TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (86 page)

The balance of the world rocked in that moment.

Elaira could do nothing,
nothing at all,
except hide her useless presence; a shaming, sad epitaph, to leave her beloved no more than his false belief in her safety.

Yet as Desh-thiere's curse rose in force to flatten its helpless prey, Arithon's
current
lack of response struck a shrilling note of discrepancy.

'You have a plan?' gasped Elaira, incredulous.
Limp surrender made no sense from a man who never accepted defeat, even when he was beaten.

Elaira held herself braced, too much in pain to hang her hope on a straw. Hard as she tried, she imagined no course that could buy any last-ditch evasion.

Yet as the red coils of the curse flared into blinding coruscation, the Mad Prophet
had not taken wise charge as a mage, to steer Arithon's drug-inflamed consciousness back to safe harbor.
Instead, swamped by inept uncertainty, Dakar relied on the absence of guilt to lift the block over Arithon's mage-sight.

All unwitting, the enchantress was caught by surprise, still linked to Arithon's consciousness.

The explosive unfurling of his restored talent struck her wards like an unshielded blast of white
light. Spun into the firestorm,
Elaira sensed his empowered awareness meet and grapple the curse's bid for possession. As the garroting coils of compulsion closed down, choking his access to self, the battering exchange of attack and defense came on too fast for her to assimilate.

The Mistwraith's geas had its victim stripped naked,
but no longer helplessly vulnerable.
On set course with his past, Arithon wielded the untrammeled gifts of his mastery;
as well
his maze
-
bound awareness redefined the event, granting unilateral vision into the crystalline web of earned consequence. He fell back on leverage and genius. His pulsed burst of rage threw wracking strain against Desh-thiere's curse-bound compulsion. Arithon engaged talent in affirmation of private identity, lent borrowed force on the strength of a Fellowship seal set under blood oath at Athir. His focused will blazed and struck through.

Final possession was narrowly denied, but not without unforeseen backlash.

The mage-trained, rigorous survey he launched to cleanse and balance his aura raked Elaira's stilled spells of concealment like the actinic slam of a lightning bolt.
In present awareness, Arithon perceived the circle masked under her wards.
Given unshielded vision, his bristling assessment cut through her set runes of concealment on the speed of furious reflex.

Stunned shock limned the moment in pristine silence.

On the stopped cusp of time, strung on the synapse leap between startled, first contact and the irrevocable step of conscious recognition, Arithon grasped the instinctive premonition he had stumbled against lethal peril. Davien's Maze was a Fellowship warding, a framework of spellcraft far outside his strength that would suffer no act of trespass. He realized also: only
one
presence in all of Athera might touch on his inner boundaries without ruffling his reflexive protections.

Arithon's reaction arrested instinct, shattered every rule of time and progression. Pressed by agonized need, he burst limitations and ripped past the veil, claiming the simultaneous intersection of past and present in the higher-range frequency of synchronous existence. Once there, he accessed grand conjury and slapped down the wardings that circled Elaira's self-contained presence, liven as Dakar had done to shield a snatched store of punishing memories, Arithon embraced his beloved's linked consciousness and enclosed her within the self-aware current of his vitality.

He wedded her at one with the inviolate love he cherished within his heart. One thread and one mind, Elaira felt herself claimed as an inseparable part of him. Not trusting such acceptance to shield her from harm, he infused her with himself, poured the inner grace of his being through her spirit in turn, until even the maze's exacting, cold wards could not unspin his meshed weave and define her autonomous existence. Within that sealed haven, that core of free will that no Fellowship Sorcerer would venture to violate, poised over a well of stopped time, Arithon took pause. Shuddering yet from his jolt of raw fear, he marveled. His care for her bloomed, illuminating the exquisite jewel of a consummate, vulnerable intimacy.

'I'm not sorry,'
Elaira ventured at brief length.
'Sony's too small a word for what's happened. Since I didn't destroy us, I can only find space to be glad. Can you ever forgive me?'

'You are here,'
said Arithon, still dizzied to wonderment. His stunned joy turned wry.
'And anyway, what's between us to forgive? By this I presume the chase is still on, with my carcass decried as the Prime Matriarch's prized trophy?'

'They'd prefer you caged living,'
Elaira admitted, her riposte touched to acid chagrin. Cocooned in his presence, the connection between them was wholly without shadow or subterfuge.

Arithon perceived her naked self just as clearly. She need not fear misunderstanding. In the maze, joined as one, he must unequivocally discern that her loyal priority lay with him. Given his attentive, searching focus, he had already mapped the extent of Prime Selidie's clever bind; how the treacherous release to exercise autonomy let Elaira's presence in love become the made tool of Koriani machination.

'You aren't Fionn Areth,'
Arithon pointed out, stung to fraught apprehension as he further explored the extent of her vulnerability.

She chose to dig back, knowing razor-edged wit sometimes eased his shattering concern,
'Well, you smashed their last trap and made off with the bait.'

Yet this time his maudlin mood did not break. If the stakes carried too charged a peril for mirth, he matched her in lockstep for wit.
'The lesson didn't stick. A hatchling crow has better memory.'

'Crows have more brains than to peck at a wildcat, far less try the deadly trick twice. Should I trust you?'

'Ahead of your order?'
Now Arithon did laugh. 'I
would, but for having the Mistwraith in tow. What blandishment would entice Prime Selidie to give up?'

'She won't,'
said Elaira in levelest honesty.
'It's a two-legged trait, to meddle with wildfire bare-handed. And Jaelot blistered. A shaming performance.'
In fact, Arithon had played a Senior Circle selected for reliable experience for a pack of rank fools, no sort of behavior to make a proud, female order tamely tuck tail and give up.
'Though it costs blood and death, the Matriarch wants her finale.'

'Quite. It's the bitch without the bone.'
Arithon's inner smile reflected his bitter recrimination.
'I've regretted that, often, in hindsight. Beloved, I'm sorry. Jaelot was a botch-up. Can you accept my apology? I would have spared having you stuck as the lynchpin turning the crux.'

'Well, there hasn't been leisure to invent another script.'
Squeezed dry of humor, Elaira fell back on immutable truth.
'You are loved. That counts far more. I would rather stand at your back and do nothing than suffocate elsewhere in safety. Nor will I extend any help unless you ask me.'

Arithon shut his eyes, struck speechless with gratitude. Then he turned his head, his unseeing regard trained once again down the tunnel in wide-lashed, forced concentration.
'I would suffer any indignity of Selidie's before I allowed myself to fall prey to the curse of Desh-thiere. If I lapse into madness, take my permission here and now. Should my life become threatened, don't lie, beloved. Even had I not sworn my oath to the Fellowship,
I could no more watch you die than cease breathing.
My love for you will not suffer false promises. Honor my preference, but only if you are able. For myself, in plain truth, I lack the fiber to hold firm and see you take harm.'

Which meant he must live at all cost or sacrifice. More than a seal set in blood tied his life. To spare her, he would indebt himself to the Koriani Prime Council a hundred times over. Cruel hardship still confounded his best-laid intent. Kewar's maze might defeat him, regardless.
'We have Vastmark ahead. Then an affray at Riverton that made a mockery of my oath as a crown prince. Merciful Ath! I can't do a thing to spare you from sharing the raw worst!'

'Don't try,'
Elaira returned, her admonishment gentle.
'You survived both. So can I. Please remember.'

He swallowed again, forced down the rogue panic, that he could not manage to make his wracked body stop shaking.
'You know I can't keep my talent to shield you. I'll be blind once again, after this phase of reliving plays itself through.'

'You will endure,'
said Elaira.
'You must.'
Then, anguished, she let him explore the bleeding roots of her pity.
'Oh, beloved! Can
y
ou not weep and be done? Further suffering is useless, a meaningless punishment. Have you not paid enough for the deaths of the innocents
y
ou could not prevent at Tal Quorin?'

Arithon drew in a tortured breath. He lifted his bracing hand from chill stone and crossed both forearms over his breast. Yet no gesture could rebind his torn heart, or refound his worn store of courage. 'Guilt offers no haven, since payment and suffering can never put right any loss that has already happened. Remorse can't bring back even one child. Asandir's question is answered.'
He paused, buried his face in scraped palms, then stated in sorrowful, stripped anguish,
'Yet where lies the reprieve? Desh-thiere's curse will not answer the release of self-forgiveness, or any other Ath-given grace allotted to our human spirit!'

Elaira had always suspected his lost talent was self-inflicted, a defense to ensure his aptitude for grand conjury could never again be turned as a weapon to kill.
'Choose to try
,' she exhorted.
'Above anyone living, I trust you. My Prime's trap has now been unmasked by your hand. Therefore, my order cannot charge you with debt. If my presence now strengthens your will to survive, the advantage comes as the consequence of your own actions.'

Which words fell short. If she came to harm through a failure of his, she saw all too clearly the blight would destroy him. Nor had he the power to unbind Davien's Maze bare-handed, or set her free of the strangling ties of a Koriani vow of life service.

'Reset your wardfield, beloved,'
Arithon said, grim.
'The guard seals on this place will not forgive, and I don't trust Prime Selidie not to claim intervention if I take the first step joined to the sweet joy of your contact.'

He was right to move on. Delay would spare nothing; only make the needful but harsh separation all the more difficult to complete. Elaira could not ease his dread for the trials to come, but only release him to address his demons without grinding him down with the misery of additional forethought.
'When you master this maze, when you see sky again, I'll indulge my bound orders and find my way to your side. Surely between us we can contrive stirring escapades to balk Prime Selidie's will? In fact, the bait's willing. We, might actually drive her to hair-ripping fury if you wish.'

'Kiss under the moon till the stars fall?'
Arithon smiled, the tenderness in him a radiance clean as new morning.
'My dear, my heart, for your order's comeuppance, I'll bow to your pleasure on all counts. Consider the promise as done.'

Yet to hold his word true, he first must surmount the ordeals that awaited ahead.

Still wrapped in the shelter of Arithon's protection, Elairil rewove her tight ring of wardspells.
'You will triumph,'
she
whispered, steady as she bro
ught an end to an intimacy fast
becoming too hurtful to sustain
. By the gift of a miracle, her
w
ill remained firm as she shaped the last rune of closure. The circle joined. A flare of searing light severed her awareness back into desolate separation.

Easier, surely, to rip out her heart, than to bear the set apprehension whitening Arithon's features. Now alone in the spell
-
charged gloom of the cavern, he shied back from measuring the testing to come. Reflection would but tear him to lethal uncertainty. Forced by exigency to secure Elaira's safety, Arithon stepped forward with no pause at all to regroup.

The past reclaimed him, thrusting him back into the
Khetienn's
locked stern cabin at the moment when Dakar's stopgap sacrifice had restored his access to mage-sight.
Again,
he would spurn the safe course of escape.
Ruled by the fist of unmalleable expediency, he rejected the decision to transmute the tienelle's potency and stand down . . .

* * *

His choice reached Elaira within her sealed wards like a dousing shock of thrown ice water. Her dismay rivaled Dakar's, as she shared recognition that her beloved intended to take up the dropped reins of his purpose, and scry the cycles of probability that attended the hour Lysaer's war host would march into Vastmark. As committed as he had been on the eve of Tal Quorin, Arithon would not meet that armed invasion blindly. He engaged his talent and single-mindedly pursued sequential auguries, each grueling course of posited choice tested to define the best tactics to grind down and starve out the enemy. Each combination was replayed, many times, at each repetition revised to bring the toll of lives down, and to ensure that the tribal archers he had hired as marksmen would not become decimated or run from their ancestral territory.

The posed course of each future unreeled as running waves of searing impressions: of men caught in traps, or shot down in passes; of townborn patrols lured onto weathered stone ledges, to perish of falls as the unstable footing gave way; of men hazed up impassable gullies, then cut off, for bowmen to shoot down at leisure. She watched her beloved test substitute tactics: to spare
this
shepherd an end, trapped and tortured for information; to dispatch toward safety
that
encampment of mothers and young children; to deflect those advances that could not be stopped. Arithon worked the disparate threads of his resource from all angles, ferreting out every method to unravel the discipline of seasoned troops. He spun out unspeakable, ugly strategies designed to break nerves and devastate tight-knit morale. Where relived experience had shattered the mold for brutal ambush and massive casualties, the Maze of Davien unveiled one thing more.

At first, Elaira thought she glimpsed a ghost imprint
-
the sudden, unlikely shimmer of movement brought on by overcranked tension. As adept as she was at wielding her inner senses, she found this ephemeral disturbance eluded her focused skill. Arithon's initial attempt brought no better success. Yet the next time a phantom slipped through the weave, he was on wary guard. On lightning reflex, he snapped down a ward and froze the flow of the augury in midstream.

And there, damningly inscribed, he uncovered the masked face of tragedy.
Spellcraft derived from his signature style had been worked like snarled knit through his scrying.
Here, strung in cobweb fine patterns, he read subtle runes of shading and masking; there, a seeded impulse to waylay the eye, as though by chance met distraction. Arithon pulled up short with stopped breath.
Here,
he encountered the deft nets of spellcraft he had once wrought to protect young clan children in Deshir on a carefree spring morning spent carving toy whistles.

The maze stripped away pretense. That same innocuous chain of ciphers now obscured a more sinister activity. Proof stood, unequivocal:
Desh-thiere's furtive workings had in horrid fact infiltrated his mind and skewed the results of his augury.

'Cry mercy!' Elaira gasped in a soundless, stunned whisper. Her tears flowed then, for a grief beyond mending.
For alternative pathways of future event had existed, no doubt ones with changed outcomes.
The insidious compulsion of Desh-thiere's geas had slipped them from Arithon's grasp in vile and secretive cunning.

In the heart of the maze, the Master of Shadow faltered between ragged steps. His face blanched bone white. Sorrow and guilt all but unstrung him, as he viewed the dawning horror of past judgments made on the basis of a false assessment.

'Thirty thousand deaths,' he ground out, punished by abject revulsion. Rage drained him, that
perhaps
probability had contained the unseen thread of happenstance that might have spared Lysaer's war host from subsequent, sweeping carnage.

Elaira choked back the cry of her heart. She could not reach through, or dare to point out that logic argued against such a likelihood. Given the preset array of raw circumstance, no ending could evolve with such wishfully clean simplicity. The Mistwraith's covert meddling just as likely masked lies, well designed to entrap its victim's sensitized conscience. A sequence of viable futures might lurk behind those insidious, spelled wisps of diversion; or the barriers might have been set as blank decoys to inflame an already tormented mind.

Too easily, the gift of his forebears' compassion might draw Arithon to lose himself in the mire of his past, endlessly seeking improbable reprieve on the lure of unfounded suggestion.

The Teir's'Ffalenn must have perceived that potential pitfall. Despite reeling distress, he turned aside, left the invidious snags without giving way. He abjured the temptation to salve his past agony through futile exploration. The maze forgave no man who refused the soured fruits of even his misled past action. To stop, to shy back and glance sidewards would be construed as a willful avoidance.
Whether or not a bloodless solution had existed to resolve the battle plan gone awry at Vastmark, the path he had taken must run straight through the cliff-walled cove of the Havens . . .

Cry mercy.

Elaira had heard the damning accounts attributed to that spree of slaughter. For the wanton butchery enacted on that shore, Avenor's judiciary council still held a sealed arraignment for black sorcery. Their case, heard in absentia, had hung on a disaffected sailhand's account and conjecture, founded in scholarly diatribe.

Unreconciled to town law, the clans had not shirked the horror of plumbing the truth. Rathain's vested
caithdein
had been charged with the unsavory burden of conducting formal trial under the justice of kingdom charter. Earl Jieret had named the event as forthright murder, excused on the grounds of war and expediency. His sentence had been incontrovertible, with the prime testimony given by Arithon himself, bound Under a blood oath laced through with truth seals, and with an unwilling Dakar forced to stand horrified witness.

Still other voices had damned by omission. The Fellowship Sorcerers gave no opinion at all. Caolle, who had been second
-
in-command to his crown prince, had kept as stony a silence. Of the clan liegemen who had served in Vastmark, all returned changed; Sidir, who was closest, had wept.

When challenged by a peer Koriani on the subject of Arithon's guilt, Elaira had allowed him testy defense, saying,
'I
would ask him. Whatever his Grace of Rathain did, then or now, he will have had his own reason. I have never seen him lie for convenience. Nor have I known him to break from the sound tenets of his character.'

Mearn s'Brydion, a clan duke's brother with an uncanny, sharp mind, had said almost the very same.

Now, in Davien's Maze, at the cusp of reliving the unplumbed depths behind Arithon's core of reserve, Elaira noted his expression of chiseled dread. The trapped quality to his stillness, captured between steps, scraped her nerves to quailing unease.

Some truths perhaps were best locked away beyond even a loved one's shared sight.

The thought chafed like scaled iron, that his fear ran bone deep: she might not find the endurance to stomach the darkness he kept wrapped in obdurate privacy.

'Oh, beloved,' she cried, though he could not hear.

For of course, if he halted, Davien's wards would close down. Inaction on his part would kill her. 'Give me torture and loss, give me death,' Arithon forced out in a ragged, tight whisper: a repeat of the words he had spoken in Merior, when he had denied his love rather than author the cause of Elaira's certain destruction. He finished in fluent Paravian,
'Llaeron iel tiriannon an shar i'ffaeliend.'

'Send light, to ward off the shadows,' Elaira murmured in desolate translation.

Arithon s'Ffalenn closed his eyes. From a heartcore of tempered strength he never knew he possessed, he summoned the grace to step forward.

The scene in the
Khetienn'
s cabin resumed, launching the final sequence of tienelle auguries into full-bodied reliving: seed plan for the massacre Arithon had deployed from the rock inlet at the Havens. No thought could prepare, and no rote forgiveness withstand the visceral violence of the onslaught.

Elaira encountered, face on, a savagery without parallel. She recoiled, appalled, as the pattern unfolded for a bout of killing no spirit-born human might reconcile. Sickened through, weeping for release, she shared Dakar's pealing cry of distress.
For the explosive indulgence of cruelty was not random.
Pinned to a crux of horrendous expediency, the enchantress watched Arithon hammer down compassion, stamp back his bardic sensitivity. Over his most ruthlessly trampled sensibility, he mapped a cold course to disown every moral tenet of his character. Here, in the scalpel-cut clarity of tranced scrying, he tailored a bloodbath with nerveless intent to revolt the most battle-hardened nerves.

Stunned beyond word, wrenched outside thought, Elaira saw him design one brutal, sharp strike, to be enacted with heartless forethought. The wards of the maze permitted no secrets, but laid bare the hideous framework. Arithon engineered violence on a large enough scale to ensure no mistake, and to waive any possible grounds for ambiguity.

His premise sprang out of soul-chilling mercy: if five hundred men were cut down without quarter, the ploy might provoke the living retreat of Lysaer's remaining thirty thousand.

'Cry mercy,' Elaira murmured, her aghast litany a plea to ward off the shattering vista of final disillusionment.

Unfounded fear; upon the next step, the maze reaffirmed steadfast proof of Arithon's intact compassion.

He had not launched his course of premeditated massacre with no tested proof on the outcome. Before the influence of the tienelle faded, he embarked on his closing round of scrying to establish rigorous sureties. He sifted futures one after another, until he garnered his promised reprieve: a scene showing Lysaer broken in sorrowful distress, commanding the war host's withdrawal. And there, in exacerbating viciousness, the resharpened vision of the maze exposed an insidious, fresh twist:
the geas of Desh-thiere had not been quiescent.
Flicked to flash-point life by the brief view of Lysaer
s'Ilessid
, the curse had been wakened, its touch invisibly subtle. A masked flare of static had sheeted through Arithon's being, invidiously timed to break Dakar's guarding hold over his guilt-ridden conscience.

The spellbinder's protective wardings had snapped
by Desh
-
thiere's provocation,
with the flattening burden of self-damning remorse fallen back onto Arithon's shoulders.

Just as before, the resurgence of blindness smothered his access to mage-sight. At the edge of defeat, as his born talent failed him, the Master of Shadow saw his work irretrievably cut short before he could cross-check his result.

Nonetheless, he had not yielded tamely. Wrenched from the fast-fraying threads of his mastery, Arithon had grasped his last shred of awareness to effect a practiced unbinding. He saw Dakar freed. If his truncated augury brought a misstep in Vastmark, he could at least make sure the Fellowship spell cord that shackled the importunate prophet to his service would not tie another victim to his doomed company.

The reliving ground onward, while the maze refigured yet another excoriating thread of repercussion: before the shattered scrying went dark, a fragmented incident had been swept aside, masked under the cascade as Arithon's mage-sight subsided to blankness. The moment of faulted memory was no accident. The deep-seated influence of Desh-thiere's design had effected another intervention, hazed under blanketing spellcraft. In chilling exactitude, Kewar's spells revealed
one last, lost sequence of augury.
The scene unveiled a clandestine exchange in the field quarters of Lysaer's war host. Now dredged up intact, its contents became incontestably damning:
under tight secrecy, Lord Commander Diegan signed a writ of execution that ensured the handpicked survivors of the Havens never lived to report the atrocity to Prince Lysaer.
The Light's army had marched into Vastmark
unknowing.
Their proud companies advanced and attacked, fate
-
fully ignorant of the warning Prince Arithon had designed to dispatch them safely homeward.

'Oh, cry
mercy,'
Elaira gasped in devastated shock. Five hundred murdered spirits at the Havens had died, each one, in unforgivable futility.

The crucial flash of augury that cast doubt on the outcome had been hidden by Desh-thiere's spelled geas. An indispensable gift of uncertainty
that would have changed Arithon's subsequent choice of action. Surely, without any cursed stroke of meddling, the campaign at Vastmark would have left a less brutally damning legacy.

At what point does the strong heart fail? How many sliding falls into treachery, before the visionary mind must shudder off its set track, and seek the surcease of ungoverned madness? Hands braced to the narrowing walls of the corridor, Arithon attempted the next step. The pain slashed him, anguish sharpened tenfold. He buckled to his knees, bruised under a crushing, harsh grief that hounded him past reprieve.

Cry mercy.

His body rejected his will to arise.
'Iel dediari,'
light forgive, he could not go forward, could not face again those five hundred premeditated deaths. Not struck to cold knowing that his premise had been warped by the poison of Desh-thiere's manipulation.