Free TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate by Janny Wurts Page A

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