TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (41 page)

'We've kept the slinking vermin too pressed,' Sulfin Evend dismissed, though the prick of his instincts belied such a pat explanation.

'Better hope so.' The headhunter scratched at his greasy black hair, then dug in a spurred heel to forestall his horse, which bared yellow teeth at the Lord Commander's wiry gelding. 'Me, I'd be worrying what other mischief Red-beard's plaguing fiends've brewed up.' That said, he reined his irritable mount volte-face to resume his delayed patrol. 'Sure as fish swim, I'd say that gibbering priest didn't cast off his faith for anyone's natural causes.'

Double the scouts who ride in the skirmish line,' Sulfin Evend cracked back, too trail-wise to stew over morbid fears and formless, circling supposition.

Done, then.' The veteran headhunter took his leave, too pragmatic to say if the change had settled his own store of reser
-
vations.

Through the interval while the main company with Prince Lysaer ate trail rations on the sheltered side of the crest, Sulfin Evend lingered on the hilltop. A searching, sharp sweep from that desolate vantage did not shake his recurrent suspicion that he did not ride alone.

'Grace and Light!' he hissed under his breath. 'Will you breeding fiends just begone!' A man did not move in Daon Ramon barrens, that spirits did not hound his tracks. At length, in disgust, since no shade could wreak lasting harm beyond headaches and unsettled thoughts, Sulfin Evend adjusted his slackened reins. His round of inspection would not be complete until he had checked on the pack train, and arbitrated the day's fresh complaints from the drovers in charge of the baggage.

At first stride, he hauled his mount back to a halt. Something
did
watch his back: a massive golden eagle perched amid the dead limbs of the scrub. Its flat, amber eyes seemed to
look right through him
in that brief instant of shared contact.

Then the raptor unfolded shadow-dark wings. On a powerful downstroke, it launched into flight, the gust whipped up by its passage a lashing slap against the Lord Commander's cold-reddened cheeks. Sulfin Evend blinked back stinging tears. When his blurred vision cleared, the uncanny creature was lost beyond sight.

In its place a messenger on a lathered horse tore up the scree slope, urgently shouting. 'You're wanted back, now!'

Sulfin Evend pressed his mount down the slope. He heard the gist, moving: how the sun wheel priest had collapsed from his fit without warning.

'His heart stopped, they say, though no one's hand touched him,' the messenger gasped through the clatter of scree churned up under cantering horses. 'Prince Lysaer assayed a blood scrying after that. Now he's bid for a change in strategy. You're needed to oversee the division of our forces. By command of the Light, we've now got to run down what looks like eight separate fugitives.'

'Decoys?' Fastened on the gist of the problem, the Alliance Lord Commander set urgent spurs to his mount. He chose to plow through the next stand of brush. Clawed like fell vengeance by the dense canes of thorn, he vented his grim disbelief.
'You're saying the shadow-spinning bastard's found a way to fabricate false leads that foiled the cast sigil of a blood scrying?'

'Apparently so.'

Sulfin Evend kept his balance as the horse scrambled over a patch of bad footing and recovered. That dire news drove his spiking dread down to the marrow of his bones. 'Then you know what we're facing is a sorcerer's maze created with fell signs and black sorcery.'

'Divine Grace will prevail,' said the messenger, breathless.

'Even so,' Sulfin Evend snapped back, 'I'll place my trust in steel before prayer.' He kept pace with the messenger's flying mount, now grappling the firm evidence that the stakes were likely to turn for the worse. Lysaer
s'Ilessid
would not retreat before evil. Riding in the footsteps of his slaughtered predecessors, Sulfin Evend could not shake the ugly foreboding: that the cocksure hunters in their sunwheel surcoats were now being nose-led, the traps for them set by one desperate and dangerous mouse.

* * *

A speck against sun glare, the eagle circled. Where a mortal bird might have flapped, unable to rise on the weak winter thermals off the slopes, this raptor soared, unimpeded. His high-pitched cry communed with the winds and invited their dancing partnership. The frigid north air whistled through knife-edged feathers, ruffling the russet-and-gilt hackles on his neck, but causing him no inconvenience. Avid, he watched. His awareness interpreted far more than an avian creature hatched from an egg, and his farseeing gaze missed nothing.

Where the definitive signs of clan presence could be hidden from two-legged eyes, the advantage of height unveiled every stray movement against the crumpled tapestry of Daon Ramon's stork landscape. In eight tight-knit enclaves, Earl Jieret's war band prepared for their imminent encounter with the Alliance armed forces. The dulled glint of steel through clumped brush told where leather-clad scouts crouched in ambush. Of the spring traps, the nooses, the deadfalls with trip springs, set where oncoming troops would soon tread, no sign showed; the ground seemed untouched by disturbance. The snares had been laid before the past snowfall, some set under the clairvoyant guidance of Jieret's dreaming, and others by hunch and conjecture.

Yet the eagle's uncanny perception read beyond surface appearance. His sweeping overview revealed dangers a man's earth
-
bound senses would miss. Death awaited the Alliance's sworn faithful, cunningly placed on rock-strewn hillcrests, or under the innocuous snowdrifts, and on the brush-choked, silted banks of the meandering creek beds. No matter how vigilant, the armed ranks who invaded the sacrosanct wilds would pay with their lives and their blood.

Mage-wise, the eagle discerned the subtler tactics, as well. His peerless vision detected the flaring light of Prince Arithon's signature pattern, stitched as a fetch into the thin shells of acorns by thread-fine chains of spelled ciphers. He knew the Names of the men chosen to bear the sealed constructs. Moment to moment, he could have listed the ones most likely to die, as the shifting templates of causation and intent laid the map of the unwritten future above the range of etheric energies.

Nor did the bird's survey miss the lone rider who chivvied two saddled horses on lead reins. He unlocked, in an instant, the arcane connection between one horse's bundled-up burden, and the silk-wrapped weight of the Paravian-made weapon strapped to the mounted man's back. What the eagle knew, the Koriani partner he carried in linkage understood just as clearly: his awareness encompassed Elaira's stricken dismay as she unraveled the import of the Teir's'Ffalenn's desperate strategy.

For reply, the raptor circled into the wind and spiraled his flight path still higher.

The horizon rolled back, the earth a broad platter seething with bellicose industry. To the north spread the toiling lines of the Alliance companies from Etarra, their trampled back trail a dimmed swath straggling southward over the snow. Eastward coursed the pack of Darkling's light horse, streaming through thickets and brush, and relentless as hounds in full cry.

To the south glimmered the entangling snarl of compulsion cast over Jaelot's spellbound guard captain and the hard-bitten remnants of his company. The weak or faint-hearted by now had been left by the wayside. The strong-minded and practical voices among them, who had argued the folly of a suicidal advance, were long since dispatched, sent homeward bearing insatiable demands for relief supplies and reinforcements. The zealot survivors had abandoned all reason. Time and close contact had extended the spell's reach, infecting them with the driving obsession borne by their luckless commander. Beneath the eagle's expanded scrutiny, their heads seemed entangled in a sickly orange web. In contrast, their bodies appeared queerly darkened, their forms traced like moving shadows against the vibrant aspect of their surroundings.

No hedging protection could mask the blighting signs of dark practice from the probing sight of a Fellowship awareness. The cast sigils that warped them through the discipline imposed by their captain's chain of command stood out clearly as strung foil on the hazeless, cold air.

Elaira's shock of recoil was genuine, as her linked vision recorded sure evidence of Koriani meddling in the men's state of unkempt self-abandonment. She had not known, then; the Sorcerer clothed in the form of the raptor saw into her heart, and was satisfied. If the enchantress also recognized the hand that had wrought such offensive craftwork, her thought remained masked; that license was permitted. In respect for the fact she could not break integrity in betrayal of her order's vows, the eagle did not pry, though the clean winds of the thermals wafted the taint of that sorry usage: of matted hair rancid with unwashed sweat, and grease from the seared horse meat the men had consumed when supplies ran low, and the lean, barrens deer failed to yield enough fat for subsistence. Like mad animals possessed by some ravening need outside the bounds of their nature, they would course their live prey with insane disregard for survival.

The great eagle quartered the winter-bare landscape. His raking flight swept over the sunwheel banners cracking above Lysaer's personal troop. On the cusp of the moment, while Sulfin Evend lost his passionate argument against dividing the Light's forces for a change in tactics at the ninth hour, Jieret's clan war band wove their desperate, last-minute strategies, aware they could not prevail. Their thin lines of defense could do no more than to stall and deflect, or kill with ruthless invention. Encounter would set off a dog-pack fray of brief but manic intensity.

To the eagle's prescient perception, the freshets in the hollows would soon run fouled and red. Combatants who fell here would never return home. Rathain's clanblood stood to lose irreplaceable family lines; townborn would be shown no mercy. Winter itself would cause losses. Distinction would blur between the hacked dead.
The fallen would be beloved fathers and sons, alike as brothers in abandonment. Their scattered remains would be devoured by scavenging wolves, then picked over by ravens and crows.

The gusts moaned across Daon Ramon Barrens that day, alive with the wisped forms of Paravian spirits, who mourned for the sorrows of war come again. Though the eagle's rarefied hearing could have shared their plangent lament, its purpose lay with the living.

'Whom would you follow?'
the creature inquired of his Koriani guest. His words were not spoken, but arose as whispered sound braided into the wind hissing over its silken feathers.

'His caithdein,'
came Elaira's reply, a thought as steadfast as an iron rod to the eagle's nonavian mind. Shrewd even through her paralyzing worry, the enchantress had taken the tactical choice: named Earl Jieret over the dour-faced Braggen, riding alone, with a laden horse and the dire burden of a silk-wrapped Paravian sword.

The eagle returned caustic admiration.
'Brave lady.'
He wheeled, his power and grace like the shimmer of storm-charged lighting.
'You don't flinch from necessity, do you?'
Sorcerer that he was, he endorsed her conviction: the Koriani Prime would be assiduously tracking every small move that she made. By granting the more believable decoy the branding tag of her interest, she would mislead them; but at the cost of relinquishing Prince Arithon's fate through his hour of critical risk.

'Cringe, rather,'
Elaira returned, wry. Her stab at humor was empty bravado. Her consciousness felt stretched, cast over such a vast distance, the mortal burden of flesh and bone gone liquid and unreal as water. Detached from the body, her visceral fears became magnified by the merciless fact she had lost every outlet for distraction.
'My sisterhood plays for stakes far more lethal than Lysaer's compulsion to kill.'

Lirenda's failure had fanned coals to flame in the order's entrenched desire to trap Arithon. Elaira could not conceal her deep dread from the Sorcerer who bore her along. For herself, and for her beloved, the stakes riding on a misjudgment promised ruin without parallel.

She knew, as no other: Koriani spellcraft coiled through crystal could be made to bind the free spirit and impose an imprisonment to outlast a lifetime.

Invalid

The half world that swallowed him fueled nightmares, unending: of fire that seared him, skin and muscle from bone. His suffering brought agony that licked every nerve end, an acid-walled prison without cease. He slept little. The grinding weight of his damaged body abraded away his awareness. Cohesive thought became ripped to delirium. Each breath that necessity forced him to draw whistled into his body, tormenting seared tissue with inescapable repetition.

The pain wore him, tore him, snatched away the requisite peace he must have to seek a quiet passage out of life. He wept with longing for the turn of Fate's Wheel and the oblivion of final release.

Who he had been mattered far less than what he had become, which meant the voice calling his name repeated itself for an immeasurable span of time. Words and syllables seemed only meaningless noise amid a cacophony of chaotic sensation. The insistent throb of his flame-ravaged flesh disallowed him the locus to respond. Minutes flowed past, unmeasured, spiked at odd intervals by motion and touch that set off a conflagration of raw torture.

He would have screamed then, had the fires of the Khadrim not scarred his throat beyond the capacity for speech. Because he had no will and no choice, he endured, in animal misery.

For unfathomable days, the voiced phrases flowed around him, over him, through him, eliciting no response.

'. . . his consciousness may have left his body, but not detached . . .'

'. . . could use Name and recall him. At least then he could remember himself, and recover his birth-born identity . . .'

'. . . adepts have refused that. He asked for help, but whether to live or to die remains at issue still. Until he garners the presence of mind to decide, nothing more can be done. Have patience and tend him. His youthful strength and resilience are considerable. Though he suffers, he's not yet outmatched . . .'

The words washed over him, flooding and receding, less meaningful than the reflex pull of the moon dragging the ebb and flow of the tides.

Until one string of phrases spiked through, shattering the fog like a stone cast through paned glass: . .
well, the waiting makes no one suffer but him. His lady mother believes he is dead . . .'

His royal mother believed he was dead. The mere thought of Ellaine's tears scalded conscience: a solitary love that strung the sole thread of her joy, snapped and gone with his spirit. Her loneliness blazed like a cry in the night, and his anguish could not be deafened. Grief exploded and smashed through his physical pain, a wounding a thousand times deeper.

On the pallet in the white-stone ward of Ath's hostel at Northerly, Prince Kevor
s'Ilessid
dragged in a terrible, hitched breath and reclaimed the power of his voice. 'Help me,' he rasped, the barest, scraped whisper lost under the pound of Stormwell Gulf's breakers, sheeting white spume against the vicious rocks of the coastline. Hurled spindrift misted the chamber's high-tower windows, until leaded panes wore a frosting of salt, spindled with crystallized patterns.

Kevor tried and failed to force his eyes open. By the dull, muffled burn, he presumed there were bandages soaked with strong salves masking his face.

He could not know the truth, that the covering of cloth made no difference. Were the wrappings removed, the flat glimmer of afternoon light lay beyond his fire-scorched eyesight. He tried again to frame speech, and discovered the horror: the passage of air through his ruined mouth and throat could not shape clear words to release the scream in his mind:
'Help me, I beg you! For my mother's sake, I would live.'

'Blessed Ath lend him grace!' someone cried in relief. 'He's found his way back to self-awareness.'

Then, as though his anguished thoughts had been heard, an explosion of white light deluged through his being, blinding him to the ceaseless erosion of pain. He drifted. Tenderly clasped in a river of calm, he was soothed, the raw wound of his torment cocooned. The bright current th
at buoyed him disturbed not a
thread of his being, but lent him the gift of serenity. He could pause, and recoup, and rebuild shattered consciousness from the haven of sheltering peace.

Out of clear calm, a whisper arose, and Named him in utmost compassion. 'Prince Kevor
s'Ilessid
!'

The call of that summons hurled him into a dizzying, upward spiral that wrung him, spirit from flesh. For the span of an eyeblink, he was not here, nor there, but all places, and all things, a thought without limit, spun through the weave of creation.

Then he woke as if from a dream.

He found himself standing in the shaded, summer twilight of a forest glen. Small flowers bloomed in the long grass, drenching his bare feet with dew. Birds took flight, and somewhere, a nightingale sang. A fox watched him, forefeet extended in a lazy, luxuriant stretch. Beneath its paws, bare inches from its muzzle, a field mouse crouched washing its whiskers. The unnatural absence of the small creature's fear did not seem out of place. Nor did the trilling splash of water welling up from some sourceless spring in the rocks require the encumbrance of logic to source its continuous renewal.

Naked, reborn, Kevor stood in that place of enchantment and gasped. He felt no self-consciousness, no sense of shame. Only the riptide wave of pleased wonder ran through him, alive with untamed abandon.

'You expressed your desire to heal,' someone prompted from behind him.

Unstartled, still wrapped in amazement, Kevor turned around and saw the white-robed woman who regarded him, her long, fine hair spooled gold on her shoulders, and her eyes soft as moss on a streamside.

His curiosity escaped before thought. 'Who are you?'

As though his lapse of courtesy meant nothing, the lady's smile came quiet as moonlight. 'An adept of Ath's hostel, here to assist, but only as free will dictates.'

Touched by a distant remembrance of fire and the searing trauma of attack by Khadrim, Kevor waited for the shiver that never came. He felt whole. His memories were complete, yet somehow excised from the impact of terror or pain. Horror had been denied its cutting edge. He discovered he could examine his past with an unparalleled freedom. 'I was maimed,' he stated, an unemotional truth. 'Have I died, then?' The grief of loss caught him unprepared, as though his current emotions gained an additional spin from the shedding of prior encumbrances. 'Is this vale on the path to Athlieria?'

The adept's smile faded into a gesture of gentle negation. 'You have not cut the tie to your body. Not yet. You need not, if you feel the life that hangs in the balance still holds meaning and value.'

'You can send me back?' Distracted by a momentary flicker of movement, Kevor glanced sidewards. Wonderment touched him. The languorous fox had been joined by a tortoise, while a luminous moth with mother-of-pearl wings flew from flower to flower, dusting a gold haze of pollen. He might have become lost in rapt fascination, had the adept's grave remonstrance not called back his strayed attention.

'You could heal yourself.' She knelt to the tortoise, which ambled forward and shared silent concourse at her knee. She thanked it politely. Then she nodded her dismissal and restored her wise gaze to the young prince who watched in stilled patience. 'To that end, I can offer you counsel.'

Robed in fair skin and his natural dignity, Kevor held out his hands. 'Am I not healed already?'

The adept arose, saddened. Her hair caught the light, moon
-
touched to the chill gleam of platinum. 'No. You are dreaming. The body you remember holds to life by a thread. The Khadrim's fire left crippling damage.'

Kevor shivered, overwhelmed all at once. The uncanny place, with its deep-running current of mystery, was too strange to quell his uncertainty. Cast out of his depth, he fell back on his breathtaking gift of raw courage. 'Say how I should start.' His voice shook, as again, the thought of his mother left alone in Avenor raked over his heart like cold fingers.

The adept clasped his hand. Her touch felt warm, too real for a dream figment, and yet, her sincerity could not be faulted as she led him toward the lip of the spring. Her voice was clear as poured honey, over the bubbling uprush of water through stone. 'First you must honestly answer what caused you to set your life into jeopardy.'

'But that's simple.' Kevor let himself be drawn into the pool. Cool water burbled up through his toes, and splashed over his ankles and shins. 'The forester's daughter was going to be killed, and I was the one standing in the nearest position to act.'

Her hand released him. The subtle absence of touch became the first indication that his integrity was set on trial. 'If that were all, you would not have seen harm.'

'But—' Kevor's protest died away unspoken as the water in the pool rippled and fractured into vision: showing him alongside his two honor guards, and one of them prepared with a bow and a timely arrow. Showing him again, with the presence of mind to exhort the children to scatter, then himself, spinning to run in the
opposite
direction, which caused the Khadrim a fractional hesitation, as it was forced to discern, and choose between three possible targets. Showing him again, hurling his cloak as diversion, then rolling to hide underneath the snow-covered log he had sat on.

'Something undermined your commitment to life,' the adept pointed out. Her velvet admonition came tempered in honesty that probed his intent like honed steel. 'You acted to spare someone's child, that is true. But your own purpose faltered. You allowed your own death in the outcome.'

Kevor swallowed. His chest felt stone heavy, and his mind flinched from direct encounter with the weighty revelation that gnawed at the edges of consciousness.

The adept read his reluctance. Her compassion was immediate. 'You are given free will. No one but you can name the moment when you pass across Fate's Wheel. The complexity lies in the way you lose your true self in the maze of your own awareness. Healing is an energy that arises from within. If your choices, your feelings, and your fears lie in conflict, the channel of your will becomes clouded. To cross back, to return to the other side of this divide and reclaim your right to wholeness, you must first understand the choices that set your life into jeopardy.'

Kevor lifted his head, faced her square on, though the roil of raw nerves made him dizzy, and his spirit shrank from the impact of the cruel facts that arose out of darkness to meet him. Once he had skirted that edge of harsh truth to Ranne in the winter wood. The questions still held locked in his heart must find voice, though the cost would be written on a shrouded future, wrought of unformed event on a landscape of shapeless menace.

'I was afraid,' he confessed. 'I knew if I broached the uncomfortable question, I might uncover more lies. The answers I found might run deeper than a corrupt influence in Avenor's high council.'

Kevor faltered. The adept waited, patient, as he assimilated his sorrow and defined the fell demon that rode him. 'If I examined each issue, and followed the logic of mercy, I realized I might expose my father's call to the Light as a fraud. Worse still, I saw the possibility of a more callous cruelty: that the men who
r
ode with me were being sent to their deaths for the purpose of a political manipulation.'

Once spoken, the ripple of dread rolled over and through him. Chills puckered his skin. He was naked, stripped beyond privacy, inside and out. The shame burned Kevor red, first for the taint on his
s'Ilessid
name, then oddly, for the fact the ugly truth freed him. He could act. Now, he could face the worst, and not let the core of his own hidden dread stalk him out of the shadows.

His young will took fresh fire, rekindled by the knowledge that if Tysan's high council had a rotten core, his born gift of justice must prompt his return. He would confront his father and rout out the canker. No son worthy of his royal lineage could leave Lady Ellaine alone to face the possible threat of Avenor's internal corruption.

His resolve must have shown in his face and changed bearing.

'You should be warned,' the adept added in tender precaution. 'In this place, you walk very near to the seat of your true power. You will choose to live, but the fires you call down to transfigure your maimed body cannot do other than remold the foundation of your being. Your flesh will be made anew in the passion of, your will. But the man who steps forth shall be changed.'

Kevor replied with the bright-edged impatience of youth. 'Then I must take that chance.'

'No chance, but a certainty.' The adept regarded him and saw no weakening of his resolve. 'Immerse in the pool. Make your choice with your heart and the whole of your mind. Then allow what occurs. You will awaken and arise if you can accept the gift of your own grace, healed or still scarred by the tenets of your conviction. If you cross the Wheel, one will assist. If you regain awareness, I will be there, standing vigil at your bedside to offer you comfort.'

Kevor gave her his smile, which had won him the loyalty of men, and the love of Avenor's populace. His resolve showed the steel-clad fiber of his heritage. A shining commitment to justice that,
in another set of circumstances, with no premature blight cast on the path of his destiny,
would have earned him the Fellowship's sanction for high kingship.

Tysan's true prince bowed amid the safe haven of the grove. 'Lady, my gratitude will last for as long as I live to draw breath.'