TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (4 page)

The change in the match occurred without warning. In the space between heartbeats, the Shadow Master's light-handed style ripped away, immolated by driving brilliance.

Fionn Areth gasped. Scrambling to maintain a classic defense against an onslaught of innovative genius, he at last understood the prelude had been a bald sham all along.
This was a master swordsman he faced.
Anytime, even now, the dark blade could slice in and take him at will. He lived and moved on his enemy's sufferance, with no prayer for reprieve if he faltered. Gone were the mocking phrases as well, vanished like silk over flame. Lashed by a whistling, furious offensive, Fionn Areth heard Dakar shouting.

Then he shared the reason for his enemy's unveiled form: the thunder of oncoming horsemen. An armed company of Jaelot's guard charged the mill, drawn on by the belling notes of swordplay.

Rushed to elation, that despite his failed skill the sorcerer would receive his due punishment, Fionn Areth took heart. He pressed on in fixed purpose to sustain his defense until the mayor's pursuit overtook them.

Just as obstinate, Arithon extended his will to bind up his steel and disarm him. The slide of rushed footfalls scuffed off the thinned snow. Locked now in true combat, the Shadow Master and his double circled and feinted and thrust across an arena of pebbled, gray ice. Panted breath and marred balance tore gaps in technique. The raging clang of each closure sang ragged where one or the other combatant scrambled to regain slipped footing.

And still, two opportune openings came and went; even threatened with capture, Arithon abjured the disabling stroke.

Dakar shoved both fists against his shut teeth to stifle a screamed exhortation. One trip, one distraction could precipitate a fatality. Too wise to stress Arithon's rapt concentration, he recognized the moves that led into the wicked reverse stroke, and disarmament. The same sequence had once downed Lord Erlien of Alland, in a trial fought years past in Selkwood. Fionn Areth, still green, could only withstand the attacking diversion, without clue his defeat was self-evident.

But this night, on the winter-cold banks of the millstream, Arithon's skilled tactic went wrong. That stunning, last bind became slowed by a skid, then a misstep caught short of recovery. His dark steel jerked downward, unpartnered, while his left toe gave way underneath him.

Fionn Areth's missed thrust drove on, unhindered. Given no option to avoid a stabbed chest, Arithon guarded with the back of Alithiel's quilloned grip. Dakar shouted as steel screamed and slid through. Yet no outcry could arrest the following force of Fionn Areth's stripped hatred. The sword rang between Alithiel's wrought rings, and impaled her s'Ffalenn bearer's right hand.

Footing recaptured, Arithon sprang backward. Blood slicked the grasp of fingers gone strengthless. As he switched grip and fell back on a left-handed style, he was going to miss the next parry.

Yet Fionn Areth showed stubborn mettle and withheld the lunge that would have pressed the advantage. 'You have a main gauche,' he said, raging bitter. 'Why haven't you thought lo use it?'

Arithon stood, hard-breathing and stilled, while the blare of a horn clove the night. An officer's bellow spurred the pounding hoofbeats on a converging course down the draw. All right,' he agreed. 'But let's not spoil the odds, my two blades to your one.' He flicked back his cloak, drew the evil, quilloned weapon from His sheath at his hip. 'You take the main gauche,' he invited Fionn Areth. 'I prefer my small dagger.'

As if no company of guardsmen closed in, a fast toss shied the weapon, grip first.

Fionn Areth fielded the catch in astonishment.

'Ath, no!' pealed Dakar, wide-awake to fresh danger even before his tuned mage-sense seared warning across his overcranked nerves.

This was the same main gauche that had struck Caolle down one wretched night seventeen years ago.
Its steel still harbored the horrific stamp of past dissidence: the cruel death and bloodshed of a liegeman fallen for true loyalty, and a wounding of conscience that to this day stood unrequited. In an enemy's hand, fed by hot temper and the high stakes of extremity, that grievous, dark imprint might refire. In lingering resonance, old grief could allow such raised dissonance the opening to cloud Arithon's better judgment. Charged by s'Ffalenn guilt, a self-abnegating justice might complete that blade's accursed history.

But the fight disallowed any pause to broach reason. Fionn Areth bore in, sword leveled, the main gauche couched in a determinedly competent left hand.

Arithon met him, his sword tip unsteady in his maimed clasp. The weapon he retained for his left-handed guard was a suicide's choice, a slender poignard for eating. Its tanged blade had no cross guard, no length, and no leverage to outmatch the swung impetus of a sword stroke.

Dakar's rush to intervene was dragged short by four horses, planted by herdbound instinct. With raised heads and pricked ears, their curiosity had snagged upon Jaelot's approaching destriers. Dakar snarled words concerning maggot-infested dog meat.

While undaunted in the clearing, the Araethurian goatherd readied the stop thrust to murder the last s'Ffalenn prince. Restored to self-confidence, in strict tutored form, Fionn Areth held his unwavering focus. He tracked the raised sword that would fail to deflect him, and so missed the deft flick of Arithon's left hand, that launched the flat, little dagger.

The knife struck, sunk hilt deep in the goatherd's extended shoulder. He cried out, hand gone nerveless. His sword cast free, falling, sliced a glancing gash in the high cuff of Arithon's boot. Left the main gauche, but no space to react, Fionn Areth ended his thrust, still in balance, but unable to effect a timely recovery given the wretched footing.

Arithon stepped close. Stripped to desperate efficiency, he struck one sharp blow. Alithiel's jeweled pommel clubbed Fionn Areth's exposed nape and felled him, unconscious.

The horses gave way before Dakar's goading. They sidled ahead in snorting excitement, while down the choked gash of the draw the charging lancers bore in on the ruined mill. Swearing in language to raise fire and storm, Dakar reached Arithon's side.

'You've made a right mess!' he snapped, voice cracking as he stooped to assess the wound in the prostrate boy's shoulder. 'Ath on earth, man! Why did you have to choose now to indulge in a schoolboy's folly?'

Breathing too hard, his sword smartly sheathed, Arithon recovered the herder's dropped weapons from the snow. He secured Fionn Areth's bared blade through a pack strap, then reclaimed the cold burden of the main gauche. 'No folly,' he gasped, flat sober and strained. 'My given promise to meet him in challenge was made in dire straits, to make him leave Jaelot without argument.'

'Damn good that does, now!' Dakar retorted, then caught his breath at the stony expression locked upon Arithon's face. 'Don't mourn. He's not dying. Just stuck like a pig at the butcher's. He won't bleed to death. That's assuming our captors allow me the grace to set him in bandages before they drag us in chains to the dungeon.'

Arithon's relief was a palpable force. He caught the near gelding's bridle and flung the reins over the animal's plunging head. 'We aren't going to be taken.' He reached again, snapped the packhorse's lead out of the Mad Prophet's stunned grasp, then vaulted into the saddle. 'You're to keep that boy safe! Promise me! Use every means necessary, breach my private trust as you must. Just teach him that I'm not his enemy.'

Dakar missed his grab for the gelding's lost lead rein. Ever and always, he failed to keep pace with s'Ffalenn cunning through a crisis. 'Arithon,
no
!'

But the oncoming riders were near, and fast closing, leaving no time to argue poor strategy.

'Ward this place,
now
!
I'll divert them.' Arithon closed his heels, spurred, pitched the horse underneath him from a standstill into a gallop. 'Given shadow, I ought to manage.' As the packhorse swerved and bolted in response, Arithon called over his shoulder. 'I'll find you, or meet you when
Evenstar
docks!'

Both horses and rider crashed into the wood, extended in flat-out flight.

Dakar stood his ground by the deserted mill. He extended the spells for ward and concealment by rote, while the horn call as the lancers wheeled and turned sounded all but on top of him. Nor could an untenable choice be reversed. Shouts pealed through the storm, fired by discovery as Arithon crossed a thinned patch of wood, or perhaps a woodcutter's clearing. He would have lagged purposefully for that brief sighting, to draw the danger away after him.

Dakar could not rejoice for the respite of safety. Naught remained but to tend Fionn Areth. That charge left the spellbinder heartsick with shame, for in fact, against the world's peril posed by the Mistwraith, the life left in his hands was the expendable cipher. Whether moved by compassion for feckless youth, or some sense of misguided loyalty, Dakar knew his excuse for inaction fell short. He had failed the primary obligation set upon him by command of the Fellowship Sorcerers.

Rathain's irreplaceable, last prince now rode alone. He carried no better protection than his birth gift of shadow, and a paltry few sigils of concealment stitched into the livery hack's saddlecloth. Whipped to zealous pursuit, the mayor's guard from Jaelot pounded hard on his trail, swallowed at length by the fall of fresh snow and the gloved ink of solstice night.

Winter Solstice Night 5670

Retaliation

On the hour before solstice midnight, the vintner's shed where the Koriani enchantresses in Jaelot held their headquarters lay in flickering gloom, the reek of cheap tallow stewed through the tang of stirred dust. The flames in the dips hissed and dimmed to the drafts whining through ill-fitted shakes. Sifted snow let in by the cracks sheeted glittering residue in the corners. Only one of the circle of women who manned the crude outpost rejoiced for the upset to the order's covert plotting. Well accustomed to the ramshackle joinery that made the rough shelter a misery, Elaira lay curled in her cloak. She had finger-combed the worst tangles from her damp glory of bronze hair. Undone by the relief of Prince Arithon's escape, she slept through the first peaceful moment she had known since Fionn Areth's unjust incarceration.

Lirenda viewed her younger colleague's repose with distaste. Less inured to tough setbacks, too riled to accept the wormwood of defeat, the senior enchantress paced the shed in mincing steps and balked tension. Her hands shook. Agitated reflections snapped through her rings like actinic sparks in the flame light.

Her assigned circle of peers maintained stiff decorum. Anxious lest her shortfall brand them in shame, they endured her irritable commands in strict silence.

Lirenda rebuffed their probing questions. She gave no explanation for the monumental lapse in propriety that had allowed Arithon s'Ffalenn to bolt through Jaelot's cordoned walls.

'You must find him!' she exhorted her overworked seeresses,
s
till bent in trance over a water-filled vat once more joyously used to mash grapes.

Failure to secure the Shadow Master's capture framed a setback of calamitous proportions. In peril of ruin, Lirenda demanded another spell-driven sweep of the countryside. Her foul mood stayed relentless, as though by persistence she could expunge the memory of the branding kiss the s'Ffalenn prince had bestowed to unravel her upright character.

'You realize we waste time,' Senior Cadgia pointed out, her steadfast patience frayed ragged.

'Search wider,' Lirenda lashed back in hissed sibilance. 'I won't hear your excuse for the static thrown off by a mere winter storm. The s'Ffalenn bastard can't go far on foot in such weather. I'll know where he shelters, no matter how thorny the setbacks!'

Deliberate before such needling superiority, the elder seer addressed the frosted white image that rejected her skills in the scrying vat. The sigil she sketched with competent briskness did not frame the seals to generate ordered renewal. Instead, fingers snapping, she engaged the chaotic rune of dispersal.

The spelled binding that framed the construct for tracking dispelled as a sheet of blank light.

Ahead of Lirenda's explosive rebuke, Cadgia let fly her long
-
suffering temper. 'No! Enough of this foolery.' She pushed to her feet as though her back ached. 'I told you before. Your fugitives lie under Dakar's warded protection, no easy barrier for our skills to break through, even under auspicious conditions! My circle of seeresses are all bone weary. Your fruitless schemes have exhausted their strength, and I won't see them down sick by extending them further. Until this storm lifts, accept the harsh fact. Nothing more can be done.'

'How dare you ignore the Prime Matriarch's directive!' Smoothly groomed, her sable hair imperiously pinned since her demeaning affray by the wall, Lirenda advanced in a swish of damp silk.

Yet Cadgia folded broad arms, unintimidated. 'Don't start. Not now. You're behind on events. The old balance of power has shifted.'

'You've had news?' Paused as though doused by a pail of chill water, Lirenda drew a sharp breath.
'What are you saying?'

'That when the wards you had set over Jaelot's walls were breached by the Shadow Master's passage, we received urgent word from the lane watch.' Sobered now, without petty smugness, Cadgia delivered the tidings withheld by the Prime's express
command, until Arithon's escape was past salvage. 'Your hope is ashes. The succession is already accomplished.'

Lirenda blinked, gold lit as an old painting against sepia shadow. The impact of meaning took moments to crumble her adamant wall of denial.
'Prime
succession? Then Morriel lost her last faculties?'

Sensitive to the porcelain-frail note of vulnerability, Cadgia broke the shattering gist. 'Morriel is dead. We bow to the will of a new Prime Matriarch, who bears all the powers of her predecessor.'

Lirenda felt emptied, as though earth itself had dissolved from under her feet. 'Who?' she forced out in a glass-edged whisper. 'Which initiate has come to stand in my stead?'

Cadgia masked pity as she spelled out the cutting truth. 'Selidie, of course. She was the appointed Prime Senior.'

'But that's impossible!' Lirenda's disbelief uncoiled to rage, her heartbeat a drumroll within her. 'That lackwitted girl knew
nothing at all.
She never completed even a fraction of the requisite course of training!' Granted blank stares from the onlooking seeresses, who abandoned their posts one by one, Lirenda stemmed her shocked fuming. The disparities she mentioned were not self-evident. She alone had once held the candidate's position within the Koriani Order. Of all ranking seniors, only she had successfully mastered eight of the trials of initiation.

'Nonetheless,' Cadgia said, matter-of-factly. Informed by the avid stillness that Lirenda's defeat was too public, she snapped a prompt order to dismiss her subordinate seers. Mantles rustled as the women filed out. While the blast of the storm through the rickety doorway spilled in and tattered the tallow flames, the ranked senior resumed speaking. 'Should the outcome surprise you? Beyond every doubt, you failed your test here in Jaelot. I have not asked to know how the Master of Shadow managed to make his escape. Nor will I concern myself further. My seeresses tried, but their best efforts cannot salvage your gaffe. For the future, no one yet knows if Prime Selidie will renew the mandate for Arithon's capture. She has sent her summons. We are all to present ourselves for audience in the coastal city of Highscarp.'

Lirenda did nothing but close tortured eyes, a futile gesture. She had guarded against every setback but this, to be supplanted by an idiot initiate who could scarcely be trusted to silk wrap a quartz crystal; a mere child
she knew
had never progressed to the point of mastering even the least potent of the order's array of great focus stones. Still stunned by the shock of monumental betrayal, Lirenda fought to muster a civilized response. 'Go. Leave me. I need time to accept what has happened.'

Cadgia curtseyed. Her large-boned frame and careful tread crossed the dust-shafted glow of the dips. A barrage of raw wind and the clang of the latch saw her gone, leaving Lirenda to choke on the aftertaste of defeat.

She had no comforts, here; no soft carpets; no hot bath; no warm, perfumed mantle to ease the frayed rags of her pride. While the crawling spill of flame light cast overlapping haloes across the uneven floor, and the water abandoned in the scrying vat puckered to paned ice in the cold, Lirenda stood huddled in fine silk and grade wool, shivering through crushing disappointment.

The nadir to which she had fallen lay beyond words to express. Cast from the pinnacle of needy ambition into an abyss of total anonymity, Lirenda beheld the death of her most cherished hopes. She could live for six centuries on longevity spells, and at best earn the title of Second Senior. Always,
forever,
she must stand behind Selidie, whose interests she had blatantly spurned, and whose youth must inevitably outlast her.

'Life does have more than one facet, you know,' observed someone in gentle reproof.

Lirenda spun in recoil, to find Elaira awake and regarding her. The unranked initiate she had always despised sat erect in the shadows, the auburn hair she seldom troubled to plait spilled over her snugly clasped cloak. Between them, unspoken, hung the shared knowledge of Arithon's recent escape. Elaira had witnessed the despicable drama, had stood by and applauded as Lirenda's inexcusable lapse granted Rathain's fugitive prince the loophole he needed to exploit.

Yet Elaira's gray eyes held no trace of contempt; only sympathy clothed over the steadying framework of prosaic conversation. 'The Prime's seat has its drawbacks.'

'What would you know?' Lirenda snapped, all at once crushingly weary. Forgetful this once of marring her silk, she braced on the rim of the grape vat.

'Everything to do with having nothing left to lose.' Elaira tucked up her feet. Her small, marring frown came and went for the fact her ankles had numbed from the chill. 'One learns, in the streets, what cannot be taken. Friendship, courage, self-respect. The world's weave is set on a very broad loom. A single snapped thread doesn't have to mar the whole fabric.'

Lirenda tipped up her chin. 'Fine words for you. Easily said, since you never passed into rank.'

Elaira just looked at her, an odd little smile arguing the gravity of the moment. 'I can't have what I want, either. That can be supported. There are other joys, other goals, many avenues in which to seek human growth and fulfillment.'

A moment fled by, filled by the moan of the wind, while the tallow dips fluttered and streamed oily smoke, and the door shook on its ill-fitted hinges. Then Lirenda looked away. Had anyone else offered companionship through her hour of abject defeat, she might, perhaps, have loosened the grief fastening her shackled heart. But Elaira's straight tolerance did nothing but refire the memory of the s'Ffalenn prince's face, and a tenderness held in the depths of green eyes that, now and forever, would only be there for another.

Elaira had made herself outcast for a love well returned.

For Lirenda, Arithon's boundless compassion had touched and uprooted her sense of inner alignment. His cool removal left her exposed and unpartnered. 'You cannot help me,' she told the woman whose bedrock dignity eschewed refined clothes, and whose bone-simple courage surpassed her. 'I asked to have privacy. Do you mind?'

'No. Not at all.' Elaira arose. She tucked up her cloak hood and let herself into the night, in the earnest, but mistaken, belief she left her sister initiate to the healing virtues of solitude. For Lirenda, alone in the frigid isolation of the derelict vintner's shed, rage and shame far outstripped any wounding of sorrow. Truth nipped like a gadfly. If Arithon's kiss had unstrung her defenses and bared her most glaring weakness, the betrayal of Morriel's promise of redemption assuredly had preceded the bastard's flight out of Jaelot.

'Damn you to Sithaer's nethermost pit!' Lirenda cursed the lately departed spirit of the Prime. 'You had to have planned this! Why else should you contrive your passage of the Wheel while I was diverted by the pretense of proving my worth?'

Why indeed;
the stabbing resurgence of logic hitched her breath. Lirenda chafed her numbed hands. A frown marred her ivory forehead, while her mind turned in bitter calculation. The events were too perfectly aligned for less than a calculated endgame. She saw, for all time, that she had become the duped butt of Morriel's manipulation. The old Prime had set her up, blindsided her with distractions, even played upon her flaws to ensure she would be distant and preoccupied through the crucial change in succession.

Lirenda reviewed the irregular facts, doused by the needling, certain awareness that her presence at hand would have posed a sure threat. Only a former First Senior could have known of Selidie's outright incompetence. The young woman had never been remotely capable of surviving a second-level initiation, far
less
the rigors of the ninth test required of all aspirants who had achieved the seat of Prime office.

'What have you done?'
Lirenda demanded of the departed spirit of the crone who had wrangled and cheated her.
'Ath, oh Ath, what was your grand plan, that you dared not risk me as a witness?'

The wind gusted, rattling the door on its hinges. Snow crystals scattered in driven bursts against the gapped board walls. Inside, ignited to towering fury, Lirenda paced, the dust lashed to billows at her back. Her cloak snagged a hook on the bottle rack. She snapped the hem free, uncaring as the lining tore with a scream of ruined silk. Her skirts with their elaborate layers of gold stitching flared to her agitation like the charge in an oncoming squall line.

No human balm could absolve her deep pain. The hate scalding through her lacked target or recourse. One stroke had cut off the prize she had pledged her whole life to pursue. The ignominy galled. Her initiate's vow to the Koriani Order would permit no release into freedom. All her days, she would suffer in dog-pack subservience for the sake of a kiss in an alley. Arithon's unconscionable intervention sealed her fate. Her name would now wear the same taint of disgrace that Elaira had borne for three decades.

'May you scream, chained in Sithaer, prince and Spinner of Darkness!' Lirenda swore under her breath. Even
still,
his near memory scalded her mind. She relived the branding, hot passion, unwilling, of her lips against his, pliant with ecstatic surrender. Damned for all time for a liaison of the heart, she reviled the love she could neither banish nor conquer.

She would suffer Morriel's most wretched revenge for that failing. Another ignominy piled on the first, when impatient ambition had driven her to break the original grand construct designed to snare the Master of Shadow.