Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 gallop to mend leached at Sethvir’s consciousness, a burning imbalance that frayed through ordered thought with the tenacity of flung acid.

      Until Asandir arrived at the site and effected full-scale intervention, the tenuous grip of the Warden’s stretched resources became all that stemmed those pent powers of chaos. He had held the line firm since the deranged lane force had snarled in backlash. The stopgap spells maintained at long distance throbbed to Sethvir’s heartbeat, draining his core reserves of vitality. Each minute, passing, bled more strength from him. His competent grasp on his earth-sense ebbed, while the unchecked spate of images plunged his cognizant vision into frenetic disorder.

      The Warden of Althain could scarcely harness the flow. His consciousness rode the slipstream of impressions like a leaf unmoored in a gale. All his last strength was engrossed in the ties, faint but ever-present, that cast lines of spelled force like webs of wrought light across the flawed seals of not one, but six additional grimwards. Eleven others he watched, wary, alert for the first, crumbling trace of attrition. The stakes were unforgiving if his vigil should fail. Just one broached grimward would upend the world’s order. The wild resonance of drake-dream would unleash tangling chaos and unravel the ties that bound matter.

      Asandir could claim neither rest nor respite until he had tested and repaired the seals binding each grimward under Fellowship guardianship.

      Another flaw in the rings holding Eckracken’s haunt spat a leaked burst of static. Sethvir sensed the discharge as a pinprick of pain snagged through the whole cloth of awareness. Sensation flowered at once into vision, of a sere, winter bog, windswept under the clouded night sky. Something more than mere wind ruffled through the dry banks of the reedbeds. Sethvir knew dismay. His earth-sense scanned those contrary riffles and detected a small swarm of iyats, energy sprites native to Athera that fed upon elemental energies. To mage-sight, the creatures appeared as a mad gyre of sparks, winnowed and whirled by the insatiable hungers that drove them. They normally fed on the natural forces found in falling water, tides, and the changing dynamics of weather. Yet the tuned spirals of refined spellcraft offered more powerful fare, and inevitably lured them like magnets. Their voracious appetites were already piqued by the interference signature of the ward forces, wobbling on the brink of release. If the iyats reached the site of the grimward ahead of Asandir, they would cluster and sate themselves on the emissions let off by the lane-damaged ward rings. Like a yanked loop of knit, their feeding frenzy would unravel firm barriers into a draining breach.

      Sethvir measured the drumming pound of the black stallion’s hooves. He found himself faced with immutable fact: his colleague’s intervention from the field would not come in time to deflect the inbound swarm of fiends. Despite sharp awareness of his prostrate state, and the frail balance of overtaxed faculties, the Sorcerer saw no choice. No other could act. He was Althain’s Warden, and bound by his office to serve the Fellowship’s founding purpose.

      He slipped into deep trance. Oblivious to Luhaine’s cry of alarm, Sethvir drew core power that he could ill spare from his already beleaguered life force. He delved into the spinning fields that bound light into matter and rewove their delicate axis into drawn cords of intent. His construct took form outside time and space, an alignment braided from will and desperate awareness. With exacting care, he paired force with counterforce, framing an intricate baffle to match the high-frequency energies leaking from the distressed grimward. Mask the source of emission, and fall back on hope that the fiend swarm would lose impetus and dissipate.

      Sethvir readied his stayspell, a starburst of light whose resonant frequencies precisely canceled the signature of the grimward’s skewed seal. He tapped into his earth-sense, interlinked with its tapestry, then aligned his remedial ciphers overtop of the flaw in the ward ring. The Paravian prime rune closed the contact. The grand veil of the mysteries parted, and the wrought energies of Sethvir’s spell assumed anchored form in the world of Athera.

      Even in trance, Althain’s Warden sensed the moment of impact.

      His flesh felt bathed in a fissure of lava. That raging, bright firestorm seared through muscle and bone, as though living tissue rejected its ties to firm substance. Each nerve lit and blazed to a white incandescence that promised to burn for eternity. His mind, in stark contrast, was locked in cold, a chill that stopped thought and half smothered him.

      There СКАЧАТЬ