TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (80 page)

His past came alive, each act of misdeed accounted. At odd intervals the compassionate drive of s'Ffalenn birthright wove a net of resilience to shield him.

Fledgling birds he had nursed to first flight, a deer he had healed of a broken leg, the elderly seeress who had befriended him - all walked at Arithon's side. Their protection of him in return lent some measure of mitigation. He retrod his own footsteps to ten years of age, when the high mage himself instilled Hie lessons that readied the mind for the perilous initiations that opened the keys to grand conjury.

Past warnings reechoed with the resonance of summer thunder.
'Before you access the gateways that cross through the veil, before the quest of the spiritwalk, where you link with the forces that weave Ath's creation, you must comprehend the raw impact of your mind. Every thought creates shape. Every feeling, no matter how passing small, precipitates the spin that unleashes event. To tread the way of power, you must waken the intense self-awareness that permits you to clear and harness the stream of your inner being.'

Again,
Arithon stepped across the tuned rim of the circle laid down by his grandfather's hand. Yet this time, the trial that led him through the nethermost pit of his fears was not guided. At Rauven, the high mage had steadied his past steps. His wise presence had stood as bulwark and shield to guard against youthful uncertainties. Firm admonishments had steered each misstep through the quagmires of imbalanced thought, and the entanglements of false beliefs. On Athera, alone in the Maze of Davien, Arithon s'Ffalenn performed the same trial, stripped naked.

He did not revisit his boy's fears again. Those phantoms had been conquered, reforged, or put to rout through the ceremonial cleansing of each battle of self enacted within the spelled circle. No longer the carefree, untried youth, the man who walked Kewar's Maze trod the more shadowy thicket of his adult expectations: the bad thread set through the cloth of his being that still bound him to self-induced error. Through the unblinded eyes of compassion, he wept for his deepest shortcomings.
The young girl who had feared him because, deep down, he felt flawed; the hollow cry that insisted he could not trust himself. The very power that flowed through him was double-edged, a moving peril that could touch and raise beauty, yet still carried the dire potential to wound.
In green youth, Arithon had survived on naive expectation, that he could keep such dark passions in check.

Yet the Maze of Davien did not mask the unrecognized truths under beguiling innocence.

Unbuffered, Arithon became stalked by his future:
knowing
that his later experience in Karthan would brutally rip through his dreamer's pretense. Exile had not freed him. A crown prince's oath on Athera would see his unfounded presumptions shattered in one day, a sentence written in running blood on the spring green banks of Tal Quorin.

'No!' His scream pierced the reliving, made bare stone ring with the echoes of horror to come. But no sound and no agony could stave off the flaying knives of his conscience. Through, the eyes of the Spinner of Darkness in Kewar, Arithon saw the forged pillar of self-worth that had founded his master's integrity; crumble, then winnow away into dust.

The lens of the maze realigned his perspective. The music that founded his emotional mainstay, the surrogate outlet for the love and close family he never had as a child, rang hollow. Forced to retrace his past step from the trial of the high mage's circle, Arithon was no longer blind to the fissure shot through the weave of his character. His ears were not deaf to the seed of rank discord soon to sour his untrammeled happiness.

Lessons in ancient language and lore, the arduous study of spellcrafting, the respite he wrought through his skill on the lyranthe, every hour of reflective contentment he enjoyed in the company of animals passed him by, a cascading flicker of imagery.

Again, he stood red-faced, as his grandfather upbraided him for letting the kitchen maid lure him into the hayloft for a bout of giggling dalliance.

'Boy, you're born with talent!' The old man tapped a white heron's quill against his creased palm, while the migrating geese streamed past the window, and autumn breeze wafted, sharp with the scent of the apples being pressed to make cider in the yard. 'You have sight well beyond the dullard's vision that Ath granted to men born with two eyes! Did you use it today, boy?'

Arithon maintained a desperate, locked stillness, his snarled shirt laces still half-undone, and his sable hair caught with straw. He stood straight as iron, too embarrassed to cringe. 'No, grandfather.'

Mak s'Ahelas arose. 'You will, then. Right now. Terik will escort you down to the harbor. You will visit the sailhands' brothel, not to indulge, but to observe what occurs in the aura when a man and a woman lie down in the act of coupling.'

Arithon paled, then flushed in shrinking humiliation.

But his grandsire showed no shred of masculine mercy. 'Sex creates an energetic binding, you'll not forget. You will accord women your deepest respect, whether or not they grant themselves the same reverence. Use your body as a spiritless object of pleasure, and you'll tie up your strength and bleed off your power with more subtlety than an addiction. You will go to the brothel, and perceive the cost, and know not to undertake such things lightly. Done without love, any congress between man and woman degrades the creative intelligence that graces your humanity.'

The maze granted no quarter. Young Arithon saw the past lesson through, by the end of the night brought back weeping with mollified pity. He avoided the kitchen maid after that, and later, threw silver to the sad-eyed harlots who accosted him on the street. 'For your comfort,' he told them, not accepting even one grateful kiss on the cheek for his blessing.

His last years at Rauven streamed past in a blur of marred happiness.

Arithon shrank from the heartbreak to come. In step-by-step traverse down Kewar's narrow corridor, he suffered the past, strapped to the pain of his future losses. Each revived memory arose resharpened by the untempered lens of blithe innocence.
Again,
he reenacted his learning to transmute the poisons of tienelle. From trance, he retraced his first spiritwalk, striding the limitless stream of the mystery whose wellspring lay past the veil. Still gloved in flesh, he learned to split his perception at will. The indescribable thrill of wild ecstasy rode him, as he first read and mapped the energy signatures of Name woven from the living elements, fire, earth, water, and air.

Once, all of those things had been effortless.

He had never questioned their permanence; never thought to imagine that the solid foundations of self could be cast to the four winds and jeopardy.

The foreknowledge of pain all but shredded his being as,
again,
Arithon watched himself make the decisions that
would come
to unravel his core of integrity. The ephemeral expectation of triumph slammed his heart like a physical blow on the day he completed his final initiation, and his grandsire bestowed the earned accolade of full mastery.

Every particle of will, of good sense, of learned wisdom, wished for opening to remake the past. Yet the maze forced one foot to follow the next. Arithon could not change his cognitive memory, or alter the choices that unstrung his fate. All over again, with bruising awareness of consequence, he answered his father's request to shoulder the heirship of Karthan.

Then, as now, the decision cut like a sword's edge. The inherited drives of farsight and compassion unraveled his peace until he could not escape. The needs of a people must ever overshadow the cry of his burgeoning talents.

Yet this time, as Arithon repeated the impassioned words that sealed his decision to depart, vision widened. The maze forced him to share in an aged man's heartbreak. This pass, he was shown his grandfather's frail hands, locked in whitened anguish on the wooden desktop to mask their grief-stricken trembling. The dark, intense stare and inviolate stillness, then mistaken for censure, became cruelly unmasked as the High Mage of Rauven heard fully and finally that he would be losing his daughter's beloved son.

The most gifted master he had ever trained stood tall before him, and pronounced his intent to voyage to Karthan and rule a sandspit of marauding pirates. In measured, firm words, Mak s'Ahelas saw his years of restraint bear the fruits of triumph and punishment. Arithon had indeed learned to think for himself. The irony came barbed, that the relationship a wise grandfather had expected to cultivate with the young man he had tenderly guided would not ever flower under his roof at Rauven.

'Avar is fortunate
.'
Mak s'Ahelas had said, honoring his grandson's independence. By then a weary, lonely old man, he had been great enough to allow his young protege the gift of his heady freedom.

The maze replayed every wretched detail.
Again,
Arithon s'Ffalenn knelt at his father's feet and swore his oath of peace over the bared blade of Alithiel. To the cheers of Karthish sailors, and the high mage's stifled sorrow, he set sail from Rauven, into blue waters and the very wreckage of his youthful hopes and dreams.

The barren fields encountered on that distant shore were no less an offense against nature, for the fact they were revisited in memory. The hunger of babes and the tears of the widows whose loved ones died at sea marked the heart with no less wrenching a sorrow. Arithon settled among the villagers of Karthan. Sharing poverty and rags, he engaged his deep talent and strove to transmute salted soil back to grain-bearing fertility. He engaged his mastery, used every trained resource at his command to assuage the devastation of generations of feud that had shackled a proud kingdom to garner subsistence through piracy.

The knowledge of his inevitable failure turned his words of encouragement to bitterest ash on his tongue. The maze did not forgive, or soften the outcome. Arithon
now
could not apologise for the defeat of his high aspirations.

His appeal died, broken to echoes between Kewar's unyielding stone walls. He could make no redress for the promise of hope that would be irremediably broken.

In wounding, inexhaustible detail, he retraced his path through battle and fire to the hour of his father's death, then his exile to distant Athera.

As the white static forces of the Worldsend Gate hurled him from Dascen Elur to the Red Desert, he screamed like the damned, to no avail. No ears heard. No help came. The Maze of Davien allotted its victims no mercy. Ahead, inexorable, lay the curse of Desh-thiere, then ten thousand dead in the field of blood on the banks of the river Tal Quorin. Arithon knew,
oh, he knew,
he could not repeat the violence of that reliving.

The wardspells allowed no deliverance.

'No!' Arithon walked, milled to abject despair. He could not face the consequence of the horrors he had wrought, bound by oath to the Kingdom of Rathain. His misuse of grand conjury to save lives would not spare him the vicious lash of full consequence. The spells in Kewar Tunnel were bound by their nature to mirror the past with strict clarity. He must experience the unspeakable toll of atrocity with no saving shield of separation. Every death, every wound, every shed drop of blood that already savaged his conscience would be replayed in clear empathy upon the stripped cloth of his mind, and the bound, naked flesh of his body.