TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (85 page)

Friends suffered for even his innocent acts. Acquaintances who enacted his business had
died
for the curse that beset him.

Arithon sucked down another rash breath. Confronted by pending invasion of Vastmark and the might of his half brother's war host, he saw no alternative but to try and wrest back his mage-sight. Hurled without anchor into the tienelle's rush of expanded awareness, he must wrest back the foothold to force the locked doors to his talent. In the past aboard
Khetienn,
at the crux of the crisis, he had rejected the likely alternative, that he might kill himself in the attempt.

Davien's Maze ripped away that tissue of delusion, laid bare his self-blinded dismissal. Impelled to the precipice, Arithon stayed chained to the instant as drug-fired vision unreeled out of control. He battled sharp terror. Amid thundering chaos, already lost, he wrestled the tide to cling to bare-bones survival.

Then nightmare dropped like a blanket and swallowed him. Fragmented visions flooded his mind. Deaths at Tal Quorin came indiscriminately mixed with the fatalities of sailhands, burned and drowned with the fleet at Minderl Bay. Their thrashing torment and their screams yanked him down. Arithon shuddered, unable to stay upright as the agony of a thousand unendurable wounds pulped his body and mangled his awareness.
Not again;
the maze had already extracted its due for those victims his actions had slaughtered. Yet Arithon failed to subdue his flayed nerves. Hurled to visceral revolt, he reeled, helpless, as his curse-driven violations of integrity touched off an explosion of drug-induced chaos.

No discipline saved him. The strictures to restore calm tore through his flayed grasp, and his access to mage-sight stayed darkened.

Arithon lost his anchoring contact with the present. The fixed stone of Kewar seemed fallen away, dissolved to a well of oblivion. Unmoored amid tumbling torrents of dream, he thrashed screaming, the horrific fragments of experience shredding thought to an abattoir of white pain. He was many men, dying to the red plunge of steel; he was the tears of women raped and widowed; he was a child, burning with fever instilled by a septic hand; he was a young girl, lying broken on rocks, bleeding out life from a crossbow bolt.

'No!' Arithon gasped. 'Not again.' But drugged vision cast up random memory like jetsam, and the maze, uncaring, reclothed unending deaths in the torment of pitiless detail.

'Cry mercy,' Elaira murmured, unheard behind her sealed ring of wards.

For this reliving augmented by tienelle exceeded the concept of punishment. Resharpened senses snapped each experience into still more ruthless a focus. Emotion expanded. Suffering and fear and blinding agony came refigured to a barrage of magnified emotion. The mind lost its boundaries. Imagination seized on distortions and ran rampant, until quivering flesh balked at mapping the scope of an ordeal driven amok. Ripped apart under the heightened influence of narcotic smoke, Arithon felt himself savaged. His talent stayed blocked. Each access he attempted pounded into blank emptiness, congealed over mind and heart. No method availed him.
He could not break through.

Yet in contrary malice, the flares of unruly vision skittered past every stay of encumbrance. Etheric perception opened his sight in raging fits and starts. The effect made each battlefield a stark nightmare. Over pulped bodies lying churned in wet silt, Arithon watched the contorted flares of loosed energy shred into streaming smoke. Here, in the wake of violent death, animal magnetism bled off in a spilled miasma. The impact as spirit was torn from dazed flesh ranged outside the physical senses. Arithon felt each passage arise as a cry, marring the grand chord that inflamed the realms past the veil. He was a mote in a gale, flailed and winnowed as the destruction of massacre wailed across the living web underpinning all conscious creation.

The battered intellect languished, assaulted on levels beyond mind or heart. Drug-honed perceptions smashed identity and reason, until shocked flesh, torn asunder, defined breath and life. Arithon shivered and wept for release. Easier, to let go. So simple, to lie back and die of the next arrow or sword wound, to embrace a battering fall from a yardarm torched into crackling inferno. To surrender life, shed the mangle of crushed tissue, and let the turn of Fate's Wheel mill him under. The temptation to surrender himself to Daelion's judgment beckoned with the honeyed syrup of oblivion.

Yet the oath sworn at Athir forbade him that grace. Binding spells set over freely let blood strapped him to suffering survival.

Arithon plowed forward on hands and knees, long past mourning his gutted integrity. He was the sword, slaying; he was the arrow aflood in the stream of arterial bleeding. He was the cold brine of Minderl Bay, filling the lungs of a rat trapped inside a foundered vessel.

Davien's Maze had long since immolated the threadbare remnants of pretense. No refuge existed as the tienelle visions unfolded full view of his wretched, curse-driven destiny. The birth-born mold of s'Ffalenn compassion left him a wrung rag in the trapjaws of self-condemnation. Arithon dragged himself onward, his knuckles skinned raw against the stone floor of the cavern. He owned no more recourse beyond brute resistance. He could not evade culpability. No cursed act of violence could ever be justified under the Law of the Major Balance. His bruised conscience accepted expiation as meaningless. The dead would stay killed. An ocean of tears would not restore them. Arithon endured that assault of futility through bare-handed, dogged persistence.

And nightmare spurred him, each forced inch of progress achieved to the rake of steel through his heart. He was the fire, voraciously feeding until entrails and flesh crisped to paper. He was the tears of a grandfather's lonely despair. He was a clansman, gasping in leaked blood, perpetually caught at the crux of a mortal wounding. At next breath, he was an innocent babe, flash-burned by the levin bolt hurled down by Lysaer into the grottos of Tal Quorin.

That single death, in the random deluge of thousands, wakened the sleeping dragon.

Arithon bristled as the blaze of Lysaer's unleashed talent roused the coils of Desh-thiere's curse.

This, the true enemy whose handling could unstring him. Arithon howled in abject terror. No wall he raised might shelter the opened well of his mind. The geas rammed like a knife through the gaps torn by the tienelle visions. The cold-cast force of compulsion blazed uncontested through and through his whole being.

Stripped naked amid the surge of the torrent, Arithon planted his will in denial. Just as well ask the sand to reverse the riptide. Intact resistance had crumbled
long since.
For years, he had moved and breathed the insidious taint of Desh-thiere's spell turned corruption. Each year, each encounter, eroded him further; Davien's Maze even now battered the footing that grounded his failing stance.

Tienelle vision refocused truth with unflinching, painful clarity. Arithon owned no untouched bastion within, no clean space to guard his self-worth.

No choice, but to strangle in sighted awareness, tugged this way and that by the strings of the Mistwraith's revenge. The lockstep rape of choice that plundered his joy could only give birth to more acts of self-damning violation. Arithon groped forward. He wormed on his belly, confronting the mockery of a resistance that came to mean nothing. Brute endurance might sustain him for an hour, or a day, or a minute, all to no meaningful purpose. He must finally break down. His abraded identity would wear away, until he was sucked to a hollowed shell, directed by the string-puppet pull of the relentless evil he carried.

'No.' His whisper cast back flurried echoes.
'I will not go down.'
Over and over, he repeated the words to stave off crushing surrender. Nor would the Mistwraith have the least part of himself, uncontested. He would hold on, as he once had in Riverton, until the mind came unmoored from the last frayed tie holding sanity.

Yet even so brave, he could not sustain.

Elaira wept for inconsolable pity as the tienelle visions fell as a scourge upon Arithon's conscience. Better that his refined talents had never been born to Talera; that a world beset by Desh-thiere had never known the rarefied light of his talent. The loss would darken Athera for all time, that the exalted grace of her Masterbard's empathy should be cut down to mute struggle by suffering.

Elaira cursed the spelled works of Davien as Arithon shuddered into collapse. At any moment, the Mistwraith's cursed geas must finally shatter him. Well braced for this hour, worn sick by necessity, the enchantress readied the ritual runes of unbinding. Before she watched her beloved give way, she would cast off her concealment and dare intervention. Lent her strength and her balance, buoyed by her undying love, Arithon might find the grace to stave off final ruin. Debt to the Prime Matriarch seemed a small price to pay, if her joined presence could defer Desh-thiere's triumph.

If compromised, his will might be salvaged intact.

Yet her move to react was cut short.

An outside assault of rough magecraft hurled in, smashing like a dropped boulder through the churned visions of backlash. Elaira's bursting hope, that her need had drawn rescue, became instantaneously dashed. The disturbance was only another reliving, drawn out of Arithon's past. Exasperation struck next as she realized the mangling invasion could not be a Fellowship working.

The rash of taproom swearing that followed tagged the unlikely culprit. Kicked from his rut as the complacent wastrel, Dakar had embarked on the startling effort to draw Rathain's prince to safe haven. Only a fool would undertake such peril lightly. Arithon's blinded talent had not stripped out the trained patterns instilled during childhood. Dakar's clumsy effort provoked a defensive response out of hair-trigger reflex.

Arithon's explosive rejection lashed out like a hurled sheet of balefire. Witnessed at second hand, its natural force left Elaira shaken. Even while shocked outside his right mind, Arithon's guard could unbind the Koriani sigil of command.

Dakar caught the full brunt, whimpering in misery. By the martyred whine of his curses, the enchantress derived that the fragmented horrors of the tienelle vision had bled through his attempted contact. Smashed to reeling retreat, Dakar understood any subsequent effort to help would be hammered down with the same vengeful finality.

'Cry mercy,' Elaira whispered, wrung to sorry distress for the fact she was just as wretchedly helpless. Her own resource fell just as woefully short to scale a barrier of such vicious magnitude.

Yet where prudent talent should have known to step back, the Mad Prophet returned like a terrier. Again his attempt was mauled to lame shreds. Battered numb, hazed dizzy, well aware his slipshod technique was outmatched, the Mad Prophet hauled himself up by his bootstraps and rashly refused to give in.

Elaira tracked the decision, incredulous. 'Ath's deathless grace! Dakar, don't try. The next strike must surely shatter him!'

Yet the past was not mutable. Bound to the chain of enacted event, the fat spellbinder gathered himself, weeping, and launched off a third attempt.

The insidious progression would not stay before breaking crisis. Elaira shared Arithon's beleaguered recognition
that the reliving was going to unstring him.
His defenses
had
crumpled, that ill-fated night aboard
Khetienn
; Dakar's reenacted response was going to tear him wide open. For that crucial instant, he must stand as he had, inwardly stripped of protection.
Past and present would intersect in Kewar Tunnel.
His core self would be stripped naked and exposed to possession by Desh-thiere's curse.

Frozen to horror, Elaira looked on. The grief all but savaged her, that her power fell short to stave off the fall of disaster.

Dakar's strike shocked through vision like thundering storm,
the brutalities of Tal Quorin and Minderl Bay seized and turned back as the edged weapon to stun Arithon's mind to paralysis.
The tactic was deployed with icy forethought, as Arithon's awareness spiraled unchecked, entrapped in the throes of drugged nightmare.

Elaira gasped, shocked dumb as the blow fell. She scarcely tracked the surgical follow-through, made on the moment the
Master of Shadow flinched into agonized recoil. Dakar attacked in dead earnest, his spearpoint the most reviling scenes ripped from his victim's cursed past.

'Oh beloved.' Bleeding with sympathy, the enchantress shuddered with each smashing impact as the Mad Prophet punched roughshod through Arithon's beleaguered identity. She could but watch, slapped numb by stark suffering, as the corrosive remorse became excised from each field of slaughter. The Mad Prophet stayed the course of that lacerating history, sealed against scruple or pity. He smashed privacy wholesale. Memory for ugly, reprehensible memory, he cut through with locked runes of binding and laid claim to Arithon's innermost mind. Each contested sequence of raw recollection, the Mad Prophet closed into the circle of his own being. There, as he hoped, a mage trained to mastery would hesitate before daring trespass.

That night in
Khetienn's
stern cabin, Arithon succumbed.

A stunning victory for Dakar in the past, one that had wrested Arithon's salvation from the seizures of tienelle poisoning. Yet here, relived in the Maze of Davien, embattled by the roused threat of Desh-thiere, the exposure flung wide the gates to disaster.