Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
in my aura. Since no tendons were cut, let’s not give Lirenda’s pack of scryers the free gift of a beacon to track me.’
He looked up, doubtless warned by Luhaine’s tacit stillness. ‘What’s wrong? Dakar told me he’d had a vision that Morriel Prime had stepped outside of her body. He presumed she’d passed the Wheel. Has she left a death curse? Did she somehow strike out in malice and upset your stewardship of the compact?’
‘Not yet,’ Luhaine assured, relieved that the core of his business stayed obscured from the nuance of mage-schooled perception. ‘Though you should be cautioned. The Prime Matriarch broke all law and precedent to arrange the transfer of power upon her succession. She caused a large-scale upset to Athera’s magnetic lanes, a distraction made for the unprecedented purpose of claiming a young initiate in possession.’
‘She’s succeeded? Ath’s mercy!’ Arithon measured Luhaine’s reserve, black hair torn loose by the wind flicking the drawn line of his cheekbone. To the Sorcerer’s refined vision, he seemed a figure spun out of Falgaire glass. More than the shock of physical exhaustion set his faculties under siege. His fresh separation from Elaira told deepest, left him heartsore and emotionally naked. Too bone weary, this once, to question just why he might be directed to seek shelter at Ithamon, he cast his net of logic too close and fixed on the problem nearest to hand. ‘Of course, if the Prime Matriarch’s abandoned all principle, then Dakar’s protection must guard Fionn Areth.’
Luhaine in hard wisdom chose not to expose the conclusion as fallacy. The s’Ffalenn prince faced a journey of terrible hardship to reach his fast refuge at Ithamon. Let him keep the false gift of his peace of mind and ride without fear that the wards over Rockfell were compromised.
‘I seek Dakar next with a list of instructions. Meanwhile, time is short. Align your flight with the crest of the midnight lane tide. The tonic effects of its passage should carry you into the foothills.’ The image of the Sorcerer’s presence flicked out. Behind him, he left the unmarked fall of the snow, and last words, whirled in the wake of precipitous departure. ‘The flux will do much to offset your exhaustion. Ath go with you, Teir’s’Ffalenn. Know the seals I have set on your two horses will bolster their stamina through the night.’
Six leagues to the southeast, Fionn Areth regained awareness, wrapped in a net of blazing pain. Too fuddled to groan, he felt as if his skull sloshed with acid and stewed all his brains into jelly. His body seemed just as abusively compromised. Jackknifed, facedown, and seized by sick vertigo, he attempted to stir. Wrists and ankles, his limbs had been snugly tied. Through scattered senses, he assembled the jangled impression that he lay tossed like a meal sack over a moving horse.
His gasped protest drew no response.
The horse kept on walking. The disjointed view through its scissoring legs showed blank snow lapped against wind-torn darkness. Through a brief, sweaty struggle, Fionn Areth raised his head. That effort bought him a lashing sting, as gouged brush slapped across his bare face. Somewhere beyond view, two voices engaged in unhurried conversation, one speaker a polished, resonant baritone whose accents belonged to a stranger.
‘The marker you seek lies fifty paces hence. Veer just a bit to your right.’
‘Thank you,’ the Mad Prophet said, testy as his toe snagged on a tree root and wrenched him into a stumble. The gelding flipped its nose as the lead rein jerked taut. Fionn Areth almost missed the next line, jostled to the beast’s broken stride. ‘I’d be pleased if you’d tell me what caused the delay, since I sent asking help several hours ago.’
A fir branch slashed back, dousing snow down the herder’s nape. His yelp raised no sympathy. The unseen arrival, in flowery prose, gave answer to Dakar’s question. ‘Morriel Prime has stirred trouble beyond everyone’s worst expectation. Her meddling hurled all seven lanes on the continent into magnetic imbalance. Sethvir’s earth-sense was compromised. If you called, very likely he failed to hear. Worse, I’ve not come to help, but to ask your willing support on a problem of grievous import.’
‘You think I don’t have enough on my hands?’ Dakar urged the burdened horse up a rise, snagged aback by its fellow, who had sidled wrong side around a fixed tree trunk. That difficulty resolved through a tug and ripe language, the Mad Prophet resumed in the same vein of bother. ‘This yokel herder is rescued from death, and what does he do? He bites the same hand that dragged his arse clear of the fire!’
Another piled branch unburdened its load over Fionn Areth’s strapped torso. His howl startled the horse underneath him to a jig that pummeled the pit of his stomach.
‘Oh, do stop your moaning, boy!’ Dakar bit back. His snap on the lead rein hauled the beast up short. It balked, then resumed its belabored pace through the deepening snowdrifts. ‘Given the fiends plaguing trouble you’ve caused, you’re damned lucky to find the breath of life still in your body. If your prince hadn’t spoken, I would have gifted the fish with a millstone tied to your ankles.’
‘I never asked to be saved by a criminal,’ Fionn Areth ground out.
The horse underneath him stopped as if jerked. Chill steel kissed his skin. The rag ties that secured him abruptly parted, and someone’s brutal, intolerant push spilled him head over heels in a drift.
Fionn Areth plowed upright, coughing up snowflakes. The gift of erect posture provided no boon. A cloaked, portly figure observed without pity as his bashed head spun him dizzy with pain. The ignominy sparked thoughtless temper. Fionn Areth surged to his feet with bunched fists. His bandaged right shoulder hampered his swing. He lashed out, regardless, driven wild by injured pride and confusion. His blow whisked through air. Though the body he swung at seemed rotund as Dakar’s, endowed with the same rooted obstinacy, his left-handed counterpunch passed straight through. He connected with nothing but an aching, dire cold that made his bones sting like struck glass.
‘Do you know,’ said the Sorcerer, Luhaine, offended, ‘just how high the price of your rescue might come to be worth?’
‘Should I care?’ Shivering, Fionn Areth glared back. The apparition was a sorcerer. Nothing alive could mistake such a presence. The spirit regarding the herder in return was not patient, his stature restrained to a self-contained power that would stand down bared steel on a glance. Hackled by his own reckless fear, Fionn Areth lifted his chin. ‘If I was a Koriani pawn before this, what am I now, but a plaything held captive by the fell forces of darkness?’
‘You are much less than that,’ Luhaine pronounced in frigid correction. ‘Just how much less, I hope by Ath’s mercy your family never finds out. The Crown Prince of Rathain might well die for his choice to indulge your adolescent ingratitude. If he does, this world could lose sunlight again without any chance of reprieve.’
That statement snapped Dakar’s complacency. ‘Not Rockfell!’ He shoved off the gelding that butted his chest, ice melt and snowflakes snagged in his beard, and his anxiety suddenly piercing. ‘Luhaine, don’t say the wardspells holding the Mistwraith have somehow been thrown into jeopardy.’
‘The very truth.’ Image though he was, Luhaine shared the gravity of the old, leaning marker stone crusted with lichens at his back. ‘When the lane tide crests barely minutes from now, the recoil set loose by Morriel’s upset will dissolve Rockfell’s outer defense rings. I must be well away before then. No one else could be spared to stand guard when the wards in the shaft go unstable.’
‘No one?’ Cracked to shrill disbelief, Dakar tugged his cloak off a thorn. ‘Where’s Asandir?’ Rocked by the scope of unsaid implication, he advanced on the Sorcerer who faced him. ‘Ath, your field strength is compromised. That’s why you need me?’
‘To travel to Rockfell with all speed, yes,’ Luhaine admitted. His focus upon Dakar stayed too acute to spare second thought for Fionn Areth. ‘You do understand.’
Dakar shook his head, bludgeoned to blunt terror. ‘How I wish that I didn’t.’ He stamped his feet, fumbled the lead reins, and regarded the horses’ trusting stance as though their