TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (76 page)

Gone to Earth

The instant after the Spinner of Darkness eluded the Etarran patrol by crossing the entry to Kewar, Lysaer
s'Ilessid
felt the driving pull of his enemy's presence fray away into nothing. Reined up short by the momentous event, an outcome of appallingly unseen direction, he called an immediate halt to the advance of the Etarran main company and its rear guard.

The sunwheel banners flapped in the shifting, sullen wind. The men stood in stilled formation, uneasily silent, or talking in unsettled phrases. Discipline held them facing rigidly forward, while their Blessed Prince conferred with his officers and issued his change of orders.

After that, Lord Commander Sulfin Evend rode up and down the ranks like a hazed hornet, gathering a specialized, small troop, then selecting the cream of the royal guard. The reduced company went armed, but carried no burden of banners or supplies. Chosen for speed and responsive mobility, they lathered good horses to rejoin the advance guard, sent into the high ground ahead of them.

Amid their sharp company, Lysaer
s'Ilessid
reached Davien's stair in the late afternoon. Daylight by then had just started fading. The gray scud of cloud lidding the vale had dispersed to streamed tatters, with thicker mists hooding the peaks. The land wore its ragged cloaking of snow in splotches of pearl and gray, interlocked with upthrust stone outcrops. By evenfall, the lucent patches of aquamarine sky would deepen to cobalt and amethyst.

The stair wore the light like watermarked glass, the sheen cast off its cut angles reflective as marbled satin. The effect was eerie, a contrast of masterfully worked stone set against the savage, split rock of the ledges; as though Davien's works had slashed natural law to a razor-cut break in continuity.

Regarding that vista, his hands pinched on his reins while his mount sidled irritably under him, Sulfin Evend thought of his uncle, Raiett Raven, whose shrewd mind and keen insight now advised the mayor's council at Etarra. Even that renowned statesman might lose his objectivity before such an unsettling marvel. In framing his entrance to Kewar Tunnel, Davien had fashioned a bold statement of force that challenged the mind's arrogance and compelled man's separatist nature into a disquieting self-examination.

The first impulse to look away, to deny, became overridden by morbid curiosity. The eye found itself as helplessly riveted as steel filings drawn to a magnet.

'Are you planning to spin cloud wool, or have you decided to take the role of a stone statue?' Lysaer arrived at his horse's head, gold and white and commanding. A diamond flashed, scintillant, as he caught the beast's bridle and restrained its restive pawing. 'Your horse wants its comforts, whatever you choose, and the men require your attention.'

Sulfin Evend dismounted, a wind-ruffled hawk unhooded and deadly. 'If that is the bolt-hole that shelters the bastard, our swords will be woefully useless. You mean to go forward?'

'I'm astonished you think there's a choice in the matter.' Lysaer passed the horse to his hovering squire. The glance that sized up his Lord Commander was sapphire cool, couched in a majestic self-reliance that, against such a setting, seemed the effrontery of a fool's arrogance.

Or else such a bearing of seamless assurance hallmarked an avatar of the divine. 'Have your sharp wits all fled, bewildered by spells?' Lysaer smiled. His kindly humor robbed the sting from a ribbing that could have rankled his wellborn officer. 'Or by chance, have you lost your excellent hearing?'

Sulfin Evend roused as though kicked from a dream, made aware of the distant, raucous noise rebounding amid pristine quiet. 'Father and mother of all coupling fiends!' he ripped out in acid irritation.

For the light horse patrol he had entrusted to run down the Spinner of Darkness appeared to have jettisoned discipline. The whoops, the explosive, bursting laughter of a manic celebration carried downslope to the site where the horses were tethered, and where the small company forming the royal escort had also been forced to draw rein. 'What stark, raving madness has turned them possessed?'

'Fear. Courage too long held, that is trained not to bend, set against the minion of darkness.' In place of self-righteous fury and frustration, Lysaer displayed openhanded pity, and tolerance that granted magnanimous forgiveness for foibies and human shortfalls. 'Left a challenge beyond mortal bearing to face, they may have resolved their distress by assuming the trappings of victory.'

'Well, someone up there better have a dead body triced up for a ritual burning!' Sulfin Evend's snapped gestures masked shame as he adjusted his sword belt for climbing. 'No other cause under sky could give those wretches a reason to slack off their duty, rejoicing.'

'They don't have a dead body,' Lysaer
s'Ilessid
pronounced. Awarded his Lord Commander's piercing disbelief, the Light's minion was frost and iron, the braced prospect of failure leashed into regal restraint.

Sulfin Evend dispatched a clipped order, and his officer rushed to ease girths and tie up the horses. While other men mustered to stay on as escort, his impatient survey combed over the slope risen in tiers of stepped ledges. 'Do I gather you think the flasks in the saddlebags have been freely shared in our absence?'

'Well, the other alternatives aren't so inviting.' Lysaer kept his tone low as the reduced company re-formed foot ranks within earshot. 'Would you rather your men had been reft of intelligence, spell-touched and maybe possessed?'

Sulfin Evend adjusted his rust-streaked, scaled gauntlets. His grim gesture inviting the Blessed Prince to proceed at the forefront, he said, 'I suggest we go up and find out.'

The scrambling ascent was accomplished in spare efficiency and silence, the crunch as hobnailed boots cracked through refrozen slush interspersed with terse words of command. Lysaer did not set himself apart from the superb teamwork of the men. As often as not, it was his grip that steadied, or the interlaced fingers of his white-gloved hand, offered to cradle a rank-and-file climber's foot. True to the letter of his earlier promise, he left Sulfin Evend in charge. In tacit deference, the Light's Lord Commander gave his divine liege no demeaning task or direct order.

Yet the punctilious humility with which the Blessed Prince answered the need of the moment caused his guard to surpass themselves. Inspired by the exalted touch of one they held as god sent, they shouldered each trial with alacrity. Yet their efficiency could not halt time. Day was fast fading around them. Freshened gusts from the north refroze sunken drifts into granular ice, lending a hazardous edge to an ascent already steep enough to be treacherous. Despite difficulty, their progress was swift. The lead climbers reached the self-abandoned party of their fellows with no fanfare to forewarn of a royal arrival.

The light horse patrol whose lapsed quest had unraveled into debauched celebration never noticed. The most aware of them proved scarcely able to stand upright. Their less sober comrades lay in prostrated heaps. Others swayed singing, arms linked over the shoulders of their unsteady fellows. Still others lolled at ease, their surcoats unlaced, passing the dregs of broached spirits between them. Their boasts roused sniggering bursts of drunk laughter. Slurred insults described the minion of evil's tail-whipped last run into the guts of the mountain. Others rambled through wistful dreams of hot women and high living, anticipating the sumptuous crown reward awaiting their honorable discharge.

Sulfin Evend's stunned outburst cracked through the genial mayhem like the thunderbolt fall of Dharkaron Avenger's first spear cast.
'Honorable discharge?
For you lot? That's laughable! Unless you have charge of the Spinner of Darkness as a stiff corpse? Sure as sluts whelp, you're no sort of guard I'd entrust to secure a live prisoner!'

The troop's flushed officer fumbled erect. Spurs jingling, he staggered, tugging at his disarranged surcoat and sword belt in a pitiable effort to restore his parade-ground decorum. He swiped a hand over his smiling face, then slapped his breast in snide imitation of the salute exchanged between clansmen. 'We have no live prisoner, nor even a dead one. Just eyewitness proof. No man need fear the Spinner of Darkness from now to the ending of time.'

His expansive gesture toward Davien's stair head needed no further embellishment. Thought of crossing the archway beyond was a peril no right-thinking man would dare contemplate.

The Blessed Prince proved the exception.

'Show us.' Two whiplash, shaming words of command, delivered in velvet-clothed patience; Lysaer
s'Ilessid
stepped to the fore. The spun gold of his hair gleamed like sunlight unveiled against the gloom of the Mathorn landscape. His face was wind
-
burned as any man's, his white surcoat begrimed and creased. Yet amid that trail-weary company, his fired edge of determination bespoke a dimension outside of humanity.

His steady blue eyes showed no flare of censure. Beside Sulfin Evend's rankled impatience, the equanimity cut from such lordly restraint raised the Etarran to livid embarrassment.

He bowed, if not sober, then dignified by a pride beyond oathsworn service or loyalty. 'Lord Exalted, mount the stair. You shall see. This day has brought the Light a great victory.'

'I'm going along,' Sulfin Evend insisted. 'No other,' he declaimed, as the captain of the royal escort moved to join them. Then, wiser than most to the perils of spelled ground, he gently suggested that Lysaer
s'Ilessid
shed every one of his weapons. 'I'll carry the blade for us both, and shoulder the consequences if bearing steel calls down a sorcerer's penalty.'

Lysaer's attention fixed on him, immediate. The wide-open, blue eyes displayed limpid sincerity, unfailing reassurance that any belief, no matter how strange, would be heard and weighed without prejudice. 'You entertain that possibility?'

'I questioned the guard the light horse's captain left posted on watch at the picket lines.' The pale steel of Sulfin Evend's returned glance was like the wild falcon's, that would strike to defend on pure reflex. 'The man said he saw a crossbow quarrel hammered to sparks by a wardspell. If the stonework carries embedded protections, let me be the one to risk springing the snares we can't see.'

'I am the living Light,' Prince Lysaer returned, his unsmiling correction almost tender. 'Your life rides in my hands, not the other way about.'

Sulfin Evend inclined his head. The thoughtless, bright elegance of the prince alongside stamped him to the acutely discomfited awareness of his own grizzled stubble, and the marring splotches where rust on his mail hauberk had bled into his rumpled surcoat. The owlish silence fallen over the men implied he was no fit figure of command. The finest of his officers seemed a clay martinet, ineffective and silly as his drunken light horse, who had fled Davien's stair without posting even the basic pretense of a sentry.

The cut marble soared upward, an uncanny fashioning. Of the band of tired men gathered beneath, only Lysaer's self-possessed, golden authority seemed a match for its dimension of exalted challenge.

'Lend me your shoulder
.'
said the Prince of the Light. 'When I reach the first stair, I'll haul you up.'

The Lord Commander masked his own shaken nerves behind the ripe pretense of Hanshire arrogance, well aware that on his own account, he would never be treading anywhere near such a place. Yet in Lysaer's shadow, a man found himself. The core fiber of his being became reforged into something addictively glorious. Whether or not his death lurked ahead, he would not back down before uncanny evil, or quail in the face of adversity.

'Then grant me the folly of kindness, Lord Exalted.' Sulfin Evend squared his shoulders, hapless as the fighting cock tossed into the pit to challenge a mastiff. 'For the sake of my peace of mind, first humor my needless request.'

Still smiling, Lysaer unbuckled his sword belt. Sapphire settings flared in the half-light as he passed the blade to the gaping man at his right hand. 'I, myself, am the weapon sent to drive out the Darkness
.'
he reminded. 'For both our sakes, don't forget that.'

Sulfin Evend set his jaw, assaulted by memory of seared men and horses, smoking on the razed earth of Daon Ramon. Even so, he stepped forward.

Ahead of his asking, two others offered their bodies as living ladder to assist the Divine Prince up the sheer rock abutment. No easier path granted access to the carved staircase. For the act of trespass upon his most intricate creation, Davien the Betrayer had set his explicit demand: the journey began with an unequivocal act of free choice.

Sulfin Evend stripped off his scale gauntlets, which might hamper his grip on sheer stone. Sweating and pale, he followed his prince, aware as others were not, that threat to his own person might not arise from the Dark, or from dread assault by any Sorcerer's laid wardspells. He alone had stood witness to nightmare, as the brave company from Narms had been shorn down by Lysaer's own Light, set off by a conjured illusion.

Integrity held him, and the bound obligation that the same endowed gift of
s'Ilessid
had once spared his life. The Alliance Lord Commander set his boot and thrust upward.

'Bless you, Lord, guard his Exalted self
.'
murmured the captain behind him. 'Light bring you both back unharmed.'

Sulfin Evend returned a curt glance of acknowledgment. The latent talent inherent in his trace of clan ancestry would grant him instinctive warning. He would not shirk his place, standing guard.