TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (82 page)

The maze was a lens that unmercifully exposed: a branch in Arithon's life path slammed closed, more of his cherished freedom of movement irrevocably rendered forfeit. Tumult and tragedy, as the barb of satisfaction chosen that fateful, past moment at Ithamon presaged the unconscionable abuse of a herdboy named Fionn Areth . . .

Arithon paused, wrung to gasping remorse. The next step forward would not bring reprieve, or the next, as the coils of Desh-thiere were bound under seal and ward. Victory here would but lead to further imprisonment. Ahead loomed the upheaval surrounding his crown oath at Etarra, then the first breach of his inviolate will under the curse of the Mistwraith. That fracture of self would birth all the horrors of Tal Quorin, and the ultimate loss of the prodigious, sighted talent that stood as his raised shield against Morriel Prime's deadly enmity.

In the dark of the maze, Arithon uttered his threadbare plea to sustain. 'Move, damn you! No fear can be worse. It's just a reliving. The fiendish embellishment is nothing but truth, and truth, of itself, does not kill.'

But conscience could, and had, in this place, where Kamridian s'Ffalenn had died screaming.

Elaira held fast, her empathy crushed silent, as her beloved mustered his strength and mastered another step forward . . .

The sequential impressions raked like cut glass, as Asandir arrived on the scene and exchanged brisk words of chastisement. Arithon retreated to seek solace in solitude. Alone in the ruin, he was hounded first by Ithamon's endowment of haunts, and next by his half brother's misguided effort to seek his counsel in private. The hour wrought consequence: the Master of Shadow, too ridden by anguish, and Lysaer, too ignorant to realize the perils of speaking outside, on unwarded ground. The Mistwraith launched a vicious attack and caught them defenselessly exposed.

Elaira shared the bursting crisis firsthand, as Arithon raised talent to counter. She tasted his rank fear as his efforts to set wards became jangled; each construct unbound before his seals could be joined into stable completion; tearing breaches that erupted across his fixed barriers with no more finesse than a chalk line erased by the feet of a trampling multitude. Although Elaira had been born on Athera when the mists still enveloped the sky, she had never sampled the nature of Desh-thiere's underlying malevolence. No record existed, for what she beheld in the maze-wakened stream of Arithon's recollected experience. The nightmare terrors that surrounded and tore at him had no form. They expressed through no fra
mework of flesh. Pure spirit,
they swirled, fragmented faces with leering, fanged mouths, and empty, vicious, starved eyes. Hands plucked, one touch seductive and insistent, and the next, raking with claws to rip life essence out of the aura. The wraiths were not one, or a dozen, or a hundred, but a mass mind too vast to encompass. Teeming millions of entities had fused over time, awarenesses knotted and tangled into a vortex of virulent hatred. Their amalgamate presence was malice distilled, a more dangerous net than any spider could weave to entrap its diet of hapless small insects.

The influx Arithon strove and failed utterly to grapple was a massive gestalt, cognizance loomed into an insatiable thirst to consume and assimilate life.

Elaira shuddered to acknowledge the colossal misapprehension, that Morriel Prime, and after her, Selidie, had neither understanding nor experience to measure the broadscale threat posed by the entities the two princes had subdued at Ithamon. Koriani lore held no concept to encompass the malevolence, live and seething under ward beneath Rockfell. Otherwise, no Prime would dare the audacity to meddle, or play Arithon as a live pawn in their age-long struggle to disband the Fellowship's compact.

The horror defied description, as Desh-thiere's attack sidestepped Arithon's invention with alarming speed and agility. Its lancing, swift contact stabbed like needles of ice, razing through spell-wrought shielding with numbing force. No work of man seemed enough to counteract a barrage of such sustained ferocity.

Demoralized by what seemed an inevitable slide toward defeat, Arithon still fought. He ceded no ground. His mulish, inventive resistance served breathtaking rejection to the overpowering force ranged against him. He would not stand down, though every barrier he raised flashed to ruin like spark-touched lint. Against landsliding despair, the Master of Shadow held to his obdurate belief: that an avenue to stave off annihilation
must
exist. The intelligent complexity of Ath's creation was not bound by limitation. Some untried combination of wards must be possible to wrest back the chance for salvation. He clung to hope, mustered bare-handed resource for as long as he could stay upright.

More than his own life lay at risk. Lysaer had collapsed. Arithon dared not break, lest the half brother slumped in his arms become the shared victim of his incompetence.

Yet against the brewed horde of Desh-thiere's wraiths, one man's self-determined refusal to yield was the wish of a feather exposed to a gale. Arithon felt wrung through. He reeled, milled under and hooded by probing darkness. His lost senses were buffeted by incomprehensible movement and noise until his knees gave way underneath him. He sought to cushion Lysaer from harm as he swayed and lost his balance. Then agony sliced through and splintered his mind to a thousand glittering fragments.

Just as trapped by the maze's projected reliving, Elaira heard Arithon's harrowing scream resound through Kewar's sealed passage. For a moment, elusive,
something
of cold purpose flicked and passed like a snake through his mind. She felt it questing, gathering, absorbing his core being with a ransacking turn of intelligence. Then a crackling force of purple-white light snapped down like a shining cleaver. The shadowy presence retreated, its tainting influence there and gone without trace.

Elaira grasped after the memory, concerned an impression of vital importance had somehow escaped her awareness. But she lost the ephemeral sense of its essence. The encounter receded, unformed as the shimmer of heat lightning glimpsed and then lost into distance.

Then Asandir's voice cried,
'Let go. Dakar has hold of Lysaer.'

Through Arithon's spinning vertigo, and a nausea that grabbed like sloshed sand in his gut, the ugly, rifling presence escaped memory, obliterated by thundering torrents of bared force as the Fellowship Sorcerer unleashed his might in protection. Merged at one with the Shadow Master's mind and memory, the enchantress lost herself to awe, that a spirit in command of such power as this should still walk as unassuming humanity.

Elaira saw nothing, felt nothing beyond the dazzling constraint in Asandir's bridling of raw power. Forces that
by their wild nature could have unstrung the grand arc of the veil, and banished all substance to chaos.
Such was the depth of the Sorcerer's resource,
he could have expunged the most rigorous Koriani protections from the face of Athera on the spin of a moment's defined thought.

That his Fellowship had not countermanded free will; had not crossed outside the bounds of the Major Balance to blunt the pricking thorns of the Prime Matriarch's meddling bespoke a tolerance beyond comprehension. Recast to such scale, the order's belligerent challenge of the compact seemed an act of desperate insanity.

Reluctant to examine the reach of such insight, Elaira regarded the troubled conference that followed the Mistwraith's attack.

Asandir led the questions. His mage-sighted survey of the surrounding countryside touched every leaf, stone, and briar like a probing interrogation.

That Arithon could track the Sorcerer's mental agility by now came as no surprise. Yet the heartsore regret he experienced in the maze wounded all the more deeply set against the concurrent awareness that access to talent was closed to him.

He could not turn back. The last days in the battle to contain the Mistwraith unfolded, inexorable, the glass edge of danger braided through the close-woven thorns of a jagged despair. Each step unwound time; carried him closer to his accession at Etarra, and the horrific reckoning meted out on the banks of Tal Quorin.

Arithon plowed ahead. His progress was accomplished by ingrained determination, and the steel-cased awareness that to stop, or to languish, would buy him no grace of relief. Davien's web of spellcraft held no mercy for the man who could not face his actions head-on. Past the harrowing hour of Desh-thiere's captivity, Arithon endured his ceremonial presentation as the Fellowship-sanctioned crown heir.
Again,
he knelt in the chilly spring earth of a rose garden to receive affirmed right of succession from Asandir.

The antagonistic hatred and distrust of the townsmen surrounded him like a caul, day and night. He breathed and moved through their webworks of intrigue, slept and walked under strong wardfields entrained to deflect the knives of their covert assassins. Hampered in strangling cords of obligation, Arithon traversed the last days leading up to his disrupted coronation. Hindsight let him see the Fellowship's tension; telltale signs embedded in words, and in the consummate handling of masked reactions. The Sorcerers had been forewarned of a reckoning to come on that fateful day in Etarra.

Freely sweating, arms crossed tight at his chest as though mortal strength could restrain the cry of his captive heart, Arithon made his way forward. By the cascading complexity of his emotions, Elaira saw how the Fellowship's awareness cast disturbing, fresh light over the shape of events yet to come.
The Sorcerers had known, and not acted.
The reason for such a momentous betrayal stayed maddeningly veiled beyond reach. In pursuit of that mystery with all his sharp wit, Arithon reached the inevitable crux of the hour he became cursed by Desh-thiere.

Elaira sensed his shrinking trepidation. Beside him, she experienced the blackout dread that threatened to sap his fixed will.

Here lay the dire crossroad. The next step forward must retire the moment that had fully and finally unstrung the course of his life.

Arithon's whispered cry of appeal was addressed to his absent grandfather. 'Mak, when I said I could not accomplish what's asked, you told me, by all means, start dying at once.'

'Shrink yourself down to a shadow, a ghost, because you fear to make a mistake? Mistakes are life, boy! They teach strength and character. Back down from the contest, and you cast to the winds the best part of your given potential.'

But had Rauven's high mage ever foreseen such a challenge as Desh-thiere's stroke of revenge?

Elaira held fast, pressed to uttermost sorrow, as Arithon s'Ffalenn mustered his courage. She heard him speak the forlorn phrase in Paravian,
'lei drien i cadiad duerung undai sied ffaelient,'
meaning, 'Light for the path leading into rank darkness.' Then he gathered himself and stepped unresistingly forward.

Again
he was fleeing through packed throngs of people, seeking Fellowship assistance, and
again,
the hands of two merchants detained him with self-righteous force. His half brother's cast light bolt arced over the packed square, with himself held as captive target. Arithon had no time, no chance for evasion. Traithe's raven, extended in flight overhead, became his sole hope to draw help. In his desperate fear, he ripped his right wrist from the townsmen's encumbering grasp. Only one split second of freedom, and one narrow opening for choice: he had snapped off a shadow laced through with spells to protect the Sorcerer's winged messenger.

Elaira gasped, knowing as Arithon had, that the brunt of Lysaer's offensive must now strike his naked hand.

At the crux of reliving, he had curbed all fear. Yet his past grounds for trust became poisoned, in hindsight: that his trained talent and his skilled handling of darkness could still intercede and effect a recovery after the moment of impact.

Superbly prepared, his balanced mind braced to withstand searing pain, he turned his palm upward. By the first jolt of contact, he had already engaged shadow. The lethal force of wrought light was strained off on effortless reflex. Then the stunning, stark horror that served warning,
too late:
as a power embedded within the assault burst through his defenses unblunted. Spiraled energies pierced
through
his wards in a half twist, and wrapped his exposed flesh like hot wire.

Arithon screamed. Wrenched out of mental alignment, he was slammed to his knees by a blistering influx of agony. His torment was not born of blinding light, nor charring heat, but the cleaving bite of spellcraft aligned with devastating thrust to cause harm. The construct was not random. Its design had been specifically tempered to access the range of his shortfalls. In one stabbing thrust, weeks past, at Ithamon, the Mistwraith had mapped out this strategically tailored attack.

Beyond help, the shocked victim discerned his misjudgment.
Lysaer's light bolt had been no more than the carrier to enact Desh
-
thiere's vengeful malice.

Arithon fought, wrung breathless as the jagging, red coils of the curse closed over him, mind, heart, and spirit. His banishing wards were deflected straight back at him. He dodged, and encountered the vibration of Name, his own image the raised snare to entrap him. The Mistwraith's incursion ripped viciously inward. He felt its prongs pierce his inviolate core and invade, threading an inextricable geas of compulsion:
for as long as he held to life and breath, he would seek to destroy his half brother.
Arithon contested each coil of the pattern. His countermeasures met defeat. All his raised barriers crumbled. As a whole being, he could not be divided against himself. Yet to thwart Desh-thiere, he must try. A string of laid snares anticipated, then blocked his attempt to cut away the taint entwined with his essence. The Mistwraith had learned guile. The innovation that once had saved Traithe from possession became most cruelly forestalled. Not even self-destruction could wrest back the firm ground for Arithon to seize back his will and stay free.