TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (64 page)

Testament

The adept keeping watch at Sethvir's bedside in Althain Tower straightened, her shining white robes a soft, varnished gold by the spill of a single candle. Concern stitched a frown line between her silk eyebrows. Despite the masked dread binding her sorrow, she stroked the Sorcerer's limp fingers on the coverlet, her touch a firm reassurance. 'The request you have asked will be granted.' Shattered from calm, her voice shook as she added, 'One of us expected this hour might come. The witness is already summoned and waiting here at Althain Tower.'

The Sorcerer's eyelids returned the barest, small flicker. He hoarded his dwindled strength, while his game heart pushed the blood through his veins, unflagging as time itself. Yet unlike an organ wrought of formed flesh that could be asked to answer his bidding, he could not slow the trickling passage of seconds, or defer the last, waning hours before equinox.

The adept waited, not patient or resigned, but troubled by the entangled coils of the world's fate, a knot far outside her strict provenance to answer. She could succor Sethvir, but not his bound causes; such was the nature of the power she wielded, that sourced itself in the prime life chord.

'Brave spirit,' she whispered. 'As always, we live in the Fellowship's debt.'

Nothing else could she give Althain's Warden. Words fell far short, for her depth of gratitude; the inadequate solace of her patient presence could do nothing to stave off the perils to come.

Desolate, she measured the deep, spaced intervals of Sethvir's breathing, while the fugitive brilliance of the candleflame flickered, its wobbling illumination cast over the wine red carpet. The chamber was stark, in its sickbed neatness, the tipped piles of books and worn bridles put away, and the chairs and side tables tidied. The wicker hamper in the corner was empty, the holed stockings darned and folded into the bronze-studded clothes chest. The adept bent her head, chafing Sethvir's slack palm. Her throat closed, and her shut lids trembled with sudden, upwelling emotion.

'You're weeping?' Sethvir ventured, his speech a thread
-
slender whisper.

She swallowed, fought up a wounding smile. 'Sometimes tears have a mind of their own, do they not?'

'A diamond is less precious,' the Sorcerer replied.

The silence that followed was grief-struck.

Nor did the brine tracking the adept's dusky cheeks leave space for her rage, or the furious protest that howled inside like the smothered blast of a thunderclap. The Prime Matriarch and the Koriani Order had desired the Fellowship sundered, the guiding covenant of their compact with the Paravians broken. Now, the crisis brewing at Rockfell Peak threatened to finish the objective Morriel's conspiracy had set in train the past autumn.

The Warden the adept guarded might never arise from his pallet. If the worst happened, Sethvir of Althain would not be allowing small spiders to make homes in his teacups again. He could lose the chance to wear out the soles of the new wolfhide buskins Traithe had sent as a gift. Nor would a human successor step forward to inherit the wide-ranging gift of his earth-sense.

Stark tragedy, that the Koriani Prime deemed the price of Athera's survival as a bargaining chip, to leverage back access to the starfaring culture renounced by mankind's destitute forebears.

Too weakened to scry through the thorns of possibility, or to measure the scope of the pitfalls that might lurk in the uncharted future, Sethvir faced the dire worst without flinching. He had made his request to record a last testament. Should Luhaine, Kharadmon, and Dakar fail at Rockfell, and Desh
-
thiere's fogbound entities burst their wardings, he had no hand left to send to avert their inb
ound brethren from Marak. Athera
could be devastated, first by the m
alevolent sentience in the mist
taken captive at Ithamon at terrible cost to two princes; and then by invading free wraiths, voraciously seeking possession. Horror would not end there. Every living spirit on Athera, enslaved or free, would be lost in turn, immolated by the dreams of dead dragons as Sethvir's steering hold on the land's fractured grimwards weakened and finally faltered.

'Keep trust in your spellbinder,' the adept whispered, shying back from the darkening maze of possibilities, each one a bearing landscape of ruin too grim for cool sanity to contemplate. 'Dakar has untapped strengths. In crisis, he may well discover them. Believe in the strictures Asandir instilled over the course of his training. Your Mad Prophet may yet keep his stance through extremity.'

But Sethvir's stilled face showed no flicker of hope in the kindly spill of the candleflame. He held to his wish, unrelenting.

The Sorcerer had begged the service of a witness of Ath's Brotherhood to help seal a record in crystal. As Warden of Althain Tower appointed by the Paravians, Sethvir was insistent. The integrity of his post lay at risk. His last act before he engaged threatened faculties must catalog the cascade of events that might soon write the last lines of Athera's closing chapter. Should Asandir return from his labor to find ruin, he must know in detail what had passed. The great drakes had entrusted the Fellowship of Seven to ensure Paravian survival. An integrity outlasting three ages would not founder; not without leaving clear word of the struggle that could stand as the Sorcerers' epitaph.

At length, a soft tap at the chamber door; the adept called in for his specialized skills had arrived to enact Sethvir's dispensation.

The bursting glitter of silver-and-gold threadwork emerged like a cry from the gloom of the outer landing. The slim figure stepped in and closed the oak panel. Such was his care, the latch fell without sound. Then he pushed back the hood, with its crowning cartouche, the interleaved ciphers of safekeeping and trust framing the seal of the bonded witness. If the man was still young in years, with the beautiful thin hands of an artist, his talent had powerfully marked him. The solemn brown eyes in his beardless face reflected an ancient's deep wisdom, paired with an astuteness that had gazed into world upon world past the veil.

He nodded to the lady on watch at the bedside. His poise could have been a dancer's, a warrior's, or the mold for a sculptor's masterpiece as he knelt at the Sorcerer's shoulder.

I am here by request to stand witness,' he greeted Althain's Warden, then laid his hand overtop of the lady adept's, still clasped to Sethvir's slack fingers. 'Though I wish that the sorrow of this hour had not come, and that I was not the one called to assay the burden, know you are beloved. As ever, our Brotherhood bides in your shadow. Mine, the honor, to serve your request with integrity.'

The Sorcerer's fingers fractionally tightened within the adepts' linking grasp. A tormented interval elapsed before Sethvir opened his eyes. His speech came with effort. 'In the aumbry under the arrow slit you'll find five wrapped crystal spheres.' His voice sounded stiff as the rust on old hinges as he labored to impart his instructions. 'I ask, leave the amethyst and the citrine. The clear quartz preferred to work with Ciladis, and should stay undisturbed. Of the two smoky quartz, bring the pale one.' His breath exhausted, the Warden explained by sent thought that for joyless tasks that particular sphere was most likely to grant its expansive permission.

'I understand.' As the witness gathered his robe to arise, the lady adept touched his arm in restraint. 'Stay with Sethvir.' She disengaged from the Sorceror's slack clasp and offered her vacated footstool. 'I'll fetch the crystal the Warden suggested.'

Resettled at the Sorcerer's side, the witness bent his head, eyes closed as he readied his faculties. A mind as complex and broad-ranging as Sethvir's would require far more than a long reach. His earth-sense could impose complication and hardship. The scope of the electromagnetic current he channeled, minute to unthinking minute, was vast enough to burn the unshielded mind to a cinder.

Ill equipped to engage such a burden without help, the adept calmed his breathing, then opened the gateways in mind and heart to tap the prime source itself. Power flowed in, gentle and sure, of a force to spin mountains from one grain of sand, or clasp a butterfly without one particle of dust disturbed from fragile wing tips. The chord that first made, then sustained all creation charged the adept's presence with a shimmering corona that washed through the thin glow from the candle. Shining, in his robes of pure white, the thread pattern on his hood and cuffs scintillant as sparks splashed off heated steel by a forge hammer, the adept set barriers of protection to encapsulate his inner self. The rest of his being became as blank slate, empty and clear of all imprint.

'Sethvir, I am here,' he pronounced in soft assurance. 'When you're ready, I'm prepared.'

The cool hand he cradled between his warm palms returned no response. But deep in his mind, a sure, controlled touch claimed the channel the adept offered up to the Sorcerer. That tacit, first contact was not overwhelming, a ripple of light imagery drawn from the surface current of Sethvir's entrained gift of earth-sense
... in the ruins of Penstair, a snowy owl furled silent wings over a killed hare. Southward, in Orvandir, three unsettled crows pecked at glaze ice by a streamside that by now should be swelling with thaw.

The witness sighed through parted lips, amazed by the masterful, flowing thread of the Sorcerer's shared awareness. He understood resonance. Like a perfect, sustained note pared out of a chord that described every facet, of reality, from harmony to cacophony, he sensed the fierce will that embraced the mammoth torrent of Athera's moment-to-moment existence, and,
even pressed to extremity,
stepped its vast torrent down to a delicate trickle.

The ongoing effort such a feat must demand stunned even the adept's illumined cognizance.
While over the Storlains, a new blizzard raged; a field mouse in a burrow in Havistock husked a dry seed, a small wrongness: by this time of year, had the frosts been less deep, the shell should have softened and cracked as the pale shoot inside strained to sprout. . .

No witness in the dwindled ranks of Athera's hostels could keep pace with a presence refined to such infinite precision as this. First raised to awe, and then abjectly humbled, the adept let the tears seep shamelessly through his closed lids.
'You are needed beyond measure,'
he dispatched through the link.
'Truly, is tonight's course the choice of absolute necessity?'

Sethvir's answer emerged as a wound skein of imagery, clear
-
cut as sorrow itself. The sequence opened with sight of the Paravian continent, and its massive, crossed fault lines, whose major array intersected beneath the thermal pools of Silvermarsh. If the Fellowship's effort to isolate Rockfell Peak failed to channel the deranged branch of the lane flux into safe realignment through the Skyshiels, the fragile balance of Athera's crust would be set under stress. Disturbance in one fault was certain to rattle the more active rift through the Thaldeins, disrupting a cycle of quiescence that had lasted the span of an epoch.

'The continent wo
uld
survive the shaking,'
Sethvir sent. A string of images fleeted past, of town buildings crumbled, and sorrowful loss of life. Yet grief and death did not shape the core of the Warden's immediate concern.
'Just one massive quake would shift links of anchoring spellcraft set in place since Paravian times.'

The visions that unreeled after that caused the witness an unpleasant shudder: of wardings released, that kept vile creatures and malevolent sprites under gate and guard, and which human language had no name for. The Fellowship Sorcerers maintained deep protections in steadfast dedication until such time as the Paravian races should reclaim their abandoned place on the continent. Yet the aberrant creatures given form by the impetuous dreams of old drakes paled unto insignificance as Sethvir delivered the shattering gist, of spelled anchors tied into the earth's molten iron core, that would spin out of alignment with an unnatural shift of Athera's crust. A sharp change in the flow of the planet's magnetics would destroy fine-tuned calibrations and
unravel three more grimwards wholesale.

'Should those grounding seals be disrupted, I have no more resource,'
Sethvir confessed in bald helplessness. The Paravians were gone, who had sung those mighty constructs into existence. Lacking the strength of his Fellowship colleagues, one Sorcerer would not be enough to instill any patch of remedial spellcraft: the grimwards would break, disgorging rank chaos, and cascading ruin would unleash a cataclysm beyond all imagining.

'I cannot stand idle and watch as all life on this world is destroyed.'
The Warden of Althain served up his conclusion in stark rage, that refused the bittermost ash of defeat.
'While I recognize truth,
I
hold power to act. Ath Creator allows us our lives, to spend or redeem by willful expression. In passing the Wheel, I might, perhaps, constrain those lost dragon haunts
for just long enough
to bear them across the veil with me.'

The adept paled, appalled. 'You would fail in that sacrifice. Even risk unraveling the pattern of your spirit from the infinite span of existence!'

'I would merely be first to suffer that fate,'
Sethvir corrected in gentle sadness.
'If the Fellowship falters, you and your white brotherhood, and everything extant would follow. By the end, unless Asandir returned in time to attempt the recall of a dragon, random chaos would devour the whole world, and then the bright, teeming consciousness of all that claims space and order within it.'