TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (84 page)
Read TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate Online
Authors: Janny Wurts
Arithon stepped forward, and died first as a horse, down and rolling with the agony of a javelin shaft impaled through the gut. Thrashing, his throat opened in a scream of animal pain, he pressed on, and died again, as that mount's fallen rider. Paralyzed and neck-broken, he choked out his life with the taste of green moss and mud mixed with blood on his bitten tongue. Death did not release him. He suffered the lingering, penumbral shadow: the bereaved ache of that man's aged mother, and two brothers; of sister, and wife, and three fatherless children. Their tears and smashed dreams hammered nails of pure sorrow into his laboring heart. . .
'Oh, cry mercy!' whispered Elaira. Ribbons of tears coursed down her dreaming cheeks. Far removed from Whitehaven and the sheltered, secure couch of her body, she felt nothing of the hands that cradled her head, and brought towels as her pillow grew sodden . . .
She walked Kewar, as Arithon died, again and again, uncounted assaults of wounding steel; of arrows; of drowning; of maceration under thundering tons of unleashed current and logs, and razed trees. He died of spring traps, moaning from the ripping cut of sharpened branches that disemboweled. After a hundred contorted falls, he lay sprawled amid the spilled steam of his organs, whimpering for nonexistent mercy. He gasped out his life with crushed lungs, pinned under the weight of a bloated, dead horse. He drowned in his own vomit, facedown in black mud. He died trampled by panicked companions, and of threshing plunges into cunningly masked deadfalls, where he writhed impaled upon pointed stakes. He died of a cut throat by the hands of a furtive child. He died, weeping for his mother, his father, his young sons; for babes orphaned and wives abandoned to the miseries of unmarried childbirth.
Over and over and over again,
the Wheel's dark crossing claimed him. Worse, sometimes he lived, croaking in fevered delirium from the slow agony of suppurating wounds. He begged in the gutters of Etarra and Narms, without legs, or a hand. Other times he endured in wasting neglect, in the care of impoverished relatives. He exhaled Gnudsog's last breath, gagging bile and silted water, and lay broken on a rock in a river as a girl child shot down by a quarrel. As a woman, he drowned in a river of hot blood while the bright sunlight faded to dark.
He died, raped and screaming, as Jieret's young sister. Of a sword thrust in the belly, he died yet again as Steiven's violated wife. He died as a babe, torn from the breast of his mother and spitted. He died, an old man, hacked like carrion; and the same, in eight thousand sickening variations, again and again, a progression of visceral nightmare that skinned his throat raw, leaving him voiceless. He pleaded in a scouring whisper, and still died, without water, without succor, without hope or mercy, while the repeated assaults of shattering pain hounded him to the threshold of madness.
When he could not walk, he crawled. The steel-poised awareness he sustained through mage training yet clung to a battered understanding. The spells that entrapped him allowed no relief; to stop would only prolong an already untenable suffering. He died of burning, of freezing chill shadow, of arrows that sleeted down through ripped leaves, and out of the dazzle of sunlight. He died to the frenzied, shrill clamor of steel, and then of a crossbow whose metals were sundered by an unspeakable, warped twist of spellcraft.
His ugly work; even mage-blind, he sensed his own patterning. For that act of transgression, young Jieret had survived; even still, conscience howled. He heard his grandfather at Rauven, words quiet and scornful with censure, then the thunder of Dharkaron's condemnation, a shriek that lashed with edged lightning, denouncing him in Paravian that no end ever justified the foul means.
Steiven's Deshans survived;
the act had to mean something.
But surcease was not granted in deliverance.
Arithon clawed forward by tortured slow inches, and died: of sword thrusts, of quarrels, of jabbing, sharp steel, snared in the slow sap of a tree's dreaming, his mind and his agony filtered in the muffled fall of snow and the whisper of leaves through midsummer. He died, slammed in the back by a javelin as he fled other clansmen wrought of illusion.
Then the moment of reliving he most dreaded overtook him, etched out in unnatural hatred. Arithon fought to rise up on one knee as he beheld the past vision of his half brother Lysaer, and reexperienced the smashing assault of Desh-thiere's curse. He howled in despair. No one answered.
Again,
his humanity was lost, milled under a riptide of black, burning passion. He felt mind and heart consumed by fell fires that tore away all restraint.
Again
he opposed Lysaer, reforged as the Mistwraith's claimed instrument of destruction.
The horror returned, magnified, venom-sweet, as the ecstasy of surrender raked through him.
Again,
he blazed with the ripe triumph of the moment when he had mustered his shadows and raised his bared steel to annihilate his half brother.
One split second, in the maze, Arithon felt the inward recoil:
sensed the lashing response as the curse awoke in him, no stripped vision of reliving, but as an excruciating storm of live force that bludgeoned his exhausted grip on identity.
Then young Jieret blundered into him with wrenching force, and tore him back into his past.
For this, the boy lived. Always to call him back from the brink, and for what purpose under Ath's sky?'
The suffering and death were ever destined to recur. The damning proof would compound, seeding holocaust at Minderl Bay, at Vastmark, and Daon Ramon Barrens . . .
Broken, weeping, Arithon crumpled.
He died, seared by fire and light, and died again, as a thousand trees, burning. He lay for uncounted hours in pain, tortured breaths puddled in rivers of shed blood, then met death again as a friend on the sharp, skilled knives of his kinsmen.
Grief beat him down. He languished in mourning for loved ones slain, and for others lost to nightmares and madness. He moldered as hacked bones beneath a stone cairn, under the singed trees of Strakewood. He blew on the winds as dry ash, and he cried as the rain falling on the slagged rock of a grotto.
At the end, lying flat on the slab-cold granite that floored the Maze of Davien, he wept for the beauty of a single voice. The bard was his lost self, immersed in the guidance of mage-sighted singing, that called on compassion and used woven harmony to settle the riven shades of the slain who wandered Tal Quorin, bewildered.
'You have to arise,' urged a gentle voice. A hand firmly tugged at his shoulder.
Arithon turned his head. Sucked clean of strength, he regarded the sad ghost who knelt over him, bearded and kind in the starlight. Tears clogged his throat. He unlocked his tongue and gasped a mangled utterance that resurrected a name from the past. 'Madreigh?'
'For the gift of your care,' the clansman admitted. His soothing quiet drowned the fading last clamor of Strakewood's red toll of slaughter. 'I breathed through the sunrise, and was laid to rest alongside my sons. For your effort, a brother survived me.' Madreigh reached out again. His touch was silvered mist, and his hands, healing light, as he bore Arithon's battered flesh up in his arms. 'Let me carry you through the crossing. As you did for me, let compassion free you from the pain as you meet your hour of reckoning.'
One step, two; Tal Quorin fell behind. The ghost of Madreigh embraced his liege, cradled like a child in his arms. Then he set his royal burden down, and on soundless footsteps, departed.
The nightmare horrors receded, leaving the bright-graven memory of eight thousand deaths, bound in chains of guilt and the withering ironies of Desh-thiere's entrenched geas of vengeance. the legacy lingered, no less cruel in reliving: Arithon felt the blank caul of blindness settle over the marvel of his gifted talent.
Set back on his heels, alone with searing grief and the ache of a loss beyond words, the man who was Master of Shadow and prince leaned gasping against the smoothed stone of the tunnel wall. He begged the still air for the grace to bear his bruised spirit onward.
No one answered; nothing stirred.
But in time, under starlight, a soft spray of lyranthe notes emerged and buoyed his flagging resolve. In music, he bought consolation, if not healing. On world-wearied feet, he assayed the next step, and the next, and the next, after that.
'So,
prince, are you guilty?'
Asandir's voice lashed at him from the darkness.
The harsh answer condemned.
Arithon shivered, still punished by the unequivocal truth forewarned by his tienelle scrying; that now, beyond the pale of his knowing, an enchantress he cherished shared also:
had he broken his crown oath to Rathain and fled, had he not stood to Deshir's defense using talent, the toll of dead would have numbered half of the eight thousand who had passed beneath Daelion's Wheel. But of the four thousand he might have left standing, who could have marched back to Etarra triumphant, no single one would have been clanbred . . .
Deshir would have sheltered no standing survivors. The legacy of Jieret's people would have been utterly destroyed, lost to memory and land forever after.
'Cry mercy
.'
Elaira said, her shielded whisper scraped raw by sorrow. 'Beloved, I never knew.'
Early Spring 5670
Hour of Darkness
Told by Ath's adepts that Elaira has dreamed herself passage to join her mind with the fate of her beloved, the Warden of Althain closes tortured eyes; for although the news brings him strong affirmation of Arithon's continued survival, he views probabilities, caught into recoil by an evil stab of foreboding: Cry mercy,' he murmurs, grief-struck and subdued, 'she's likely to break before he does . . .'
Met by Whitehold's seeress as her galley docks, and informed of Arithon's attempt to seek sanctuary inside Kewar Tunnel, Selidie Prime lends her view to the forecast that Rathain's royal lineage must be irretrievably lost: 'We know, since we once used a fetch to provoke Desh-thiere's curse, that the binding responds to ephemeral stimulus. Davien's Maze will grant Arithon no mercy. On the outside chance he can emerge alive, he will not retain grip on his sanity . . .'
During a catnap snatched on the crumbling wall in the midst of Mirthlvain Swamp, Asandir is touched by a true dreaming:
again
on the night sands of Athir, he accepts the fresh-blooded blade that Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn once used to swear his oath to survive; but the rending cry cast through time and space to the Sorcerer's listening presence on this hour frames a scream of unending agony . . .
Early Spring 5670
XVI. Path of the Damned
W
i
thin the reactive spell-wards of the maze, the oath sworn at Athir changed everything. Immersed in the coils of reliving his past, Arithon knelt upon salt-damp sand, the knife cut beneath his freshly dressed wrist stinging like Dharkaron's vengeance. The full-throated scream torn out by his anguish slapped diminished reverberations down the corridor of Kewar Tunnel. The echoes rang still in his dreaming mind, though above, vision showed him a tranquil night sky, cloudless and jeweled with stars. Waves unraveled their white-lace petticoats against ribboned sand, glistening like old, tarnished silver. The dune grasses whispered of breezes.
Arithon ground his knuckles against his closed eyes, but could not erase the overlaid memory imposed by the powers of the maze: of the moment of oathswearing, when Asandir's vision had bled into his awareness, smashing across the blockage that blinded his mage-sight.
For one reeling interval, he had shared the breadth of the Fellowship Sorcerer's perception, the structural imprint of present experience underpinned by its etheric array of probabilities. Through Asandir's eyes, Arithon had watched the unloomed thread of creation spinning the course of the future. At the instant he pledged, while the searing, white lines of his binding promise became sealed by let blood to his fate, he had glimpsed the jagging red cords of Desh-thiere's curse, nipped like tight stitches through all he had done; and far worse: all he would strive to accomplish in the days and the years yet to come.
If Arithon had successfully thwarted the drive to pursue his half brother's murder, one glimpse through the Sorcerer's clarified perception revealed that his acts had not been untainted. Desh-thiere's geas might not have broken him to fully consenting collusion, yet it had still managed to rob him. In vicious small increments, its whispering currents sapped his autonomy. Creeping influence stained even innocuous thought, and slipped barbed hooks through his weaknesses, until the fragile balance he maintained between incidents abraded clear thought like the burn of salt rubbed in a blister.
Unmasked, as the blood oath tied him to life, Arithon reeled under the certainty that such secretive incursions must increase over time. The curse gained force and momentum at each subsequent encounter with Lysaer. Even the accreted memory of conflict sharpened the impetus of its pattern. The constant trickle of subtle manipulation must eventually swell to a current that would burst his last barrier and flatten him.
Arithon saw beyond ambiguity: within Davien's Maze,
each subsequent reliving would refire the geas, invoking the additional increase in virulence raised by a live encounter.
'Cry mercy,' Elaira whispered.
She knew mortal terror. The trial her beloved shouldered in Kewar cast him beyond all concept of peril. Laid over the threat of his personal shortfalls, the ranging force of Desh-thiere's revenge could not do other than ruin him.
Arithon howled, heart and spirit, for release. But if any Sorcerer possessed the power of intervention, no stay of mercy was granted. Nor did the exacting weave of the maze let its victim take false shelter in mage-blindness. Initiate, now, to a masterbard's arts, Arithon could not deafen his wakened awareness as the rapport with Asandir faded. He now sensed Desh-thiere's curse as a continuous, buzzing dissonance, razing across his leashed thoughts.
Davien's Maze smashed illusion with diabolical thoroughness. Arithon bled on the thorns of fresh grief, too aware he would find no escape. He must carry his pernicious cognizance forward. Through the rending distress of the bloodbath to come, he would be forced to unvarnished acknowledgment of the manipulative twists his cursed nature had spun through the train of events.
The stark effort he required to arise and assay his next step drove Elaira to riveted anxiety. The dread in him gained over powering force, as his resharpened vision caught the stamp of Desh-thiere's design on his shipbuilding interest at Merior.
Again,
Arithon returned from the north to find the yard's works damaged by fire. The cruel discrepancies this time stood exposed, a self-damning truth, that with unblighted mage talent, he would have set wardings. The ill will of the disaffected sword captain whose torch had engendered the sabotage would have been easily deflected. Recrimination tortured, that the curse itself might be fueling his guilt to ensure that his talent stayed shackled. Each step, each choice, each small tie of friendship came under the blighting venom of reassessment. Reviled by integrity set into question, the Teir's'Ffalenn traversed the maze, touched bitter by self-condemnation.
How much had the Mistwraith tempered his loyalties to a widow and her blameless children? Arithon stumbled, sucked by riptides of doubt. Had he in fact sworn Jinesse his oath of protection to excuse his involvement against the hour his presence must draw Lysaer?
'Forward,' he whispered. 'Don't think. Just move on.' He had but one grace to sustain him: on the night he had sailed, leaving Merior defenselessly open to Alestron's inbound war fleet, Elaira had gone far away. His beloved was blessedly sent outside his influence, safe under vows to her order.
'Cry mercy,' the listening enchantress whispered on the wrung rags of her breath. The unveiled pitfall yawned under her feet with acidly punishing clarity. For the heartrending phrases that Arithon had once spoken, imploring their separation at Merior, never showed a more vicious coil of truth:
'Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction,'
he had said.
'Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.'
She must not lose her grip. Arithon's fragile hold on self-trust had never in life been more threatened. The unwelcome exposure, that she had dared step into jeopardy alongside him, might easily become the telling stroke that sealed his destruction. His trials in Vastmark still lay ahead, an entangling chain of events that must preface the most brutal encounter of all.
Sealed inside her warded circle, Elaira watched Arithon retrace the year's late spring and early summer, each facet of activity replayed with spell-stripped clarity. There had been joys to temper the sorrows of Merior's forced abandonment. Notes for gold, written in unshaken faith by friends at Innish; a young boy rescued, to mitigate the tragedy of a six-year-old shepherd girl's fatal wounding on the claws of a wyvern. The thrill as the brigantine
Khetienn's
completion raised a flush of pride and accomplishment. The untamed night splendors of the Vastmark sky lifted spirits, and the rough, chafing humor as the tribesfolk worked their herds of recalcitrant sheep. Afraid beyond words for the violence to come, Elaira ached for Arithon's braced recoil as he encountered the fresh stings of bared truth. For the sinister weaving of the Mistwraith's intent had indeed been laced through his most stringently guarded planning.
Ground down by that ongoing backdrop of devastation, Elaira cherished the rare moments of warm, human contact, blessing those acquaintances who had lent her beloved their affections, or steadied his moments of uncertainty. During the months the Alliance host mustered, Arithon had applied himself, unstinting, to life. The enchantress tasted his exhilaration in the archery contests, and again in the madcap pranks played to manage the cross-grained clansmen sent to handle Shand's raided livestock. She tracked her beloved's dizzying invention, then the inspired flight of planning that had arranged his daring abduction of Princess Talith.
Elaira's laughter, unheard, tracked the piquant contest of wits as Arithon proceeded to raid Tysan's ransom gold. Yet as the summer days lengthened, such byplay lost its savor. Grief shadowed the razor's edge of awareness, that the ending brought Talith to tragedy.
The princess's marriage would come to founder. The taint left by Arithon's wily handling would finally lead to her death, arranged by the machinations of conspiracy that riddled Lysaer's inner cabal at Avenor.
The small hurts struck deepest for being unexpected. Elaira suffered the backstab of the widow Jinesse's distrust, and the needling pitfalls of Dakar's virulent hatred. She watched, awed, as Arithon met the Mad Prophet's undermining interrogations with stark truth. Hazed in the smoke of a summer night's campfire, he had once admitted, bald-faced, the self-damning possibility that Desh-thiere's machinations might color each facet of his affairs. Davien's Maze saw that bleak probability confirmed, making a razor's nest of past hope.
Self-determined, Arithon sustained. Though the darkening trial of his planned defense, and the unforeseen snares wont to snag him, each footstep, he relied upon Caolle's gruff and unfailing support.
Too soon the freedom of Vastmark was exchanged for the tense court setting at Ostermere. At each turn, the maze affirmed Arithon's effort to maintain his core framework of honesty. The proofs stood like stars: in his unvarnished confession to Sethvir, that the insidious grasp of the Mistwraith's curse deepened its stranglehold at each encounter; then through the dance-step reenactment of diplomacy, as he rebuffed Havish's courtiers through the due public process of restoring Princess Talith to her husband.
The deep, hidden wounds were relentlessly exposed. Elaira shared Arithon's grief-struck rage at the stunning news of Captain Dhirken's death, hurled down in petty revenge as the ransom in gold was accounted. She endured the bleak hour of Arithon's recrimination, as he reboarded the
Khetienn
and drove under spelled winds back to sea.
On that hour, no friend stepped forward to help lift his leaden depression. Elaira resisted the sting of her pity, lent no grounds for interference. She had seen her beloved sustain worse as his nerve snapped at Minderl Bay; when at his royal orders, Earl Jieret had been compelled to break him at sword point, then force him to complete the hellish strategy that provoked Lysaer to destroy his own fleet. She clung to belief, and begged fate the next stage of reliving would not hold the unseen barb that would cripple. Given the clear winds and the freedom of seafaring, surely Arithon could use the delay to regain his fractured resiliency.
No succor came to him. The maze retraced his past, unremitting, and the hour delivered its freighted burden, a poisoned interval of self-condemnation suffered inside the locked privacy of his cabin. The ongoing strain compounded since Tal Quorin at last shredded Arithon's restraint. Nothing prepared Elaira for his suicidal risk, as he embarked on a maudlin and desperate bid to wrest back the slipped reins of his fate.
The method he chose courted outright disaster: to force the locked wall of his blinded talent by attempting a tienelle scrying.
Davien's Maze could only exacerbate the danger as the narcotic smoke of the herb expanded perception. The sudden, drawn tension in Arithon's carriage reflected his redoubled apprehension. A decision once made in isolate security, surrounded by leagues of salt water, must inevitably strike a more plangent chord in the course of a spell-forced reliving.
The volatile, fresh contact with a past, high-stakes crisis must provoke Desh-thiere's curse in live concert. Arithon shuddered, jabbed to unchecked terror. The next step might see his free will thrown irrevocably into forfeit.
Beyond any doubt, he had acted the fool, that unpleasant night after Ostermere.
The coils of the maze would redraw the penalty against irrevocable stakes. Arithon held no illusions. He confronted a passage of harrowing traps. To emerge intact, he must hold the Mistwraith's geas in check through raging madness: brave the unclothed nightmare of drug-induced visions, with no counterbalance of reason to temper his visceral reaction. This trial would hurl him outside known limits, a live testing in fire
made after subsequent encounters had strengthened the impetus of the curse.
Arithon bore up under sweating dread. His strength now relied on his unassailable belief that he walked the maze in strict solitude. If the wretched worst happened and Desh-thiere's will triumphed, the bleak comfort remained, that no others would be doomed alongside him.
'Cry mercy,' whispered Elaira. Her resolute confidence ebbed to a flicker. Woe betide her if she came to break, and Arithon's peace became shattered by the signal unkindness, that her presence
in fact
rode the unmalleable risks laid against his fight for survival. The maze forgave no inept fumbling, no blunder of fatal ignorance. Like Arithon's rash move to drive fate through tranced consciousness, the enchantress could not reverse her decision. She could not escape the dread consequence of commitment as her beloved steeled himself and advanced.
Again,
in the tossing dimness of the ship's cabin, Arithon lifted a spill from the candleflame. He ignited the bowl of the packed stone pipe with trembling fingers, set the stem to his lips, and drew breath. Like the seed of damnation, the spark ignited the silver-gray leaves of the tienelle. The stinging tang of toxic smoke spread throughout his filled lungs. The herb's effects followed, a swooping, spiraling rush that upended and shattered the senses. In transfixing fear, hung on the thread of agonized hope and the rage of rebellious exhilaration, Arithon rode the first wave of expansion.
Resolve from his past had welcomed the chaos. He could no longer tolerate life as the storm-tossed victim of fate. Stung by his forced abandonment of Merior; aggrieved by the unjust deaths of Lady Maenalle and Captain Dhirken; just that evening dealt a Fellowship Sorcerer's word that divisive ruin would sour Lady Talith's royal marriage, Arithon raged at his shortfalls. For far too long, he had left himself hobbled, unable to set the most basic of safeguards around his day-to-day movements. Trained talent had once accorded him mastery. He refused to handle the trials ahead, shackled by crippling helplessness.