TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate by Janny Wurts
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, plashed 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 oat
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 the
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.