Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ the sake of your crimes against our fair city of Jaelot, your spirit shall be delivered by sword and by fire to your rightful hour of death…

      – Mayor of Jaelot, decree of execution

      Third Age Year 5669

      The storm settled over the Eltair coast just after the advent of nightfall. Like the worst winter gales, it stole in on cat feet. The fitful, fine sleet dusting over sere landscape changed on a breath into muffling snow as the temperature plunged below freezing. The moment caught Arithon s’Ffalenn, last living Prince of Rathain and birth-born Master of Shadow, crouched in the iced brush of a hedgerow.

      Each labored breath burned his lungs like cold fire. His sprint was cut short, though the city of Jaelot’s stone walls lay scarcely a bowshot behind him. A skulking fugitive hard-pressed by enemies who hunted by sword and by spellcraft, he shot a concerned glance sidewards as Fionn Areth folded, gasping, beside him. The young man had spent the dregs of his strength.

      Even the threat of relentless pursuit could not stave off stark necessity: the goatherd just snatched from death on the scaffold could run no farther without pause for recovery.

      ‘Rest,’ whispered Arithon, as winded himself. ‘For a moment. No more.’

      Fionn Areth’s clipped nod showed resentment, not gratitude.

      Yet no moment could be spared to treat with the young man’s inimically misguided loyalties. Enemies hounded their backs without respite. Koriani seeresses would be tracking with spelled snares. If the mayor’s armed guardsmen from Jaelot prevailed first, the pair would be slaughtered on the run.

      ‘They’ll find us.’ Fionn Areth cast a harrowed glance over his shoulder. His chilled hand tightened on his sword grip as he noticed the patrol sweeping the high crenels of the battlements. The flutter of their pine brands speared rays of light through the thickening snowfall. Arithon measured their movement, intent. The alarm bells stayed mute. No outcry arose from the gatehouse. Careful to mask his own tension, he said, ‘Bide easy. The mayor’s guards can’t know we’ve slipped through the walls unless the Koriathain decide to inform them.’

      Nor would the senior enchantress, Lirenda, be anxious to disseminate word of her failure. Since her towering arrogance had granted her quarry the opening to escape, she would be loath to approach her male allies. Once again, her order had bungled their promise to entrap the Master of Shadow.

      Left raw by the price he had paid to win back his threatened autonomy, Arithon closed with dry irony, ‘From stung pride, I expect the witches will try to recoup their blunder in secret. That’s to our advantage. Thick snowfall should foil their scryers and hide us, at least for a little while.’

      Fionn Areth returned a poisonous glower from a face that, feature for feature, was a mirror image of the Shadow Master’s. Having narrowly missed execution and burning for the crimes of his look-alike nemesis, he still suffered the morning’s shock of discovery, that his appearance had been fashioned by the meddling design of Koriani spellcraft. The cruel fact chafed, that he had been used as unwitting, live bait in their conspiracy to ensnare the unprincipled killer beside him.

      The betrayal stung yet. ‘Never mind witches,’ he gasped in spat venom to the Spinner of Darkness. ‘The Alliance won’t rest until you’ve been dismembered and burned to serve justice.’

      Expressionless, Arithon refused answer. He was no less enraged at being made the political pawn in the feud that pitched the enchantresses against the authority of the Fellowship Sorcerers. Since bare-bones survival perforce must come first, he took ruthless stock of bad circumstance.

      While night settled like impenetrable felt over the Eltair Bay coastline, he wrested the lay of the land from his reluctant memory. Northward, past the black spur of Jaelot’s walled headland, small farmsteads patched the land like paned glass. The occupants were suspicious and ill set toward strangers, the ancient codes of hospitality long lost since the rising that threw down the high kings. Nor did the countryside offer safe prospects. Tangled cedar windbreaks and hedgerows of red thorn squared the rough, fallow fields. Two vagrants in flight from the mayor’s justice dared not ply the lanes, with their drystone walls high enough to entrap, and their rutted mazes of crossroads. To the east, the salt waves of Eltair Bay thrashed a raked stretch of shingle, and a wind-razed, shelterless marshland. To the west rose the forbidding stone ramparts of the Skyshiels, sliced by ravines of weather-scabbed rock, and mantled in glaze ice and fir.

      Fitful gusts already stirred the stilled air, first warning whisper of the bass-note howl yet to build to an oncoming gale. Arithon tucked frozen hands under his cloak. He held no illusions. The snowfall that helpfully covered their tracks, and disrupted the Koriani scryers carried a double-edged threat. The night ahead would bring lethal cold, and blinding, bewildering drifts. Inadequately clothed to withstand hostile elements, he and the victimized herder he had rescued could easily die from exposure.

      For the storm that drove in had not arisen out of natural forces. Arithon sensed its song deep in his bones. The subliminal, whining vibration of dropped pressure came exacerbated by the imbalance wrought by disturbed magnetics. Earlier, Dakar the Mad Prophet had served him hard warning: the Fellowship Sorcerers were themselves caught in crisis, distracted by some larger upset. The illicit magics Dakar had engaged to unravel the Koriani defenses in Jaelot had assuredly added more stress to the roiled currents of lane flux. With the surge of winter solstice cresting at midnight, Arithon lacked accurate means to measure the backlash that might follow. As he chewed over that burden of worry, Fionn Areth stirred in the darkness.

      Warned by a muffled, metallic ring, Arithon spun. He clamped the boy’s wrist in a strangling grip and arrested the sword halfway pulled from the scabbard. ‘Eighth hell of Sithaer, are you insane?’

      ‘I should kill you here!’ Fionn Areth gasped through locked teeth. ‘There are widows across the five kingdoms who’d thank me.’

      ‘They might,’ Arithon agreed, his annoyance turned acid. ‘But a blade in my back won’t see you safe. The opposite in fact. My blood in the snow would act as a beacon for Koriani scryers. If you think you can manage to evade their spelled snares, Dakar has the food and the horses we’ll need. You aren’t going to find him without my guidance. Better to salve your fool’s craving for justice after we’ve scrambled to safety.’

      Fionn Areth’s murderous resistance failed to slacken under restraint. Darker truth eclipsed reason. He knew this creature who entreated in pressed self-defense was unnatural, an unprincipled sorcerer whose guileful strategies had slaughtered three dedicated war hosts. Across the continent, men flocked to Lysaer’s sunwheel standard and pledged to the Light to destroy him.

      ‘Then swear me your bond,’ Fionn Areth insisted. ‘As Prince of Rathain, prove you meant what you said when you offered me trial by combat.’

      ‘Very well. Accept my given word. We’ll cross swords at the first opportunity, but after we’ve slipped our pursuit.’ Solemnity spoiled by a stressed thread of laughter, Arithon provoked with glib melodrama, ‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear strike me dead should I fail you, though the point will likely prove moot. Koriathain and Jaelot’s guards would end Rathain’s royal line with no help from Ath’s angel of vengeance.’

      Fionn Areth found his sword arm released, though his volatile temper stayed unsettled. Ice showered down in cracked shards from the branches as Arithon ducked free of the hedgerow. All animal grace and dangerous focus, he cast no glance backward to ascertain whether his oath was accepted. On the insufferable assumption his young double must follow, he pursued his route across country. Brisk progress was sustained in swift СКАЧАТЬ