TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (63 page)

This tide of beingness
was his own Name,
but loomed on a thread that extended far past the constraints of time and space. Dakar lost his grounding to Rockfell's staid peak. The flux that roared in to reclaim him raged on, stripping out reason and logic. Every template of mortal belief was hammered flat with no mercy, then reforged to support a near-limitless platform. Dakar screamed, unstrung by shock. The sound battered through him, a barrage that took form as senseless waves, endlessly tumbling outward.

Then his eyesight cleared. Given no warning to preface the transition, Dakar sat and blinked, restored to an unnatural clarity that saw far outside the range of visible light.

'How disorienting,' he gasped. The arm he propped to lean on was as tangibly perceptible as the refined layers of his aura. Stone cast an equally manifest energy field. Dakar stared, stupidly trying to sort through an interface of bewildering complexity. Objects and flesh were now overlaid with the energy lines that defined the tracks where light and air interacted. He saw himself melded, rendered at one with the dancing expanse of the sky.

Eyes squeezed shut, or lids open, Dakar discovered he could not close down the broadened band of his altered senses. Awed once again by Kharadmon's equanimity, he said, 'Did you see this way before you were disembodied?' Nausea knifed through him. The spasm was swiftly suppressed by the Sorcerer's expert touch, more efficient remedy than his own crude impulse to clamp his teeth in set misery. 'How did you manage to know what was solid, and how do you steer without hitting things?'

'Experience.' Kharadmon's reply issued through the Mad Prophet's own lips, inflected by his breath and voice.

'Dharkaron wept!' Dakar cried, startled half out of his skin.

He opened his eyes, beheld the intricate patterns of light and sound that
was Luhaine,
and jumped from riled nerves yet again.

Before the other discorporate Sorcerer could proffer an involved explanation, Kharadmon finished answering the gist of the question. 'Some of the senses you're using lie outside the body. The brain still interprets. That's why the perceptions don't respond as you block out your eyesight.'

Dakar glanced aside in searching anxiety, belatedly mindful of his forced promise to Arithon. 'Fionn Areth will surely think I've gone crazy, speaking with myself out of hand.'

'The fool herder's out cold,' Kharadmon dismissed. A raised hand that moved beyond Dakar's volition indicated the young man, slumped amid a haphazard nest of rucked blankets. 'When your body appeared to be having convulsions, the young idiot lost his head. To quiet his shouting, Luhaine sent him to sleep.'

With supreme tact, neither Sorcerer mentioned the irony: that the first time Desh-thiere had been sealed within Rockfell, Kharadmon had performed the selfsame service at need to quell Dakar's intrusive behavior.

The disappointment struck, bitter, that the epiphanies of realigned awareness had not fully released the conditioned shortfalls of a lifetime. Neither age nor maturity quite banished the specter of past terror instilled by that earlier experience at Rockfell Pit. Dakar sensed the reechoed, questing touch, as Kharadmon mapped the source of his apprehension. He shuddered in discomfort, sweating for the residual memories dredged up for examination. Even the fragmented impressions he retained held the stuff of undying nightmare.

'Try not to fight me,' the Fellowship Sorcerer advised. 'I can't help where you won't give your trust freely.'

But to release ingrained fear without trained comprehension was to act on a leap of blind faith. Dakar knew the shortcomings of cowardice too well to stand on false comfort or illusions. 'I told Arithon once, I'm not a hero.'

Kharadmon shrugged. 'You'll have to be, this time, no choice on the matter.' The mental query cast out to Luhaine sidelined his partner's contrary perceptions and his mishmashed muddle of uncertainties. 'How deep does the fracture run through the wards?'

'You have to ask?' Luhaine released a vexed puff of breeze. 'Very deep. All the way down to the innermost ring.' He need not belabor the obvious point, that no saving miracle could buy them more time: the defenses could not be reworked soon enough to stave off the maligned currents of the impending equinox lane tide.

'No choice then,' Kharadmon answered, laconic.

Granted no pause to relapse toward self-pity, Dakar shared the paralyzing resignation: as a Fellowship Sorcerer
who was also afraid
lifted his spread hands and flattened both palms on the mirror-polished stone which concealed Rockfell Pit's outer entrance.

For his opening, Kharadmon sent the presence of the mountain a formal greeting. He gave unflinching acknowledgment that Named who he was, and added a heartfelt apology for delays fallen outside his province to remedy.

Next, with an attentive humility that raised Dakar to amazement, the most impetuous of the Fellowship Sorcerers stilled his perception and
listened.

A resonance reemerged through the stone, deep and slow, in bell tones rich with harmonics that transcended natural hearing. The voice had striking character. Dakar experienced Rockfell as never before, a being more distinctly defined than a man. The mountain was conscious on more levels than the animate mind could encompass. Its nature of inherent tenderness stunned him, a nurturing born of unsurpassed patience, and strength backed by an integrity that reserved no allowance for hardship. Rockfell was mineral, its structure a statement of everlasting commitment that gave of itself without boundary.

Nor was the mountain without unique preference. Rockfell's record of service framed its steadfast pride. The lament in its appeal to Kharadmon was described in a detailed and poignant delicacy that shattered Dakar's preconceptions. He had always assumed rock was carelessly dull, its endurance rooted in obstinate bulk. The contrast tore him open, for the opposite held true: Rockfell's purview was no function of brute mass. It knew itself down to the tiniest fissure, even to the most delicate vein of formed crystal, whose miniature terminations would seem no more than a sparkle of dust to human eyes.

The mountain's noble scale reflected the reach of a meticulous memory. It had known time prior to the Age of the Dragons. Its consciousness held the linear record of each day, and each second of each bygone hour. At will, it could sing back the tones of sun and rain, for any season or any tempest to fall within the long tenure of its existence. Each change of the wind could be recounted with flawless exactitude. Events were not ranked or attached to importance. The death of a leaf, and the melting of a snowflake were recalled with equal detail. Against such broad scope, the lives of men and beasts became as a fleeting thread set into a tapestry of epochs.

Rockfell knew Desh-thiere. Kharadmon was given the acute rendering of the mountain's distress, that its steadfast guardianship stood compromised. That awareness spanned layer after vertical layer of nested consciousness, fully informed of the consequence should its vested pledge of internment fall short.

The mountain sensed Desh-thiere's malice. It had recognized its dark peril in the rainbow scale of reverberation cast beyond elemental awarenesses. The potential for pain and wrought harm to plants, trees, and mosses came entwined with knowledge of the fish and snails in the riverbeds. Rockfell's taproot communed with the red fires of earth's magma. Through strata of bedrock, and the lisping trickle of groundwater, it knew the distant thunder of surf, where Athera's vast oceans creamed against the stark bastions of the headlands. It understood patterns, and lane flux, and the draw of the stars and the moon. The sink pools where Koriani meddling had backlashed in misalignment reverberated through stone's deep heart, a knell of congested, bruised pain.

The sheer magnitude of all the mountain encompassed bespoke empathy beyond all imagining. The cognizance of its looming failure, once the lane tide crested at equinox, struck tones of sore grief for the sorrows that heartrock might bear through the ages.

At one with Kharadmon's tuned sensitivity, Dakar measured the grandeur of the mountain's petition. The unimaginable scale of its care overwhelmed him. He heard and wept; then received back the reflected anguish of his own tears, as stone shared his distress and responded.

Kharadmon did not weep. Instead, in fluent Paravian, he framed his eloquent promise. 'Rockfell Peak, I have heard. Be it known, let all being stand as witness, that Luhaine and I are pledged not to let down such trust. Stone has not fallen short. Nor shall, as I live. Morriel's wrought malice will not be permitted to sunder the charge of your duty. Accept my commitment by Name, and as Fellowship warden, the crisis at equinox shall be averted.'

The lie was transparent, a deception of such arrogance that Dakar's gorge rose. Entrained into empathy with the mountain's predicament, he exploded in revolted fury. 'What can you do? The critical hour has already passed! Even with all seven Sorcerers helping, you can't hope to refigure the wardings that bind Desh-thiere's prison in less than eight hours!'

No recourse existed. The equinox tide would blast over Rockfell's skewed axis. Roiled energy would leach through the imbalanced ward rings, and Desh-thiere would seize its fell freedom.

'Then the wards will stay flawed,' Kharadmon agreed without rancor; the opposite, in fact, as he bowed to the truth behind

Dakar's frantic outburst. 'Since the misaligned axis must be healed second, we'll try for a stopgap remedy up front, and protect warded stone from the elements.'

Given the Mad Prophet's blank incomprehension, Luhaine's windy presence sketched out an explanation. 'We must isolate Rockfell. The faulted bindings inside have been patched. Desh
-
thiere's prison will hold stable as long as the ward rings can be shielded from the direct surge of the lane flux.'

The overweening arrogance of that undertaking struck Dakar utterly breathless.
'You think you can divert the equinox tide at its crest
!
Sheer insanity!'

'That's the workable option.' Unlike old stone, Kharadmon had no patience for dissecting esoteric minutiae. 'If you have some genius alternative, speak up. If not, we have a lot of brute conjury to lay down before the advent of sunset.'

Such a working must be unassailably in place, Dakar realized with flattening dread. Once the lane flux arose with the dawning of equinox, there would be no recourse; no pause to remedy inadvertent mistakes, or to make last-minute adjustments. The Sorcerers must foresee every ramification, on all levels, with no detail left overlooked. The task posed complexities of titanic proportion, a challenge to strain vision as broad as Sethvir's, with the Paravian gift of his earth-sense.

'We'll have Rockfell in partnership,' Luhaine pointed out. To Kharadmon, brusque, he demanded, 'Which remedy, a sink for grounding the distressed recoil, or shall we attempt to create an alternate conduit?'

Still in contact with the mountain through Dakar's bare hands, Kharadmon framed his answer in consultation. 'The sink is no option. We have a canted axis, and this imbalance is impelled energy, not meant to travel to ground. To try would fire the veins of magma that run molten under the Skyshiels. We dare not build pressure under the fault line. The risk of cracking a new fissure is too high, which leaves urgent need for a conduit.'

For Dakar's benefit, Luhaine spoke aloud. 'Attractant or bridge?'

'Bridge,' Kharadmon snapped, then added the imperative driving his decision. 'At the crux, we are two to your one.'

The dismayed revelation set the Mad Prophet aback. Now aware he must loan more than his flesh, but also the inadequate discipline of his craft, he recalled his part in the death of a girl child in a lonely Vastmark ravine. Despite Arithon's forgiveness, the shame of Jilieth's memory still rode him. Easier by far to balk in straight fear, like Fionn Areth; to fail as the victim of mishap rather than endure the conscious awareness of becoming the bumbling wretch who fell short.

The equinox forces could not be averted to spare the weak link in a chain. 'I have no discipline to match this demand! Moon and tide, I can't stand in the path of the flux!' Dakar shivered. 'You ask the impossible!'

'No?' Kharadmon's amusement stung fierce in denial. 'Then you'll hold the breach while Luhaine and I do our best to prove you are wrong.'

Neither Fellowship Sorcerer would give any thought to the range of unbearable consequences. Dakar gasped a last, strangled protest. 'If you've gambled badly?'

Kharadmon lifted the spellbinder's quivering shoulders into a fatalistic shrug. 'No remedy left. We all die for it.'

Refusal pinched off, with Dakar's free permission an already irrevocable pledge, the Sorcerers pursued preparation. Luhaine whisked off on a brisk crack of wind. Kharadmon resumed his intense communion with the self-aware essence of Rockfell. His dialogue was too dense to follow, beyond the immediate gist: as the mountain yielded its requisite consent, the spellbinder grasped that the Sorcerer asked leave to unbind the outermost ring of defense wards.

Rockfell's acquiescence tripped off an igniting burst, as Kharadmon's risen power combined in a synergistic flow of cause to instantaneous effect.

Dakar felt the strain. A burning pull jarred through muscle and tendon as his short, pudgy fingers were pressured to match an ephemeral impression, where the effortless reach of Asandir's larger hands had spanned the smooth rock face before him. The masterful tracings of embedded spellcraft imprinted the spellbinder's sweat-drenched palms. The virulent sting as the contact engaged raised his yelp of incensed surprise. Kharadmon paid the disturbance no mind. The vibrations pulsating through flesh and bone spoke a code that his adept intellect could interpret. He responded with precise counterwards, a sequence of runes framed in light, visualized in his mind. Dakar could not fathom their meaning, but only gasp awestruck at the complex shadings of colors and line overlaid in a mapwork of dazzling geometries.