TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (57 page)

Shadows Behind the Throne

The raven blinked.

Dream ruptured, casting Earl Jieret out of the web of prescient Sight. The image of the high gap in the Mathorns dissolved, and with it the vision that had witnessed the parting between Rathain's crown prince and the staunch Companion sworn to his defense. Yet Jieret did not recover full waking awareness with the release of his seer's talent. Instead, he found himself oddly adrift, his disembodied awareness still cast in suspension above Daon Ramon's vast landscape. The hour was twilight. From his overhead vantage, the snow-covered vales rolled away, frozen spume on a storm-tossed sea.

Preternaturally attuned to the passage of time, Jieret understood he had suffered a fit of prescient vision.
Alithiel had yet to be drawn from her wrapped and warded scabbard.
The confrontation in the mountain foothills would not come to pass until several hours past nightfall. Arithon's anonymity rested on that scant margin. The risky protection safeguarding his sanity from Lysaer's closing proximity became the sole factor to stall the drive of Desh-thiere's curse.

The realm's
caithdein
was not resigned. Regret gouged him to relentless guilt. The accursed fact galled, that he should still breathe after his late string of failures.

The raven cocked her head in midflight, her intelligent regard turned piercing.
'You are alive. Since every man is the Fatemaster's
p
artner in choosing his moment of death, your spirit remains on this side of the Wheel for a compelling reason.'

Disembodied in dream, Jieret's frustration erupted in silenced explosion.
'For what purpose, if I am left helpless?'

'But you are not helpless,'
the raven cracked back, the downstroke of her wings whiplash curt.
'The thread of your consciousness is part of the life-weave that anchors Athera's existence. Every thought you have, every whisper of feeling, every desire you hold in your heart carries a distinct, measured impact.'
Her. eye a bright bead of sheared obsidian, the bird concluded,
'No matter what straits, or how dire the circumstance, only the fool disowns his vested power to respond.'

Presented with Jieret's dumbstruck distress, the raven trimmed her ink pinions and shot forward.
'You disbelieve? Then behold, your own Sight will show you the truth. You have already looked out at your world. Yet the greater mystery will not stand revealed unless you allow what
exists
to see you.'

The land unreeled beneath Jieret's focused regard, stone and snow and hill and brush alive with the glimmerance of enhanced vision. The intricate patterns encompassed more than one layer, as though he discerned time and space through a series of stacked, colored templates. The sheer complexity stunned and confounded. Yet even without trained experience, or practice, he could intuitively grasp small details. Here, he discerned the bright spark of an owl gone to roost with fluffed feathers in a thicket. He watched the glittering, poured stream of a hunting wolf pack, and the placid emanations of deer. Daon Ramon unfurled secrets like a tapestry below, the life of all things animate and inanimate strung on the spooled flow of the lane flux. As an unseen observer, Jieret felt secure from a peril half-sensed, and beyond any language to express.

'Will you dare?'
provoked the raven, a punch-cut black shape sailing light as a leaf, at her heart the vast chasm of eternity.

'Death would be simpler,'
Jieret reproached. Bodiless, he still felt the pull of trepidation. Yet his shortfall had never been cowardice.

Given the choice between helpless captivity and passing the gateway of unknown fear, he embraced his decision. He cast off the innermost barrier of his selfhood and threw open the floodgates of consciousness, until he stood naked before every facet of Ath's vast creation.

The spun envelope of awareness that held him apart dissolved like gauze ripped by a gale.

His awareness exploded with contrary sensation: rising, falling, spinning, imploding, expanding. He had expected to forfeit his individuality, but no such oblivion befell him. Instead, all that he was, and had been, became
more.
Jieret tumbled in the maelstrom of forces that spiraled the limitless spectrum of wrought form. Nowhere became everywhere; darkness became light. He was wind, then fire, then water, then earth. He beheld the boundless space of infinity in a stone, then the space of the void packed into honeycomb vaults of energetic activity. Epiphany flooded him, that vision extended beyond the realm of perceptible light. To the thrum of a heartbeat, on the flap of the raven's outstretched wings, awareness smashed past the bounds of the limited mind.

Jieret s'Valerient perceived his own Name. Hard on the heels of that understanding came expansive recognition: that all Names in existence were contained within the imprint of his personal consciousness. Each mote and thread in the tapestry of Ath's being reflected the sum total of himself.
He was the past, where Paravians danced at solstice, and he was the branching multiplicity of futures, where all possibilities existed, based on each ongoing moment of choice.
He held the key to the hour a s'Ffalenn prince was crowned high king,
as well as
the hour the Mistwraith's curse triumphed, bringing down darkness beyond all redemption.

Both outcomes deployed from the palm of his hand. Two fates, for Rathain, strung on the balance of his unwritten destiny. At today's crux, as Rathain's sworn steward and acting
caithdein,
Jieret seized his chance to leave both futures open. The fork in the path would be left to posterity. Triumph or tragedy, the unclaimed legacy would remain, lodged in the web of unresolved possibility.

'Will you dare?'
prompted the raven again.

From a point that was nowhere, and everywhere at once, Jieret s'Valerient answered.
'I have seen your promise that I am not helpless.'

'Then my task here is finished.'
The dark harbinger banked on spread wings, doubled back, and flew
through
him, leaving her parting fragment of mystery: that Traithe and Sethvir had always been heard to address her presence as
'brother'.

In that eyeblink of time, Earl Jieret felt his awareness drawn back into resharpened focus. The part of his being that answered his Name gently drifted to rest above the slack form of his body.

Passing time had changed little. His inert, drugged flesh still lay senseless and bound within the Etarran command tent. The hour was past sundown. Lamps had been lit, their oil-soaked wicks casting a soot haze of smoke. The carnelian light flecked glints of reflection off oiled metal and the battered accoutrements of war: the racked swords and lances; the rolled pennons with their sunwheel finials; the horse harness with chased stirrups and bits. Nearer at hand, traced in gloom and spiked highlights: the brass corners of the locked chests; and the hanging flagons with their stamped tin necks plugged with rolled-leather stoppers.

Jieret's scarce-breathing form lay faceup on the pallet. The posted guard had been changed, his replacement no less than the Alliance Lord Commander.

Sulfin Evend had stripped off his field cloak and surcoat. Still clad in the pebbled gray links of his byrnie, a snagged pair of trunk hose, and boots ringed with damp from his tour of the camp, he had removed his fur-lined helm. His head was left bare, dark hair spiked and matted where the steel had pressed wayward cowlicks. His lean hands were stripped of scaled gloves as he bent keen inspection upon an arrow's repaired fletching. The activity was ongoing. Three sheaves in waxed quivers leaned at his knee. Cast underfoot, a loose scattering of shafts had apparently failed to pass muster.

Jieret's disembodied presence drifted amid the throes of a mild dispute. Across the tent, the curtain enclosing the tactical maps stood open; with deceptive nonchalance Sulfin Evend answered the query just spoken. 'Yes, Lord Exalted.' If he was overawed by the personage in the glittering, bright mail, overlaid with a jeweled, white surcoat, his level tone conveyed only emotionless flint. 'My order dispatched the best tracker we had on that errand.'

'Why?' Lysaer
s'Ilessid
's return query also held unflawed patience; but the rings on his fingers snapped curt sparks as he laid both hands, forced and still, on the layered maps spread over the trestle.

Sulfin Evend raised eyes like dark smoke with held fury. 'More likely to bring in his quarry, that's self-evident.'

The gold braid and bleached lamb's wool might have clothed a stone statue, under the flare of the lamps. 'To chase a clan fugitive, traveling alone?'

'But one who kills with the premeditated force of ten of my best-trained veterans.' Sulfin Evend thumbed the resharpened point on a broadhead. His glare a raised challenge, he turned over his hand, then shaved the fine hair from the back of his wrist to test the whetted edge. 'Against that breed of fugitive, I send out the best. That way, our skilled soldiers come back to us, living.'

'You're in command,' Lysaer reassured. Above the ranked counters representing armed men, his eyes shone the chaste blue of cornflowers. 'Though I must say, I've never done anything so barbaric as tying a man's severed plait to my standard.' His lips flexed in distaste. 'You know that's quite likely to make my poor bearer a target?'

'Then the bearer will ride at my stirrup.' Sulfin Evend tapped the arrow in his hands, his placating smile a needle of sultry irritation. 'That way, we'll flush the best of the clan archers. I'd sooner have the barbarian cut down before you're at risk of his skills. Do you think me a fool?'

'I think you are ruthless,' said Lysaer
s'Ilessid
. 'The fool is going to become the poor wretch who's asked to carry my banner.'

Sulfin Evend lifted his stubbled chin and laughed, his release as much humor as relief. 'He'll be the man who botched last night's patrol, of course. You don't like my handling when an officer's inept? Is that the fine point you're stripping my sad hide to make?'

'I don't like the fact that he's Minister Sorchain's favorite cousin,' Lysaer amended with sharp delicacy. 'He's got Etarran pedigree longer than your arm, and I'll face a political brangle, if he dies here.'

'Should I worry?' Sulfin Evend selected another arrow, closed an eye with the same steely glint as his mail shirt, and sighted the length of the shaft. 'If I dispatch the Master of Shadow for you here in Daon Ramon, I could retire. Then you and cousin Raiett can devote all your days in the lion's den, soothing your pride of Etarran ruffled tempers.' The arrow proved warped beyond saving. The Alliance Lord Commander snapped it over his knee. The crack of dry wood fell like a shout against sudden, blanketing silence.

Prompted by instinct, Sulfin Evend looked up. Lysaer remained in his seat at the map table, his posture struck to a listening stillness of deep and disturbing intensity. The Alliance Lord Commander felt a prickle of warning lift the hair at his nape.

Then Lysaer
s'Ilessid
shot to his feet. His camp stool crashed into a pile of shields, while map counters bounced in a jostled cascade from the tabletop.

'What's amiss?' Sulfin Evend cast down the halved arrow and clapped a fist to his dagger. 'Are we threatened?'

His questions stayed dangling. The spasm of hatred that warped Lysaer's face disallowed civilized speech.

A disembodied presence, unseen and unnoticed, Jieret s'Valerient also sensed the crux when the black sword Alithiel was fatefully drawn from her sheath. Though Braggen's action occurred twelve leagues distant, in the high notch of the Mathorns, the vulnerable second of transfer as Arithon's spirit rejoined its seat of warm flesh flicked a ripple across the unseen chord of world life force. The event was unsubtle. Though the tie to his drugged body had frayed to a thread, Jieret felt as though a thin, heated wire had just jerked the length of his spine.

'Muster your front-rank officers! Do it now!' Lysaer shouted. 'Light bless whatever instinct you followed. I think your best tracker's just flushed the Spinner of Darkness himself.'

'The bastard's unmasked?' Bolt upright in one bound, Sulfin Evend strode over the discarded arrows and snatched up his damp surcoat and cloak. 'Where? We've got trouble if he's already north of the trade road.'

Undaunted by that possibility for setback, Lysaer seized the officer's horn from the weapons rack by the tent flap. 'That's rugged country, but the passes are snowbound. The Master of Shadow surely can't cross the divide.' Jewels flashed to his frenetic haste as he thrust the horn into Sulfin Evend's reaching grasp. 'Sound the alarm. You've got three companies of my crack Etarran troops, well seasoned at harrying clan scouts. Cut off the hills to the Instrell coast. We'll drive the criminal to the ground in high peaks. He won't slip through,
I can sense his position,
and we hold Red-beard captive, a bargaining chip to effectively muzzle his allies.'

'Well, keep a tight guard on him!' Sulfin Evend cracked back as he shouldered head down through the tent flap. 'The Mathorns are known as a bolt-hole for raiders. If I'm still in charge, then the field scouts ride point. Damned if I'm going to spearhead a foray doomed to march into a trap.'

'Forget torches,' Lysaer said, too driven to abide the delay. 'Tonight, we're not going to need them.'