Читать книгу Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 26

Morning broke over the Eltair coast, savaged in the black teeth of yet another onshore gale. This pelting storm struck days after the Koriani enchantress, Elaira, took her courage in hand and set forth to seek sanctuary with Ath’s adepts. By then, Arithon s’Ffalenn sheltered in the ramshackle cabin of a fur trader who set traplines in the remote Skyshiel uplands. His host was a solitary, half-breed clansman who had pulled him, unconscious, from a snowdrift.

On the subject of harboring dangerous fugitives, the huge man proved cross-grained as pig iron. ‘Won’t see a man needy, and not take him in. You want to march out and die of the elements? Then say so. I’ll show you a knife-edged cliff to fall off that’ll save needless bother and suffering.’

Two armed parties from Jaelot broached his glen. Their harrying, rude search of his humble dwelling did not change his adamant generosity. He hunted as usual, leaving Arithon the tools and new planks to repair the smashed wood of his doorjamb. The traplines replenished his ransacked larder. His rice and his millet he stored elsewhere to foil rats, and the only living creatures he refused to show welcome had hooves and smelled like horse.

The tough gelding and two extra mounts claimed as spoils from pursuers sent to grief in the Baiyen were turned loose to graze in the deep valleys. From the hour that Arithon regained the strength to stand upright, they were thrown fodder and grain from the store left by Jaelot’s decimated supply train. Today’s whiteout blizzard just made that necessity harder to carry out.

The valley cleft where the herd of three sheltered was silted chest deep in fine snow. The horses huddled, tail to wind, in a fir copse, visible only if a man knew where to seek them. Arithon doled out their daily ration and chipped the balled ice from their hooves. Then he faced back the way he had come, barraged by the hags’ chorus of weather. He was well clad against the assault, given leggings sewn from second-rate pelts and a hooded bear coat from the trapper. Underneath, he still wore his own fine tunic and hose, torn and repaired many times, but still prized, since silk retained the warmth under furs in peerless comfort. He carried a bow, and tinder, and sharp steel, small precautions that counted in a Skyshiel gale, when cloud and relentless snowfall mantled the high peaks, and strength and experience lent no guarantee in the brute fight to maintain survival.

Arithon plowed through a drift, the track he had broken scarcely minutes before already erased by the screaming wind. Through the worst gusts, he paused, blind and deafened. The most trail-wise of men could lose his bearings amid such extreme conditions. A wrong turn could drop him over a precipice, or send him sliding down the cleft of a ravine. Nor did he care to stumble headlong into an armed party of guardsmen.

Ruled by raw nerves and wary care, he slipped under the heaped boughs of a fir copse. Snow funneled in hissing currents around boles scoured clean of summer moss. The high-country weather spared nothing living; browsing deer had pruned the low-hanging branches, and the lichens that clawed out a lee-side existence wore hoarfrost feathers of ice. Here, deadfalls might lurk under covering snow, the stubbed ends of snapped limbs poised like spikes to pierce through a boiled-hide boot sole, or twist an ankle on an incautious step. Arithon carried a staff for safe footing, and a hand compass in a bronze case.

A gust moaned and built to a shrieking crest. Arithon sheltered his face in his hood through a flaying barrage of sheared ice. He poised while the storm’s ferocity relented, as acutely aware as wild prey that the eye of the hunter would be drawn to movement. Sound reached him, instead, the chiming ring of clashed steel, broken by distant shouts. Then he caught the taint of smoke, borne down the length of the valley.

‘Merciful Ath!’ Arithon burst into a flat run, not back toward the horses, but ahead, in a sliding, tree-dodging charge that led toward the fur trapper’s cabin.

He could make no speed. The deep drifts and precarious, iced footing combined with blinding snowfall to slow him. The healing scar on his wrist bound free movement as he cast off his staff and clawed the strung bow from his shoulder. More clumsy, the right hand: the canker left by Fionn Areth’s sword thrust still oozed and bled through its tightly strapped dressing. Despite tendons that throbbed in fiery pain, and the swelling of traumatized tissues, Arithon groped for an arrow.

The tang of smoke thickened. Then the baritone voice he knew as the trapper’s climbed into a shredding scream. Arithon plowed ahead, fatally slowed by the uncertain ice of a streamlet. Too late, he knew as the cry shifted pitch. However he sprinted, three hundred yards and a dense copse of fir still separated him from the clearing. He drove himself onward, a punishing effort marked by searing breaths of chill air. Once inside the trees, the low branches hampered him. He fretted, inwardly cursing the care he must take to avoid the whipcrack report of snapped sticks. Each delay cost dearly. Smoke now rolled uphill in charcoal billows, acrid with the resins of burned pine logs. Men called and laughed, and a jangle of bit rings chimed through the covering forest.

Arithon worked his way downward in sangfroid awareness that even one rolling snow clod would serve warning and set Jaelot’s reivers upon him. The crackle of flame and a fanned gust of heat told him the cabin was burning beyond salvage. Past the trees, a horse snorted. An officer shouted a command, then wheeled his mount and trotted across the clearing. Through the snow-draped fringe of the firs, Arithon saw flurried movement as six more riders clambered astride and bunched back into ragged formation.

‘Make that wretch sing like a lark as he dies!’ someone called. The small column wheeled and moved on down the draw.

Arithon used the masking noise of their departure to close the last steps to the edge of the fir copse. Knelt down behind a thin screening of branches, he took stock.

The one-room log shack was a mass of gold flame, the roof timbers a sagging scrim of smudged embers. Amid trampled snow, splashed scarlet and pink, two men knelt over another, stretched prone. One pinned the trapper’s roped wrists in restraint. The other set to with bare hands and a gore-drenched long knife, to a grunting jerk of agony from the victim. A third man stood guard, thumbs jammed in his sword belt.

‘Where is he?’ questioned the tormentor, his wet fist and blade on a questing course over bloodied, quivering flesh. ‘Tell us, and your agony can be ended at once.’

‘I trap animals, not princes,’ came the ragged reply. ‘I don’t know any royalty.’

‘Pity, then,’ said the knifeman, unaware of the eyes that watched from the wood, or the hand which nocked patient arrow to bowstring and released in the lull between gusts.

Arithon’s shaft took the standing guard through the throat. The man clawed once, coughing blood, then toppled.

‘Bowman!’ The brute wielding the knife jerked erect, then dived flat, unsure where in the trees the attacker lurked in ambush.

His companion was a half second slow to react. The next arrow ripped through his abdomen. He sprawled, screaming, over the legs of the trapper, who jackknifed and kicked out. A brutal strike with a hobnailed boot smashed the gut-shot man in the skull.

Arithon nocked a third shaft, but spoiled the release as the bowstring ripped from his lamed fingers. Before he could draw again, the wind blew a veil of snow over the clearing. The knifeman snatched his moment, and charged. His scrambling plunge into the fir thicket was met by the black steel of Alithiel, wielded with left-handed, lethal precision in a thrust through the solar plexus.

‘Damn you to the joys of Dharkaron’s Black Chariot!’ Arithon set his foot on the twitching corpse, yanked his streaming blade free, and ended the man’s ugly, whistling shrieks with a mangling slash through the throat.

Bow and sword still in hand, he thrashed out of the tree line and slid to his knees in the rucked snow next to the trapper. ‘They’re dead. Be still.’ He raised his blade, cut the black-and-gold surcoat off the guard’s corpse, and used Jaelot’s lion to stanch the flow of the bone-deep gash in the thigh of the man who had given him shelter.

‘Say I won’t lose my leg, and that you’re not royal,’ the wounded man gasped through locked teeth.

‘You won’t lose the leg,’ the Shadow Master assured, then cursed the unhealed scabs that marred his accustomed dexterity.

An interval passed, while the wind screamed and buffeted. Arithon packed a compress of snow over the knifeman’s unspeakable handiwork. The injured man shivered and moaned at his touch, unstrung by shock and suffering. ‘Just say you’re not royal!’ he hissed through blind agony.

Arithon stayed silent, but in relentless efficiency bundled him into another dead enemy’s mantle. The trapper stared upward into a face of black hair and green eyes set in steep, angled features. ‘If so, damn you, man! You should never have come back. Your vengeful spree of slaughter can’t help but draw notice.’

Arithon laughed with an edge like smashed crystal. ‘Ath, I hope so!’ His tone more chill than the storm’s, he added, ‘By my name and ancestry, may I never condone such an act of extortion and cruelty!’

In anguish, again, ‘Say you’re not s’Ffalenn born!’

Arithon paused, rinsed in gold light by the flames, now chewed through the cabin’s four walls. He evaded, ‘There’s truth to the claim I’m a bastard.’

‘Go, get out.’ The huge trapper cried out at the delicate probe of the fingers that explored his gashed abdomen. ‘I’m a dead man. As a healer who’s seen wounds, you know this.’

Arithon shook his head, tied the stripped cuff lace and torn shirt into another snow compress.

Between dizzy bouts of pain the trapper gasped argument. ‘Those vultures from Jaelot are witched men, I swear, with your Grace bound as someone’s prized quarry. It’s unnatural. As many times as my cabin’s been searched, they come back. They’re out in a gale in the Skyshiels, pure folly! Even a pack of fell fiends out of Sithaer would have long since turned tail and gone home.’

‘Well, they haven’t discovered your root cellar yet.’ Arithon applied pressure to close a slashed vein. ‘My hand has scarred over. I’ve just proved I can hunt. Your traplines should not be beyond me.’

‘Are you listening?’ The trapper’s weakened struggles did nothing to curb the care taken to stanch the blood flow leaking from his mauled organs. ‘I can’t survive.’ He added the list, in graphic, hard logic, of the inexorable course of a stomach cut.

‘Your fate seals my conscience,’ Arithon agreed. Then, stilled and grave, his words chisel-punched through the crackle of flame, he swore the oath of sovereign prince to bound liegeman. ‘For the gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath. Dharkaron witness.’ He knotted the compress, then finished, ‘You didn’t betray me.’

The trapper turned away his gruff, bearded face, unprepared, and embarrassed to be touched to sentiment. ‘Don’t mistake your importance, prince. I wouldn’t give Jaelot’s dogs a stripped bone.’

‘I don’t leave them my wounded,’ said the Prince of Rathain. He arose, yanked the cloak off the third corpse, and breathed a blessing to Ath’s grace as he found the trapper slipped beyond consciousness. At least that small mercy would spare him the torment of being moved in the sling of a drag litter.

Three days later, the fur trapper used his last, labored breaths and named his next of kin to his prince: an uncle who ranged with Earl Jieret’s clans in Halwythwood, and a married daughter settled with a cooper in Eastwall. ‘’Twas my grandame who said I’d die tended by royalty. She had clan lineage, and with that, the born gift of Sight.’ A long pause, then the afterthought, trailed off in self-damning irony. ‘Though I thought these mountains were as far as a man got from the finicky habits of princes.’

Arithon gathered the slack, cooling hand, his touch firm through the wracking spasms. ‘My finicky habits don’t run to court ceremony. But that doesn’t explain the big-hearted trust that stood ground under torture to spare me.’

‘Thank grandame for that,’ gasped the trapper, eyes closed. ‘She said I would choose if the prince who called down Dharkaron’s Black Spear died beside me.’

‘You failed nothing and no one,’ Arithon assured, though remorse all but choked him from speech. ‘I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’

For answer, an unearthly sweet smile touched lips already blued to corpse pallor. ‘Long life, and my blessing. The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’

Arithon bent his head. Left beggared by a giant’s generosity of spirit, he said nothing through the final, torturous hour while the huge man’s wracked lungs fought an exhausting passage, and the heart labored through the gasping last rattle of breath.

Nor did the ending bring peace or reprieve. Arithon arose. Though the hour was past midnight, urgency rode him. He packed satchel and saddlebags by the flickering glow of a precious stub of wax candle, then bundled his weapons and provisions outside. Around him, the night was a wind-tossed maelstrom, stars and moon mantled under the cloud of another westbound storm front. Threat of snow rode the air like subliminal lightning. Arithon ached for grief, but dared not pause for decency. He sealed the trapper’s remains in the root cellar, unable to grant the small grace of a pyre, or a bard’s song to honor the crossing. Not while Jaelot’s patrols swept the territory in force, lashed on by their zealot captain. The sole tribute he could grant this man’s sacrifice was his unbending dedication to survive.

Arithon judged his best chance was to travel fast and far as he could before daylight. The diligence of his care meant the horses would answer his whistle for feed in the dark.

The thirty-five-league passage through the Skyshiel uplands resumed and became a feat of grueling endurance, on both sides. Driven off the Baiyen trail by unsettled dreams and queer hauntings, and chased by the balefire of ghosts, Jaelot’s troops scoured the high forests in small search parties. They rampaged down slopes of pristine snow, and axe-cut young trees for their bonfires. Flame was believed to drive back the haunts, and proved more reliable than the echoing dispersion of horn calls as a signal to muster or regroup.

Men quartered the gulches and ridgebacks on foot, or plowed in mounted columns through winding valleys. Despite ice and winds and bleak storm, they persisted, while their quarry slipped past like the fox. He evaded their lines, unseen and unheard, under cover of shadow, or night. The wind and the elements were his tireless ally, until the skilled trackers exchanged sullen whispers, calling him demon and fiend, an unnatural sorcerer who left no footprint on the worldly face of the landscape.

Then contrary evidence would move them to scorn, as they found frozen hoof marks and dung, or broken ice on a stream, or a swatch of young maple bearing the teethmarks of browsing horses.

Several times, a rider was spotted, crossing over a ridge. The men dispatched to investigate circled and climbed, but found only unscalable, ice-clad ledges, where neither horseman nor unmounted scout could give chase. Some claimed the sightings were apparitions designed to lead them astray; others argued that sorcerers had spellcraft which enabled them to walk upon demon-made bridges of air. Whatever the subject of carping dispute, the conclusion was self-evident: Jaelot’s pursuit of the Spinner of Darkness was a harebrained feat of madness in the Skyshiels.

And yet, the guard captain held his ground, unremitting. Jaw hard, eyes narrowed, with gloved thumbs jammed in the cross belts that hung his hunter’s quiver and map case, he insisted, ‘Mayor’ll dice my liver if we turn back without the quarry we came for. Now saddle up!’

No suggestion to withdraw was allowed thought or weight. The order to advance stayed relentless. Each dawn, the parties ranged outward in search.

For Arithon s’Ffalenn, the nights passed in desperate flight, those days he was flushed out of hiding. Time and again he was turned from his course, or hazed between patrols back over terrain just traversed through rugged hardship. The days became patchworked fragments of memory, stitched together by dark intervals spent in furtive flight, or tension that wore like etched acid. One fair afternoon, armed riders overtook him when he went foraging for wintergreen to brew an astringent for his gelding’s puffed fetlock.

Snow and fierce wind had masked their approach. Caught in the open, Arithon scrambled up rocks and snatched refuge on a cliff ledge scarcely an arm’s reach over their heads. There he panted, chilled and motionless, while one man dismounted to piss in a snowdrift, and three others cut diligent circles below him. In sore misery themselves, the scouts missed the dimpled depressions of his footprints; the drifts, dry and light, were too fluffy to hold outlines. Had a man of them glanced upward, he was utterly exposed. Nor could he attack and kill all of them cleanly before someone sounded the alarm.

The rider who relieved himself mounted up, whistling, and the patrol moved off up the ridge. Arithon laid his cheek to iced stone, wrung wretched with shivering relief.

Days and nights, he endeavored to keep faith with Luhaine and reach promised refuge at Ithamon. He dogged his own hunters to steal cached supplies, then set off through seamed cliffs to the high country. Nights, under starlight, he picked his way over the scoured rock past the timberline. Shadow masked him, while his ears rang and burned to the language of wind, singing litanies over bared granite. He weathered gales in the smothered glens of the valleys, and slept under banked drifts, the warmth of his breath pocketed by the laced boughs of the firs that framed the eaves of his crude shelters.

He tracked deer, and surprised wolverine, and drank bracing waters freed from their armor of gray ice. His beard grew. The jet hair he had no chance to groom whipped in snake tangles over his shoulders. His eyes creased with the squint of haunted apprehension, and constant survey cast down his back trail. The sun shone on him, gold and glaring and without warmth, and the snows howled and stung, lashed by the bitter east wind. Higher, he ranged, into the black-stone summits of the Skyshiels, laddered with glaciers and the cobwebbed patterns of snow trapped in filed bands of sediment. Nor was he free, or alone in that wilderness that could and had torn the sinew out of all but the strongest hearts.

Against natural odds, beyond the limiting frailties of flesh, Jaelot’s bewitched guardsmen tracked him. He watched them, filing like ants up the valleys, or burning fires of green fir that streamered flags of smudged smoke. He saw them break and run from the queer lights on the Baiyen, and wait, starving, for their supply lines. Like desperate, flushed game, Arithon ran before them, sometimes in the same glass-eyed panic, and other times in nerveless planning that left him as a stranger to himself.

The hand that stubbornly failed to heal grew a mass of raw, welted scar tissue. He boiled rags for bandages, and rebound the weal, and used his blades left-handed. In tight-focused effort, he mastered the pain and forced his arrow shots accurate. The few times he killed deer, they died cleanly. In their swift death, he found his sole measure of victory: his private, ongoing reassurance he had not been abandoned by mercy, and could still grant the same grace to an enemy.

Winter deepened. The high peaks wore stainless mantles of white, between storms that ripped them to bare bedrock. Always hungry, never warm, Arithon pressed northwestward, and always, his pursuers dogged him. He lost his brave buckskin down a ravine, had to sacrifice an arrow to dispatch him. Nor could he pause to salvage the meat. The gelding’s scream as it fell had drawn wolves and men in a primal rush for the carcass. But the wolves adhered to natural instinct; they stopped and gorged. The men, geas driven, trampled the streambanks, but found no means to scale the high cliff face.

Safe on the rimwall, Arithon fled, while the horn calls echoed and reechoed, calling in the reinforcements that kept him dodging throughout a miserable night. Dawn found him sprawled like an animal in a khetienn’s lair, while the displaced feline hissed protest, wedged into the sinkhole where the earth had caved away from a tangle of tree roots. Arithon spoke to her, the magnificent instrument of his voice burred rough with disuse. He wept then for sheer grief, that the grand resonance of his words in the ancient Paravian had lost their skilled music to calm her.

When he woke, hours later, the enraged cat had fled. Every muscle and sinew in his body had an ache, and cold willowbark tea scarcely tamed them. His trail-hardy mare had long since lost her shoes. Arithon seared the cracks in her hoofwalls with a red-heated knife, lest she split to the quick and go lame. The gelding with the puffed fetlock improved, but still could not bear a rider. He packed the supplies, uncomplaining, his coat rough and lusterless from hard use and an uncertain diet.

‘When we reach Daon Ramon, you can paw for dried grass,’ Arithon soothed. He ran his hands down both animals’ ice-crusted legs, checking for heat in the tendons.

And the day did come finally, when the mountains relented; when the stone-clad heights receded from the cloud hems, and the trees in the valleys stretched tall and majestic with the shelter of lowering altitude. Snow sifted down, deep and smooth in the hollows, storm winds having shrieked and broken their force on the unyielding ramparts of the ridges. Arithon left the lichen-bare rock of the timberline behind him, and saw, from the north-facing gaps between ranges, the white sweep of Daon Ramon below him.

The triumph of that accomplishment was short-lived as a horn blast from behind set him under close-pressed pursuit. Arithon ran ahead, driving his tiring horses into the dense growth of a thicket. Then he retraced his steps and whisked out their hoofprints, and laid another false trail to a streambed. For a blessing, this time, the swift current had thawed. He plunged in, left the trackers the logical conclusion he had masked his trail in the water, but escaped by hauling himself into the drooping boughs of an evergreen. Tucked in the branches, he waited, unseen, while his hunters gouged the streambed to stirred silt and muck. They moved out at last, split up, north and south, in mistaken belief he would have made egress elsewhere.

Twilight fell. The drifts lay on the land like iridescent silk, tucked in folds of cobalt and violet beneath a sky deepened to indigo. Under a spattered brilliance of stars, Arithon climbed down from the pine that had sheltered him. He cut a furtive path over the snow his enemies had left trampled to confusion. Masked under shadow, he collected his horses and moved on, toward a plain that, by nightfall, unveiled the hot sparks of a dozen enemy campfires.

The despair of his straits washed over him then, a powerful force that made even the effort of hope a travail. Alone amid the whine of cold wind through acres of winter-stripped boughs, he longed for Caolle’s hard-bitten advice, or Earl Jieret’s firebrand tolerance. Elaira’s love seemed a figment of dream, and there, too, fate denied him fulfillment. Arithon endured the dismal ache of his solitude, his relief a set litany, that this time no friend would die in heroic effort to spare him. He closed his sound hand over the frozen leather of the lead reins and sought after the comfortless shelter of a south-facing ravine.

Through the night, he lurked hidden in the deepwood, and kept sleepless watch for patrols. In a day, perhaps two, the next blizzard would roar in. While a storm masked the telltale trace of his footprints, yet again he might seize the advantage and slip past the cordon Jaelot’s men cast ahead of him.

Three fortnights had elapsed since his flight on the solstice. Arithon scoured the rust from his steel, and took no false heart from the fact he had so far managed to evade capture. The windswept downs of Daon Ramon lay ahead. Thirty leagues of exposed landscape unfolded between the wooded, Skyshiel foothills and the promise of Earl Jieret’s protection at Ithamon. Under deep winter, with inadequate cover, he would stand at the mercy of Jaelot’s trackers. The lame horse would become a dangerous liability, and the sound one, a burden he dared not eliminate. Traveling on foot, if his enemies flushed him, he could all too easily be run down and killed, or captured by enemy riders. Jaelot’s men dogged him, before and behind. Were he spotted, they need do nothing at all but close in and form ranks and surround him.

Arithon shot Alithiel home in her scabbard, then oiled his main gauche dagger. He scrounged a meal of stale biscuit and cheese, and smoked jerky from a near-emptied saddle pack. Snugged down in his cloak and his thickest fleece jacket, he measured his dwindling assets. Where Luhaine’s advice had dispatched him inland, no one had factored for the driven tenacity of Jaelot’s spellbound captain. Arithon found the odds on his continued safe passage had become laughably small. His broadscale use of his shadow to seed terror was now his most necessary weapon of expedience.

Spinner of Darkness, the Alliance had named him. Arithon shut his eyes, wrung to bitterness. If he survived his next crossing, the title was bound to be answered and justified.

Recalcitrant, the sky held fair through four days. Dawn on the fifth, flat cloud roofed the peaks. The air wore the whetted, crystalline sharpness that presaged another fierce storm. Jaelot’s hard-bitten guardsmen watched the weather close in with trail-weary experience. The company bound to Arithon’s pursuit carped over the aches dropping pressure brought to old scars. Their complaints availed nothing. While the first moaning gusts roared down off the heights, their labored progress was reduced to moving shadows amid the whirling white eddies of snowfall. They saddled their horses, formed up in patrols, and fanned out, seeking the Spinner of Darkness.

Noon rendezvous found them hunched with their backs to raw wind, while their squint-eyed tracker deliberated over the ground by the glaze of a refrozen streamlet.

‘Your man fished for trout here,’ he announced at due length. A jab of his stick broke through snow and revealed the buried ash of a blaze kindled out of pine heartwood that would burn fast and hot, with very little trace of smoke. ‘Here’s where he boiled his catch. The fillets would be dried, or packed in ice and frozen. Won’t need a fire to fill his belly for at least the next several nights.’

The sergeant in charge cast away the frazzled twig of witch hazel he had plucked to scrub his filmed teeth. ‘Starving or sated, may Dharkaron’s Black Spear rip his vitals in twain in the afterlife. Set chains on the bastard, and we can go home. Just tell us which way he rode out.’

The tracker straightened, one gloved hand pressed to the stiff joints in the small of his back. He quartered the streambank with mincing steps, musing aloud as he sifted the scanty evidence. Always, the story had to be wrung from the s’Ffalenn demon’s fastidious campsite. ‘Didn’t bring horses here, never that stupid. Want to know where he’s bound, have to uncover the trail that leads where he had his mounts picketed.’ A pause, a poke at a bush with the stick, then a drawn moment while the woodsman knelt and gently blew the new powdering of snowfall away from the sun-crusted layer underneath.

‘Got him. This way.’ The grizzled tracker arose and dusted his trousers, his dour face turned toward the sergeant. ‘Might as well dismount now. Yon cursed spawn of evil won’t belike to change his sly habits. Not for the sake of sparing your feet or your comforts.’

Never had Arithon made the fool’s mistake of staking out horses where his pursuit could launch a mounted foray. He would risk the approach of no enemy horses lest equine herd instinct raise a neigh of greeting and sound a disastrous alarm.

Afternoon, the patrols were set searching in spirals, while the wind howled down and snow pelted. The west-facing slopes of the foothills soon wore a packed cowl of whiteness. The tracker forged ahead, leaned into the gusts, while his cloak cracked and slapped at his tough, stringy frame, and his beard gathered gray spikes of hoarfrost. As the men on his heels fumed and vented rank oaths, the tracker unraveled the difficult trail, patient as a spider reweaving a web from small clues strung like scattered snippets of silk.

After six weeks of balked circling through desolate territory, men muttered that Arithon s’Ffalenn walked the land far too lightly. Around fires, by night, their talk named him uncanny. By day, braced up by camaraderie and bravado, they scratched their thick beards, and boasted of how they would hang their caught quarry by the heels, and tease him with firebrands just to watch him use shadow to save his bastard’s skin from the cinders.

Loudest were those who kept score by their suffering. ‘As I’m born,’ exclaimed one, ‘I’ll see the fell creature repaid for the frostbite that’s blackened the tips of my toes.’

A comrade hooted. ‘Who cares, for some toes? While we sleep on snow and scratch biting fleas, freezing our bollocks in this wilderness, what’s to stop the wife left at home from warming the bed in our absence? We don’t go back soon, I swear my sweet member will forget it wasn’t made for something better than pissing.’

Someone else guffawed. ‘Your member? Daelion’s justice! That wee slippery thing that doesn’t know a woman from a wet gob of spit in a mitten?’ In rejoinder, chipping ice from his hobnailed boot sole, he added, ‘Or aren’t you the one we hear moaning behind the picket lines those nights when you draw the late watch?’

‘Quiet!’ snapped the sergeant. ‘The pack of you ladies would flush a deaf post with your noise.’

‘If there’s a fugitive left in these thickets to snare, he won’t be the fiend’s get we’re chasing,’ came a sullen grumble from the ranks. ‘Mark me, in this storm, the Spinner of Darkness will have snatched his chance and bolted headlong for Ithamon.’

A testy colleague elbowed the speaker. ‘Would you stake your next ration of beer he’s done that?’

‘Be silent, fool!’ cried the sergeant in rife exasperation. ‘You chattering magpies let the tracker do his work. We wait on his word for my orders. If the Master of Shadow’s for Ithamon, he’ll be caught without any man’s bet on the outcome.’

The men met his glower in foot-shuffling, sheepish quiet. They scarcely needed a tongue-lashing reminder that Jaelot’s most competent officer already had a company of men positioned for ambush at the ruin.

Against the whiteout scream of a gust, the sergeant snapped his conclusion. ‘Sure enough, it’s our task to drive the bold rat into the trap we have waiting. But before we hare off through a blizzard on assumptions, we’ll damned well make sure the bloodsucking sorcerer’s turned west across Daon Ramon Barrens!’

‘He’s turned.’ The tracker wormed his way out of the thicket, then winced at the shower of snow the sprung branches dumped down his collar. ‘Found the hollow where he had his horses tucked up. The tracks when they left lead northwest. He’s gone for the barrens in a cracking hurry. No time before this have I seen him carve a course that ran so infernally straight.’

‘Move out!’ The sergeant hazed his troop to form ranks. ‘We go where the bastard’s trail takes us.’

But the rising storm raised a morass of obstacles, with landmarks obscured, and the far-ranging patrols of outriders too scattered to be found and recalled at short notice. The wind stiffened to a lash of unmitigated misery, lent a scouring edge by the snow driven down in a hissing, whirled maelstrom of dry powder. The horses stumbled ahead, heads low and tails flattened, the men in their saddles cursing the patched skin torn off if they touched mail or weapons bare-handed.

Beyond the sheltering eaves of the forest, the fierce gusts flayed exposed flesh. Snow worked and sifted into everything, from the folds in wool cloaks to the crevices of boot cuffs, then melted into an insidious, numbing dampness that chilled a man’s bones till they ached. The wet spiked the horses’ coats into steaming, soaked redolence, then tipped their long guard hairs in ice. The miserable beasts shivered beneath sorry masters, who slapped sodden thighs, and cursed the name of Arithon s’Ffalenn.

Nor did the wide barrens afford man or mount comfort. The low, rolling landscape wore snagged cornices of rock, with the lee sides of the dales a morass of brush and crabbed briar. The horses ripped the fronts of their cannon bones bloody, and left streaks of pinked snow where the officers called rest halts. Iced streams and gulches snagged the lowlands like torn seams, a hazard masked over by drifts. More than one horse became wrenched to its knees in a floundering, dangerous fall. Inside of an hour, two mounts were lamed. Another had to be shot for meat, reft beyond cure by an ugly, splintered bone shredded through the thick hide of its gaskin.

While men shouldered the work to render the carcass, the officers met in harried conference with the headhunter guides and the trackers.

‘Can’t press on after dark, the terrain is too savage,’ said the garrison quartermaster, his pouched eyes haunted, and his ruddy cheeks sadly thinned from his weeks of tribulation on the Baiyen.

‘Storm’s going to make the light fail early.’ The sergeant slapped numbed hands, just as wearied. ‘A fire and a horse roast will bolster morale.’

The head tracker held his opinion in dour silence, while the more hard-bitten headhunters insisted their wily enemy was certain to widen his lead while Jaelot’s moping sluggards ate and slept.

‘Would you push us on in the dark and see the next man break his neck?’ The patrol captain hunched against the pelt of the storm, his nose a red knob dripping moisture. ‘Hard enough to keep our bearings in this weather with the snow like a witch’s curse upon us.’

‘Stop now, and I tell you,’ the chief headhunter argued, ‘every trace of your quarry will be lost by the morning. Blizzards in this country can spin out for days. Stay on him. Press the chase. Or else throw away what chance you have left.’

Debate raged and resolved, with the patrols on the move through the gloom of a premature dusk. With the failing light, the dirge wail of the wind sawed men’s nerves to uncanny tension. The lead riders lit torches that the roar of the storm fanned down to sullen embers. Their dulled, ruby glare became swallowed by murk, invisible within a few yards. No fire warmed the chill from wet feet and hands. The fresh-slaughtered meat slowly froze, a sore point for men with pinched bellies. Griped on their diet of hard biscuit and cheese, they blundered into night, harried on by a gale like a hell-bound scourge, screaming over the weather-stripped vales.

Midnight downed another horse with a torn tendon. This one they shot with a quarrel through the brain and abandoned in the gully where it lay. Fresh bickering raged over the beast’s steaming carcass. On foot since the morning, the tracker was soaked through his fleece leggings, and grown testy. He questioned the reliability of what scant sign he could glean from the iced-over bogs in the hollows.

‘One bad reading could turn us astray. We’d be drawn leagues off course, come the morning. Could lose our quarry for sure. Might be days before we could find his cold trail. Fresh snow’s an unmerciful disadvantage.’

The chief headhunter rebutted, ‘But the fugitive hasn’t turned. He’s crossing these hillocks on a crow’s course, straight for the towers of Ithamon. The plain fact he’s not paused to lay a false trail means that he’s pressed, even desperate. I say we’re too close at his heels for him to attempt the precautions of a trapped fox.’

A gust raged full force, raking snow like barbed glass against the riders’ bared faces. Through the misery of the moment, while men suffered unspeaking, the shrill neigh of a westbound horse rode the storm like a shred of blown rag.

‘By the dark, that’s none of ours!’ cried the garrison sergeant, wheeling his mount. ‘We’ve got no outriders that far ahead.’ He dug in his spurs without waiting for conference or orders from his fellow officers.

Strung out in disorder, the rest of the company plunged after him. Each man in his way cursed the impulsive action. Yet to pause and deliberate was to risk separation amid the black brew of foul weather. Given scant choice, the captain in charge barked at the laggards to fall in.

The night was a wadded shroud of black felt, knit through by the forces of chaos. Ahead, amid the treacherous terrain with its rock crowns and unseen gullies, scouts picked up the muffled drumming of hooves, now sure of the beast they were tracking. The sound came and went like a phantom between gusts, a lure that kept beckoning onward. In a frenzy propelled by spell-driven eagerness, Jaelot’s men-at-arms forged ahead. Whipped up to the blood-sport passion of the chase, they pursued the twisting, blind flight of their quarry until their mounts were belabored to exhaustion.

Their pace slowed to a walk, the hours passed, interminable. Cruel winds bit and snarled. Snow swirled and sifted and stung like edged sleet, the storm’s onslaught continuous through air like stirred pitch. Tempers frayed. Two men came to grief, thrown from their saddles when their horses missed stride in the potholes. During the pause while the company healer set and dressed one unfortunate’s broken arm, the chief headhunter returned with the unwelcome word they had spent a fruitless chase to corner a riderless gelding.

‘What?’ snapped the company commander, caught dismounted to examine the withers of a horse chafed raw where the saddle had shifted. ‘I thought one of your scouts said he’d sighted someone astride?’

Shamefaced, the headhunter qualified. ‘What he saw was a decoy, a manikin fashioned from old clothing tied and stuffed up with pine needles.’

To the owner of the galled horse, the commander said, ‘Strip the mare’s bridle and pack that sore with salve.’ His frustration set a lash to his already sharpened speech. ‘Nobody rides anywhere until we recover sound wits and a sense of direction!’ Then, to the headhunter who shifted from foot to foot in the dark, ‘You’re here to tell me we’ve spent the whole night running blind circles for nothing?’

‘We’ve caught a lame horse,’ the man stated, shamefaced. ‘The single count we’ve got going in our favor, our enemy has just one mount left.’

‘Which does us small good. Now the fiend could be anywhere!’ The commander did not need the trapper’s gloomy confirmation that the fugitive’s trail would now be obliterated, perhaps lost beyond all recovery. No option remained but to camp until dawn on the hope the storm would relent. Only the glimpse of the rising sun could reestablish their obscured bearings.

The men hunkered down, soaked and miserable without fires. The low brush was too thin to sustain a good blaze, and the demon gusts extinguished the sparks the field cook coaxed from dry tinder. The horses were too spent to paw for the grasses that poked spiny clumps through the weather sides of the snowdrifts. Men huddled in blankets amid punishing cold, uncomforted by the knowledge that their enemy endured and suffered the selfsame privations.

The night roared and howled, possessed in the grip of what seemed an interminable punishment. Dawn did not come. The men in their misery ached and wept pleas for the return of comfort and light. No voice answered. In vain, they held steadfast. No dark hour in memory had reigned with such force, that the advent of day should stay banished.

Early dread became whispers, spun to volatile fear. Surely this was the end. The Spinner of Darkness had worked his fell shadows and consigned his pursuit to oblivion.

As the mutters swelled toward an outbreak of panic, the officers fought to stem ebbing morale and keep a sane semblance of order.

‘Are you ninnies and girls, to wail fear of the dark? No one’s hurt. No one’s dying. Have faith in the Light, for the dawn came again, even at Dier Kenton Vale and the maelstrom that beset the war fleet at Werepoint. We are numbers against one. This wall of shadow is doubtless no more than the work of a driven and desperate criminal.’

Men huddled together. Some sang. Others prayed. In due time, the vortex of darkness thinned and lifted to unveil a late day ripped by storm winds and blizzard. The adverse conditions would not permit tracking, nor could spent horses be forced to bear laden packsaddles and riders. The company chose the sensible alternative, and made camp in a dale where a thicket of thorn formed a windbreak. They lit fires, ate a cheerless meal of stewed horse, while their officers conferred, and decided at length to proceed for Ithamon. They would join Jaelot’s guard captain there with all speed as soon as the weather relented.

‘Better hope the Master of Shadow is ahead of us, bound headlong into our trap.’ The sergeant slapped chips of ice from his mail and voiced his bitter conclusion. ‘Else we’ll be ordered to regroup and give chase when the storm clears enough to take bearings.’

Yet the snow fell at sunset, and all through the next night, a horizontal barrage that layered the landscape like draped gauze, and battened the sky in fleece scud. The brushfires burned to coals, then steamed and went out, puddled to slush and dank embers. The next cheerless day, the wild tempest blew out to thin cirrus. A platinum-pale disk spat hazed sun dogs. East, against an enamel horizon, the looming peaks of the Skyshiels notched the view in ice-clad splendor, skirted in foothills of spruce.

‘Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance!’ the gaunt tracker fumed. ‘We’ve drifted back eastward! Sithaer’s deepest pits, we’re so far astray we ought to weep as the butt of our enemy’s laughter.’

‘Well, he won’t laugh for long.’ The chief headhunter pulled out his whetstone and dragged it, screeling, along the kept edge of his dagger. ‘He’ll find our sweet ambush at Ithamon soon enough. May the sword of the Light and Sithaer’s righteous fires drive his accursed spirit past the Wheel.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn believed himself braced for return to the haunted ruin of Ithamon. Across the sparkling, snowy vales of Daon Ramon, under sunlight like shards of white glass, he had seen spirit and sinew put to the test. Surely the three decades elapsed since the Mistwraith’s capture should have allowed ample time to address the scarred wounds that remained. Yet the passage of years had done nothing to soften the old pain, scalpel-cut to the heart. No mind trained to mastery could reconcile the loss, when misuse of grand conjury in defense of his feal clans had severed his access to mage-sight. If the agonized sufferance of such a blinding could not be resolved, the cold burden of guilt could be borne. The stab of roused memory lay familiar and worn, like the ghost throb of a severed limb.

Yet when Arithon crested the knife ridge of drifts that edged the dry bank of the Severnir, he found himself grateful for the misfortune of his shuttered talent. This pass, he would be spared the visioning dream of the ghosts that shimmered and coiled through the ruin. He would see no past kings pleading for the hope of a crowned heir bringing long-sought restoration. Their gut-wrenching sorrows and their cry for reborn grandeur now lay beyond reach, safely screened from mage-gifted senses by the barriers of unhealed affliction.

Arithon would not be wrung by the tears of his bygone s’Ffalenn ancestors. Nor would he behold the searing grace of the Paravian spirit forms that sheared like bright flame through the mists.

Yet if he escaped the echoed reflections of lost glory, he could not be spared the terrible desolation of the ruins themselves. The shattered stone walls, with their smashed carvings, still bespoke the bitter violence of the uprising. The memory of dead high kings still walked moss-grown battlements. The wild winds keened through the shells of breached keeps, stones laddered in stripped ivy and an aura of tumbledown majesty.

Arithon pressed his exhausted horse northward, troubled in thought and memory. He had known these hills in the mantle of winter; had ridden, then as now, across crusted snow, with the parallel ridges carved out by gales turned the shot gold of damascened silk. A sky as lucent as aquamarine crystal reduced him to a toiling speck upon a spread tapestry of landscape. So many years since he had left this savage country in the trickle of spring thaws, savoring his last days of freedom after the arduous conquest of the Mistwraith, and before the inevitable, fated coronation that laid him under geas at Etarra. His half brother had gone mounted, pensive, beside him, while the chickadees in their solemn slate plumage had scolded over the sere fruits of last year’s briars.

As if no shed blood and no curse lay between, the birds sang still in the branches. The springs burbled through their paned ice in the dells, as if only seasons had changed, and no wars strained the cloth of world destiny. Arithon paused only to water his horse. Pushed to the bone-weary limit of endurance, he wished he had less time on his hands for the morass of solitary reflection.

Too real, the chance he might fail in the mission sealed by his sworn oath to the Fellowship.

He rode with his ears sometimes ringing with fever, the relentless ache of his wounded right hand slung in a pinned fold of his cloak. Under dressings he had been too hard-pressed to clean, a raw sore leaked pus where the traumatized flesh refused to close over and heal. His chin was a stubble of uncut, black beard, and his shirts stank of unwashed sweat. By day, the sun lit flash fires in his brain. By night, the fierce stars of Athera’s vast heavens pierced him with limitless emptiness.

He felt like a vessel sucked hollow of dreams, until the dread moment he chanced to look up to establish a routine bearing. His fate lay before him. Against the scribed ribbon of the horizon, he beheld the upthrust scarp of rock that bore Ithamon’s ruin like the battered rim of a diadem.

Just as before, the sight struck his heart like a blow, leaving him winded and breathless. No less poignant for the forewarning of memory, the eloquent testament of smashed lives and broken dreams in the stark, tumbled stone of the wreckage. Then the four towers arisen among them, still pristine in grace, pure as a cry amid the tumbledown battlements. The ruled fall of sunlight struck their façades, raising fine sound like the chiming tap of a bronze mallet against keys of crystal and glass.

A man raised to the powers of a masterbard’s art would have to be deaf not to hear. Arithon gasped, smote to the heart by that soundless chord of vibration. Four pealing notes, whose fifth register was absent, a void like a wound into darkness; for of four towers raised to anchor the tenets of virtue, the fifth one had been cast down. The King’s Tower was crumbled, reduced to a weed-grown foundation on the hour a Paravian king had been murdered.

Hunched on his horse, his fist crushed to wet mane, Arithon bowed his head, shattered. He wept unabashed. The nerve in him faltered, for what lay ahead. Though blinded to sight of the spirits, the practiced maturity of his bardic perception laid him wide-open all over again. There would be no escape. He would hear in song, pouring from broken stone, the bittersweet echoes of beauty and truth, cut down by violence and bloodshed. The call would sing to him, sinew and nerve, and shackle him to the future. As the last surviving s’Ffalenn prince, his was the born burden to shoulder the promise of crown rule and restoration.

Never mind that the very thought of that role ripped him to mangling agony. The ruin sustained protest, endured against time. Its state of desecration could not alter its set law, or its ingrained fire of inspiration. Here, the unseated stones themselves rang to the foundational chord of compassion and undefiled mercy. That imprint waited with the blank patience of time, to be reclothed in its rightful, lost harmony. Arithon tasted the salt of his tears, reduced to abject humility. While he lived, Ithamon would never release its ancestral hold on the blood and the bone of him.

Torn open, exposed against silver-clad hills, with the winter’s harsh grip embossed foil on black rocks, and the wind a honed dagger to flay him, Arithon fought for the necessary courage to prod his thin mare forward. The ache in his spirit would not be assuaged, nor the guilt that rode at his shoulder. There were too many dead for his name, since Tal Quorin, then those casualties multiplied manyfold more, at Minderl Bay and at Vastmark.

Those ghosts would bind him to the seat of s’Ffalenn sovereignty, and hound him to desolate madness.

A more cruel moment could not be conceived, for enemy riders to sight him. Attached to the garrison men encamped by the ruin, the party of five had been sent foraging for game to ease the scarcity of supplies. Their shout of discovery from the crest of the next hilltop caught their quarry defenselessly vulnerable.

Arithon snapped face around. Shot erect by dousing, shrill fear, he took in at a glance the ragtag black surcoats worn by Jaelot’s city guard. He drew Alithiel left-handed. While the enemies who charged to kill drove downslope in a spray of burst snow, he reined his mount, staggering to meet them.

‘Go back!’ he pealed out, a cry that distilled his raw tumult of unanswerable pain. ‘Ath pity your families, desist!’ Through the trained timbre of his Masterbard’s voice, the hills spoke in echoes to shiver the spine.

Here, his blood tie as Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince could not fail to be recognized. Where the current of the fifth lane sang through the kingdom’s ancient heartland, the flux line itself bore the stamp of the Fellowship ceremony that had sealed his affirmation. The light striking off Ithamon’s high towers peaked in resonance and burned, raised to a beacon flare of wild magic.

Then that errant burst snuffed out like blown flame as Arithon clapped down a defense wrought of merciless shadow. Through a darkness to freeze living flesh to dry powder, he reined about and urged his horse to a stumbling gallop.

Downhill he raced, toward his pursuit. To reach Ithamon, he must pass through them. His mare was too spent for a circuitous chase back through the open countryside. Heedless of bad footing, he forced reckless speed. The guidance that steered him was the jingle of mail, and the bewildered shouts of the armed men who blundered, equally blinded, to take him. If he held slight advantage for his trained grasp of sound, they were five to his one, and mounted on horses that were decently fed and well rested. Raked by thorns, slapped by branches, Arithon smashed through the gully. The heave of the horse’s shoulders beneath him informed him of rising ground. Armored horsemen thrashed headlong down the slope. The shod hooves of their destriers struck red sparks from flint rocks, and their curses were all but on top of him.

Arithon sifted the oncoming barrage of sound, the whine of wind sliced across someone’s bared steel, and the jink of roweled spurs, and a bearded man’s labored breathing. He angled Alithiel, braced to thrust as he passed, prepared for the shock as Paravian steel sheared into armor and bone. His worst risk, the chance the blade might bind fast, and tear from his grasp in the wrench as the maimed rider tumbled.

One stride farther on, his mare misstepped, slid a foreleg on ice, and crashed sidewards. Arithon tucked into a roll before impact. He struck full force on his shoulder. The air slammed from his lungs. His grasp on the shadow screen lapsed for one second. He saw light strike through, flash in dazzling reflection off the bared runes of Alithiel, outthrust away from his body. Then the hooves of the enemy horse thudded over him, and a blow to the head sundered him into the yawning void of unconsciousness.

Winter 5670