TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (74 page)

He managed a league at that cracking, fast pace before the blown animal forced him to slacken. Dropped back to a raggedy trot, the horse flattened its ears as Arithon's heels pressured its choppy stride forward. His determined hands on the reins drove a straight course, with no allowance for clawing, low brush, or snow-patched swales and snagged ground. The Master of Shadow forged on like a wraith, through stands of black firs, their storm-whipped boughs bowed to the ground. He clattered over rock gulches and fissured ledges at a pace not designed to spare horseflesh.

The eagle he followed flew steadily northwest, its wing strokes no less urgent. The hillocks it traversed reared upward into massive stone ramparts. No horse could scale them. The towering scarp sheared in canted, layered stone, patched with glaze ice and rockfalls, and riddled with treacherous footing. Left nowhere to go but into the heights, Arithon slid from the saddle.

He murmured phrases to soothe the beast's rattled nerves, but could not stop its shying from the smell seeped through his right glove as he stripped off the blood-soaked leather. His breathless apology translated through the scrying spell in the quartz sphere. 'Little brother, stand easy. I owe you my life.'

His voice missed the gentle register he required. Elaira winced for the strung note of tension; shuddered as he drew the clogged knife that had dispatched the valiant gray. Yet this time the blade was not wielded for slaughter. Arithon cut only the leather headstall and girth, then jettisoned the stripped tack.

'Go find a wild mare!' he enjoined the dazed horse. Perhaps knowing Elaira's presence stood by him, he loosed a lamed gasp of laughter. 'I'd do as much, if I had your freedom.'

The confused animal regarded him with mournful, dark eyes: nothing like the endless, deep mystery he cherished in Elaira's bright gray ones. The solitary desolation of his straits all but broke her heart, as he slapped the creature's steamed rump, then peered ahead, and shouldered his dogged way forward.

'After you,' he said in stark irony to the eagle, perched above him in ruffled impatience.

The bird snap-turned its head. Its glance harbored no human light of encouragement as it unfurled dark wings and launched into a beating climb up the slope.

By then, the warm rains had slackened to drizzle, touched chill by the increased altitude. Ground fog drifted off the thaw-rotted snowbanks, breathed into white rags of mist. The vales hung under cloud like spoiled lacquer, and the dank air blew raw off the heights. Small sounds fell magnified by close rock and dense moisture, until Arithon moved through a half world defined by the rasp of his own labored breath and the slipped scrape of his steps on slicked rock. At times he clawed upward hand over hand, his fingers grazed raw on the ledges. He suffered repeated, painful delay, his knife needed to chip off loosened ice.

Elaira shared each labored increment of his progress. The empathic link showed the stark determination that forged beset thoughts into focus. Step by step, under siege by Desh-thiere's curse, Arithon scaled the inhospitable face of the mountain. His beloved observed each missed foothold, breath bated through each perilous traverse, over ledges moss rotten and frost cracked. The mulled cider set at her elbow cooled off, untouched, beside currant bread barely nibbled. The adept who returned to collect the small tray knew her will, and scattered the stale crusts for the birds.

In time, the guiding flight of the eagle curved into a lazy circle. The peak where it took station reared up into mist, a jagged shoulder of stone too grizzled and stark to offer a high pass for egress. Cloud cover lidded the summit above, and late afternoon limned the shrouded slope in lusterless gloom and flat lead. The drizzle now slackened, an ominous sign, as the fickle south wind backed and threatened to blow once again from the north.

Wringing worry crushed hope. Elaira whispered helpless endearments over the wheeling scene in the quartz sphere. She fought to contain her crippling doubt, that would only serve Arithon disheartenment. Yet the fickle equinox weather was worsening. Nightfall in the heights was going to bring punishing cold.

Stripped of jacket and cloak, Arithon knew he faced death by exposure. He carried no provisions. His hunting bow had been lost underneath his dead horse, leaving no weapons but dagger and sword. Though the trapper's pouch with tinder and flint remained strung from the strap at his shoulder, the rock crannies grew no fuel but gorse. No comfort could be wrested from that lonely place, even if he eluded the half brother closing steadily from behind.

Elaira heard the shrill cry echoing up from the defile as the Etarran advance scouts encountered the jettisoned saddle and bridle. Her pulse raced, overturned by raw fright as Arithon reacted to the unkind moment of discovery. He knew he posed a defenseless target, exposed on a slope with no cover.

By main strength, he banished the pressures of fear. Without looking, he kept climbing, every shred of his faculties applied to maintain forward progress up the cliff face. He drove himself, even as enemies answered the hail of the scout and gave chase with redoubled zeal. Elaira shut her eyes, unable to stem the graphic flood of her dread, or Arithon's raised pitch of desperation.

He rejected bad odds, that the townborn light horsemen were many to his one, or that the ledges he inched up hold by creeping hold could be scaled at speed, given the advantage of numbers and highly skilled training. Elaira clamped the quartz sphere between paralyzed hands. Her worry distilled into needling anguish, she saw Arithon discard the logical tactic, to haze his back trail under shadow.

'Beloved, why not?' Strain rushed her dizzy as she plumbed the linked contact to fathom behavior that seemed incomprehensible.

Yet Arithon's mind had become a closed vault, his concentration too narrowed.
Nothing
emerged but his pinpoint intent to keep climbing despite all impediment. His headlong sprint drove him heedlessly upward. Such profligate effort must break him down with exhaustion inside a matter of moments.

Elaira, who knew him, felt her damp skin rise to gooseflesh. 'Beloved, where are you going in such haste?'

For of course,
the eagle had granted him purposeful guidance. Yet where, in this vista of untenanted stone, could a hunted spirit look for refuge or sanctuary?
Then logic leaped one drastic step further. That first, reaming chill shot panic down to the bone.

'Arithon, no!' For in the high Mathorns, one dread place existed where Davien the Betrayer had formerly drawn a crowned s'Ffalenn forebear. Where Lysaer's avid troops might indeed fear to tread, since the site held a maze of dire spellcraft, inextricably linked to old legends of terror and death.

Elaira cradled the quartz sphere over her heart, ripped into white-knuckled tension. Ath's blinding glory,
how could she send warning
!
To spare Arithon one fate was to leave him as victim to the Etarrans' black hatred and the insanity of Desh-thiere's curse. Act to intervene, and she would invoke the binding obligation of a Koriani oath of debt. The jaws of the quandary were closing too fast, if any safe option existed.

'Dharkaron forfend!' Elaira started to rise, prepared to risk an appeal to Ath's adepts to beg for wise counsel. Too late; the eagle unfolded dark wings. Its brief, gliding flight set it down on the incongruous, carved stone of a newel post set on the side of the mountain. The gray-on-gray image unveiled by the scrying showed the parting of the mist, then the stair of cut marble, fashioned by the eerie precision of a Sorcerer who owned an artisan's genius for masterworked spells. Patterns of knotwork were incised on the blocks that marked the odd, angled landings.

Elaira understood her beloved had been led to the threshold of peril already. 'Mercy, Arithon, no! Not the passage into Kewar Tunnel!'

He could not hear. The scried link was passive, restricted to remote observation. Yet if the quartz would not transmit her cry of dismay, the shared bond of empathy first forged through healing obeyed no such limit. Her explosive distress would flow straight to his heart, a stab of jagged emotion that could only tear him apart.

Arithon looked up, green eyes wide. As though she stood in his path, crying censure, he braced himself in mid-climb. 'Elaira?' His speech was lucid, despite breathing torn by exertion. The quartz sphere transmitted his astringent concern with excruciating clarity. 'Beloved, my heart, you fear for me? I ache for your hurt. Yet I would shoulder the unknown danger here.' As her surge of response reached out and touched him, he turned whitened features away. 'Yes, I will take that choice! This before giving myself over to Lysaer, and the blind hatred of Desh-thiere's curse.'

Upslope, the eagle screamed an agitated warning. Arithon snapped back his lapsed concentration; heard the whine crease the air at his back. War-trained instinct took over. He flattened against the breast of the slope, wary enough to recognize t
he sound of an inbound arrow. T
he shaft fell short. Its rattling clatter tumbled down the ledge he had scaled scarcely seconds before. Arithon hurled himself onward. His clawing flight upward abandoned all rules, and every small care for his safety. Whipped on by sharp worry, he had to realize one of the bowman's companions might pull a stronger weapon; or another archer might supplant the first, armed with steel quarrels and crossbow.

The base of the staircase nestled above a vertical rock escarpment. No man who set foot there arrived by mistake. Arithon began the laborious last yards of ascent, clinging to the face like a spider. More arrows shrieked into the slope right and left of him, arc shots launched at extreme range. They would wound readily enough, even kill if he suffered an unlucky hit. Arithon grimaced. The taxed muscles in his forearm screamed under strain as he stretched for a handhold over his head. The troops swarming up from below by now realized his flight up sheer rock held the hope of a saving destination. More arrows sleeted in, through an officer's shouting. Then the sound he most dreaded: misted air carried the measured ratchet of a crossbow, cocking. The enemy longbowmen did not let up, but pressed the limits of skill and loosed off more ragged volleys.

Arithon scaled rock, forced to take ruthless risks, his stamina and judgment fast failing. The misstep, the slipped hold he could not afford might as easily dispatch him to a plunging fall down the mountain.

'By Torbrand's name, no!' An end bought by mishap would make ungrateful repayment for Jieret's life, and a clan war band more than half-decimated; would adulterate the desperate murders Braggen had been forced to commit in the name of his prince's survival. For Caolle's sake also, and the sworn oath of debt owed to the Fellowship Sorcerers, Arithon drove his taxed flesh beyond mercy, while Elaira wept for his suffering.

The scried image spared her no small detail. For each creeping foot won from that last rock face, the demands of exertion cost him. His old sword wound reopened. Blood stained the grimed wrap that remained of Jieret's careful dressing. The thin air of high altitude became as a knife in the lungs, until Arithon's head swam and reeled. Spoiled balance bought mistakes. Once, he slid backward, saved by the jut of a stone and one hand. No time to recoup from that narrow escape; lost footage must be won back, while the wasp hum of arrows invited distraction, and the angry smack of the first crossbolt hammered flying chips from the granite. Too close; fragments of stone pelted into his cheek.

Arithon shut his eyes. Reduced to driven flight, he dragged himself upward, and tried to shut out the ratcheting clank, as the weapon was spanned by the marksman.

The next bolt bit into the crevice above him. Arithon's clipped expletive collided with the sawn gasp of Elaira's intaken breath. A sharp marksman's next shot might easily take the Prince of Rathain through the back.

The danger did not escape him. Arithon scrabbled, jammed his toe in a crack, and shoved upward on faith and main strength.
T
he thrust let him catch the lowest carved riser, but only with his left-hand fingertips. A fraught moment, he dangled in helpless extension, while his legs kicked and scraped against icy stone, vainly seeking fresh purchase. Like vengeance unleashed, the next crossbolt howled in. Arithon had no secure footing to move. Need drove him to try, a mistake. His cramped fingers started slipping off the smoothed edge of worked stone.

The bolt struck,
too close.
It pierced through the grimed rag of his sleeve and rebounded, snagged by the flange of its broadhead.

His instinctive recoil cost the last of his balance. Arithon screamed in wordless rage. With the last, fierce scrap of will he possessed, he hurled flesh and bone beyond limits and thrust his legs straight. Off a fugitive toehold wrung from straight friction, he snapped out his right arm and clawed upward.

He hooked the lip of the stair, just barely. Through a gasping interval, he hauled himself up the rough rock. Weathered granite resisted each inch, dragged at his clothing and scoured his flesh. Exhaustion racked him to snarling pain. Arithon forced one forearm and elbow onto the stair, then the other, crossed over the first. Shaking, he clung by his shoulders and chin, then levered his torso until his cheek pressed against the smoothed marble riser. There he dropped, spent. His pumping breaths whistling in graceless gasps, and his feet dangled limp down the precipice.

'Move, oh Ath, move!' Elaira exhorted.

For the next crossbolt hissed on a deadly trajectory, straight for Arithon's exposed nape.