TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (78 page)
Read TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate Online
Authors: Janny Wurts
* * *
Hours passed. The wheeling stars above Althain Tower marked the passage of midnight, their dance the interlocked measure of time. Sethvir's chamber was a wrapped well of gloom, the honey grain of the maple stand at the bedside lit by a flickering candle. Seated on a painted leather hassock once the gift of a Sanpashir Desert tribe's holy woman, Asandir laid aside the smoky quartz sphere that held the Warden's witnessed testament. He retied its shroud of silk wrappings, lifted shaken fingers, and nestled his forehead to his cupped palms to ease his explosive tension.
Since words were beyond him, a light whisper emerged from the pillows cradling Sethvir's head. 'You have come back to a world that still turns. We abide with the compact unbroken.' Drained by the constant, bleeding pull of four unbalanced grimwards, he lacked the resilience to express railing humor. 'As ever, I cannot decide whether to curse or rejoice in the bent of Davien's recent actions.'
Asandir raked back the singed ends of his hair. 'He's abroad in the world again, that can't be argued. If he helped right the imbalance that threatened Rockfell Peak, then we owe him sheer gratitude. None can deny his assistance was a necessity.'
There were no gentle words. 'But Davien made no direct intervention to resolve the crisis at Rockfell.' Sethvir's gnarled hands raked the coverlet in frustration, until his colleague offered an arm and lent him the strength to sit up.
'Then how in creation did we ever prevail?' Asandir encountered the Warden's stark weariness, flesh and bone reduced to the frailty of paper, and the bright spark of irony worn from lusterless eyes. Even their natural color seemed leached, battered to a dulled shade of slate.
Braced yet again for a frightening answer, the field Sorcerer showed disbelief. 'But your earth-sense imprinted in crystal reflected impossible odds.' The combined powers of Luhaine and Kharadmon, run through a mere spellbinder's flesh, had never been close to enough to forestall a cascading disaster.
The inevitable rupture at Rockfell should have called down a catastrophic chain of failures.
Sethvir's sigh scarcely ruffled the fall of his beard.
Asandir filled an unsettled pause, rearranging slipped quilts and piling up pillows for support, while Althain's Warden marshaled his anguished reluctance to speak.
The blow fell with utmost, stunning brevity. 'Kharadmon saved the wards by invoking the crown prince's tie to the land.'
Asandir snapped stiff. He turned his head, shocked, the silver
-
gray hair tumbled over his shoulders darkened by gloom to the grain of rough, filed iron.
'The world's fate was cast wholesale upon Arithon's shoulders?'
'We were lost already.' Sethvir folded limp hands in the trough of his lap. The effort pinched creases across his pale forehead and drained his tired eyes almost lightless. 'Kharadmon knew as much. If the lane flux had destabilized the Skyshiel fault lines, added risk to his Grace was not going to signify.' Like a torrent bursting through a broached dam, the Warden dispatched sequential images unveiling the full course of events. Rather than reveal the onerous imprint of the crown prince's subsequent suffering, he summed up with impersonal speech. 'By the time Davien effected Arithon's healing from the energetic imbalance of backlash, Lysaer's Etarrans were too close. Escape to the coast of Instrell Bay was no longer a viable option.'
'Which left Kewar and the maze? Ath forfend!' Asandir thrust to his feet. 'I never imagined the hour straight weakness could leave us so desolate!' Needled at last outside disciplined calm, the field Sorcerer drove into a fit of long-strided pacing. 'Fire and frost! We stand here breathing each moment on
nothing
but borrowed time!'
'Then you noticed the eagle?' Sethvir broached, his whisper glass-edged.
'
That the bird was actual bone-and-blood flesh, and not spun from etheric energies? Right away.' Asandir stalked to the table. The drawn jut of his brows seemed chipped out of obsidian, in the whirl and dip of the candleflame. Wolf gaunt and austere as his leather-clad form, his shadow swooped over armoire and clothes chest as he addressed the task of pouring the sweetened tea Ath's adepts had left on a tray.
He crossed back to the bed, the porcelain of an antique cup cradled like a songbird's halved eggshell in his welted, large hands. 'It's all right,' he assured as he settled the vessel into Sethvir's trembling grasp. 'I already understand that Davien has evolved beyond prior limitations. He has drawn Arithon to Kewar, if not through opportunity, then by crafty design. The question of why may well pack a bitter poison.'
Sethvir peered into the depths of his mug, as though some benign remedy for lethal secrets might reside in the rising, wisped scrim of steam. 'Why indeed?' He did not set speech to the shadow that hung, unmentioned in leaden silence: that King Kamridian had died, broken by the magnified burden of self-perceived guilt, as the royal gift of s'Ffalenn compassion entangled him in his conscience.
Asandir fetched a second cup for himself, swirling in a dollop of honey infused with ground cloves and cinnamon. He sat down again, his lanky legs folded, and his bent elbows braced on his knees. 'Where are the sureties? Unless Davien's gone insane, he would be mortified at the thought of retreading past steps and old ground.'
Sethvir sipped his tea, his glance fever bright with exhaustion. 'Well, since he chose not to open free dialogue, like beggars without coin, we can do very little but sit and wait on the outcome.'
'Not a comfort.' Asandir changed the subject, not thrilled by the fact that a blood oath sworn at Athir became the sole straw weighting a negatively tipped balance. 'What of the torn wards at Rockfell?'
'Almost back in hand.' Sethvir sent the sequence of patterned geometries that defined the ward rings in the mountain. The construct glowed blue, gold, and pulsating, soft purple, where light crossed the extreme edge of vision. At the heart of the shuttling play of live energy, an obsidian core had been wrought of a stuff beyond sensing. Asandir had worked wardings at the site many times. A brief glance assured him that the innermost guard ring was fully sealed, with work under way on the second. The runes of closure could stand complete in a day, maybe two, depending on Dakar's stamina. The outermost ward on the entry itself would not take long after that.
Asandir settled back, the restlessness in him rechanneled to deep thought, and the piercing steel of his eyes masked by steam as he lifted his mug to his lips. Persistent aches gnawed his bones from prolonged exposure to the deranged resonance of the grimwards. No respite lay in sight. Despite sternest discipline, and the pungent, spiced warmth of the tea, disheartened sorrow wore the field Sorcerer through. He felt Sethvir's moth-wing touch brush his knee, responded with a nod, then received the swift stream of images that showed other incidents drawn from across the Paravian continent.
Not all the tidings were bad. A long shot had borne fruit, and Prince Kevor had survived; Elaira still claimed safe sanctuary with Ath's Brotherhood at Whitehaven hostel. Lysaer's Etarrans mustered for their march homeward, while the survivors of Rathain's clan war band limped back into Halwythwood in small groups, exhausted and hungry, bringing joyful consolation to some, and tears of bereavement to others.
If marauding Khadrim still flew and slaughtered in Tysan, Prince Arithon's spectacular orchestration of grand confluence had rebalanced the lane flux enough to bring in the spring thaw in the east. Fields could be sown in time to stave off widespread famine. Asandir stretched out a cramp in his leg, then set his empty mug aside.
'At least Davien left Prime Selidie in a state where she's unlikely to become an immediate stone round our necks,' Sethvir said, raising the kicked ghost of humor.
'I could wish the galley that bears her would founder on its coast-hopping run down to Ithish,' Asandir replied with bad grace. 'The Great Waystone could certainly benefit from a permanent dousing in seawater.' Having just shared the unsavory details concerning the Koriani Matriarch's succession from Sethvir's recorded testament, he looked ready to lapse into venomous temper. 'You could have informed me of Morriel's possession of Selidie sooner than this.'
Althain's Warden glanced up, his eyes the limpid blue of a robin's egg, gilt touched in the uncertain candlelight. 'What could you have done?'
'The same thing I'll do now. Go to refound the seals on the next grimward her mad bout of meddling left deranged. I'll be away just as soon as the dawn tide fires the Paravian focus.' Asandir stood, still bristling, though his touch stayed unfailingly gentle as he lifted Sethvir's finished cup from slack hands. 'Which of the damaged ones drains you the worst?'
'Haspastion's, in Radmoore.' The Warden seemed suddenly dwindled, a wisp of starved flesh tucked amid a bastion of pillows and quilts. 'Though your journey from Methisle could entail complications. Traithe had to take work with a farmer near Ganish to earn the price of a skiff.'
Asandir laughed. The free-ringing sound filled the close chamber like the brisk clash of sword steel in challenge. 'The mud pots of Mirthlvain will be thawing, of course. A few methspawn, poisonous serpents by the vile dozen, or fifty thousand hatched karth-eels with sharp fangs, those plaguing ills I can handle. In fact, after Morriel Prime and Davien, I'll find them a welcome diversion.' Any crawling horror seemed more inviting than standing slow vigil, wondering how Prince Arithon fared, entrapped in the maze under Kewar. 'I'll lend Verrain what help I can as I ride the mire's west border. He'll manage until Traithe comes, rest easy on that.'
'Mind your step on the wall,' Sethvir bade him. 'The harsh winter set frost that has loosened the stone.'
'Isfarenn will look after me.' Asandir bent one last time, laid a hand on the bone-thin shoulder beneath the muffling blankets. 'I'll try to return before the spring orchards reach flower.' The trace flush raised by his brief mirth had faded, erased by concerns he lacked any resource to lift. 'You'll be all right, here?'
Sethvir's eyes drifted closed on the offered imprint of the entangling, stopgap diversions Kharadmon had left spun outside the perimeter of the star wards. The imminent threat of invasion from Marak still dangled, unbroached and dangerous beyond measure. 'Once Rockfell is sealed, I'll have too much help,' the Warden of Althain complained in flippant, brave parting. 'Or do you think a few wraiths can make Luhaine and Kharadmon cease their incessant brangling?'
'Summon Davien,' said the Fellowship's field Sorcerer, spurred on to stabbing, wry irony. 'Sit him down in between, and if we're lucky, that feuding pair might rip him to shred pie instead.'
Early Spring 5670
Sunrise
At Rockfell Peak, daybreak streaks the high clouds in bright crimson; and exposed to the freezing winds on the ledge, Fionn Areth shivers in the whipped folds of his cloak, waiting for the Mad Prophet and two discorporate Sorcerers to complete the harsh wardspells that drill ranging vibrations in waves through his bones, and burn him to raging headaches . . .
At Methisle, roused out of sleep when the Paravian focus flares white, the master spellbinder Verrain descends the dank sandstone stair with a fluttering rushlight in hand, to be met by the scrape of a stallion's shod hooves; then the dark, cloaked presence of Asandir stops him short with a cry of relief, 'Oh bright Ath! Let this not be a figment of dream, here and then gone to leave me alone with the horrors of a waking nightmare . . .'
At Avenor, clad in his robes of high ceremony, and surrounded by twelve of his acolytes, Cerebeld, High Priest of the Light, enters the square and pronounces the Spinner of Darkness driven into the dark maze of Kewar, where no mortal man might walk with impunity, but where a demon might consort with fell powers of sorcery, and emerge with yet more fearsome strength . . .
Early Spring 5670
XV. Peril's Gate
A
r
ithon awoke untold hours later. Featureless darkness met his opened eyes. His ears felt stuffed in a black-cotton silence, and the absence of wind abrading his skin made him feel entombed alive. No trace remained of the portal that admitted him. The smooth-polished stone supporting his body felt chilly, but not winter cold, and the air held no scent at all.
Prickled to a crawling stab of disquiet, Arithon rolled onto his elbow. He sat up. The movement disturbed his unsheathed sword, which loosed a clangor of echoes. As he groped left-handed to recover the hilt, he discovered more: every ache and bruise, scraped cut and strained tendon seemed erased from his body. Leaving the weapon untouched where she lay, he explored his bound hand, but felt only minimal discomfort. Only the knot of lumped proud flesh let him know the disfiguring wound still existed.
Grief cut to the quick for the ruin of his music, the blight of lost hope most cruelly resharpened by that isolate, black well of stillness.
To forestall self-pity, Arithon rose to his feet. His joints were all limber, his mind clear and rested. The neutral stillness around him did not smother, but instead seemed to feed his heightened state of awareness. He listened, unbreathing, but could not detect any lingering vibration from the subtle spellcraft that must have combed through his being as he slept. That singular fact spurred his rising uneasiness. Whatever the potentized forces at work, that gloved, quiet power also muted Desh-thiere's curse. The geas seemed a lodged stone in his gut, unmistakably
there
, but reduced. Its inert, weighted presence did not wear him with pressing compulsion.
Left with no explanation but his unquiet breaths, and the pounding rush of his pulse, Arithon knelt and swept the featureless floor left-handed until his questing touch encountered his sword. He closed his fingers over the wrapped leather grip, and froze.
The Paravian starspells imbued in the steel came alive at his touch, a living thrum of aroused vibration that razed through his bones to the wrist. Light followed, a hazing of actinic flame that licked down the silver-laced runes. For no reason under sky he could name, that pallid glimmer gouged his sight like the vicious stab of a levin bolt.
Arithon gasped. Still poised on one knee, he averted his eyes before he went blind, wincing as busy needles of pain rained length and breadth through his aura.
Yet where was the enemy?
Unease consumed him. Never before this had his vision been bothered by the ancient blade borne by his forebears. Arithon squinted, avoiding the disquieting dazzle of the blade. Nothing else stirred in the darkness.
He sensed no one near. The sword's slowly waxing, silver
-
smoke glow burnished the stone floor, a smooth-polished slate with a merled grain configured into a spiral. The shape snagged his attention, was in stunning fact
not natural.
Arithon examined the rippled striations scattered into gray stone like sparkling grains of cast salt. Distinct as a touch, icy fear lanced him through;
he was staring at minuscule runes interlaced into thousands of braided chains, and binding who knew what spell-charged directive.
Sweat sprang out on Arithon's skin as he realized the place where he slept had crossed the centerpin of the gyre.
He bit back his impulse to plead for Ath's mercy; stamped back futile longing for unimpaired use of his mage-sight. Sorely as he wished for his sundered gifts, no flicker of talent would answer. He could not pierce the blank barrier imposed by the bloodshed once wrought by the river Tal Quorin, although his life might rely on such access.
Arithon gathered his shaken nerves, forced his trembling legs to bear weight. Standing erect, he lifted Alithiel high overhead, using the brightened flare of the runes to survey his surroundings. As he first suspected, the archway that admitted him had erased, melded back into walls of wild stone. The layers were ribboned with ancient striations, where eons of fire and sediment had birthed their early formation. Arithon turned a full circle in place. No opening appeared. No crack broke the rock, not even a cranny to admit roosting bats or the wings of a night-flying insect.
Yet the place was not sealed, despite seamless walls that appeared to entrap the unwary spirit who trespassed. At each move he made, Arithon sensed the rising tickle of power playing across his damp skin. The sword in his fist waxed brighter, second by second, until he was forced to shield his eyes with the back of his bandaged hand.
'Mercy,' he whispered.
The pain was intense, knifing-bright light now joined by the low thrum of harrowing sound. The sword's song brought no joy. Only a deep, deranging vibration that made his skull ache as though Dharkaron Avenger's gloved fists boxed his eardrums with ringing force.
Then came true movement, a concatenation of elemental forces ignited
from nowhere
behind him.
Arithon spun. He faced a wide archway. The structure, with its queer, twisted pillars
had not been there
when he had examined that wall scarcely seconds before. Across a silled threshold incised with black runes, the sword's glow sliced, muffled, through darkness.
Where prior aspirants had wailed at the sight, Arithon held, braced and silent. No stranger to grand conjury, he had once commanded the veil of the mysteries, lifted. He had knowledge. A master's training still structured his outlook, lending the wisdom to override animal instinct. He required no access to vision to realize he was fully ensnared by powers too vast to grapple.
Warned as well by the blazing cry of his sword, he understood he must move ahead. Cringing thought would not save him. No hope would bring rescue; no chance remained to turn back. Far better to meet unknown sorcery head-on, than to be sought, or much worse, to be hounded along out of forfeited will to a fate magnified by raw fear. Arithon was too well seasoned by experience to succumb to self-blinded helplessness. Weakness that fled the spelled strength of aggression never yielded the slightest advantage.
A Fellowship working of consummate genius, the Maze of Davien was unlikely to prove the exception.
Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn gripped his sword in slick fingers and engaged a decisive step forward.
Two torches sprang into crackling flame, set in black-iron sconces at either side of the archway. Their unsteady light spilled across the carved sill, revealing a high, vaulted ceiling. Another pattern of runes spiraled upward, their reverse image dizzying to the unshielded eye. Arithon wrenched his spinning gaze free, before his trapped mind tumbled senseless into the infinite. More ciphers were set in the walls past the arch, leading downward into a stairwell. The curving rows of interlocked seals had been formed in Paravian script, yet the language framed no words that Arithon knew. Under close scrutiny, they seemed to shine with blue light, too deep and dark to cast illumination, both
there
and
not there,
like the eruption of color caused by grinding clenched knuckles against the lids of shut eyes.
Arithon advanced. His booted step echoed. The tingle of live energies speared through his flesh, and the sword in his hand whined and brightened.
Who was the just enemy, if not himself?
The prospect filled him with terror. Far worse, the alternative: that the construct of the maze held the basic, brute resource to bend Alithiel's imbued virtues. Whichever case faced him, he walked a path of rank folly to believe he could challenge a ward of such potency.
Rathain's prince swallowed back his unease. His master's discipline was
all
he had left. Shrinking back was not going to spare him.
He braved the next step, and the next after that. Stark will brought him up to the archway. More torches ignited on the far side. Their snapping flame unlocked the dread way ahead of him. Shivering to suppress a nerve storm of alarm, Arithon crossed over the threshold.
Alithiel screamed. Her wail of stressed sound razed down his arm, driving a cascading wave of vibration. The dissonance raised pain that knifed into his viscera and threatened to flay living flesh off the bone. Jaw clenched, sweat streaming damascened tracks down his temples, Arithon refused to give way. He did not sheathe the blade, though mounting discomfort threatened to derange his cognitive thought. He could not use mage-sight. Stripped of access to talent, he must cling to bare trust: Alithiel's forging carried the sound-and-light chord of primal creation. The tonal harmony that had first Named a star had been laced through its steel by Athlien Paravian singers, then sealed by the dance of the mysteries called down by the graceful Riathan. The shrill peal of the sword's voice became the only true gauge of the dangers aligning against him.
Changing resonance as the Paravian weaving encountered the worked emanations of the maze provided some semblance of warning. Arithon could trace the ward's waxing or waning. Left nothing else but his limited eyesight, he would have seen nothing more than a stair that led
downward,
and torches that bloomed into flame, lighting the passage of each forward step.
Down, the stair spiraled. Torches blazed up, unveiling what seemed a limitless path to infinity. Arithon walked with Alithiel held upright, one forearm thrown over his forehead and face to ward off the hurtful blaze of the starspells. Raw sound reamed him through, and cast hammered echoes back off the rune-marked stone of the well. In time, the orange glow leached from the torches. Their unnatural blaze crackled as bright as the sword, glaring white against the stygian dark receding without end ahead of him.
He forbore the temptation of meddling with shadow. To win through the maze, he must master its center. A divergent purpose might only exhaust him, or provoke a reaction as likely to set back or weaken him.
'Never needlessly test yourself against a power of greater self
-
awareness,'
his grandsire s'Ahelas had cautioned.
'You could incur a devastating backlash, at worst, as countercurrents seek equilibrium. If you did not lose balance, you still might lay open every part of yourself to fine scrutiny. That mistake could set a crippling limit upon every choice you make afterward.'
Reliable counsel; yet even a high mage's vested guidance carried small consolation. Arithon could not shake the undermining belief that he was a walking sacrifice.
He descended until his legs throbbed from exertion, and the sword's screeling vibration numbed out his mind and senses. The stair shaft delved into the roots of the mountain beyond any concept of depth. Arithon could not have described where he was; knew little else beyond the fixed choice that sustained his will to move forward. He anchored himself to the rhythm of his feet, stepping downward in endless progression.
The stair ended. Unbalanced by the wrenching change as his boot slapped onto a level surface, Arithon flung out his bandaged palm to catch himself short of a fall. Unshielded contact with the rune-inscribed wall hazed his flesh like the kiss of raw fire. He recoiled, swearing. Dazzled by the sword, he squinted past his masking cuff and made out the outline of another doorway ahead.
This portal was framed by two pillars, one black and one white, bearing more chains of spiraling ciphers, and the timeworn sigils representing the sun and the moon. The lintel above was not a keyed arch, nor did it have a guardian statue or gargoyle. The massive beam was a slab of razed granite, of post-and-tenon construction. Its crosspiece was carved. Through the searing glare thrown off his sword, Arithon made out Paravian runes twined into the symbol for infinity, etched above a ruled line of scrip wrought out in glowing blue characters.
He labored to decipher their meaning, grasped that the words would be known to him. But Alithiel's vengeful resonance burgeoned, risen to a torrent of punishing light and battering waves of shocked sound. The flux swept him under, tore him piecemeal and shattered him. He buckled at the knees, never felt the impact of his fall. The shrieking chord of the Paravian sword's resonance unwove his being and sucked him into a whirlpool of darkness.
* * *
Hearing returned first. Cradled in velvet-textured stillness, Arithon came aware lying prone on smooth stone. A throbbing ache bespoke a bruised cheekbone. Opened eyes remained sightless. His limbs would not move. As though all his nerves had been stripped, he sprawled helpless, an inert mass of pummeled meat cased over a deadweight framework of bone.
The uneven rush of air through his lungs suggested he was not totally paralyzed. Against looming panic, mage-trained discipline resurged: granted the tenuous continuity of his breath, Arithon created the anchor to define the rest of his being. He imposed reasoned will, smoothed down raging fear. In abiding calm, he affirmed the rhythm of life, inhale to exhale, until his mental clamor subsided.
Sensation returned. His displaced awareness reintegrated with his body, a tingling surge that racked running tremors from head to foot. Rough return from a spiritwalk sometimes induced such reaction. Arithon kept on breathing, held himself quiet until the disturbance faded.
He lay by the portal, awash in the chilly glimmer of light tracing the lintel's inscription. His dropped sword was not far. The rune-worked length of the blade rested partway over the threshold, the dark sheen of spelled steel gone ominously quiescent. Tenderly careful, Arithon sat up. His shadow pooled underneath him, a darkness as void as the well of primal creation. Everything lit wore the silver-blue flare cast by the carved characters overhead.
Leaving the sword, Arithon stood. He scraped back tumbled hair, raised his gaze to the twined runes that commanded the intangible reach of infinity. This pass, he read what was written there.
The impact of meaning raised a transfixing dread that slammed him through, until he felt pinned on the shaft of Dharkaron Avenger's thrown spear.
'Siel i'an i'anient,'
the inscription read; meaning, 'Know thou, thyself.'
Stunned by recognition
of just what
he had challenged, Arithon understood how Kamridian s'Ffalenn had met tormented death in this place. He knew, as well, why Alithiel had wakened. No given cause in Ath's wide creation could be so exactingly just:
the enemy he faced in the Maze of Davien was to be the shadow within his own self.
The truth had been evident, all along, plainly stated by the symbolic gryphons flanking the outer entrance. Mercy and strength offered the sole powers of deliverance for the trial which lay ahead.
Preparation was impossible. No weapon could stave off the danger. To wait would only engender starvation, and deplete the resilience of courage and will into the turmoil of mental anxiety. By every wise tenet of his upbringing at Rauven, Arithon realized he must forge ahead. Yet the knife-edged range of consequence that move must entail robbed the impetus from firm initiative. He hesitated, shaken to clammy sweat.
He fell back, yet again, on the words of his grandsire.
'Arithon,'
the old man had said, when a mishap had half drowned him while learning to swim,
'our fears play us like string puppets.'
While the high mage spoke, his brusque fingers had bundled up his dark sleeve cuff to dry a small boy's disturbed tears.
'There is no terror so powerful as the one never faced. That
sithaer,
that hell, must not rule your mind. The man who makes the water his friend is the master who breasts the current and learns how to tame it through partnership.'
Then again, years later, as a callow apprentice, Arithon recalled the day he believed he had slipped and omitted a line of protection. A shadow of nightmarish force had slid cold and dank through his construct, and his splintering scream had brought his grandsire running.
Mak s'Ahelas had not been as tender, that time.
'Boy, your wards were well sealed! That terror was not outside, but in fact within. You encountered a reflection of yourself!'
The high mage bore in, overriding his grandson's blustering claim that the threat just dispelled had surely been separate and alive.
'Were you frightened, boy? Oh, then by all means, hide the fact. Shove it down! It will not be gone, but run wild and nip at your heels. You'll have a lurker haunting your dreams. Your belief you are helpless now feeds its existence, and it grows, sucking off your self-trust. Now, that energy you've left to itself will evolve, unchecked, and yes, as you say, even kill. Not with teeth or claws, but by the much slower poison of leaching your innate free claim to existence. Though you go on and enact all life's motions, you will be worse than dead. That fear never faced becomes a parasite that will not respect any ward. It will slide through the best-laid protection, unbanished,for you have
given
it leave by quitting the arena without contest. You cannot pretend you don't know you were vanquished. The self cannot mask from the self and stay whole. Left to bide, fear will never relinquish its hold, but forever possess that lost bit of vitality you surrendered to endow it with being.'
Far from his childhood at Rauven Tower, embroiled beyond help in the Maze of Davien, Arithon s'Ffalenn repeated the high mage's counsel to breast insurmountable terror.
'"Go back in. Die once. Let the fear be the part of yourself that does not survive through the crossing.'"
Yet what bracing words would Grandfather Mak have advised for the wretched encumbrance of Desh-thiere's curse? The spontaneous answer arose, fresh as the kiss of changed wind from the mind schooled to self-disciplined mastery.
'Die once, and be done. Let Fate's Wheel turn, quick and clean.'
Stripped of false consolation or comfort, Arithon scrubbed his damp palms on his forearms. He sucked in a final, unsteady breath, bent down, and retrieved Alithiel's dropped length from the floor. Spelled steel did not rouse. The blade remained black and utterly inert, even as he assayed a trembling, reluctant step forward.
The Paravian characters scribed in the lintel flared brilliant white, and snapped out.
Darkness descended, a pall of absolute jet that stabbed the eye to behold. Left to grope his way forward, Arithon sheathed his sword. Between one bold step, or two shuffling, short ones, he chose the first, and crossed over the darkened threshold ahead of him.
A trace prickle of force shimmered over his skin, lifting the hair at his nape. The sensation raised a fresh sweat on his brow. No other sign of distress marred his person, where other mortal predecessors who had threaded the maze in willful self-conceit had been forced to duck, or crawl through that portal, or worm belly down in ignominious shame.
No sconces flared alight on the other side. Arithon's arrival roused a flat, directionless illumination that unnaturally threw off no shadow. He found himself in a narrow corridor. The walls were stone, still, but strangely polished. Their silvery sheen wore the same glaze of reflections found in a tarnished mirror. Other small changes rattled the nerves. Arithon found his wide-open eyes utterly unable to blink. Nor could he muster the self-command to stand down as he saw a living replica of himself approach from the opposite direction.
He quenched rising panic, which urged him to run; resisted the impulse to unsheathe his weapon. To flee would just bind his consent for the nightmare to hunt him down from behind; to attack would certainly wound his own flesh. A bold forward step was the only option. Arithon advanced on his uncanny double,
and the floor changed beneath-,
his leading footstep set him down at the heart of an intricate pattern inlaid into seamless obsidian. He recorded the flash-point impression of the quartered cross and circle of Daelion's Wheel, the centerpoint cut by the diagonal slash that signified the axletree of fate. Then upending dizziness routed his mind. His senses reeled under a storm of wild power like nothing ever encountered in life, or the brutal, hard course of his training.
If he cried out, his scream became swallowed. The mirror
-
smooth walls blurred, then shattered ahead of him. He saw his doubled image split asunder, repeated until he beheld himself as a multitude, face after face alike as his own, regarding him with accusation. Then vision dimmed. He discerned no surroundings. The surge of incomprehensible power withdrew, rewoven into a seamless webwork of insubstantial, poised force. The subliminal sense of its confining pressure lurked just beyond reach of his outstretched hand.
Given nothing, again, but his harshly rasped breathing, Arithon mustered a semblance of disciplined calm. He made his way forward, surprised by his own steadiness; and the featureless twilight around him balled up and gave birth to a scene from his childhood . . .