Peril's Gate

As though spurred by suggestion, a flicker of sight framed the fortress at Methisle, where tumbledown walls no longer contained the migrationof 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.