TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (11 page)
Read TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate Online
Authors: Janny Wurts
'We don't get to camp here?' the whiner said, hopeful, while his mount guzzled water. 'Just once, we could sleep out of the Ath-forsaken wind. Why not take advantage of shelter?'
'No camp!' snapped the captain before the suggestion started a pleading chorus. 'We've got maybe six hours left before sundown, and no cause to waste a clear day. Too soon, we'll be facing the teeth of the next storm.'
'Send a messenger back to guide the supply train,' the huntsman suggested, too pragmatic to waste opportunity. 'They can make good use of this campsite, and chop a few logs to bolster our store of firewood.'
'Carlis!' barked the captain above the descant jingle of bits, and the thuds as the horses were wheeled about in departure. 'Carry the word back, and warn the supply sergeant I don't want to run short of fodder!'
The noise of the retreating company diminished, combed through by the sigh of the wind. In the cave, wrung to shaking, Arithon released the noses of his two geldings. He sat, faint and dizzied, his first rush of relief accompanied by tearing anxiety. The rock lair had hidden him, just barely. Saved by the fact he was too ill to move, and sheltered behind an ephemeral veiling of snowdrift, he knew his bolt-hole could never withstand the close presence of an encamped supply train. He needed to move, and far worse than that: he dared not allow the precarious position of being caught between two hostile companies.
'Damn and damn, as Dakar would say.' His straits had gone from bad to untenable. Baiyen Gap offered the only fast route through the Skyshiels, and his pursuit, now ahead, blocked the way to his haven at Ithamon. Their armed numbers posed an unknown impediment. He could not fight through them, however few; not by himself with his sword hand crippled. Nor could he hope to outmatch their pace if he left the known gap and tried the rough passage through the storm-whipped peaks of the Skyshiels.
That problem a looming, insoluble impasse, he confronted the immediate danger of the supply company due to arrive in his lap before nightfall.
His promise to Luhaine seemed an act of blind folly. Wretched and shivering and weak at the knees, Arithon rested his forehead against his crossed wrists and fought back crushing disheartenment. Each step led him on to more bitter setback. The taint of fresh blood on his hand informed that his stopgap handling of the geldings had undone his fresh job of bandaging. A clench of nausea roiled his gut. He suppressed it, his will fueled by savage, deep rage. The prospect of what lay ahead of him sickened him more than the pain of his mangled hand. Nor would he weep, though regret burned bone deep for the words he had spoken before Asandir, years past on the desolate sands of Athir.
'To stay alive, to survive
by any expedient . .
.' he had whispered over the sting of the knife that bound him to irreversible blood-bonded surety.
The cost of Athera's need must be paid, yet again, in an untold number of lives. Rathain's prince railed at fate. His rage had no target. His heart could but cry, hagridden by the royal gift of compassion bred into the breath and the bone of him.
'Forgive
.'
he whispered to the stolid pair of geldings, who asked nothing more than grain and animal comfort. For there was no kind turning, no gentle release. Once again, s'Ffalenn cleverness must spin deadly traps, ever condemned to a curse
-
fated dance with the fervor of Alliance hatred.
'Ath, oh Ath Creator, forgive!'
Racked by a despair beyond words or expression, Arithon forced himself to his feet. In aching sorrow, he turned his mind and scant resources to master the most ugly expedient.
The strategy he designed was disarmingly simple; and sickened him, body and mind through each step required in advance preparation.
* * *
The supply train labored, beasts mired to the hocks in fresh drifts, while their drovers startled and cursed. The Baiyen Gap was no place for the townborn. Even the wind through the firs seemed ill set, moaning in voices against them. The high peaks laddered with ice frowned and brooded, standing sentinel over the ledged ribbon of road laid by the great centaur masons. Words seemed an intrusion the gusts whisked away, and the clangor of shod hooves upon uncanny stone rang with ill-omened warning.
Nerve jumpy men glanced over their shoulders, or tripped upon ground that held neither loose rocks nor deadfalls.
'Close up that gap!' snapped the sergeant in charge to a laggard who held up the pack train. 'What's the matter? Think you see more of those blighted lights following you?'
The burly drover shook off his unease and plowed onward. 'No lights. I've got no barbarian blood in my family, to be cursed with visions of haunts in broad daylight.'
'Better we could see the queer thing that plagues us,' grumbled his bearded companion. He sawed at his reins, swearing as his sidling horse persistently shied at what
surely
was only a shadow crossing the trail. 'Worse, the creepy sense somebody's watching your back. Or you feel solid footing's about to give way, and the trail's an uncanny illusion.'
'No niche for a spy on these forsaken cliffs,' the sergeant said in snarling annoyance. 'If you fall, that's your fault for not keeping your eyes straight ahead. You want to sleep in the open? Then get that beast moving. I'll strip hide from the man who keeps us from reaching that sheltered campsite by sundown.'
The supply train reached the del
l
with the aspen grove under the lucent gleam of twilight. They settled in, boisterous with noise as horses and mules were stripped of packs and harness, and trees were cut to lay campfires. Jerked meat and rice were set boiling in pots, while the cold flecks of stars scattered the upland darkness. Night deepened, filled by the dirge of the winds that quashed ribald conversation. The men huddled closer to their flickering fires. On the ridges above, the wisped whirl of the snow devils seemed stirred by the restive ghosts. The skeletal tap of bare aspens framed a language too wild for mankind's tamed comprehension.
Worse, perhaps, the deep silence between gusts, vast enough to drown thought and swallow the petty, thin sounds of their presence. In this place, the bygone Ages of time lay on the land like poured crystal. The armed men and drovers clung to their fellows, uneasily aware the trail through the Baiyen did not welcome intrusion.
That moment, a deep, groaning note issued from the side of the mountain. The camp sentries spun, hands clapped to their weapons, while the men by the cookfires leaped to their feet.
For a tense, unsettled moment, the darkness seemed to intensify. Then the snowbank lapped over the rocks exploded. Flying clods and debris disgorged the forms of two galloping centaurs. Massive, immense, and bent upon murder for the trespass of heedless humanity, they drove headlong into the picket lines. Panicked horses screamed and snapped tethers. Their milling stampede swept behind startled masters, hazed into panicked retreat. In darkness, in fear, shouting in terror, men and beasts fled the corrie. The smooth trail beyond was a narrow ribbon of ice. Sliding, falling, unable to stop as their horses mowed haplessly over them, Jaelot's invaders plunged screaming and clawing over the brink of the cliff face and dashed on the fangs of the rock slopes below . . .
* * *
Braced on the rumpled snow at the rim, Arithon s'Ffalenn dispersed his wrought weaving of shadows. Trembling, he gathered his revolted nerves. His body the rebellious servant of will, he stood up. He soothed his overwrought geldings until their flaring snorts finally quieted.
The frigid night had forfeited peace, the pristine stillness of the Baiyen defiled as mangled men and smashed horses shuddered and cried. Pulped flesh and white snow commingled in bloodstains, snagged on fouled rock, and the stilled hulks of the murdered dead, fallen.
Arithon tied up the horses. Gut sick, unsure of his balance, he unslung a slim bundle from his shoulder. Then he struggled and strung the heavy, horn recurve Dakar had selected to hunt deer. The arrows were a hunter's, broad-bladed and sharp. They would kill by internal bleeding.
Unaware that he pleaded forgiveness in Paravian, his words a scratched utterance without grace, Arithon knelt in the trampled snow. Twice, overcome, he folded and rendered his gorge. Nor was his eyesight trustworthy, blurred as it was by the bitter well of his tears.
The pull of the bow pained his infected hand. Determined, he nocked the first arrow. Wood rattled against horn, tempo to his trembling, and the snatched sob of unsteady breath. Yet the will behind each move was pure iron. Integrity required that he must not falter, whatever his bodily failings. The fabric of self, curse torn and sullied, demanded no less than to finish in mercy the cruel act imposed by oathsworn survival.
At the end, as he hauled the bow into full draw, his rage at the binding proscribing his life became the fuel that set his hand steady. The ache as his mangled right hand took the strain and the sudden spurt of fresh bleeding became a pittance beside the wounding affliction of conscience.
'Myself, the sole enemy,'
he gasped in Paravian. 'Dharkaron Avenger forgive.'
He released. On the smeared rocks below, one less voice cried out. Arithon dashed back the burn of salt tears. Again, he nocked feathered broadhead to string. Arrow by arrow, he dispatched the groaning wounded downslope. Each careful, clean shot snuffed another cry of suffering, but woke in him recall of an unquiet past, and a summer dell known as the Havens. He quashed the revolt of his clamoring mind, but could not repress the shattering screams of the dying. Pain and will could do nothing to erase final agony.
Alone in the Baiyen, against a sere mountain silence Mankind had no right to break, a night's waking nightmare dropped
Rathain's prince like a spearcast run through the heart.
At the end, the bow fell from his nerveless hands. No strength and no passion of temper remained, to hurl the hated weapon away. Arithon crumpled, brought to his knees by the anguish of immutable truth: that no centaur guardian had
ever
used lethal force against any man who offended. More wounding still, no matter whose war host harried his back, the toll of his dead had unmanned him. He could not shoulder the tactics of massacre again, except at the cost of his sanity.
Winter 5670
Diviner
Far removed from the blizzards that savaged Baiyen Gap, and the fugitive crown prince who fled Jaelot's guard, the forerunner of war set foot on the eastern coast of Rathain. The fated arrival came deep in the night, on the decks of an oared galley rowed at forced speed through the narrows of Instrell Bay.
A fortnight had passed since the solstice. Oblivious to the flare of contention between Koriathain and Fellowship Sorcerers, untroubled by threats posed by grimwards or bindings containing the rampaging hungers of wraiths, the Mayor of Narms awoke in snug blankets. Someone who had a fist like a battering ram hammered the door to his chamber. He blinked, reluctant to complete the transition between dreams and the burdens of cognizance.
The pounding continued, relentless. 'Hell's blighted minions!' The mayor sat up. Blinking in owlish distemper, he croaked, 'Which trade guild's been raided this time?'
Two more hours remained before dawn. An ice flood of light from the waning moon threw shadow from the mullions in cut diamonds over his counterpane. Faint shouts echoed up from the courtyard. Then the door panel cracked, and his snub-nosed chamber steward peered past the jamb in fussed inquiry. 'My lord, you'll be needed. A galley from Tysan just tied up at the docks, flying sunwheel banners and bearing no less than a royal delegation.'
'Royal?
The Prince Exalted, himself?' Narms's mayor shot out of bed, while a gapped seam in the quilt exhaled a flurry of goosedown.
Past the whirl of feathers, the house steward returned a blunt shrug. 'I'm sorry. The banners suggest so.'
'Loose fiends and Dharkaron's Black Chariot!' An unannounced crossing in the depths of winter suggested a breaking disaster. Gruff even when fully wakeful, the mayor batted snagged fluff from his beard and hushed his wife's drowsy inquiry. 'State visitors. Ring the bell for your maid. We need to be dressed very quickly.' To his steward, he added, 'Have you heard what's afoot?'
The pink, balding man bobbed his head like a turtle. 'Lord, the dock runner who fetched me knew nothing. The night watch hauls wood to light fires in the hall. There won't be time to rehang proper tapestries.'
'Well at least the trestles were scrubbed since the feast,' the wife said in acid irritation. 'Royal envoys who don't send a herald ahead will just have to bear with inconveniences.' She shoved out of bed in her night rail, a handsome woman with graceful hands who marshaled her thoughts, blinking into the flare as the servant struck light to a candle. 'The kitchen staff will be baking the day's bread. Get someone to send them notice we're receiving, and tell them how many guests of state.'
'I'll go, mistress,' the steward offered at once, then added, 'should I have the east-wing chambers refreshed?'
'Wake the master of horse, first,' the mayor amended, one foot poked half into his hose. 'If this meeting's too pressing to bide until daybreak, I'm thinking we'll be dunned for fast couriers before anyone wants hospitality and beds.'
'Yes, lord.' The steward ducked out, the door latch clicked shut with apprehensive care.
'At least we didn't suffer this intrusion two days ago.' Prosaic, the wife pinned her smoky tangles of hair, then dug in the lacquered armoire for a wrap, and the best of her fancy lace petticoats.
Stalled by a tangle snagged in his points, the mayor gave tongue out of habit. 'Our guild ministers weren't all puking drunk at the twelfth night festivities.'
'No.' The honeyed agreement that made his wife indispensable at state functions preceded her wasp sting of denouement. 'But if your Divine Prince saw all the jewels on their wives as they tried to outshine the Etarrans, we'd find his marshals dunning our treasury. Or don't you think Avenor's come begging for funds, or armed troops, or else the grain stores to mount a winter campaign on barbarians?'
'I don't know what he's come for!' Off-balance, the mayor jammed his stick shanks into his best pair of silk-slashed breeches. 'If you're going to speculate, have the good grace to wait until after I've clothed my shivering buttocks.'
'You'll sweat soon enough, on your knees before royalty.' The wife's catty tongue showed no deference to station. 'Bowing to a blood prince was bother enough, before there were flocks of sunwheel fanatics, rolling cow eyes like he's god sent.'
The mayor stretched a kink from the small of his back, startled to unwonted laughter. 'Say that to his Grace, I'll buy you new pearls.'
'I'd rather warn the unmarried chambermaids to steer clear of shadowy alcoves.' Adrift in lace petticoats, with her ribbons undone, his wife looked up in snide interest. 'Gossip from Avenor insists his Exalted Grace hasn't bedded his princess since the hour his heir was conceived.' Through a frown at her husband, who snatched up yesterday's shirt for convenience, she added, 'That's sixteen years. If the
s'Ilessid
's kept his manhood to himself for that long, I agree with his priests. He's not human.'
'He's not human
.'
the mayor affirmed, then bellowed, short
-
tempered, for his valet to roust up and lend help with the studs on his doublet. When the slug-headed servant failed to appear, the mayor kept talking, his elbows bent at ridiculous angles through his effort to loop rows of braid frogs on jet buttons. 'His Grace hasn't aged since I was a child, and he was presented as Prince of the West. That was before he forwent Tysan's colors for a mantle of white fox and diamonds.'
'Oh, he's aged
.'
the wife argued, her sharp humor fled as she stepped to assist with her husband's disgruntled robing. 'Just look at his eyes. Hard as faceted sapphire, and too driven for pity.' A break, as she perked up his wilted lace collar, then, 'You want the gold chain and ruby pendant?' Without pause for his nod, she settled the massive links over his dove gray silk. 'Whatever the Exalted Prince asks you to give, don't commit the new recruits.'
'What?' The mayor peered at his wife.
'
There hasn't been heavy fighting since the Caithwood campaign failed to clear Taerlin's forests of clansmen.'
'I know.' His wife spun away in a rustle of layered muslin. 'But things change. Whatever ill wind has blown in with that galley, no man of twenty should be sent out to die before the grass greens in the spring.'
The mayor took pause, the squared links of his state jewelry dipped blood in the fluttering candlelight. 'You think the Master of Shadow's come back?'
His wife plucked up her hand mirror. One glance, and her puffy eyes half filled with tears. She slapped the silvered face down in rare and explosive anger. 'Whyever else should we be dragged out of bed before dawn?' Discomposed by the thought of exalted state company, she rebounded to blistering irritation. 'If Avenor brings word of the Spinner of Darkness, the ill news of his reiving is just going to wait until my maid makes me presentable.'
Chilled in stockinged feet, unsure how to manage the imminent concept of shadows and minions of evil, the mayor bent and rummaged through the bottom of the armoire. He fetched out the fanciest boots he could find, ones with velvet-lined cuffs and stitched patterns of seed pearls. 'I'll delay the proceedings by serving mulled wine.' He jammed a foppish black hat with peacock plumes over his short-cropped head, then sailed through the doorway, girded to balk
s'Ilessid
divinity and appease his wife's queer foreboding.
The hall and the stairwell were darkened by night, the pine
-
knot brand in the lower vestibule burned down to a flickering cinder. The light would be refreshed at the dawn change of watch, as yet several hours away.
Such lack of diligent guard was routine. Narms was no bastion of armed prowess, to draw the Divine Prince in a crisis. Its city maintained one dilapidated keep, without earthworks. Built over and around the site of an ancient Paravian sea landing, her wealth was guild owned, and invested into skilled labor. Through the centuries since the uprising, the crumbled brick quay overlooking the bay head acquired a sprawl of shanties and warehouses. Sailhands' dives lined the waterfront by the fishmongers'. The recessed cove of the harbor sheltered the industry of dyers and craftsmen, whose lifeblood was tied to town trade. Raw materials and goods came and left from the moss-crusted jetties built through the years after Rathain's last high king was slaughtered. The current garrison quartered only mounted men at arms, split into small companies to guard caravans. For the clan raids that plagued the land route to Morvain, Narms's south district offered a comfortable nest for fortune-seeking headhunters, who scoured Halwythwood for scalps that paid bounty.
By tradition, Alliance interests made landfall at Narms, then passed briskly through to hold loftier counsel at Etarra.
The mayor approached the entry to his great hall and discovered the royal delegation from the harbor already installed ahead of him. One leaf of the heavy double panel lay ajar. A spill of escaped light sliced the dimmed anteroom, strung through by the echoes of rapid-paced talk. The oddity shook him, that he felt estranged while underneath his own roof.
Anxiety bit deeper as he reached the threshold, his short
-
strided footsteps unnaturally loud as he entered the cavernous chamber. The hearthfire newly lit by his guard captain did nothing to lift the dank chill. Stone walls had been stripped of the star and moon tapestries unfurled each year for the solstice festivities. On a floor scrubbed bare of its formal wax polish, the replacement hangings of hunting scenes lay still rolled, not yet looped on the polished brass rods. The board trestles had been stacked by the wall during cleaning, except for the one set erect for the use of the surprise delegation from Tysan.
That rectangle stood like a snag in the candlelight, bare of linen cloth, and surrounded by men whose steel-clad intensity raised a wall of unease at ten yards. Among six, on their feet, the seated man towered, his self-contained presence a mantle of majesty that seemed bred in the flesh and the bone of him. As always, Lysaer
s'Ilessid
held the eye like a compass drawn by a magnet.
Golden-haired, cloaked in white, the
s'Ilessid
prince shone brilliant as diamond and pearl couched against the unadorned setting. The chair he occupied might have been a throne, not the tawdry furnishing the deerhounds had chewed to tattered hanks of burst horsehair. His innate nobility overshadowed his retinue, whose sunwheel tabards of gold and watered silk showed the sad creases ingrained by pack straps and sea chests.
A glance showed the mayor his game plan was forfeit. The basket of new bread sent up from the oven lay cooling, untouched, on a footstool. The carafe of mulled wine had been shoved to one side, its spiced vintage spurned for the tactical map some churl had unrolled, and impaled at the corners with the wife's best stag-handled cutlery.
'Prince Exalted,' the Mayor of Narms greeted in stiff courtesy.
His court-style bow was acknowledged by the barest, brief nod, and a glance from ice-crystal blue eyes. Preoccupied, the unlaced cuff of one sleeve stripped back to expose his immaculate limb to the elbow, the fair personage of Lysaer
s'Ilessid
laid his wrist in the hands of the slender young man in the priest's robe. Still seamlessly focused, he finished his answer to Narms's worried captain at arms.
'Yes. We know beyond doubt. The Spinner of Darkness has dared to return to the continent. His presence was affirmed well before the hour I set sail from Atainia.' A regal gesture invited the Lord Mayor to join his dazzling, close company. 'Very shortly, bear with me, we'll know where he lairs. My diviner will scry his location.'
Admitted to the inner circle, the mayor surveyed the prince's minimal retinue. He recognized the lean grace and searing impatience of Sulfin Evend, Avenor's Lord Commander at Arms. Three other sunwheel officers in chain mail were strangers, even the headhunter whose muscled frame wore the acid-etched poise of a predator.
Despite every evidence of prowess on the field, the seasoned men-at-arms gave wide berth to the effete priest. Set apart, that one wore the floor-length, sashed robe of a sunwheel acolyte. His six-strand chain of rank set his station one tier below High Priest Cerebeld. The gleaming gold sigil at the crown of his hood proclaimed his Light-sanctioned talent for augury.
As a diviner, he was young, a bone-skinny celibate whose cleft chin and pale cheeks showed scarcely a dusting of beard. Hands slim as a woman's clasped the royal wrist, afflicted with palsy, or else made unsteady by high-strung nerves as he unsheathed a thin ceremonial knife. 'Your Exalted,' he warned in a sugar-toned tenor, then effected a quick, neat cut with the blade, knapped from a bleached human shinbone.
Lysaer did not flinch. His arm stayed relaxed as the blood welled, and the droplets were caught in an offering bowl fashioned from glittering crystal.
The priest kissed the wet wound, then bound it in silk. His carmine-stained lips intoned blessings to the Light in a whisper that rasped like filed steel through the sigh of the fire in the grate.
Narms's mayor looked on, clammy with sweat, and bound to sick fascination. Before this, he had always thought of arcane blood rituals as tales told to threaten unruly children.
Nor did the men-at-arms appear to relish their role as close witnesses. Some shuffled their feet. Others looked elsewhere as a basin of water was tipped into the offering bowl. Blood swirled in pink patterns, stirred by the bone knife. When the mixture blended to translucent pink, the diviner placed the vessel at the center of the tactical map. He floated a wafer of cork on the water, then rubbed a steel needle with a square of black silk until it acquired a charge. There followed another incantation, an invocation to divine Light, while the magnetized needle was arranged on the cork float. The construct revolved on its bed of stained water, then stalled to oscillation on a north-to-south axis. The strangled quiet magnified the rustle of the diviner-priest's silk sleeves. Finished praying, he cupped the fluid-filled bowl. Chain mail clinked in partnered response, as Sulfin Evend adjusted the lay of the tactical map. When the poised needle and the compass rose matched up in cardinal alignment, he reset the abused table cutlery and secured the curled corners of the parchment.