TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (66 page)

The man raised from the mud wiped shamed tears from his cheeks. He fought shaky legs to stay standing, while another beside him did the same. Around those, others blinked, as though kicked from drugged sleep, while Sulfin Evend prodded a sobbing officer to sit up and reclaim his lapsed tour of command.

Sethvir's final outlook came stamped and grim: against natural inclination, in rebuttal of all that was joyful and free, Lysaer's handling was largely going to succeed.
The hardened core of the Alliance Etarrans would be cozened to resume their offensive march. They would leave behind their grim toll o
f wounded and the dishonored few
who failed to recoup shattered wits. The unfit and those stricken to placid stupor would be escorted home in slow stages by the drovers who manned the supply train.

The adept who stood witness forced himself to bear up. He adhered to his Brotherhood's code of neutrality. Though his heart ached in sore affliction and grief, he continued to receive Sethvir's testament: another succinct burst of geometries, then sight of an eagle, soaring over the Mathorns by night. The bird kept keen watch on two fast-moving fugitives, while southward, after days of hagridden flight, another clanborn Companion named Sidir reached the safe cover of Halwythwood.

Then, last of all, the sequence defining the stopgap construct of wards laid down at Rockfell Peak by two Sorcerers. They worked in tight partnership, borrowing off the unsteady assistance wrung from a rabbit-scared spellbinder. Here Sethvir grew specific. His exhaustive care mapped the details of rune and seal, and each listed grace of permission garnered from natural forces. The adept beheld the grand axis of power, arrayed to the cardinal points, and invoking the elements, as only Fellowship magecraft could found them. He read the spiraling channels that would serve as the conduit to reroute longitudinal lane forces. East and west, the flux would deflect into alternative paths, just as a great river in flood must circumvent the snag of an island. Althain's Warden unveiled the night's work in its splendor of pressured invention: the courageous innovations Kharadmon conjured at need, laid out like stamped foil and inscribed with needle-fine runes wrought of light; flanking each curve and precise angle like stars were the seals, holding the checkspells of containment. Each one had been fashioned with the fussy, precise patience Luhaine evoked to balance his colleague's impetuous genius.

Laced through by referenced points of concern, Sethvir's sending mapped the weak points where rushed wardspells were horribly likely to fail. Jointures made to stone that lacked enough time to set with the requisite permanence; the cast rings of ciphers their haste had been too brisk to test. Rockfell itself could not keep pace, the consciousness of stone being tied by its innate character, which pursued all it touched with deliberate, exhaustive complexity.

At length, the closing sequence of geometries played out. The witness was left wrapped in pristine silence, his mind hollow as a flushed conduit.

'It is done,' Sethvir whispered.

The strained words jostled the adept from his trance. Overcome, he bowed his head. As long and as well as his Brotherhood had known the company of Fellowship Sorcerers, the far-reaching scope of the charges they minded outpaced their most wise estimation. Humbled, the witness completed his work, sealing the Sorcerer's codicil into the crystal under the veracity of formal signature:
'Sethvir, Warden of Althain, born Calum Quaide kincaid.'
He closed with a spell to guard the information inside from falling into wrong hands. Last, he impressed the quartz with the energetic pattern of his own Name, and a cartouche that resonated to the prime life chord, to serve as steadfast protection.

As though sensing completion, Sethvir spoke again. 'Once the crystal is wrapped and stowed, I must seal the wards over Althain Tower itself. No free wraith shall be permitted to trespass inside. Nor will any others who might come to seek access be permitted to despoil the Paravian artifacts held here.' A labored breath, as the Sorcerer marshaled his tenuous strength. 'The last cipher I set will be bonded with Shehane Althain's bones.'

The adept understood the gravity of that warning, well aware that few powers could release a binding that invoked the awareness of the ancient guardian spirit. Only a Paravian singer, or another Fellowship Sorcerer in full possession of his faculties, might challenge such warding and survive.

'Forgive me,' Sethvir whispered, as the lady adept approached to retire the quartz sphere. 'I am grateful. The generosity of your white brotherhood has given me cherished comfort, but after this, no more can be done. I would face the equinox alone. You and the other adepts must depart, or else risk becoming entombed.'

The witness glanced up. His young face reflected a matchless serenity as he locked eyes with the lady, who knelt at Sethvir's other side. Her level poise and her dignified silence assured him their hearts lay in perfect accord.

'We stay,' he insisted, steadfast in love. 'Not to intervene with the way of the world, but to stand on our core of belief. We choose our future from the infinite range of probability. There will be a possible path to salvation. This once, may you lean on the strength of our hope. We place our trust in your spellbinder and two colleagues. Since the thread of their lives twines with ours, by Ath's grace, let them not fail in their charge at Rockfell Peak.'

As the Sorcerer's stark silence assumed a dimension of desolate pain, the lady adept clasped his hand. 'Where better to stand vigil? If you should perish, Athera dies with you. In that case, let our bones lie with honor beside yours.'

The witness stroked Sethvir's dampened hair from his temples, while the lady arose, the shine of the candlelight glancing over the ciphers sewn into her sleeve. She lifted the quartz sphere from the Warden's slack fingers, then secured and tied its silk wrappings.

Her office finished, she claimed her place, shoulder to shoulder with the young witness. Here in Atainia, two hours remained before midnight. But eastward, over the channel that carried the sixth lane, the cascading flux would start cresting within the next minute. On station at the summit of Rockfell Peak, a spellbinder and two Sorcerers sealed their stopgap work with the Paravian rune of ending.

Under shuttered wards at Althain Tower, tense vigil began at Sethvir's bedside. Naught else could be done under earth and sky, except cleave to patience and wait.

Lane Flux

A hemisphere away from Rockfell Peak, a scant second slipped past before the sun's disk climbed to the height of its arc. Dakar suffered the tension of that closing instant. His rapid, gulped breaths, acid drawn in pure terror, hissed in the sealed quiet where he stood. His kneecaps quivered to his stifled panic, while around him, the hollow of the mountain's upper vault pressed like a tomb of black ice.

'Steady, hold steady,'
Kharadmon urged in his mind.
'Die now, or later, the difference is moot. Best rein your fears sharply in hand.'

'Daelion wept!' Dakar forced out, through teeth clamped to stop them from chattering. 'I can't do this!'

His pleas availed nothing. He had nowhere to run. If he lost nerve and tried, Kharadmon would show no shred of mercy. The Sorcerer's bleak presence would quash natural instinct and lock his legs to paralysis.

Nor would time slow for a faltering heart. Somewhere above the lifeless stone anvil of Kathtairr's desolate landscape, the sunlight blazed down, marking the cusp of high noon.
Contact:
a screaming silence like an indrawn breath, as the fiery disk touched the meridian half a world away.

The seasonal rise of the lane current began, the cool sapphire energies of the flux snapped to instantaneous excitement. A tightening spiral of forces exploded to a burgeoning fire of loosed energy. The frequency climbed, then reached resonance and sang like the pure tone struck off a tuning fork. The north-to-south oscillation of pulses would surge to tidal peak in less than the span of a heartbeat.

The moment brought wrenching disorientation.

Naked at the crux of a Fellowship construct designed to capture and reroute those vast forces, Dakar felt wrung through. His senses wheeled into abrupt disconnection. Perhaps he cried out; if so, he felt nothing. Sound fell away as his hearing faded into dissolute silence. The breath left his lungs as a ghost's might, insubstantial, while his consciousness spun into involuntary expansion. For one distressed second, he felt as though all firm awareness of his body had been jerked through the pores of his flesh.

'Steady,'
came Kharadmon's anchoring reassurance.
'Things are as they should be, no surprises.'

Ruled by the Sorcerer's ironclad discipline, cradled by a confidence that had grappled such incomprehensible forces before, the Mad Prophet felt his being spliced into the staid patience of stone. Bound into eerie sympathy with the land, he
was
a forest of trees, rooted into winter-hard soil. He knew the mineral murmur of ore veins, laid like arteries deep in the mantle of the planet. Then over the surface of wind-whipped hills, at the jointure of moving air and staid earth, he perceived the aberrant flow of the lane flux, which Morriel's wrought construct had hurled out of balance, then wrung from its natural setting.

The onrushing comber of juxtaposed force gathered strength. Dakar saw it as light, or the gush of spilled mercury, licking down the quartz vein under the Skyshiels. Through the steel eyes of Kharadmon's experience, he measured its oncoming flood. The fear in his vitals did not lose its grip. The towering magnitude of the earth's wild forces made him feel insect frail, an ant asked to withstand an avalanche. For shiel
ding, Sorcerer and spellbinder h
ad not much more than a spiderweb: a fine network of spellcraft stitched over the breach, anchored in hope and desperate need, and sourced by a patchworked quilt of permissions garnered from the conscious landscape. As through a template of wrapped and spun wire, Dakar saw his own handiwork laced into the mesh, clumsy weavings like botched snags of string clumped within the fiercely clean elegance of Fellowship crafting.

Thought gave way to overwhelming despair, that such mismatched jointures could never hold firm.

'Hold steady!'
Kharadmon cracked in bald-faced command.
'Bear up, or you'll leave me no choice but to numb your wits senseless.'

The moment had passed, to stand down for incompetence. The rise of the flux engaged their front lines, already beyond any power on Athera to halt. Like the charged edge preceding the storm, Luhaine raced ahead of the oncoming crest. The fanned essence of his spirit combed over the landscape, the faint charge of his presence laid down like dragged scent, scoring ion trails of alignment. Slight though they were, those ordered channels attracted the distorted currents of magnetic flux. These were not tamed energies, but powers dashed to chaos, spitting white spikes and snagged peaks, spun off the disrupted sixth lane, that, unaltered, would become snatched by the conductivity of the quartz vein under Rockfell. If any one burst grazed through the pit's damaged wardings, chain-linked seals would unbind like flung acid.

Luhaine captured and wrapped those disparate coils of loosed chaos. He braided white fire. Eddy by snagged eddy, in their myriad thousands, he married the raging wave into a focused blaze like a spearhead.

The influx flared, then burned, a monstrous, bloated meteor aimed straight for the circle of protection set to isolate Rockfell Peak. Woven across that intricately forged ring, a strung path like a cord, crossing the ring-spell's diameter: the bridged conduit fashioned and held by Kharadmon and the Mad Prophet.

No space remained to plead for reprieve. Entrapped at the cusp of explosive event, Dakar watched the risen lane flux come on. The rampaging maw of raised power exceeded all human understanding. Its annihilating threat made the oblivion of death seem a haven of blessed peace. Unmanageable fright and regret canceled speech and denied the relief of shed tears as the spelled construct arranged to spare Rockfell engaged the roused forces and bloomed.

Cold-struck veins of spellcraft flared active. Fine chains of seals and flowing ciphers ignited, then burned to stenciled ribbons of violet radiance. As though the spells carved through each nerve and bone of him, the spellbinder sensed the recoiling, flash burn of heat. He felt the breathtaking, terrible wrench, as the equinox tide encountered the seals that hooked and then turned the misaligned torrent from the earth-bed of quartz transmission, and hurled the unstoppable impetus down the throat of the alternate conduits.

Then the overwhelming, wild force barreled down Kharadmon's entrenched construct, and plunged his awareness straight to perdition.

Dakar tumbled, awash in many-colored light that beat and swirled like the blast of a rapids. Rainbow swirls rinsed his sight, as though he gazed through the film of an oil slick. The shimmering hues brightened, then blazed, erupted to showers of sparks that grew blinding. Through the dazzle of ranging force hurled against him, the spellbinder dimly sensed Kharadmon's presence, immersed in the diligent work of holding the wards' calibration. Where the scouring currents eroded a weakness, the Sorcerer extended a finger of thought, and patched distressed seals and linked runes.

He grasped strands of fully charged power bare-handed. Using Dakar's dough fists, he twisted new rings of protection, spending reckless strength, again and again, until the shared flesh he inhabited swayed like a gale-blown candle. Kharadmon noticed. He dared not take pause to gauge whether such stress might inflict irreversible damage. Set against the alternative of ruinous consequences, all things within reach were expendable. Burning human resource like a touch match to hot oil, he forged craftworked barriers like linked mail and thrust them, untested, into the roil of the flux. Like the eye of the needle, guiding live thread, the lane's crested power roared over him. Ruled willy
-
nilly by that hellish partnership, the Mad Prophet became as a plucked stalk of grain, flailed seed from hull on a threshing floor.

Reduced to a husk, then a shred of limp cognizance, he felt even fear fray away. The drug of false peace did not assuage him. Trained spellbinder under Asandir's watchful tutelage, Dakar recognized peril. Vitality was draining relentlessly from him. Another moment, and the drum-taut fabric of selfhood threatened to tear. His core awareness would whip into tatters, swept away and erased by the inexhaustible surge of the lane flux.

Unable to call out or warn Kharadmon, Dakar felt the sudden, rushing burn of the first breach as it happened. A point in the major wardings thinned. Snagged light tore through. The Sorcerer, nerveless, countered by capping the breach with Dakar's naked hand, laid palm outward against Rockfell's granite.

Through that whiplash instant, as Kharadmon dammed the lane's force in check through naught else but singed tissue and brute will, Dakar gasped, 'Disengage! You can't think to contain the flux with
mere flesh
!'

Response was impossible. A breath, a slammed heartbeat, and the Sorcerer lost his fool's grip. The tide of the lane force rammed through, inexorable.

Dakar screamed then, a cry flung back in strained echoes off Rockfell's black stone.

The searing eruption of raw energies coursed through sinew and bone, scouring his nerve sheaths to fire and scraped agony. Still screaming, Dakar collapsed. Mind and thought were milled under a barrage of barbed sparks that drilled a thousand hot pins through his brain.

And still, the Fellowship Sorcerer who partnered him did not release hold on his body. Thrashed and ravaged amid the raw pulse of the lane force, the spellbinder forgot life and breath. The span of his existence sleeted into a cocoon of strained noise, and sensation became torment distilled into suffering without hope of surcease.

How long could the mind support senseless pain, without tumbling, lost to insanity? How long, before the heart burst, and overstrung muscle unraveled to quivering jelly? Denied the black passage into unconsciousness, forbidden the crossing of Fate's Wheel, Dakar gibbered, entangled in the wracked shreds of awareness. He felt like the butterfly battered by gales. No leverage existed to tear himself free of Kharadmon's shackling demands.

The moment of surcease passed all but unnoticed as the aftershock memory of suffering and horror cast its imprisoning shadow over the future.

Then, framed in white light, a Paravian rune of renewal cut through the clawing pain.

Dakar gasped, whirled dizzy. His overturned senses restored in a rush, leaving him a crushed wad without strength. He recovered himself, folded onto his knees, doubled over with racking nausea. The snagged gaps in his sight shrank to sparks, and then faded, as the lane forces dwindled, subsiding to background quiescence.

'Midnight lies behind us. The first crest is passed,'
Kharadmon ventured, a gentle, soft touch in a mind still grazed raw, as though every synapse was blistered.

Dakar whimpered. His palms were left scalded. The singed threads of his sleeves stuck to red, weeping flesh. Inside and out, he felt scarred and reamed, as though someone who loved torture had pumped liquid lye through his bloodstream. The air drawn into his overstressed lungs felt abrasive as sand; thought and cognizance seemed dulled to poured lead.

'I can't do this again,' he sobbed through a throat like ripped meat.

Kharadmon's response was inflexible.
'You must, else the world dies. Meanwhile, we have until the next surge at dawn to refit the wards and strengthen the patches holding the weak points.'

No reprieve; no rest; even for small healing to ease the sting of seared hands. Hazed back onto his unsteady feet by the Sorcerer's driving urgency, Dakar plowed ahead. His spirits stayed low. He could not shake off his creeping anxiety, that the next onslaught would break him past mending. Warning or protest, his admission proved useless. Defeatist thoughts wrung no mercy from the brusque presence of Kharadmon.

'You'll find the dawn tide by lengths less taxing,'
the Sorcerer dismissed, impelled to join awareness with Luhaine, and assess how his colleague had weathered the first test.
'With the sun's position squared with the pulse of the lane force, the next crest won't be as defined.'

Yet Dakar was not fooled. He found no haven in false consolation. The dawn surge,
on any day,
was sufficient to fire the lanes. Such natural phenomena enabled the Fellowship to effect their spelled transfers across latitude, or ignite the constructs of conjuries beyond the pale of all other orders on Athera. Seasons created a sine wave fluctuation, with the event of spring equinox framed as a harmonic balance point, raising an exponentially heightened peak resonance.

Suffering, each step, with his muscles whipped slack and a screaming ache stabbed through each unstrung nerve end, Dakar knew the ordeal just endured had been little more than the opener. The inevitable outcome required no genius. If the dawn crest did not test his resilience so severely, the noon surge would bring the high tide mark. All but shattered by the inaugural pass, he now realized
just how far
his personal resource fell short. Barring a miracle, Dakar suspected he was too drained already to surmount the dawn; never mind noon, or the waning aftershocks to follow at sunset and midnight.

The spellbinder hacked in a coarse breath to denounce the endeavor as fool's play. Kharadmon's barbed tone interrupted.
'Quit belaboring the obvious. Everyone knows you're a few feathers
short
of a turkey. Which point cannot signify, given the dangers,
b
esides, you've not tapped the last of your resources yet. We're not finished, and won't be, until then.'

Without knowing why, Dakar felt a terrible grue chase down the length of his spine. 'I don't want to go there,' he mewled. Ath's infinite pity! Why do I know I'd rather face death, first?'