TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (2 page)

An abandoned mill loomed on the swept shelf of snow, crooked in the oxbow bend of a stream. Its unroofed, square shell carved the gusts into dissonance. The rotted wheel canted in a rimed tumble of frozen waterfall. Nor was the ruin deserted. A stout, muffled figure emerged from its gloom, its waddling stride on the uncertain footing as ungainly as a discomposed duck.

'Dakar!' hailed Arithon, sounding weary at last. 'I want—'

'You bastard, you just about killed me with worry! Old storm rips my fixed wardspells to static, and you take a fiend's sweet time to make rendezvous!' Halted in huffing distemper, the fat prophet who served as the Shadow Master's henchman scowled. Blown snow frosted his ginger brows and his unkempt bristle of beard. 'You don't hear the horn calls? The Mayor of Jaelot's sent lancers abroad. I had just about written you both off as meat for the headhunter's mastiffs.'

'Dakar,' Arithon broke in, wrung by a shiver. 'Did you bring horses?'

'Dharkaron's black bollocks! Are you both soaked as rabbits?' The Mad Prophet flicked his irritated glance from one alike face to the other, spell-carved to match the same chiseled angles under wind-snagged sable hair. Unerringly able to discern the original, he thrust out a forearm to support young Fionn Areth. 'Yes, I managed to meet your request. We have four geldings, three hacks, and one knock-kneed packhorse. Come in. There's also a fire and hot gruel, and before you ask, yes. I've set masking runes, and have maze wards running against the mayor's riders at each of the four quarters.'

Arithon winced at the mention of ward sorceries, which, predictably, balked Fionn Areth.

Dakar jerked the boy forward in unvarnished exasperation. Ath preserve idiots with misaligned scruples,
come on
!
His Grace of Rathain might prefer to stay outside and brood, just show me an Araethurian herdsman born with warm-blooded good sense.'

Fionn Areth resisted, given short shrift as Dakar vented his leftover tension through scolding. 'I'm damned glad you're alive and still standing to greet me, boy. That won't lift the blight of Daelion's curse off the bone-headed folly that spared you! Your prince won't have mentioned, but the risk undertaken to snatch you from Jaelot takes the prize for catastrophic stupidity.'

At next step, they crossed into the ring of set guard spells. Fionn Areth cried out as a sharp tingle raked his skin. He nearly sprained the Mad Prophet's wrist in his panicked effort to bolt.

'Dharkaron's bleak vengeance!' Dakar exploded. Fingers locked in the Araethurian's wet cloak, he held on, his corpulent bulk no more bothered than if he had bagged a struggling game fish. 'Koriani witches changed your
whole face
through black use of their sigils of force. What's a middling weak veil of concealment going to do, except save your skin from execution? Find the sweet reason that Ath gave your goats! Get yourself warm and dry enough to think clearly before you decide we're your enemies.'

Fionn Areth flushed, grumbled an apology in his backcountry dialect, then relented enough to let Dakar lead him into the shelter of the tumbledown mill.

The roof had caved in to a rickle of slate, but the beamed track of the log carriage for the saw still stood. The planked platform winnowed the worst of the snow. In the single dry corner, cut off from the wind, Dakar had lit a neat fire. A pot of gruel bubbled over the flames. Four horses munched hay, tied by neck ropes to the skewed post of the mill shaft, its base secured by the massive runnerstone that had ground countless harvests of barley. The animals' warmth blunted the edge from the cold. Beside three heaped saddles, acquired by means of forged requisitions and subterfuge, Dakar had blankets and cloaks and thick boots lined with lamb's wool. The collection included two buck knives, a hunting bow, and provisions fit for a trek across mountain terrain.

'Oh, well done, Dakar.' Arithon unhooked the iced clasps on his mantle, hung the sopped cloth on the sacklift, and accepted the blanket tossed into his numbed hands. Swathed like a wraith, he resumed his expert inspection. 'Where are the spirits?'

Dakar chuckled. 'Here was I, wishing the troublesome brains had been frozen clean out of your head. I've got spiced wine laced full of restoratives. If you drink too much, don't damn me tomorrow. You'll feel like your innards got packed with wet sand, with river rocks jammed in your eye sockets.'

Between helping Fionn Areth, the Mad Prophet unslung a cord from his neck and passed over a stoppered skin flask.

Arithon fumbled his effort to draw the cork. He grimaced, used his teeth, then shut his eyes in distaste and belted a hefty draught. The offensive sting made his eyes water. A husked burr of betrayal roughened his voice. 'You didn't mention lye-stripping the tissue off my poor vocal cords. I won't sing a true note for a week.'

'And right blessed that misfortune will be!' Dakar shot back, scathing. 'Given the powers you've roused up in blind ignorance, we're lucky not to be cinders scattered over the Ath-forsaken dunes of Sanpashir!'

He snatched up Fionn Areth's discarded shirt, wrung out the cuffs, and hung the linen to dry. 'You'll find a clean tunic and smallclothes in the saddle pack.' At the young man's hesitation, his moon features knit into a glower fit to torch silk. 'Don't even think to protest obligation. You're the guest of your crown prince. He's oathbound by law to provide you his best hospitality.'

'We're touchy,' observed Arithon, his thoughtful gaze on the Mad Prophet's back. He rolled a sawn log closer to the fireside. As though his balance might desert him without warning, he perched. 'Has your pending fit of prescience not lifted since sundown?'

Bent over, rummaging through saddle packs like a corpulent thresher, with Fionn Areth hovering with bad humor and crossed arms, Dakar grumbled through his beard. 'I'm hungover. Jaelot's gin is a grade below horse piss - that much hasn't changed in twenty years.'

'I'm remiss.' A wry grin lit Arithon's fox features, tinged orange in the flicker of firelight. 'Why not sample your vile restorative?' He passed back the flask, while the tireless wind skirled snow devils across the darkened gap of the tailrace.

The Mad Prophet ignored both comment and offering. Straightened up burdened to the chin with bunched clothing, he foisted the pile without apology on Fionn Areth. 'Put those on.' He accepted the flask and slapped its gurgling bladder on top of a sheepskin jacket. 'As soon as you're dressed, drink up. We've got to be moving before midnight.'

Fionn Areth gaped, his arms clutching his third change of raiment since morning. 'Why can't we rest here?'

Dakar threw up his hands, eyes rolled to white rings. 'Because this is
solstice,
and the lane tides were unleashed to deliver your crown prince to Jaelot.'

When Fionn Areth looked blank, Arithon ventured a more civil explanation. 'This ruin sits on a natural watercourse. At midnight, a cresting flow of raw power will rip through the site like a conduit. Without the Paravian rituals to mitigate, the flood will rattle and shake any structure not blessed into alignment with the flow of Ath's greater mystery.'

'This mill tore to wreckage in the last causal event. And before you ask, yes, it was Arithon who sang the same powers active in Jaelot twenty-five years ago.' Nakedly worried, Dakar stowed his bulk on a saddle pack. 'The repeat performance to break your captivity might easily fell the last stones in these walls. You want to sleep under the rubble?'

'I won't sleep at all where there's sorcery afoot,' Fionn Areth retorted. Having suffered the brunt of mistaken identity, only narrowly spared execution for the selfsame sorceries raised by the hand of his nemesis, he gave each fold of clothing his suspicious inspection. If he expected copper-thread sigils worked through the seams of the hems, he encountered nothing amiss. Only sturdy, stitched hemp and plain cerecloth linings. Defeated at last by the merciless chill, he burrowed into a shirt and tunic better suited to his build than the castoffs garnered from the lady's servant who had helped them evade close pursuit.

While sorcerer and prophet shared out gruel and brisk talk, the herder buckled on his sword, then donned jacket and cloak. Leaned on a post, determined to stand guard, he declined to eat, wary lest he fall sound asleep among enemies.

The contents of Dakar's flask had a faint, metallic aftertaste. Fionn Areth drank deeply, too parched to realize that the spellcraft he reviled was in fact bound into the spirits. Grasslands ignorant, he gave no thought to question, even as the pungent restorative burned through his body and revitalized flagging, sore muscles. Restored to clear focus, warmed and eased back to comfort, he followed the conversation ongoing between the Mad Prophet of legend and the prince whose appearance the goatherd shared.

'The Fellowship knows, then?' Arithon asked concerning the defeated plot that entwined them.

'Once you crossed through Jaelot's outer wall, you broke through the ward the witches had set to forestall Sethvir's earth-sense.' Preoccupied with securing the saddle packs, Dakar shrugged. 'Better worry more for Jaelot's patrols. If I couldn't scry you, then the Koriani seers are going to be hobbled as well. Their clairvoyants can't act in full force for as long as the snow keeps falling.' The water element in the storm would maze the transmission of spells set through a quartz focus.

Arithon paused with his spoon half-raised, his level glance suddenly piercing. 'Dakar, that didn't answer my question.'

The Mad Prophet hunched his thick shoulders. Both hands stayed engrossed with the straightforward task of threading & strap through a buckle. 'Why can't you accept that I'm out of my depth?'

Arithon's expectant silence stretched taut.

'Very well, I can speculate. Sethvir's surely known about Fionn Areth's transformation for years.' Dakar gave over the truth in stark misery. 'Since the boy swore the Koriathain his free-will consent over a crystal focus, the Sorcerers can do nothing by way of direct intervention.'

'Go on. There's more.' Arithon let down his spoon, well aware his companion's diligent tidiness was in fact an outright avoidance.

Dakar jabbed the tang through the leather with a force he withheld from his language. 'For today's round of upsets, we're both in the dark. I warned you before. Something set an aberration through the lane's flux last night. Such an event on the cusp of the solstice has certainly led to an imbalance. Grievous enough to blind Sethvir's vision.
Or else your bid to reach Jaelot would have been stopped well before the Sanpashir focus reached resonance.'

'That's old ground for argument, surely?' Arithon set his stew bowl aside, banal to the point of disinterest.

Yet Fionn Areth was not fooled. Set on edge by such casual firsthand reference to Fellowship resources and magecraft, he bristled, his unease lent preternatural spin by the spell-charged effects of the wine. Warm food and shelter notwithstanding, he noticed: Arithon had not shed his piercing wariness, either.

Nor was Dakar convinced by lame gestures. 'All right.' His capitulation exposed his threadbare fear. 'I sent for help, a plea made under the permissions you gave to be used in last line of defense.
No Fellowship Sorcerer has answered.'

'Which doesn't necessarily mean they've been sidetracked by a catastrophe,' Arithon pointed out, reasonable, except for the sly, lightning glance to one side that gauged Fionn Areth's poorly leashed temper. 'The Sorcerers might just be allowing matters to run their due course by choice.'

Dakar glowered back, but had the good sense to keep quiet. He, too, noted the dangerous antipathy the herder showed toward Arithon.

'His Grace will have a plan,' the Mad Prophet said in a belated effort to soothe. 'At least, he passed an almighty thick sheaf of orders to the captain he left entrusted with care of his brigantine.'

'There was always a contingency,' Arithon agreed. Settled enough to have recovered his appetite, he scraped the savory last dregs from the bowl and washed out the residue with snowmelt. Just as seamlessly unperturbed, he requested an oiled rag. Then he cleared his crusted sword from its scabbard and began the deferred chore of cleaning. The fouled blade was rubbed down through an ongoing discussion of covert land routes to Tharidor.

As though fingers and rag were not crimsoned with stains from six brutally slaughtered guardsmen, Arithon concluded,
'Evenstar
should call in port there sometime before the thaws break. She'll give us secure passage to Alestron, where Vhandon and Talvish will see us safely back to the
Khetienn,
offshore.'

When Dakar looked mollified, Arithon grinned. 'Well, that was the promise that bought their hardheaded cooperation.' He gave a critical squint down his blade, the unearthly, dark metal of its forging like wet slate. The inlaid Paravian runes caught the sheen from the fire, sullen in mystery as molten glass drawn on the rod before shaping. Lined in the leaping, uncertain flame light, the thread silver edges gleamed straight and true. The uncanny temper showed no pit of rust, nor the wear left from commonplace sharpening. 'Vhandon got his chance to revisit home soil, and Talvish couldn't argue the blandishment. The s'Brydion duke can most likely be cozened to keep
Khetienn
provisioned in my absence.'

Arithon tossed the fouled rag in the flames, then companionably offered the oil to Fionn Areth, whose weapon was wet, and not kept preserved by ensorceling spells out of legend. 'You'll find out soon enough,' the Shadow Master confided.
'
The s'Brydion clan are warmongering lions who judge a man first by his armament.'