Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts
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no, he’s not sleeping, but drawn inward.’ The gusty, lecturing tone was Luhaine’s, the discorporate colleague first to arrive when disaster broke the past evening. ‘His sighted vision made him the only one of our Fellowship with the resource at hand to map the full scope of the damage on the hour the lanes went unstable.’
Again, Luhaine qualified with a stone’s endless patience. ‘Yes, the lanes are retuned, now, except for the sixth, which sustains a remedial spell to guide it back to alignment. Since that stay should suffice, Sethvir’s engaged elsewhere. He’s bridging the seals that keep critical wards from unraveling…’
As though spurred by suggestion, a flicker of sight framed the fortress at Methisle, where tumbledown walls no longer contained the migration of venomous creatures unsettled by shifting magnetics. Through snatched views of roiled waters, and the rustle of disturbed reeds, Luhaine’s measured phrases resumed…
‘His earth-sense is undamaged, but wielded without his full cognizance. What you ask is not possible. No other among us can track the threads of meaning and significance.’ On a whiplash note of testy frustration, the Sorcerer responded to someone else present, ‘Yes, in hard truth, the facts are discouraging. No. Please don’t try. The Warden can’t speak. His powers are spent past wise limits. The most accomplished adept in your Brotherhood could not grasp the scope of the problems he’s stemming from minute to minute. Make no mistake! To disturb him at all could cast all of this world to disaster.’
Someone proffered a gentler reply, phrasing drowned under another cascade of disturbingly fragmented imagery. Sethvir and the rest of the Fellowship understood, the lynchpin of the world yet rested on the life of the last Teir’s’Ffalenn.
Nor was that spirit safe, but driven to harried flight cross-country, with an armed pack of guards at his heels. Sethvir’s vision splintered through the branchings of parallel event. He saw Jaelot’s mayor ranting in targetless anger for the fact that the Shadow Master had slipped through his cordon. Then, in tied linkage, another view arose from north Tysan, of an ominous, damp stain that blackened the frost-silvered grasses where a stone basin had been recently emptied…
A chill swept Sethvir, even through trance, for the tangle of energies left in dissonant imprint bespoke traces of unclean acts. In the free wilds of Camris, his sight showed him spilled water, paned over with crystalline ice and the sick, phosphor haze of spent blood magic…
The extreme sensitivity of Sethvir’s earth-sense traced down that wisped remnant of energy.
‘Lysaer,’ he gasped in a tortured whisper. Unbidden vision expanded the connection. He beheld the fair coloring and chisel-cut face of the s’Ilessid prince. But the clean symmetry of Lysaer’s features appeared subtly recast, hardened to the blind fervor of the Mistwraith’s curse, which drove his headlong quest to destroy his half brother, Arithon.
‘… without doubt,’ Luhaine was saying in reassurance. ‘The s’Ilessid is still in Camris. From there, he can scarcely pose a direct threat to his half brother on the east coast of Rathain.’
But that balance would change. Sethvir’s earth-sense bore witness. Cloaked under darkness, Lysaer s’Ilessid mounted a cream charger. His urgent, clipped speech exhorted an elite party of officers to ride eastward during the night.
The man named Divine Prince by Tysan’s misled masses planned to cross the Camris plain to the coast, then make rendezvous with a fast galley. Once over the narrow inlet to Atainia, he would rejoin the road to Instrell Bay and board a trader bound for Rathain as early as the next fortnight.
‘We are called to serve!’ Arms raised in impassioned appeal, the Prince of the Light addressed his veteran officers. ‘I have received visions! Evil moves abroad as we speak! The Spinner of Darkness has returned to the continent. In Jaelot, innocent people have already suffered and died, victimized by his sorceries. I am charged by the Light to stand in defense. Ride with me! Lend your swords to bring down this minion of darkness, and be blessed in name for all time!’
‘The Prince of the Light goes to muster his eastern allies,’ Sethvir gasped, the words blurred into his caught breath, too faint to be understood. Against a blazing maelstrom of imagery foretelling blood and disaster, he cried tortured warning against the haze of raised voices around him. ‘Master of Shadow… endangered…’
‘Hush! Listen, the Warden speaks!’ Cloth rustled nearby. The drafts sang of indistinct movement.
Sethvir wrestled the crazy quilt cataract of images that battered his mind beyond reason. ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid knows…’ He rammed his thoughts stable, framed intent like stamped crystal, and at last, transferred the gist of his desperate message.
While Sethvir sank back, Luhaine’s staid presence assumed the task of explaining. ‘Yes, we have news, an ill turn for the worse. The Mistwraith’s curse does not rest while we’re burdened. Lysaer s’Ilessid has discovered his s’Ffalenn half brother has dared to return to the continent. He’ll muster for war on false grounds and religion. Yes, winter blizzards will slow him. But the pack of fanatics who have cast him as savior have resorted to unclean practice and dark augury. Word of the Shadow Master’s presence will be sent on ahead. Sethvir foresees armed troops assembled in Darkling. Etarra has mustered for years against this hour. The field commander there will set seasoned troops on the march, well prepared for rough country and cold weather. They may not move fast, but they’ll be relentless once they know Arithon’s position. Until the s’Ffalenn prince escapes back to sea, his life is going to stay vulnerable.’
A second voice questioned; Luhaine settled into exhaustive lecturing, but Sethvir lost the thread as his cognizance faded back into the tangling resurgence of imagery…
In the wooded foothills of Tornir Peaks, an escaped pack of Khadrim flew on bat-leather wings, keening their shrill song of bloodlust. They circled a trade caravan bound for Karfael, stooped in attack, and shredded the drover’s campsite. Armed guards died in flames. The screams of ripped horses and disemboweled men blended into the predators’ whistles of quavering dissonance.
Sethvir sensed the bleak pain of the dying. Beyond sorrow, he curbed his flash-point anger that the clean-cut, new wards Asandir had just raised to hold the renegade packs in confinement had been utterly destroyed in the cascading flux of the lane imbalance. Morriel Prime had succeeded too well; the Fellowship was caught too desperately shorthanded to dispatch trained help to intervene.
A second scene flowered: this one farther south, couched amid the ocher-brick towers of Lysaer’s restored capital of Avenor. There, the subtle, secretive man appointed as High Priest of the Light sat awake and brooding by candlelight. In black jealousy, he pondered the name bandied in taprooms and wineshops across the city. In place of Lysaer, Divine Prince, the land’s folk praised young Prince Kevor, whose bravery at the untried age of fourteen had quelled last night’s pending riots. Fell portents had sheared across the clear sky, an ominous harbinger of evil to come at the hand of the Master of Shadow. Yet Avenor’s unnerved people did not hail the Light, but instead drew their heart from the mortal courage displayed by the young heir apparent…
Sethvir had no chance to pursue the implications sprung from that startling twist. The unformed premonition of danger dispersed like blown smoke as his view of the high priest’s sanctum whirled away. Shifted sight showed a herd of dun deer, startled from grazing the ice-rimmed hummocks of the Salt Fens due north of Earle. The does turned raised heads, while a foam-flecked black stud thundered by, its rider charged to spell-driven haste. Upon his broad shoulders, the most perilous threat unleashed by the old Prime’s plotting…
The Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, raced toward the grimward which confined the unquiet dreams of the ghost of the king drake, Eckracken. The torn guard spells he spurred at a