TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (69 page)

'Ath guide you, my liege,' spoke a voice to his right. The other scout reached him and knelt in support, and a second staunch hand braced his shoulder. 'As long as life remains in our veins, you don't carry the kingdom alone!'

Arithon had no chance to acknowledge such bravery. He had already immersed in the sharpened awareness instilled by his master's training. Against the imperative, breaking disaster, he still owned his store of hard-won experience, tempered and tested through twelve initiations undergone at Rauven. He could not assist by working grand conjury. Yet he retained an exacting knowledge of spell strictures and natural law. By the grace of Halliron's teaching, he also possessed a masterbard's schooled ear for harmony.

Formidable strengths, paired once before, when he and the Mad Prophet had jointly attempted a doomed effort to draw an injured child back to health.

Arithon stood on the presumption that every avenue of straight conjury had already been fruitlessly tried. Music offered the sole, untapped reservoir within his province to lend.

Kharadmon's fleeted thought grasped that untapped potential. In lightning response, the Sorcerer suspended his claim to a Teir's'Ffalenn's life to dam back the breaking breach. Fast as ricochet, Arithon received terms for that stay of reprieve: he could be granted no more than split seconds to shape a successful response.

No moment to spare, for the scouts' rampant worry, no thought, for Elaira's anguish. She would surely sense the sword's edge of peril through the linkage that joined their emotions. Unable to affect any saving last grace, Arithon threw all that he was into action. He was forced to let go, plunge down and down again, deep into his innermost self. There, he sought the listening source of his gifted inspiration. Through cycles of seasons, for thousands of years, the ancient Paravians had once channeled lane force through ritual song and dance. If Arithon could plumb the key phrasing in time, he might sift out the tonal chord that would call the fourth lane's flux to shift resonance. If his mastery
could
match the massive demand of such challenge, if mortal man bearing the title of Masterbard could
perhaps
encompass the thundering scope of that untamed peal of primal harmony, one chance might be pried from the jaws of adversity.

No course, but to try. Arithon surrendered the pure, blank mirror of his intuition into the battering thrust of the lane tide. He allowed sound to rule him, body and mind. Naught else must concern him. He dared not think past that initial step. Nor could he spare thought to question slim odds, that no means in existence could find access in time to use that enabled gateway. A gulf lay between the first capture of melody, and the raw methodology required: to bleed off the raging crest of the equinox, then to bend its rarefied high frequencies into a safely reduced register of vibration.

Arithon drifted. Sleeting noise rushed over, then through him. Plunged into immersion, cast headlong into the shredding dissonance of the fourth lane's skewed forces, Arithon gasped in white pain. The deranging explosion of chaos enveloped him. His sharp, strangled outcry pinched off, unvoiced. At once, he perceived that the current tumbling his thread of freed consciousness was no natural pulsation of earth's magnetics. The flux surge the Sorcerers wrestled at Rockfell bore no resemblance to the clean, lilted flow he had sounded before, one starry winter midnight amid the black sands of Sanpashir.

This scrambling din sliced his awareness like knives. Its cacophony wrecked concentration. Arithon held fast, his teeth set on edge. He endured, flushed and sweating as his mind came unraveled, retuned to the rank beat of turmoil. Fierce training allowed him to spin with the maelstrom. He made no attempt to seek order; dared not grasp after his lost equilibrium. Instead, Halliron's taught wisdom must rule him beyond panic and temper his assaulted nerve ends.

The memory of his mentor resurged, immediate as yesterday:
'You must learn to
listen.
The practice becomes an art in itself, and first requires that you cast off all ties to identity.'
The sadness returned, woundingly deep, as the graduate apprentice now beleaguered in the Mathorns reviewed the old man's testy admonishment.
'Listen! That means, bide still, so still, sound itself molds the fabric of your whole being. Arithon, you must allow what is there to pour through you, then see what feelings awaken. Heed this well, your open heart reveals everything. Emotion alone will key
all
the notes and unlock the gateway to genius.'

Yet these shrieking harmonics scored him bone deep. Still, Arithon clung to his obstinate discipline. He kept access to his perception jammed open, let the scouring pain pour through tissue and faculty unhampered.
Listening,
he let his passive flesh be the tuning fork for the struck peal of the lane's deranged forces. He felt, head to foot, the racing rise through all registers. The devastating crescendo fast approached, that would sweep the bright tides of the equinox lane flux into its seasonal peak.

Disaster
for Athera, should he not ferret out the precise range of tonality that once tamed such raging torrent. Mortal man, and alone, he must reclaim the ancient ritual the Paravians had enacted in dance step and song. Somewhere, amid dissonance, Athera herself must recall the fired glory when the old races had walked the earth in strides of pure light and shaped the lanes into pealing renewal.

Arithon held. Mage-schooled to brace himself calm through adversity, to divorce mind and heart from the physical turmoil of pain, he endured, though the lane forces flayed him. A dust mote in a cataract, he cast off his fear, let himself be tossed by the vast power of a planet. His musician's ear encompassed its voice of raw turbulence, but found no more meaning than an insect might, flung headlong down the throat of a gale.

Tumbled, unraveled, flensed thought from flesh, Arithon forced his stance passive. He persisted, though every born instinct urged him to shrink in retreat. Through the eye of an instant, his whole being become a savaged rag. His inward self felt raked into needling agony, and his awareness of body became a flayed remnant dragged through a bed of flint gravel.

He sustained. The inherited grace of Halliron's wisdom became as a spar in the storm sea:
'You will find an intelligence expressed in all sound. Mastery lies in the ability to divine that spark, then to effect a creative translation.'

The strictures instilled by the Archmage at Rauven yielded supporting insight:
'Since nothing in Ath's creation is truly random, know a thing for itself. That uniqueness is the only signal truth you'll ever touch. You must ever strive to lose your own barriers and allow the pattern to speak to you. No matter how obscure, no matter how far removed from humanity, existence itself affirms the presence of consciousness.'

Arithon listened. He kept every inward barrier flattened, until the staid boulder beneath him and two clansmen's staunch presence became all that anchored his place in the world. He tuned his receptivity wider, then wider again, until voice answered, and the stone of the mountain itself opened the path to retrieval. Granite possessed a faultless, long memory. It recalled the old measures danced upon the stations of equinox and solstice. From the veined rock, layered beneath the dell's frozen soil, Arithon received the ghost imprint of the chord underlying the fourth lane's magnetics. He picked up the tuned imprint that Paravian singers had once stepped out at Caith-al-Caen.

That wisped fragment must source his inspiration, raw seed for an invention he had only the split frame of an instant to complete.

His gift answered the challenge. A masterbard's heartfelt search for trued sound took soaring flight, bearing those remnants of melody. Arithon rode intuition, entrusted his instinct to fill in the gaps. Were he bound to the physical limitation of rendering song on the lyranthe, he understood he could not do other than fail. At the crux, the interface of hand and wound string would have proved too clumsy and slow to draw half-sensed fragments of dream into full manifestation.

Yet immersed in the unworldly stream of the mind, Arithon could respond on the fleeting breath of tuned reflex. He
knew
when the notes that he groped for were wrong; sensed the instant correction to any disharmonies running counter to the pattern's completion. He saw in advance where the gaps became canceled by harmonics and misplaced resonance. Here, a fifth interval changed to a seventh raised an answering blaze of cleared light. Riding blind on a current of crystal tonalities, he reached, touched, shaped, and observed, until the grand confluence of the chord he sought to restore achieved its masterful glory within him.

The raised fourth lane melodies reached stasis and
blazed.
Fired illumination and tuned power combed through the uprush of wild forces, and spun even Kharadmon's watching presence to awe.

On the trembling brink, with the sixth lane still cresting, Arithon stood on that platform of raised harmony and
reached out, listening again.
Desperation framed the bent of his guidance. To avert the disastrous break through at Rockfell, he must tune the fifth lane, and
not stop there,
but cast outward again. He must re-create in flash-point, perfect recall, the sixth lane chord he had once raised in song to enable the focus circle set under the mayor's mansion at Jaelot.

Yet the axis of extension unreeled too far. Arithon felt himself spread too thin, thoughts paled to the edge of attrition. His frail, human faculties were going to fall short. The overwhelming scope of the task was defeating: his talent, but one thread, when he needed the breadth of a loom to string the warp and weft of a whole tapestry. He sensed, in concept, how to close a bridging conduit, then call the aligned energies into the ancient channels and disperse them like a tonic across latitude. But the structure was too deep and complex for the mind riding on the wings of rushed thought and intuition.

Given time, he could solve this!
Despair all but tore him. The millisecond that remained before the flux reached full peak was too scant to raise and align the precise chords to consummate balance, and wed three parallel lanes into harmonic connection.

'Arithon!'
Kharadmon cried out in appeal.
'Call on your strength as Rathain's sanctioned crown prince! There was power invoked by the oath you once swore at Etarra. The land knows your Name. Draw on your blood heritage!
We
all have no choice! You'll have to reforge the connection!'

At the Sorcerer's encouragement, the flash-point memory resurged: of the hurried ceremony conducted under Fellowship auspices, affirming the s'Ffalenn right of succession . . .

Under chilly spring sky, inside a walled garden, Asandir had gathered a handful of soil. The Sorcerer's invoked blessing had laid a binding upon the Named Teir's'Ffalenn, and a feat of grand conjury had transformed common earth into a silver circlet. Arithon had experienced a swift flash of heat at the moment the metal had been pressed over his brow. Yet the nature of the attunement had been too brief, too ephemeral to grasp at the time he had spoken the crown heir's traditional acceptance . . .

Now, pitched by fraught need, Kharadmon broke the seal that had blurred the full scope of that past initiation.
'Prince, you have
m
arried Rathain through the element of earth! Call on that asset! Let the wisdom of that union guide you.'

Such a move would assuredly reaffirm a commitment, and engage active ties to an unwanted royal ancestry. Yet Arithon saw no option. The cresting currents at Rockfell already hammered the first crack in the guarding ward rings. Stressed seals crumpled and burst. A rain of loosed lane flux laced sputtering static over the link bridging Kharadmon's distant awareness. Luhaine's effort to spin a remedial patch became swept away in the torrent. The Sorcerer who rode Dakar's body flung himself into the breach; and a cataract grown too massive to stem carved onward. Its voracious charge ranged down the irrevocable chains of permission linking the Mad Prophet with Rathain's prince.

Contact touched the nerves like live fire. Arithon experienced a scouring agony that seared flesh and bone from within. Had the breath not been wrung clean out of his lungs, he would have lost hold, all awareness dissolved into shattering screams.

Torment upset the tuned chord in his mind. The next instant would see him immolated by the rampaging conflagration. He fought back. Earth, beneath him, and the iced kiss of snow, became all that secured his stressed grasp upon human awareness. Against the sliding fall toward oblivion, Arithon called on the cast-iron discipline instilled by his grandfather at Rauven. He hardened his will, recaptured the stressed harmonies of the ancient Paravian melody. Pain, fear, raw terror itself were reforged by sheer will into a razor-point edge of aimed thought. Since the land afforded his last hope of deliverance, Arithon yielded to the claim of his ancestry. As affirmed s'Ffalenn prince, he embraced the staid calm in the bedrock spine of Rathain's mountains.

For a split second, the template awareness of his body merged into the pulse of the land. His sovereign oath bound him. He became, all unwitting, the living interface between Rockfell's crisis and the greater territory set under his oathsworn charge to protect. Nerve and bone melted into ley meridian and mineral; and the lane flux, raging wild, leaped the gap.