TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (96 page)

Arithon stamped down the first jangle of panic. Since his concrete senses could not be trusted, he shut his eyes, stilling the nagging impulse to speculate over what might have befallen had he succumbed to the lure of those queer, jeweled doorways. The disturbing possibility could not be dismissed, that he might become endlessly diverted, exhaustively sounding through spells of illusion until his body gave way in collapse.

Dwelling on worry would earn the same end. Arithon released his strung tension, deliberately slowed the ragged edge from his breathing. One by one, he channeled his resources inward. As he had learned as a child at Rauven, he achieved centered balance, then diffused his attention through the poised well of his mind. Inner stillness immersed him. Awareness dissolved, erasing the boundaries of separation until his subtle senses embraced the layered stone of the mountain. He reached from that still point, allowing what
was
to infuse his listening silence. Slowly, he sounded the chamber, entrained into a communion of etheric rapport drawn from the natural elements.

The signature configurations of air and earth revealed the six walls to be solid. The ceiling showed him a smooth, groined vault, unbroken by shaft or skylight.

Arithon deferred apprehension through patience. Persistent, he measured the expanse of the floor, and there, the room yielded its secret. The exit lay scarcely three paces ahead, a shaft that plunged steeply downward.

Tacitly careful, Arithon reopened his eyes. He had solved the next riddle. Now unveiled to mage-sight, a staircase descended from an oblong vault in the floor. Testing each cautious step, he worked his way downward, though the prospect of delving into the mountain ran hard against better instinct. He could not determine how far he had come since he had left daylight behind him. Fellowship spellcraft could bend time at will, or extend the body's vitality. If he felt the slight pinch of hunger and thirst, he had no means to tell whether the deprivation had extended for days. Anxiety hounded him. He might wander too long and finally perish, ground down by Kewar's inexhaustible invention.

The stairwell ended abruptly. No lighted sconce appeared to relieve the pall of featureless darkness. Arithon worked through mage-sight and painstakingly traced the walls of another sealed chamber. This room had seven sides, and dishearteningly yielded no sign of a hidden exit. The stairway behind had predictably vanished, and the air wore a textured, velvety thickness, its presence burdened with spells.

Arithon countered bewildering complexity by choosing the simplest option. He groped, found the shoulder strap hanging the wallet that contained his tinder and flint. As he drew his small knife for striking a spark, the pressure surrounding him tightened.
Any
slight move apparently shifted the balance of unseen forces. Since delay seemed just as likely to spur a reaction, Arithon twisted a spill from a rag, then struck a tremulous flame.

His brave pool of light sheared into the darkness, birthing a rustle of movement. Arithon started. A yearning circle of wax
-
pale hands reached for him out of the shadows. Unveiled by the wildly flickering brand, he glimpsed a circle of anguished faces steadily closing around him. He could not step back. Old men, grandmothers, women and boys,
more people crowded behind him.

That moment, his glimmer of flame light snuffed out. The blanketing dark that returned was not empty: the gathering of specters his presence had wakened remained plainly visible to mage-sight. Arithon stamped down the fool's impulse to recoil. He had nowhere to run. Whether or not the fell creatures had form, their presence ringed him like jackals. They suffered all manner of hideous affliction: limbs with weeping sores, twisted bones, or the ghastly deformities caused by old scars that had atrophied to shrunken tendons. Other folk were emaciated and starving. Man, woman and toddling babe, they jostled against him, pleading relief from their suffering.

Arithon reeled, choking down his distress as the crowd continued to press him. He smelled the musty, diseased pall of flesh. Mournful wailing tugged at his heart. He could move nowhere, for the pressing crush of such need, or shake off the plucking grasp at his clothing.

Worst of all, the creatures raised a fell chorus of voices that called him directly by name.

Accosted no matter which way he turned, Arithon saw no one he recognized. Some people were rich, others raggedly poor. Their dress came from all walks of life. No singular clues identified which kingdom or world held their origins. They might have been victims of Kewar itself, trapped in eternal confinement. Or they might have derived from the unlived future, sickly harbingers of some misfortune to come, arrived to demand retribution in advance for unmade choices that would come to ruin them.

Arithon had no succor to offer, no balm of healing or hope. He could not answer their beseeching questions, or promise to seek their release. Disaster in Kewar might wear many guises. If these people were living at all,
their presence in this place would be nothing else but another form of entrapment.

Yet his inborn compassion would not be ruled by the dictates of hard-core logic. Tears poured down the blanched planes of Arithon's face for the harsh fact he dared not show pity. The least intervention to try and ease pain might invoke the consent for a tie of commitment. Yield out of kindness to just one lost child, and the Teir's'Ffalenn knew he might bind his fate to the plight of these hapless victims. He could ill afford the mistake of misjudgment. Act without caution, and his next step could seal his permanent downfall.

Arithon muffled his ears, to no avail. His bard's gift woke him to empathy. Undone by fresh grief, he battled for callous will to tug free of beseeching fingers. He turned back raw suffering with unblinded eyes, shouldered ahead, and threaded his beleaguered way forward. Yet this time his movement brought no relief. The maze responded by raising another obstruction. The chasm that opened ahead of his feet was no less real for the fact that his vision could not perceive it.

Only the hollow whisper of air gave him warning, its sibilant consciousness picked out by mage-sight. Where the staid tones of earth should have spoken the deeper-toned language of stone, air described the lip of an unseen abyss. Arithon stopped. The jostling press of the maimed barged into him, threatening to stagger him forward. He must not fail to concentrate, even bled as he was by the abrading pull of emotion. Such pity might kill, if he lost firm grasp on the requisite balance to pierce through the veil of the maze.

A triumph of entropy, if he died for a tearful child whose existence was likely a spell-turned trap to snare him through moral integrity. Arithon grappled to silence the cry of his heart, while his nerves became slowly scraped raw. He felt strained and guilt-ridden, as though he ought to be able to disarm the snare that enacted such dreadful suffering.
For mercy, he dared not even raise art through song, to ease even one grieving grandmother's sobs.
His swift, testing effort to call down a banishing recoiled in slamming backlash.

Arithon set his teeth, ripped off-balance as pain shot needles of fire down his nerves. He could not dispel such power as this. The mere effort to stay the sad wretches who pressed him wrung his senses to gray and left him dizzied by the searing scourge of a headache. Shoved a stumbling step by a man with a crutch and a woman with two whimpering children, Arithon confronted the horror of a death by cold sorcery that could conceivably extend past the veil. Should he pass Fate's Wheel still bound by the maze, he might remain trapped as a wraith. Another few moments would see him pulled down unless he tried desperate measures.

'Might as well choose damnation in style,' he gasped through a shudder of nausea.

A mage of his stature could not hope to subdue the vast reach of the forces ranged against him. But through errant recklessness, and novel use of an ill-set combination of ciphers, Arithon could loose the powers of chaos to unbind. Once, at Tal Quorin, he had entrained such a spell and unmade a steel quarrel shot by a marksman to kill him. The impact had caused ruin on a scale unimaginable, and damaged the use of his mage-sight.

Wisdom argued against the repeat of that measure. To wreak an unmaking was a violation of Ath's law, though the bounds of that stricture correctly pertained to the energetic ties that strung matter into formation. Davien's Maze was no solid form, but an entrained mesh of spells worked through the stone of the cavern. In bold theory, the rune string to wake primal fire
might
be tempered. If Arithon directed that force to break nothing more than Davien's lines of intent, only the linked continuity of the spell seals would succumb to annihilation.

Stone and natural flesh would be spared, but the driving ciphers that ranged their substance against him would fly into shreds and unravel.

Logic and theory might not hold true. Arithon had never pitted his mastery against a Fellowship Sorcerer's grand construct. The audacity of
thinking
to meddle on that scale set his heartbeat racing with dread. Yet delay was no option. The crowding horde of injured spirits snatched and pushed him, their needy cries growing more desperate. The wrist exposed by his shredded sleeve already bore bleeding scratches. Though armed with Alithiel, Arithon saw peril in drawing the Paravian steel. These folk might have existence outside Davien's Maze. If some sorry facet drawn from his future created their miserable plight, the cause he defended would not be just. The chance was too real that a wounding in Kewar might cause actual harm somewhere else.

Little use, to jab elbows and fists and push back. The packed mass of supplicants would just tear him down. Alone against many, he would become trampled, or shoved off the brink of the crevice.

Arithon sucked in a swift, harried breath. He must narrow his focus and shut out distraction, subdue the demons of sorrow and fear.
Survive, and perhaps, he could make Davien answer for each of the horrors he witnessed.
Yet first, he must banish all thought from his mind. The rune sequence he had resolved to engage was ugly and unforgiving. The chain could be dangerously swayed by emotion, lending a disastrous twist to its already pernicious function.
He must become the blank page to hold contrary ciphers, lay each delicate stay of protection without slipshod error or omission.
One mismatched seal set against a rune catalyst, and the wretched chain of spellcraft he fashioned would sour and turn in his hand.

No time to prepare. He dared not take pause to review his tight bindings, or test them for deadly mistakes. Jostled and pinched by imploring fingers, pursued by the wail of the damned, Arithon braced his beleaguered stance. He gasped out a breathless apology to Elaira, for the chance his attempt might buy failure.
Th
en he enabled the last rune and tripped the release, unleashing a primal unbinding.

A roaring wind assaulted his ears. Sound exploded to pealing thunder. The flesh-and-blood specters surrounding him frayed into nothing,
not real,
their blemished bodies spun from who knew what arena of unconscious nightmare. Yet the forces his stopgap desperation had loosed did not subside to quiescence. The fires of summary annihilation never paused. Voracious, lent recombinant fuel by wild magic, they raged on and unstrung the structural stone supporting Arithon's feet. He cried out as he tumbled, ripped to awed incredulity.
All that he sensed had been nothing else but another spelled layer of the maze.
Davien's craft had encompassed an artistry that ran outside the pale of natural limitation.
Nowhere
had Arithon encountered an illusion that could replicate stone firm enough to support moving weight. Spinning in free-fall disorientation, he shrank to imagine the enormity of his challenge, or the wrath of the snake whose tail he had tweaked with such obstinate effrontery.

Yet Kewar's creator became a moot threat if he fell as the victim of his own countermeasure. Around him, the edifice of Davien's skilled conjury continued to whirl into discontinuity. The maelstrom battered mind and flesh with a fury that threatened dismemberment. No solidity remained,
anywhere,
no fixed point upon which to orient. Arithon found himself at a loss. He could have unknowingly opened a pit between dimensional reality. No sense of gravity supported him. The explosion of chaos that savaged his awareness adhered to no pattern or law.

He spun, stormed by kaleidoscopic turmoil. To grapple the incomprehensible mass was to risk being shredded to insanity. Shadow would no longer shape to his bidding. Mage-sight was snagged to distortion. No stay of reason could order the flood of bone-hurting, dissonant sound. Arithon grasped in vain for the discipline to steady his ragged breath. Random forces pinned him under assault. Within seconds the threads of his self-awareness became stretched to the verge of snapping. He battled the morass, sought to find his way back to safe refuge inside of himself. The explosive dissolution frustrated his effort to restore his core of identity. Hurled beyond reason, he lacked proper grounding to reestablish a separate awareness.

Every protection instilled by trained reflex seemed utterly blasted away. He had lost all the requisite ties to sensation that maintained his housing of flesh. A mote in a torrent, he would be swept away, flesh and bone razed to final destruction.

Denied other recourse, whirled past reach of help, Arithon decided to sing.