TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (89 page)

Again,
Arithon sought his bed, dressed to ride. He kept Alithiel at hand, grimly prepared for the possibility he might need to take evasive action. Against the restive pull of the curse, he trusted his fast wits, his hard-set self-control, and his absolute commitment to winning the clans their chance to secure their survival.

In hindsight, he watched the seductive, slow dance, while the curse's manipulation played him straight into vulnerable blindness.

The maze held to that damning course of events. Arithon struggled to stem rising panic. No power could answer his need for more time.
Too soon,
his doom overshadowed him. Night led in the fogbound hour before dawn, bringing the Mad Prophet to his bedchamber door. The spellbinder slipped the latch, inflexibly drawn by self-righteous belief that Desh-thiere's geas had already laid claim to the Teir's'Ffalenn's mind.

Too driven to sleep, caught fitfully pacing, the Master of Shadow again took his quiet stance behind the door panel, now swinging open. His ambush, and the bared blade of his sword touched against Dakar's nape: the damning, first pieces fell as they must, into refigured alignment. Another step down the tunnel unfolded the burgeoning tension as Arithon sought to recover the broached grace of his privacy. Alone, undistracted, he could yet subdue the building force of the curse's raised currents.

Then the watershed moment arrived: Dakar's fateful, brash courage as he stood stubborn ground sparked the s'Ffalenn gift of compassion. For the one, fateful instant, Arithon saw himself waver. His resolve became flawed, to wrest back the clarity of solitude. Deflected by the Mad Prophet's earnest concern, diverted to a self-doubting review of his intact defenses, he had lapsed. The spelled pressure of the geas was left unwatched
for only an instant.
Yet that mental misstep opened a chink through Arithon's tight-kept inner guard.

Compulsion closed on him with wrathful force. Then that strike was lent impetus by Dakar's disastrous challenge:
'
I
won't move aside. To get past, you'll just have to kill me.'

On that fatal split second, Arithon confronted no one else but the enemy.

Spelled forces consumed him in a red tide, snapping through all conscious ties
except one
: he had been forced into thrall, not claimed by willing consent. That grace alone let him cling to survival. Where the grim past at Riverton had seen his defeat, in present reliving, he suffered the event as observer, beset: for the curse woke in resonance. Its active bid to claim mastery set him under redoubled attack. Only now, stirred by the stress of his passage through Kewar, the spelled cords through his being noosed tighter, invincibly strengthened by the insightful course of retracing each prior event.

Arithon had already plumbed the extent of his mage lore trying to seek mitigation. He had savaged the uttermost depths of his spirit, breaking more of himself at each trial. Since the initial defeat at Etarra, he had attempted a thousand combinations of tricks. Neither cleverness nor strength had affected the outcome. Always, he lost. By inexorable increments, the Mistwraith's geas drained more of his will to resist.

Only one wild-card tactic had not been tried. Arithon had never attempted the unconscionable risk of a passive retreat, made to seem like surrender: to give with the storm as the willow will bend, yielding rather than break.

Driven down by main force as the geas tore into him, already cornered beyond remedy, Arithon measured the abyss. The course he confronted seemed little different than an outright plunge into suicide. No advance assurance, that he owned the resilience to snap back from the dangerous brink; no way to measure whether the curse would simply snatch its opportune opening to grind him down into oblivion. He might be crushed outright. Worse, he might find himself caged inside the ring of his shrunken defenses. The husk of his awareness might stay imprisoned, helplessly pinned under siege.

He held nothing beyond the sorrowful list of past failures. Rather than tread a known path to defeat, Arithon chose not to fight. He tapped every shred of wise training from Rauven, casting himself into a diffuse passivity that would appear to spring from exhaustion. He yielded, becoming the emptiness of vacuum, or the mirror-clear reflectivity of stilled water, smoothed under rippleless air.

He had no instant to reconsider, no second to reset flattened barriers. The force of the curse leaped howling through the breach. Uncontested, the channels of his mind became thrashed into a thousand smashed fragments. His foothold for cohesive resistance ripped away, dissolved beyond hope of salvage. Arithon let his dispersed identity drift free. Passive,
inert,
he dared not draw notice. Nestled amid the false semblance of vacancy, he could do nothing else now except wait. The next minutes would resolve his hung fate. Either he would stay lost, bearing the burden of Elaira's death to the scales of Dharkaron's reckoning, or his field of sealed quiet might see him through and buy him a desperate reprieve. He had only to pass unnoticed
a
mid the harrowing of Caolle's downfall.

Arithon stamped down every flicker of distressed thought. A man walking the razor's edge, he dared not glance right or left. He must suffer the coming reenactment, unmoved by the horrors Davien's Maze would configure to provoke his revolted senses. With wide-open heart and unshielded mind, he must endure without flinching as Desh-thiere's workings inflamed him. As the fires of spell-turned, bridleless hatred drove him to insanity and murder,
he must raise no resistance. Nor could he succumb to distressed emotion.
To express any human feeling at all would expose his unconquered awareness.

False hope could not comfort him. To accept the atrocity of his own warping madness must demand the most callously rugged endurance. Arithon faced the truth. The ruthless detachment this trial might demand could well prove impossible to reconcile. All too likely the compassion aligned through the s'Ffalenn bloodline would outmatch his most desperate will.

Then the next stride was upon him. The powers of the maze unfolded the shift in ruthless detail, and Arithon saw himself on that past night at Riverton, reforged to the Mistwraith's laid pattern. The caring light of perception left first, chilling his eyes to the gleam of snap-frozen ice. His expression hardened over to unprincipled ferocity as he firmed his grip on his sword.

'Stand me down at your peril,'
he had said in ultimatum to Dakar.

Across a gathering darkness, the words came touched through by a note to wring bone-chilling dread from the sensitized ear of a masterbard. Arithon quelled his first shudder of revulsion. He held, yet unflinching, while Davien's spellcraft respun the threads of past nightmare.
Again,
as he had in the Riverton tavern, he angled his blade and attacked.

Unable to ache, denied the expression of natural horror, Arithon watched his ferocious, trained talent slash into Dakar's inept defense. Bound to his right mind by the test of the maze, he endured the breathless entreaties the Mad Prophet cried out in stressed effort to snag back his departed reason. No word touched his heart, no appeal wakened mercy. In reliving, he came on with bared steel, reduced to soulless savagery.

Past and present entangled on that ripping crux. Feeling the clamp of Desh-thiere's geas drawn like stitched wire through his vitals, Arithon forced himself
still.
The howling clang of unsheathed steel shattered hearing, strike after desperate, balked strike. He strangled back the gut impulse to recoil, while the murderous blows he had directed to wound shredded flung cloth,'
a
nd splintered through marquetry furnishings. The battle raged, beyond stopping. All mercy stood forfeit. Dakar's improvised, beleaguered defense seized on whatever object lay to hand, to be snatched up and thrown against the barrage of snake-fast lunges.

Present time self-control came at lacerating cost. Mangled by the silenced cry of his heart, Arithon marshaled the harsh tenets of mage training.

He would not break.

The rampaging rise of his outraged pity must be ruthlessly deflected. Where he could not sustain the ache of distress, he narrowed his focus, fixed his sorcerer's concentration on the minutiae of visual detail. Anything ordinary and innocent, to bleed off the impact of event; watch anything else that was not flying steel:
here,
the moving cloth of his shirtsleeve, or
there,
where direct avoidance was impossible, the rippling play of caught light, sliding over the polish of Alithiel's inlaid runes. When the rasp of Dakar's stertorous breaths broke through refined concentration, Arithon fastened his hearing around the harmonics cast off of belling, stressed steel.

That stopgap diversion proved a mistake. The spelled seals of the maze would stand for no respite where a victim's past action caused pain. Thrown into the expanded insight of mage vision by the powers of Davien's artistry, Arithon was made witness to the stained shimmer cast through his aura. Still disbarred from direct use of his talent, he saw the scorching tendrils of hatred overmaster his being. In damning clarity, he discerned how his weaknesses made him the flesh-and-blood puppet to mow down any fool who balked his intent to kill Lysaer. Truth laid him bare: the workings that turned him
had in fact been laid down through his own knowledge, and the rigorous trappings of mastery.
Rauven's learning had limits. He could not diffuse spells that learned strictures insisted lay beyond the reach of his resource. Nor could Fellowship power intervene, since the curse was no outside force. Its warping reflection stemmed from flawed beliefs, those personal shortcomings he had not faced, lacing their unseen cracks through his core image of self.

A forced break to excise Desh-thiere's influence would violate free will, also fragment the inborn integrity of the evolving spirit. Any being so abused would pass Daelion's Wheel, reflexively crossing through death to restore its disrupted wholeness.

Arithon grasped the diabolical irony. The insights of Rauven's knowledge stemmed from Ath's law: the self could not be made to disown the self. Desh-thiere's works neatly strangled the avenues of growth and change that might set him free. The necessary step of claiming a flawed idea as his own, and thus acquiring the power to master it, had been set under seals by the curse to engender his own self-destruction.

To snap its binding chain would inflict instant suicide, against his oath at Athir, and to the ruin of the enchantress whose innocent life relied on his continued survival.

Stymied by the bitter fruit of his own brilliant talent, Arithon snatched to steady his rocked foothold on self-confidence. He struggled to settle his rising gorge, that he had helped author his own downfall. Desh-thiere's geas was active, its coiling vigilance like trip wires strung to snag his unwary thoughts. The least flare of self-recrimination would signal rebellion, and call down immediate destruction. Arithon stilled out of desperate need. He let the raging despair rip him through without raising a whimper of protest. Limp and yielding before the disfiguring root of his own baneful evil, he watched himself dance in lockstep to the drive of Desh-thiere's geas.

Again,
Arithon employed deadly, sharp swordplay to batter Dakar to a gasping standstill. The poisoned moment of triumph replayed:
again,
he watched the fat spellbinder burn his own life force in reckless extremity, a fool's effort to stave off the ruin of a friend gone insane.
Again,
Arithon pressured to snap through the warded permissions given over in foresighted trust; and now the sole stay that harried his geas-bent course to attack Lysaer.
Again,
the explosion of balked fury, as he cut Alithiel downward to gut the Mad Prophet like a rabbit.

'In Earl Jieret's name, leave that spellbinder be!'
For unbearable horror,
yet again,
the unholy slaughter was deflected by the jarring stroke of a longsword wielded by Caolle's steadfast hand.

Cry mercy!
Elaira was made to stand witness to this. She must share the inconsolable atrocity that had seen this tough liegeman destroyed. Arithon choked back his wretched self-hatred. Dragged through an exposure that left every nerve scraped over by glass-edged distress, he held on,
made himself passive,
though the lashing storm of raw shame battered at his heart like a cataract. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Only the venom of bestial bloodlust, which drove him to honorless slaughter.

Nor was Caolle the soulless obstacle that the dross of curse
-
bound madness had once made him seem. Davien's Maze unwound all illusion. Arithon, passive, suffered every stressed parry of his liegeman's desperate defense. He heard each tortured breath. Endured Caolle's whimpering gasps of rank terror, as the older man matched cruel blows with an unprincipled creature
who was also his oathsworn crown prince.
The last Teir's'Ffalenn he would have to vanquish unharmed, for the sake of the clans' future liberty.

The struggle had been doomed from the outset. The veteran who had stood thirty years as Deshir's war captain understood killing odds, had an uncanny, keen instinct for timing and battlefield tactics. Caolle's strong arm was tiring. His fixed expression showed he had already reconciled the horrific recognition that a clean victory was not going to be possible.