TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (75 page)

'No!' Her anguished scream rang out, simultaneous with the wakened explosion of Kewar's outermost guardspell, as the inbound quarrel crossed the perimeter.

The quartz crystal in her cramped hands flared stark white. Elaira recoiled, caught short of dropping the sphere, while the newel posts flanking the base of the stair burned and blazed, unfurling a shimmering net of grand conjury. The eagle launched out of that raised conflagration. Its form vanished away into howling light as the shot projectile flared up like so much caught lint. Steel and wood immolated to a burst of sparks just shy of a lethal impact.

'Father and mother of demons!' Dazzled half-blind, Elaira squinted through the starburst of flash-marked vision. The sphere in her hands seemed a ball of white fire, and Arithon s'Ffalenn was not saved. Until he finished hauling himself across Davien's secured threshold, his back was still unprotected.

Sound warned him, perhaps. As the sheeting flare of the wards flickered out, the scried image cleared to show Arithon clawing himself up, wrist and knee. By the time he finally folded his body against the lowest of Davien's carved risers, Elaira blotted away streaming tears. The stairway ahead seemed defeatingly steep. Scarcely master of himself, her beloved lay beaten prostrate, while the frantic shouts of his Etarran pursuit re
-
echoed off the stone ramparts.

'Save us all! There's true sorcery afoot! Somebody! You, yes, take one man and fly! Carry word back to the Prince of the Light! Tell him we need reinforcements!' A clatter, as the frightened messengers departed. The distress catalyzed by the eruption of spellcraft was swiftly marshaled by an officer, whose hardened veterans resumed hot pursuit.

The eagle had flown, leaving Arithon to shape his fate by free choice. Elaira battered back her outright terror, striving to recall scraps of riddle and lore concerning Davien's errant creation. Certainly its history of harrowing peril did not leap to the eye. The uncanny stair zigzagged up the rock face, laid from smoothed marble, and incised with black patterns of knotwork. Circles and angles laced into themselves, with no warning marks or carved runes. The Betrayer's works were subtlety itself. If the spells of outer guard would not admit arrows, the flesh-and-blood consciousness of a man must be permitted full rein in accord with the Law of the Major Balance.

Enemies, even Lysaer, might follow at will. No power would stop them from engaging their quarry. Short of the upper portal leading into the mountain, they could still kill hand to hand, or subdue the Master of Shadow by main force and drag him back as their bound captive.

Arithon must realize he had to reassemble the raw grit to arise and resume his flight upward.

Yet the punishing effort he required to compel weary sinews to contract, and command balance, and bear weight, caused Elaira's staunch courage to falter. She looked away, tear-blind, unable to withstand the cruel cost of necessity. Like a man whipped, or a terror-struck animal, Arithon s'Ffalenn reached his feet. He ripped off his sleeve to divest the encumbering quarrel. Then, in drunken, stumbling steps, took flight the only way possible: up the carved risers of Davien the Betrayer's bewitched stairway.

Behind him, the troop of dismounted Etarrans grappled their way up the cliff face. Well fed, determined, and drilled to seamless teamwork, they swarmed up the same ledges that had left their enemy half-killed. A testing pause at the newel posts soon reassured them that no sorceries would disbar their passage.

Running, the lead scouts pounded up the stairway, hard at Arithon's heels.

He heard them. The wet slap of boot soles chipped echoes off the misted scarps of bare rock. Ripe oaths and the sour jingle of mail, and the metallic scrape of drawn weapons warned of his narrowing lead. Harried to a shambling run, Arithon rounded the first landing. A fleeting glance backward could only slow him; no breath could he spare for the heart-torn appeal of a prayer. His chest felt strapped in wire. The effort of each riser made his thighs burn and his taxed breath whistle through his throat.

Davien had set rows of gargoyles on pillars, creatures winged and beaked and snake-necked, with eyes that watched a man, climbing.

Yet Arithon had little chance to heed instinct, or address the shrill cry of Elaira's unease. He rounded the second landing, fended himself off the snout of a carved gryphon. The cold burned his aching lungs raw. Sweat blurred stinging eyes. Gusts lashed the hair not left drenched by the rain, or slicked by sweat to his forehead. At his right hand, the wild stone of the mountain dripped snowmelt. Runoff streamed down the stairwell, guttered by the seamless marble wall. Beyond the flat coping hung a chasm of air, and a drop that turned the mind dizzy. The penstroke stands of evergreen folded into the valley seemed a raveled assemblage of scrap cloth and burlap and stuck pins.

Arithon slipped on an ice patch, bashed his ribs into the lip of the wall. The arm he flung out caught him short of a fall, but the blow had shocked the wind from him. Elaira hung on the bloodless pallor of his face. Second by second, she agonized with him as he waited for his paralyzed diaphragm to break out of spasm.

The delay lasted too long.

Two landings below, the leading scout shouted. His cry was close followed by an officer's horn, pealing the shrill triumph of discovery. The blaring note rolled down the chasm of the valley, then rebounded, scattering echoes off the high rims of the peaks.

From the vale, another horn answered;
then another, a league farther back. The rallying cry of Sulfin Evend's rear guard resounded from farther still. The fanfare was answered this time by a knifing burst of white light.

Elaira raked her cheeks with tight knuckles. 'Merciful grace, don't give in!' For the moment could not have been timed with more cruelty, that Lysaer
s'Ilessid
should receive confirmation the picked guard dispatched by his Lord Commander had run the Spinner of Darkness to earth.

Lit by the flicker of that distant burst, Arithon snapped straight as though branded. His outcry was wordless, and his face, stripped to shock. He whirled. Lashed on by the fast-snapping threads of his will, he rammed himself breathlessly forward.

Elaira lost words. The quartz sphere felt welded between her numbed hands. Love and sorrow poured out of her stricken heart as the Mistwraith's curse claimed its firm foothold. Arithon's lips curled in an inhuman snarl. Shivers racked him from head to foot. He shook off the assault. As though hazed by wild bees, he gasped out a mangled phrase in Paravian. The light, lilted cadences somehow helped snag the fast-fraying threads of lost reason. No respite lasted. The roused force of the curse redoubled its siege, too inhumanely strong to deny. Arithon battled, regardless, his features contorted as though every nerve had been dipped into acid.

The green in his eyes lay eclipsed, pupils stretched into widened, black wells. Before the force that demanded surrender, he had no name, no mind, no grace of memory. All that he was became channeled will, to mount the stair and lay claim to the final landing.

The third one now visible above, flanked by winged carvings and guarded by a two-headed stone demon perched upon skulls. Another horned face overshadowed a dark archway. There lay the dread threshold of Kewar Tunnel: a place where the natural world ended, and spelled sorcery loomed order into the patterns of peril known as the Maze of Davien.

Yet Arithon had no moment to weigh what good or ill might lie in wait in the passage ahead. The flash-point crucible of Desh-thiere's geas already immolated his identity. Unswerving destruction would rule him within a matter of seconds. He would turn and draw steel, and howl for the blood of the half brother framed as his enemy.

One more burst of light sent by Lysaer must hurl him over the edge.

In a caroming stagger, from wall to rough rock, Arithon battered up the last risers. He drew his dark sword, left-handed, perhaps ruled by curse. Or perhaps, as a futile gesture of fight toward the Etarrans who charged in a yelling pack just behind him. Elaira dashed away tears. Alithiel, in the grasp of her beloved, would do nothing at all to deflect Desh-thiere's curse. The blade's powers could only arise when turned against the evil that locked down to claim him.

Yet a fox run to ground could still snarl defiance. It would use teeth and claws as the hound pack bore in and grappled to tear out its throat. Arithon pressed upward, stooped by cramped muscles as the Mistwraith's directive gained dominance. The urge to turn back raised a clamor of conflict. His sinews were stapled in knots. Compulsion gnawed at him, body and mind, until he could scarcely force one clumsy step after another.

The way he crashed from gargoyle to railing, Elaira knew his eyesight was marred. Perhaps ripped through by the harsh pound of his blood, and the laboring strain to his heart; or perhaps shut down by the unbearable pressure that mounted, second by second. If Arithon saw the brief flare of roused power as the starspell in Alithiel flickered warning, he was too spent to react.

The anomaly posed a riddle Elaira lacked time to consider, riveted as she was by the convergence about to unfold in the quartz sphere.

The last, bending curve of the stair, then four steps; three; two. Arithon tripped. On the impetus snatched from falling momentum, he pitched himself toward the black maw that demarked the entry to Kewar Tunnel.

Below him, dismayed shouting burst from his pursuit. In balked fury, they realized their quarry would pass through; had in fact planned the unthinkable to outwit them. The dread site where his daring had led them ripped their resolve to divisive fear.

Arithon had no moment to acknowledge that irony. He could not spare even one thought for his future. His tumbling fall cast him sprawling against the top stair where the archway loomed into darkness.

Light burst again from the valley, as though Lysaer
s'Ilessid
somehow understood that his chase would end in futility. The discharge raked open the sky overhead.

Thunder slammed.

Arithon screamed as the Mistwraith's curse ripped through him, skin, bone, and viscera. His body convulsed. Unspent momentum cast him rolling across the threshold to Kewar Tunnel. Nor had the air emptied from his wracked throat before the ranging, dire spells that ruled all who trespassed seized and entangled his flesh. A moment of clarity splintered through chaos, permitting the gift of clean choice:
to go forward, and rise to the Betrayer's dark challenge, or turn back, and succumb to the soulless violence engendered by Desh-thiere's cursed vengeance.

His decision was immediate, a razor's bright edge held resolute against the unknown.

'My victory, beloved,' Arithon gasped in last salute to the enchantress who watched through the quartz sphere. Then he gathered scraped limbs and thrust to his feet. Firmly and finally, he stepped across peril's gate.

The quartz sphere went dark. The tied link of empathy snapped away also, as the warding forces that guarded the cavern closed over Arithon s'Ffalenn. That severance of contact was utterly irrevocable. His being was claimed, body and spirit, consigned to an unknown fate. Free will had been held inviolate, in accord with the Major Balance. Not even another Fellowship Sorcerer could breach that sealed threshold, now.

Elaira collapsed. Shaking with sobs running too deep to stifle, she scarcely felt the hands of the adept who caught her limp shoulders in support. Reduced to a child's need for blind comfort, she allowed the quartz sphere to be lifted out of her paralyzed grasp.

'Kamridian s'Ffalenn died of his royal conscience,' she murmured, dazed by wild grief, while other hands pressed a clear elixir to her lips, and soothing voices urged her to swallow. She was helped to her bed. Then the calming soporific took hold and eased the circling pain of stunned thought.

* * *

The air changed, across the threshold to Kewar. That detail struck Arithon first where he lay, unable to do more than recover his overtaxed breath.

If the spells of protection set over the gateway had broken the drive of the Mistwraith's directive, the ruinous price of exhaustion remained. His strength was spent, utterly. His unsheathed sword rested where she had fallen across the cool flagstone floor. The limp fingers slackened across her wrapped grip could not flex and close with authority. Eyes closed, panting against the trip-hammer race of his pulse, Arithon sampled the astringent, dry atmosphere. In this place, he detected no smell of dank moss, no silted traces of dust. Only the mineral scent of clean stone, against which the sweat-crusted taint of his clothes seemed a bestial intrusion.

Silver-tinged daylight filtered up from the entry, several steps lower than the level that sheltered him. Sprawled in battered prostration, Arithon listened. He strove to recapture the rich chord of the guard ring just crossed, whose fell powers now bought him a haven. Yet the sound had cut off as he reached the top stair. Even the memory eluded him.

He could not discern what unknown fate he had traded, for the known one, so narrowly avoided.

The shouts of the Etarrans seemed excised from existence. No sound passed the archway behind him. Nor could he hear the whine of the wind, or the sullen drip of the melt seeping from thawing drifts. The silence that wrapped him was absolute, cut by the shrill rasp of his breathing. He did not feel cold. Each scrape and scratch that abraded his skin set up a chorus of stings against the deep ache of strained joints. Arithon knew he should move, make some sort of effort to rub down tired muscles before his stressed limbs seized with stiffness. But the effort required to drag himself upright was going to cost far too much.

Easier to languish in total stillness and savor the drugged sweetness of respite. Arithon understood very clearly he could not run any farther. If enemies followed, he could mount no defense. The sword at his hand was too heavy to lift, a point rendered totally meaningless. All sense of danger seemed remote. He felt sealed off by pervasive solitude, which wrapp
ed him like close, felted wool.

The impression followed, distinct as engraving: if threat to his life lay coiled and waiting, it would not arise at the hands of his enemies. No force lay in ambush; he would not be attacked. Not here, where the very set of stilled stone bespoke power beyond understanding.

He longed for mage-sight, then caught back the hurt for the blank, inner barrier that smothered his talent in blindness. The stark pain of loss still cut far too deeply. Unhealed grief ran him through like a sword of regret, and left him trembling with weakness.

Even blocked as he was, the deep quiet touched him. The poised flow of power eluded the senses, not crude or restless, but gently subtle as mirror glass that would show no movement outside of reactive reflection. Arithon lay still, tensed and waiting for
something.
Yet his bard's ear caught none of the tonal harmonics touched off by a chord of grand conjury. He detected no trace of any force moving, felt no tickle of vibration from the high frequencies past the range of sensory hearing. He was too weary to indulge curiosity. Thought and reason bled away, diffused as drifted cloud after hours of pounding stress. He had endured too many months of cranked worry, with every raw nerve end poised for fast flight, and every thought pitched for adversity. His reserves were all spent, with no resource left to plumb riddles of wily complexity.

His drowning exhaustion dragged him under at last, defeating his better intentions. His breathing steadied. Running pulse slowed to rest. Arithon surrendered to lassitude. His eyes drifted closed. Across an imperceptible transition, waking consciousness slipped beyond reach. The last Prince of Rathain finally slept as he lay, prone on the slate floor of Kewar Tunnel; and so lost his chance to turn back.

Soft, silent, more subtle than spider silk, the wardspells wrought by Davien the Betrayer wove him round, as they had every being, humanborn, or Paravian, who had crossed that dread threshold ahead of him. As they had his ancestor, High King Kamridian, who had died here, broken and screaming.

'May Ath Creator stand at your shoulder with every bright power of guidance,'
the clan scouts had wished Arithon in parting that morning. Now, in fast refuge at Althain Tower, with tears welling from distant eyes, Sethvir of the Fellowship shaped the same blessing with all his brave power of conviction.