her sleeve cuff. Cast the cloth over the Waystone, and its ties to the construct would be cut. The wards in the silk could withstand its raised power. Wrapped and pulled to safety, the stone could stay masked, the forces of backlash held in abeyance until the irritating threat of the fire spell was resolved.

Driven frantic as she snapped the folds from the cloth, Selidie called instructions to the four seniors standing as anchors. 'Scribe a fresh circle! We're going to need a new set of wards laid down underlaid by the forces of water!' The construct would close a catchframe of containment and stay the spread of the flames. 'Act swiftly!'

Within a scant second, the wax ciphers binding the original squared circle were going to puddle and give way, spilling who knew what chaos of Davien's to the caprice of the four winds and beyond.

Selidie cast the unfurled cloth over the dark facets of the Waystone. The licking blaze snapped and ignited the hem, then flared up the gauze-thin silk. Selidie cried out as the sewn copper sigils liquefied in the heat. A searing rain of metallic droplets pattered over her wrists and hands. Scalded, she gasped out a whistling breath as the ephemeral cloth wisped to ash.

'Maker preserve, we're in trouble now,' wailed one of t
he watching enchantresses.

'Be silent!' Weeping tears for
the setback, shaken with
pain
Selidie wrestled to center her dist
racted mind. Disaster beckoned.
She had less than a heartbeat to act. No choice remained,
no choice
at all
; she must surrender burned ha
nds to the fire and reforge her
s
napped link with the Waystone.

Once she harnessed the amethy
st's matrix, she could wield its
empowered focus. The constr
uct for containment and Davien's
sent spell coul
d both be doused at one stroke.

But she had to subdue the
roused Waystone first. Already
lashed into unbridled resona
nce, the jewel would strike with
instantaneous force. Its assau
lt would be unrelenting. Selidie
would have no moment of preparation, no interlude of testing quiet in which to compose her riled nerves. Worse still, she must distance every distraction. The risk was unilateral. She could not divide her resources, even to set the most basic protection to safeguard her unshielded hands.

While she battled the Waystone, the fire would burn her. In peril of her very survival, she must yield no thought to the horror, must stand unmoved by torment. Fail in rigid discipline, and the spite in the amethyst would claim her. Personal consciousness would be dragged under and shackled, a living imprisonment more final than Daelion Fatemaster's damnation.

Too many of her predecessors had been lost in times past, never to see rescue or recovery.

Not courageous at all, but ruled by the gauntlet of duty, Prime Selidie spread trembling, blistered fingers. She thrust her arms through the fire, screaming out her raw fear. Then, her dread vented, a hold like cold death clamped over her traumatized mind, the Prime Matriarch groped for the Waystone.

Eyes closed, consumed by unflinching purpose, Selidie refused to acknowledge the stink of her own charring flesh. The actinic flare of outraged nerves reamed her through, then became stripped of meaning by the bared lash of her will. She held herself shuttered. Entombed in a bastion of self-imposed calm, all her focused resource pitched to wrestle the Waystone's ferocious peril, she blundered toward her objective. Her weeping skin made contact with a searing hiss. Now wedded to the amethyst's deadly, dark facets, she would either immolate herself, or wrest out an avenue of yielding surrender through which she could impose dominance.

Crowded, battered, pummeled by the maelstrom of the stone's viciousness, she lost all thoughts but the one that secured her self-identity. Time lost cohesion. She could not stay the onslaught to know whether the wax sigils had melted, or if the squared circle had breached. All details became immaterial: whether her hands became crisped to the bone did not matter, or whether the Great amethyst would shear into cracks and shatter to fragments from heat stress.

Nor dared she acknowledge the gibbering cries of lost primes, their ghost presence turbulent about her as they mocked, or gabbled their insane advice. Slaved consciousnesses, all, they were part of the Waystone's imprinted core, a storehouse of past wisdom and historical detritus, evolved into sentient malice.

As crystal, the amethyst could not access itself; insatiably hungry, it craved to add Selidie's awareness to its purgatory of trapped spirits. Those assimilated human thoughts and emotions provided the enlivening seeds, enabling its matrix to evolve through interactive conception.

Selidie resisted the siren cries. She deafened her being to the melting enticements that promised her pleasures unimaginable. She faced down the threats, arisen like dragon's teeth, that browbeat her resolve with vistas of limitless pain. She broke through the clamor of illusions insisting her autonomy had been broken in defeat.

Obdurate, Selidie braced through the ordeal. Exposed, stripped naked by the shot arrows of a thousand barbed energies, she held fast. Her stance must
be
strength, without desperation. Inner balance must prevail in the face of rank chaos, though earth itself should give way and crumble under her feet. She must not think, must not feel. Lose her grip on resolve, and the grinding mill of the Waystone's stewed rancor would sweep her under. She resisted as rock, hammered and smashed and pummeled by currents that wore at her reserve with the blind rage of a cataclysm.

Damned faces streamed by, claiming to be mother, father, sister, or brother. Selidie kept her true memories wrapped silent, abjured all temptation to refute the snared spirits. To acknowledge them at all, even as impostors, was to trip and fall into a morass of hostile energies that would flay her. The Waystone's pack of captive spirits demanded, then howled. They tore with tooth and nail, hurling fragments of ancient spellcraft in their effort to wrest her spirit from its housing of breathing, warm flesh.

More patient than the most cold-blooded predator, Selidie maintained her beleaguered pocket of calm. She resisted the falsehood, that the scope and force of the conflict had hurled her beyond time. Centuries, or mere seconds, the elapsed interval
must not matter.
If she succumbed to any small thread of distraction, she would become lost forever.

Then the opening presented. Her inner sight picked up a split-second rift through the snarling legions of ghosts. Into that breach, she rammed the first sigil configured to rule the Great Waystone. One axis of four stood cleared of obstruction. Given that foothold, that abatement of ranged power, the Koriani Prime oriented her awareness within the dark heart of the sphere. Riding on spatial instinct and the hardened reserve of experience, she tapped into the amethyst's matrix, then lashed back, her will focused diamond, and her mastery unerring. As the other three sigils swept chaos before them, she achieved the stunning release. Unified peace descended as the crystal opened in limpid surrender.

Her senses rushed back. Slapped blind and breathless by an onslaught of lacerating pain, Selidie maintained her trembling hold. She tapped the Waystone's tamed focus to steady herself, then forced open smoke-stinging eyes.

Restored to awareness, she crouched, bent and weeping over the charred wreckage of her hands. The fires beneath had somehow extinguished, a mystery she had no scrap of resource to pursue. From whatever source, the intervention had come too late to spare her from ruin. Blackened stubs of stripped bone, stuck with scorched meat and tendons, remained clamped with welded tenacity to the Waystone.

The jewel was still hot. Smoke purled reeking wisps from the crabbed remnants of her fingers. Underneath, the heartcore of the jewel was uncracked; its facets still gleamed, the spiked core of the matrix glimmering with needles of poised force.

Limp, all but broken, Selidie croaked the command to restore the grand focus to quiescence. As the jewel's powers ebbed, then finally deserted her, she shuddered under the assault of a pain beyond all rational endurance. Overset by reaction and visceral horror, Prime Selidie tore her flaking flesh free.

She would have collapsed, had two ranking seniors not rushed forward and caught her. Their trembling grasp shored her up, a staunch presence bracing her shoulders.

'Come,' someone said. 'Let us get you away.' Then, 'Just lean back and breathe. Asya's already gone to the sisterhouse. She's bringing a third-rank healer to help straightaway.'

Selidie dragged in a coarse, moaning breath. Through a nightmare of agony, she struggled for speech: how had the fires of Davien's conjury extinguished? An inarticulate whimper rasped from her throat, weak as a newborn kitten's.

The seeress used her crystal, tapped her gift of empathy, and road her Prime's balked intent. Her neutral voice answered and resolved burning need. 'The Betrayer included a limiting rune. His fire spell dispersed by itself.'

Which meant, all along,
there had been no danger.
Amid greasy smoke and the scorched waste of her wardspell, Prime Selidie absorbed the cruel truth: that the squared circle would not have been breached; nor would the Great Waystone have cracked under stress. Had she held back, taken one cool moment to weigh risks, she could have escaped with no further harm than a few scalded blisters.

'Oh, mercy, my hands,' she groaned through locked teeth. Her head lolled back, singed hair tumbled loose, as her attendants bore her up and assisted her tottering step. 'Burned to the bone, and for nothing.' She wanted to howl, that she had been wantonly crippled by tricks, the victim of her own cleverness.

She understood Davien's promise with Elaira had been nothing more than fiendish bait all along.

Like a headstrong, green fool, she had succumbed to assumption, and treated with the Betrayer as though he was an unshielded spirit.

'You know what this means,' she gasped, excoriated by trapped rage and humiliation. Shocked, spinning on the verge of hysteria, she pulled up short, and cried out to the devastated sisters who tended her, 'What in the name of Ath's creation has this Fellowship meddler become?'
It'
s
a discorporate entity, Davien should not have possessed the means to evade her laid snare!

'Hush,' soothed the seeress. 'Never mind. Keep you still.'

Another initiate burst in with soaked towels. Solicitous hands eased the Prime down on a cushioned divan and started the tender task of wrapping the seared bones of her fingers. Soon after, Selidie lost her last wits to the pain.

A dimmed voice of protest funneled to her through a roaring storm of torment. 'Mercy on her, can't this wait for a posset?'

Then at last, someone kind forced a rag to her mouth and muffled her mindless screaming.

* * *

Back on Daon Ramon Barrens, naked to the skin, the Sorceref Davien rubbed his hands do
wn the lean, muscled line of his
flanks. Then, bothered by the nagging pull of a cramp, he clasped his immaculate, artist's finger
s and stretched linked arms over
his head. The flex of his lips
held both sorrow and irony as he
cast a glance eastward, and murmured, 'My dear, the lesson w
as
harshly unpleasant, but needful. You will certainly think twic
e
before you wield the power of
your order, or poke prying hands
into Fellowship business again.'

Supremely untroubled by the blasting wind, or by t
he last
wisping snowfall that dewed his pale skin and flecked spangling flakes amid tumbled, cinnabar hair
, Davien closed his dark eyes.

He dispatched a ranging thought to the east, and assur
ed
himself that Elaira's spirit had returned without harm to her body. She would waken shortly in the hostel near Eastwall, secure within the adept's sacred grove, and none the worse for her spiritwalk in Daon Ramon.

Then, freed to attend to more pressing matters, the Sorcerer regarded the blanketed form of Earl Jieret, lashed wrist and ankle before him.

Davien's knife-sharp brows gathered into a frown. He bent, his questing touch light as a ghost's, and ascertained the clan chieftain was unconscious. Pulse and breathing were regular. The
caithdein'
s condition was stressed, his body dehydrated from blood loss, but in no threat of imminent collapse. Faultlessly gentle, the Betrayer turned the man's head. He straightened the snarled clan braid, then stroked the soot-streaked, snake locks of loosened hair from the chieftain's cheek and forehead. 'Brave one, take my promise, you won't suffer alone any longer.'

Last, his formed will made manifest as an intricate tracery of light, the Sorcerer imprinted the cipher to summon Traithe's raven against the
caithdein'
s stilled brow.

He added a whispered blessing, then finished, 'Act wisely and well.'

Davien straightened up. His flesh by now stung to a blush by the cold, he tipped back his head. The aquiline jut of his profile formed a stamped cameo against the black rock of the outcrop as a poised second passed. Then a soundless explosion of light ripped his male figure into formless static. The sparks winked and faded. In their place, an eagle shot upward, winging purposefully northward into the waning night.

Behind, flurried in a backwash of winnowed snow, the raptor left the elegant, clear imprint of two naked human feet.

Shortly there came a gyrating wind, which blurred their edges, then fully erased them.