Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts
a clipped stillness, his hands on the knife gone motionless.
‘More than you imagine. The Koriani Order tried to upset the compact in the course of their Prime Matriarch’s succession.’ Luhaine’s confession resumed, burred rough by weariness as his image thinned toward dissolution. ‘Their spells were contained, but Athera has suffered a magnetic imbalance without precedent. That’s why we can promise the storms will be harsh, and the spring locked in ice until close to the advent of solstice. Summer will be short. Northern crops will be stunted. Can you manage?’
‘As we must.’ Earl Jieret arose, a threading of gray shot through the bonfire russet of his clan braid. ‘Traithe once gave me the more difficult task.’ Anytime, he preferred letting blood with forged steel to the unease of high mystery and magecraft. ‘Tell my liege I will stand his royal guard at Ithamon. Say also, I’ll stake him a flask of my wife’s cherry brandy that my scouts will arrive there before him.’
‘May we meet in better times,’ Luhaine said, ashamed to give such a lame parting.
For this steadfast liegeman, who time and again had risked all for a prince most conspicuous for his absence, any tribute the Sorcerer might offer would carry a sting close to insult. Although Earl Jieret would swear that Prince Arithon’s life held the future hope for his clans, in truth, the bonding between caithdein and sovereign ran deeper than dutiful service. Prince and liegeman shared a love closer than most brothers. For Arithon, that tie had thrice granted salvation from the drive of the Mistwraith’s geas.
A fourth such reprieve seemed an omen to beckon the crone of ill fortune. Yet if Jieret Red-beard shared the same dread, his fears stayed unspoken as he wished the Sorcerer safe passage.
Luhaine left the s’Valerient chieftain to gather his weapons and muster his clan scouts for war. If the Sorcerer prayed for any one thing as he hurtled across the ice-mailed range of the Skyshiels, he asked that the price of this hour’s intervention not end in bloodshed and tragedy.
Beyond the mountains, the snow fell wind-driven, a blinding maelstrom of cyclonic fury lent force by the skewed flow of the lane tides. Firsthand, Luhaine measured the building pressures Sethvir had sensed from Althain Tower. The final crest of the solstice flux would peak inside the half hour. The pending event cast a charge through the air, a dance of compressed light past the range of sighted perception. As spirit, Luhaine traced the stressed energy as a static-flash shimmer, strung in between the whiteout snowfall that was nature’s effort to clear and bleed off the imbalance.
Sethvir had discerned the forked quandary too clearly. Relief could not come through the usual release, excess power sent to ground through stone and live trees, or the veins of ore threaded deep through the earth. Not since Arithon had used chord and sound to key his earlier transfer to Jaelot. His music had done more than channel raw lane force; its resonant ties to Paravian ritual had reopened the latitudinal channels. From the hour of first tide, at yestereve’s midnight, through the day’s dawntide, and noontide, and eventide at sundown, the land had already absorbed the burgeoning flux. Every stone and tree now rang to charged capacity. Each event cast the outflow farther afield, with the last crest at midnight still building.
Once the tide touched the quartz vein that laced through the Skyshiels, the damage inflicted by Morriel’s meddling would snarl the natural flow into recoil. Ungrounded backlash would deflect into chaos, and cause undue stress on the wards confining the Mistwraith at Rockfell. Luhaine held the task of guarding the breach. As spirit, alone, he could not hope to mend the subsequent toll of the damage. The crux of that problem brought him at last to the coast north of Jaelot, in search of the Prince of Rathain.
Scarcely hampered by the mask of dense snowfall, Luhaine drew advantage from those quirks of nature accessible to him as a wraith. He was not bound by flesh to the side of the veil subject to linear time. From his upstepped perception, he could, as he chose, view events in simultaneity. Raised to static suspension, he could map Arithon’s movements, past and present, and ahead through the multiple, hazy template of what might yet come to be. The future, as now, revealed itself as an array of free choices. Unlike true augury, each sequence branched exponentially. Images split into multiplicity, until the nexus points blurred into unformed event, and the arena of possibility thinned into an ephemeral mist too insubstantial to frame clear probability.
Though an hour had passed since Arithon drew Jaelot’s mounted guardsmen in flight from the ruined mill, Luhaine easily picked up his back trail. Guided by higher wisdom and mage-sight, the Sorcerer followed, unerring, the forking tracks where the Master of Shadow had dispatched the packhorse in careening panic. The ruse had bought distance. His pursuit had bogged down in the farmlands, their zealous chase balked by timber fences, sheepfolds, and occupied bull pens. The relentless storm cut down visibility. Gusting wind filled in a shod horse’s tracks and mounded the ditches in drifts. Men floundered and swore, forced to bang upon cottars’ doors to recover their sense of direction.
Granted a hard-won few minutes’ reprieve, Arithon happened into a pasture of hacks. He briefly dismounted to open the gate. Back in the saddle, he used the shrill whistle for fiend bane to set the freed herd to a gallop. The hazed animals melded their fleeing prints with those of his winded gelding. That ploy bought him a widening lead, until the loose livestock encountered a stud plowhorse, and the stallion’s neighed challenge alerted the countryside.
The fist-shaking farmer who unleashed his mastiffs found his dogs in a thicket, snarling over the shreds of a discarded jacket. Whipped off, and urged into a wind that froze scent, the brutes were lackluster trackers. When they gave tongue at last, their master was deterred by a shadow-wrought form that convinced him the fugitive had stolen refuge within the stone walls of his icehouse.
While guardsmen converged on the farmer’s hue and cry, and the dogs whined and circled over the ground trampled up by the destriers, Arithon nursed his winded gelding out of sight over the next hillcrest. He could do very little to offset the bloodstains splashed by the cornrick where he had stolen a short breather for his horse. Koriathain would assuredly seize on that slip and flag the site on their next scrying. Night and storm masked his form from the notice of men, a double-edged kindness, as the bitter chill flayed to the skin.
Luhaine ached as the immediate past converged with a desperate present. He came up from behind with no sound at all, while Jaelot’s sought quarry yanked off the shreds of his glove with his teeth. Arithon fumbled open the saddlebag, fished inside, and located Dakar’s spare cloak. Shivering in sodden doublet and shirtsleeves, he whispered a snatched phrase of relief as he pulled on the garment’s stained folds. The wound inflicted by Fionn Areth’s sword left his right hand useless. He had no chance to arrange makeshift bandaging. His awkward efforts to pin Dakar’s garment plundered the last of his lead.
Jaelot’s lancers bore in, hot set in pursuit.
Nerve strung and desperate, Arithon spun. Overtaken on a blown horse, he prepared to recut the darkness into nightmare shapes of illusion. His strength was long spent, to bear weapons or sword. Exposed without cover, his birth gift of shadow became his last hope of evasion.
The manifest image of Luhaine unfurled and utterly caught him aback. He sucked a hissed breath, defenses half-woven before recognition woke reason.
‘Dharkaron avert!’ Rathain’s prince dropped his veiling of shadow with a wrenching, breathless start. ‘Luhaine! Daelion forfend, I thought you were Koriathain, come to claim vengeance and gloat.’ Through the oncoming pound of his mounted pursuit, he added, ‘Are you here to help doubleblind witches or horsemen? I need to know very quickly.’
‘Be at peace.’ Luhaine loosed a swift binding to hide the scatter of bloodstains from scryers. While the snowfall laced through him, scribing gaps like flung static, he added, ‘The Koriani plot’s broken, and the guardsmen will pass and see nothing.’ A small permission of air, a rearrangement of wind, and the pernicious cold bit less deeply. ‘Bide here a few minutes. The packhorse is freed, and will find you. No guardsman’s had time to pilfer for spoils. You’ll recover your bow and provisions.’
Arithon propped his lamed hand on the gelding’s damp crest, eyes closed as he absorbed