Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

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 he drifted. Time and identity hung in suspension. By the depth of his isolation, Sethvir understood: the grimward was weakened, gone dangerously volatile. Should the chaos inside break through the seals, the intimate contact of his remedial stayspell would bridge a link to the seat of his being. First the life force that sustained him, then the fabric of his spirit would become unraveled, devoured by powers without mercy.

      Through the sleeting, bright rain of static came fragmented voices, the echoes of words cast like flotsam amid the seething rush of a storm tide. Sethvir grasped no meaning; could not access the earth link. Effectively blinded, the Warden of Althain pitched himself to endure until the hour Asandir of the Fellowship could reach the site of the grimward, mend the stressed rings, and relieve him.

       Winter Solstice Night 5670

      Catalysts

      At the focus circle under Methisle fortress, near the hour of solstice midnight, the discorporate Sorcerer Kharadmon stands with Verrain under shimmering nets of wards, poised to bind the last of seven critically damaged lane currents back to stability; and while the pair labor to restore the earth’s balance, the star wards against Marak, left unwatched during crisis, flare a strident, red cry of warning…

      Far southward, in the Salt Fens above Earle, the Sorcerer Asandir dismounts his blown horse by the outer ward ring that contains the endangering dreams of Eckracken’s haunt; in competent, brisk order, he takes over the burden of Sethvir’s stayspell, disperses the questing storm of iyats, then sets about the delicate task of restoring the spells that contain the forces of unbinding chaos…

      Still bedridden in trance at Althain Tower, Sethvir recovers command of the earth link; and, amid the uprush of restored awareness, he assimilates the near culmination of solstice, then an alarming new development that drives him bolt upright, as a nexus of forces converge on the lane tide about to rake south through the Skyshiels; ‘Luhaine!’ he gasps in urgent command. ‘Your service is needed at once in Rathain…!’

      Winter Solstice Night 5670

       II.

       Recoil

      Luhaine sped forth from Althain Tower, a comet tail of urgency whose southeastward course streaked to intercept the breaking disaster Sethvir foresaw in the Kingdom of Rathain. Between patches of bare trees, under the high, horsetail clouds that preceded an inbound storm front, the discorporate Sorcerer encountered the tight-knit band of horsemen who accompanied Prince Lysaer’s raced passage toward the shores of the north inlet. As unclothed spirit, the Sorcerer’s refined perception could discern the auras of the men, and sort them by Name and character. As well as the burning, oath-driven presence of Lord Commander Sulfin Evend, Luhaine recognized the avid sunwheel seer at Lysaer’s left hand as High Priest Cerebeld’s handpicked acolyte. Sethvir’s terse summary had not flinched from grim facts. Either one of those men in a muster for war promised trouble for Arithon s’Ffalenn.

      Luhaine did not intervene. Since his Fellowship adhered to the Law of the Major Balance, he was bound to honor free will. Nor was he tempted by demeaning spite, though a word to the winds of the oncoming gale could have seen that select band of riders reduced to stripped bones, rusted steel, and pack canvas flogged into tatters. Even had Luhaine held license to act, the self-serving snarl of Alliance politics must bow to more pressing concerns.

      The Sorcerer’s urgent presence arrowed on, stepped outside the constraints