TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (54 page)

XI. Nightfall

T
h
e heavy soporific Sulfin Evend had given released Jieret from black sleep by midmorning. He did not rouse at once. Scarcely conscious, he realized at length he was strapped to the back of a horse. The creature was moving. That fact seemed detached, a detail of little importance. He suffered the burn of cold winds and the deep ache of injuries at strange remove, as though the dense weight of his flesh-bound being belonged to another existence. The more vital part of himself that was spirit drifted still, unfettered and free.

Enveloped by peace that reached past mortality, contained in that self-sustained state of winged lightness, Jieret dreamed. Merged with the air, his awareness unreeled over the land, guided in flight by a raven.

The bird did not speak. In this hour, she did not offer symbols, or gesture at inked, parchment maps. On outstretched, coal wings, she skimmed on the wind's breath, over the snow-clad hills of Daon Ramon. Rock and ice, the scenery glittered like damascened silver under the varnishing glaze of thin sun. The rough brush lay bejeweled, with the deer and the hawk, the winter owl and the hare, set as moving masterworks amid the vast breadth of the Creator's interlocked tapestry.

At odd moments, the brown pelts of the stags seemed recast in spun light, as if the ghost presence of bygone Paravians aroused lo the touch of hoofed herds on the game trails. Other times the winds recalled the lost resonance of a centaur guardian's horn call, whose belling harmonics had once sounded a paean of joy to awaken the slumbering stone in the outcrops. Past and present merged, a living dynamic that flowed in balance with the dance of four elements, wearing the changing face of four seasons.

The raven was not bound to the ribbon of time. She had flown these skies in the Age of Dragons, and also knew the dark blank of the void in the era before the earliest formation of matter. Spirit bound to the enchanted bird's course, Jieret followed her lead ever deeper into the layered realms of mage-sight.

The limitless well of the creature's jet eye held the language of wisdom, the silent unknown that encompassed all things. Raven flew beyond fear of death. She knew each crossing and gateway; she possessed the key to all portals. Peerless navigator, the stuff of the bird's very self was wrought of primordial darkness. The black rainbow shine as the sun struck her feathers knit the shroud of Ath's mysteries: all shape and form pooled as latent energy, the infinite source of the unbirthed potential that could, and had, formed whole, complex worlds at the mere flick of a thought.

The raven flew, her wings bridging the veil, and Jieret followed. Sustained by the gift of his talent, he traced every twist and turn of her course. Through raven's ears, he heard the speech of the air as the unbridled breath of dawn that gifted the listening mind with inspiration. He experienced the illumination of sun, moon, and stars, and felt the raw fire of passion that could wither or seed resurrection. The water in the streambeds channeled the flow of his feelings, and the love at the heart of him, raised and nurtured to cherish the land. In stone, he was shown the enduring commitment that shaped the firm dictates of will.

Through the raven's sight, Jieret beheld marvels: the lattice of energies sustaining all being and the strung flare of the lanes that balanced the currents of change. Passion, inspiration, love, and commitment, he tracked the spun forces within his core being. He forgot the slack body Sulfin Evend dragged north, lashed to the back of a horse. Form lost its priority. Thought and breath, desire and emotion, his clay presence was founded in transience. Granted the gift of raven's perception, Jieret threaded the labyrinthine path across the next threshold. Ancient knowledge opened through that gateway of initiation. Like the soundless spin of a black feather, fallen, the first key to grand conjury settled into his outstretched grasp.

Change bore him into a soaring lift of expansion. Rathain's
caithdein
beheld the truth in the land embodied within himself, and himself, mirrored back in the body of the land; one cloth, and one thread, wrapped and woven upon the warp-and-weft loom of the elements.

Raven's knowledge recast all form as flux, vibration and energy cast into illusion as varying states of solidity. Set against the grand backdrop of the mysteries, the momentary present ran fluid. A mountain stood unveiled as a monument of promise; and a river, the expressed voice of emotion. Drawn into connection by the bird's peerless patience, Jieret wept, touched by the purity of the joy that sourced the vast dance of creation. Suspended upon the primal chord of Ath's mystery, failure lost its cruel sting. Death was rerendered as meaningless.

Peace returned. For an hour, Jieret slept, dreamless, wrapped in primordial darkness. The swish of the raven's wing strokes soothed his throbbing hurts, and the beat of its heart timed his breathing.

He roused when hands shifted him off the spent horse. Sudden shock and raw hurt cut through like a blade and sheared off his access to mage-sight. Plunged back under the suffocating shadow of blindness, he first cried aloud out of loss, then with heartsore longing to kick free of the pain-ridden flesh that racked his senses and threatened to break him.

No succor answered, only the vicious teeth of the troubles that bound him unwilling to life. By then, tenacious, his training took over. Forest-bred clansman, he would not give way to captivity with no show of fight. His mind could be dredged from the shoals of despair. Beleaguered awareness could be compelled to sift through the broken mosaic of impressions. By blistering discipline, against trying lethargy, Rathain's chieftain recovered his bearings.

Voices exclaimed over him, none of them friendly. Jieret sorted their tones of contempt, and their clipped Etarran accents. One man's baiting comment concerning triced enemies raised gales of unpleasant laughter, then a companion's rejoinder cut short by an officer's reprimand. Boots sucked and splashed through puddled mud. Rough cloth sighed over metal. As the circle of detractors made way for another arrival, the wool-musty smell of their campaign-soured bodies admitted a shearing feather of wind.

The breeze off the hills was not scoured and clean, but came burdened by the sweat taint of horses, oiled metal, and smoky
c
ookfires boiling links of hard sausage.

Set on unsure feet in the mushy snow, Jieret had no strength to reject the enemy arms that supported his upright posture.

'No nonsense!' cracked Sulfin Evend, nearby. 'We keep him alive. That means tender handling and a healer.' His impatient spate of orders faded and resurged, as some busy horseboy gathered slack reins and led off his lathered mount. 'The barbarian will be housed under guard alongside the Blessed Prince. Yes, inside the captain's campaign tent! Now move! You sluggards can't see he's in desperate straits? I want the man flat on his back,
now,
and cosseted like a sick sister!'

Before Jieret could be hefted and slung across the most burly guard's shoulder, a small fellow reeking of unguents and dried blood shoved declaiming into the press. 'Dolts! Fetch a litter! There's been an arrow removed from that shoulder, I'm told. Hoist him like that, you'll rip the wound open. Sure as the Avenger's Black Spear, that would kill him, low as he is with shock and excessive blood loss.'

By then, the hooding blackness had started to spin. Jieret fought the rush of trembling weakness, then shuddered to the touch as hard fingers clamped down on his jaw. He recoiled into someone's mailed fist, felt his clan braid caught and held as the inveterate camp healer examined his cloth-wrapped face. Hot breath brushed his cheek, thick with the odor of onions, as some henchman pried open his mouth and exposed the ghastly, maimed stump of his tongue.

The din of the voices receded, became the shrill calling of gulls over a storm sea of surf. Jieret never noted the litter's arrival, or felt the brusque handling that caught him short of collapse. Surrendered back into the peace of unconsciousness, he slumped against the townbred captors who eased his tall frame off his feet.

* * *

He woke out of nightmare. Not yet fully aware, Jieret reacted on instinct, already fighting the new coils of rope looped over his ankles and wrists. A sharp grip caught his shoulder and wrestled him down.

'If you thrash,' someone snapped, 'they'll come back for sure and strap you down to the pallet.'

Jieret turned his head right and left, the weight on his chest invasive as poured lead, and his breath tight and fast with desperation.

The guard who pinned him flat on the ticking turned out to be rarely perceptive. 'Relax.' He flicked something limp as a tassel against Earl Jieret's flushed cheek. 'There, do you see? No one's chopped off your clan braid, just yet.'

On a groan of relief, Rathain's
caithdein
subsided. His mouth had been treated with a salve of camphor and cloves. The astringent sting scoured the membranes of his nose, and caused his seared eye sockets to water through whatever numbing wash had been used to curb the incessant pain. His shoulder had been stitched and tightly rebound. The blankets spread over his scraped limbs were loomed of fine wool and, against every precedent, dry.

Too spent to argue, Jieret settled back. His scalp thumped into the sandbags the healer had used to wedge his head still, a practice that suggested a hovering assistant, probably under instructions to force broth or possets down his unwilling throat. Since he had also been stripped of his leathers, he was grateful at least that indignity had occurred during his late bout of unconsciousness.

The greater ache in him could find no relief. The maimed limits of his sensory perception and the confines of a wounded body now became an unbreakable prison. Jieret sprawled, bound and helpless, unable to express the towering rage that flared to each beat of his heart. The remedies dispensed by Lysaer's camp healer had dulled the razor-sharp edge of his mind. He burned for escape. Beyond reason, he craved the climbing, high song of the stars and the moon, abiding within the realms of pure light that lay past the closed doors of his mage-sight.

The slow minutes passed, every second prolonged agony. Time hung. The sentries posted at the campaign tent stamped their numbed feet. Outside, a man-at-arms upbraided a page for a sloppy job cleaning his boots. The camp cook baked the day's bread in his ovens, and soldiers complained of the grinding misery that passed for life in a field camp.

Taxed into lassitude, Jieret gave way to the leaden exhaustion that made every slight movement a trial. Even discounting the stout, knotted cords, he doubted he could have mustered the strength to roll his battered frame over.

'
All right, then.' The guardsman's grip lightened up on his shoulder, then trustingly withdrew. 'Keep on using good sense, my orders say I won't have to call someone in to knock you down with valerian.'

Blinded and tongueless, kept as Lysaer's prize trophy, the clan chieftain harnessed the dregs of his resource and measured his current surroundings. Candles burned, expensive ones made from beeswax, though the rancid reek of commonplace tallow dips still clung to the canvas that billowed overhead. Oiled steel, goose grease, bark-tanned leather; one by one, he identified the scents attendant upon campaign warfare, and the stockpiles of a camp armory. The tent headquarters seemed spacious; probably had a partition, with the sleeping area curtained off from a trestle layered with tactical maps.

To Jieret's left, the varnish taint of ink and parchment bespoke a lap desk kept to write dispatches. Strained hearing picked up the muffled murmur of voices, then Sulfin Evend's impatient query demanding to know in searching detail of the outlying patrols and deployment.

The replies were perfunctory, given without excitement. Hide creaked, near at hand. Left to bored duty, the guard by the pallet presently unsheathed his knife. Jieret counted seconds to the whispery patter of scrolled shavings and breathed in the mild spice of birch.

From the feverish shadows of memory, he all but heard Caolle's disparaging comment, that a fellow who dared to pass his time whittling had better be a tried veteran carrying rank.
'Someone who won't find himself digging latrines for his idle amusement while on duty.'

Jieret wondered whether his deceased war captain had known the same bitter despair, trussed and wounded as he had been near the end, a cipher retained among enemy hands while still bound, unwilling, to the wrong side of Fate's Wheel.

Pragmatic to the last, Caolle had not stood down. The clan chief his able teaching had raised was honor bound to do nothing less. Against grinding humiliation, and the inconsolable grief that yearned for release into the rapturous refuge of mage-sight, Jieret fought. He rejected the suffocating void of futility and forced his tormented mind to wring meaning from every detail of his surroundings.

Activity from the Alliance encampment filtered through the tent wall. An invalid could track the banter and complaints of men on campaign and keep count of mentioned numbers. He could listen for inbound and outbound patrols, and between the dinning clang of a blacksmith's hammer, discern the individual neighs of picketed horses. Jieret strained through the chatter of the water boys thawing ice in the cauldrons, then the querulous bark of an officer demanding if Skannt's prized pack had been fed. No hounds bayed or barked; these dogs would be tracker cut to run silent, a deadly danger should they be yoked into couples and set on the trail of a fugitive.

In time, a disturbance unraveled the established pattern of routine. A scout just arrived on a lathered horse brought word of a raiding clansman. The reiver was assigned the fresh blame for five dead, and two victims, grievously wounded.

'. . . the same devil who slipped through the checkpoint, disguised. Yes, he got through! Who wouldn't have passed him? He used the pretense of bearing our own wounded officer on to the care of a healer.'

Last night's watch captain answered the predictable inquiry with a professional's clarity. 'A patrol was dispatched several hours before dawn, under orders to trap that barbarian.'

The day's duty officer returned his harried confirmation, that the killer had not yet been found. Between the ongoing demands of rotating scout teams and sentries, of settling disputes, and attending the loose ends of the half dozen bothersome skirmishes with clanborn holed up in thick brush, he and his overworked staff had been further beset by Sulfin Evend's scouring tongue.

Lysaer's Lord Commander had cut them no slack, but adjusted the trim of a discipline blunted by unremitting weeks of Daon Ramon's rough country and the harsh winter's recurrent foul weather. The recoil was ongoing. Men scurried, shamefaced, still caught aback by the colossal upset of receiving the Divine Prince's presence in a war camp not groomed to host royalty.

The dissent outside the command tent eddied nearer, the harked voice of the officer clashing against implied reprimand. Then wear my boots, curse you! Damn bastard sorcerer's henchmen are demons, wicked as lightning to catch.'

Jieret lay like lumped wax on the pallet, unwilling to betray the least sign of sharp wits to the watchful eye of the guardsman.

'Very well, horseman, let's have your report. Short and sweet, is the wretch sent across Fate's Wheel? Then how did your sergeant's blundering negligence manage to let him escape?' the approaching footsteps squelched through the muck beside the campaign tent, and on a blast of iced draft, burst inside.

Cut off by the slap of the canvas door flap, the breathless messenger delivered, '. . . only one barbarian, lordship, still on the loose. Wind itself couldn't corner him. He's got remounts in tow.' His excitement flowed into detailed recitation as the arrivals stamped through the curtained partition to consult the tactical maps. 'Damned fugitive's already reached the trade road. Can't read which direction he turned. Too many wagons have scoured the tracks. If we're to find where he took to the hills, we'll need skilled tracker and handlers with a dog pack.'

I'll give you twelve men, and six couples of hounds,' the day's watch officer snapped in decision. 'Take the second-best tracker. I want the one Skannt trained kept in reserve, for the hour we flush out the Shadow Master.'

'No. Send Skannt's man, now,' Sulfin Evend countermanded.

'But, your lordship, that's overreaction, surely?' Present all the while, perhaps dozing after his superior's blistering review of the camp, the Etarran captain arose to a slither of cloth and the creak of a pegged wooden camp furnishing.

Avenor's Lord Commander slapped down his protest. 'If the clan wretch has remounts, he'll be moving for some purpose. The second-rate tracker might lose him.'

'One man?' scorned the watch officer, all gruff disbelief. 'Sending Skannt's tracker's like using a catapult to peg down a damn fool rabbit.'

'Get this much, and clearly!' Sulfin Evend broke in. 'By my command, no murdering clan bastard will be given any such quibbling advantage. He might snatch that margin. Your Blessed Prince doesn't want his kind left free to breed up clutches of children! Bring him in living to answer my questions, or else drop him, dead. Fail in this, and somebody here loses his officer's badge! Take my word,
captain,
you don't want to put me in that kind of thrashing bad mood.'

The commotion raised as the chastised men left masked Sulfin Evend's cat step across the tent. Whether by instinct or the refined intuition of mage-sense, Earl Jieret felt the bearing pressure of the Lord Commander's regard rest at last upon him; as though somehow, Lysaer's dedicated
Hanshire captain suspected some
trick of binding spellcraft had allowed the Master of Shadow to slip through his line of Etarrans. His inimical survey could almost be felt, a steel probe slicing through skin.

The experience stayed unpleasan
t. Jieret knew visceral, crawl
ing dread, the unnerved anticipation an animal at slaughter must feel, when stunned and stretched fo
r the knife. The clan chieftain
endured in harrowing darkness. His hold upon life had grown tenuously light. Death at the threshold would come as a friend on the hour when fate chose to knock. The last fear he harbored was not for himself, but fo
r his crown prince's survival.

The flooding anxiety raise
d for Arithon's sake snapped the
shackles over his mind. Jieret seized that opening and escaped
.
Swept into an eerie detachment by t
he gift of the raven's teaching
his sensitized talent granted him vision beyond the limits of sight
.
In altered perception, he ma
pped the looming presence of the
Lord Commander beside him. H
e watched in turn, as the pale
steadfast flame of Sulfin Evend's oathsworn loyalty blazed
up
like the flare
of fierce-burning phosphor.

Earl Jieret garnered the uncanny insight, that the man befoll him was hagridden. His bold, Hanshire arrogance masked a consuming concern, that his plans would be balked despite the extreme measures taken. Frustration spurred Sulfin Evend like live sparks, as though the hunch rode him, that
somehow
this victim, disarmed, broken, blinded, and mute, would contrive to slip through his fingers. The contest he waged with Rathain's bound
caithdein
now trod on intangible footing.

The Earl of the North need do no more than stop breathing to triumph. His worth as a hostage to curtail the clan war bands would dissolve with his death, leaving Lysaer
s'Ilessid
no more than a rotting carcass.

No fool, Sulfin Evend apprised the spider-silk filament binding Jieret to life. 'I want the captive dosed with a posset,' he snapped. He would use every dirty tactic at hand, twist even the tools of the healer's trade to forestall any chance of defeat. 'Find whatever the camp bonesetter's got in his stores to scatter the prisoner's reason, or better, submerge his awareness in sleep.'

'My lord?' The guard dropped his carving in reflexive protest. 'What under the Light do you think the sorry wretch can accomplish wrung limp as he is with grave injuries?'

'He can think,' Sulfin Evend replied. 'That by itself makes him dangerous.'

The coarse scrape of mail and the jinking of spurs marked off his step to depart; then a pause, as he offered a rare explanation to steady his doubtful guard. 'You're too fresh to recall, man.' Heightened prescience showed the bound man on the bed that Lysaer's Lord Commander recalled the harsh lesson of Caolle's last legacy. 'But Deshir's last clan war captain was once kept alive by Koriathain after a fatal wounding. Even dying, he managed to take over three ships. Refitted them as the Shadow Master's prizes, to the ruin of our southshore sea trade. That dog trained this one. Never doubt, we'll still thrash the fiendish get of s'Valerient lineage long after the sire's been dispatched to Sithaer.'

Jieret fought, first the bonds holding him, then the camp healer's zealot assistant, arrived to carry out orders. He bit the knukles of the hand that forced his mouth open. The first posset the Etarrans sought to pour down his throat spilled in the ferocity of the struggle, soaking the blankets and also the fresh bandage wrapping his wounded shoulder.

'
Blazing furies!' cracked the bite victim, his curse gritted rough as he took stock of the fingers laid open. 'Barbarian's deranged as a rabid wolf. Somebody else can change that damned dressing and give up their dry blankets to cover him.'