To Ride Hell's Chasm

by Janny Wurts

  An uncomfortable truth, routinely obscured by Sessalie’s bucolic peace: the icy girdle of the mountains was the only barrier that kept the evil creatures from invading the far north.

  ‘May heaven’s fire defend us!’ the maid whispered, while the nearer guardsman made a sign to ward off evil.

  If not for the peaks, with their ramparts of vertical rock, and the natural defences of killing storms and glaciers, tiny Sessalie would not have kept its stubborn independence. The hardy breed of crofters who upheld the royal treasury would never have enjoyed the lush alpine meadows, which fattened their tawny cattle every summer, or the neatly terraced fields, with their grape crops and barley brought to harvest through the toil of generations.

  ‘Show me the sorcerer who could march his army across the Great Divide.’ The crown prince dismissed their fears with his affable shrug. A drunk hazed on cloud wine might dream of such a prodigy; not a sober man standing on his intellect.

  Even to Taskin’s exacting mind, the worry was farfetched. The flume that threaded that dreadful terrain was nothing if not a deathtrap. Foolish prospectors sometimes came, pursuing gold and minerals. They died to a man, slaughtered by hungry kerries, or else drowned in the rapids, their smashed bones spewed out amid the boil of dirty froth that thundered down the mouth of Hell’s Chasm. Skilled alpinists occasionally traversed the high rim. Survivors of that route had been favoured by freakish luck and mild weather, since the arduous climb over Scatton’s Pass required altitude conditioning for a crossing that took many weeks. Yet where storms and exposure sometimes spared the hardy few, the ravine killed without discrimination. The relentless toll of casualties had extended for time beyond memory.

  ‘I thought you’d want to know,’ Prince Kailen said at length. ‘My father stayed lucid long enough to oppose the seneschal’s complacency. His sealed order sent for the Captain of the Garrison.’

  Commander Taskin left the window, his brows raised in speculation. ‘Were you concerned I’d been pre-empted? Not the case. If you’re wrong, and your sister’s disappearance isn’t an innocent joke, then we could have unknown enemies lurking in the lower citadel. Had his Majesty not dispatched the summons, I would have done the same. Has the garrison man arrived yet?’

  ‘He should reach the palace at any moment.’ Prince Kailen straightened up and jumped to clear the doorway for Taskin’s abrupt departure. ‘I expected you’d wish to attend the royal audience.’

  The commander hastened towards the stair, in unspoken accord that the seneschal ought not to be left in sole charge. All too often, of late, the aged King of Sessalie lapsed into witless reverie. ‘While I’m gone, Highness, have the grace to show my guardsmen every likely nook your royal sister could have used for a hideaway’

  The gate guard who emerged to meet the herald’s band of outriders was the son of a noble, marked by his strapping build and northern fairness. His smart scarlet surcoat fell to his polished boots, which flashed with the gleam of gilt spurs.

  ‘Captain Mysh kael?’ His aristocratic lisp softened the name’s uncivil consonants. Cool, cerulean eyes surveyed the laggard still astride. ‘The king’s summons said, “at once.’“

  ‘Never seen a man limp?’ Mykkael barked back, refusing to be hustled like a lackey. Bedamned if he would jump for any lordling’s petty pleasure, aware as he was that his dark skin raised contempt far beyond the small delay for the care he took to spare his aching knee.

  The guardsman disdained to answer. Once the captain had dismounted, he extended a gloved hand and brusquely offered a bundled-up cloak with no device.

  Mykkael passed his winded horse to the hovering groom and received the hooded garment, his smile all brazen teeth. No one had to like his breeding. Last summer’s tourney had proved his deadly prowess. Crippled or not, the challenge match that won his claim to rank had been decisive. If the upper-crust gossip still dismissed the upset as fickle, he could afford to laugh. His strong hand on the garrison manned the Lowergate defences. That irony alone sheltered Sessalie’s wealthy bigots, and granted them their pampered grace to flourish.

  Mykkael flipped the plain cloak across his muscled shoulders. The hem trailed on the ground. As though his slighter frame and desert colouring made no mockery of pretence, or the gimp of his knee could be masked, he gestured towards the lamplight avenue, its refined marble pavement gleaming past the shadow of the Highgate. ‘After you, my lord herald.’

  No streetwise eye was going to miss the precedent, that the Captain of the Garrison came on urgent, covert business to the palace.

  ‘By every bright power of daylight, Captain! Try not to draw undue attention to yourself.’ Through a tight, embarrassed pause, the herald gamely finished. ‘The royal household doesn’t need a sensation with Devall’s heir apparent here to contract for his bride.’

  ‘His Majesty commands my oath-bound duty to the crown,’ Mykkael acknowledged. ‘But isn’t that golden egg already broken? To my understanding, we’re one piece short for promising the man a royal wedding.’

  Served a censuring glance from the ranking guardsman, the herald gasped, appalled. ‘On my honour, I didn’t breathe a word!’ To Mykkael, he added, urgent, ‘You’d better save what you know for the ears of the king and his seneschal.’ He waved his charge along, taken aback a second time as he had to push his stride to stay abreast.

  For Mykkael, the discomfort wore a different guise: beyond Highgate’s granite arch, with its massive, grilled gates, he shouldered no citizen’s rights, and no authority. Above the jurisdiction of the Lowergate garrison, he became a king’s officer, pledged to bear arms in crown service. His claim to autonomy fell under the iron hand of Commander Taskin of the Royal Guard. That paragon was the son of an elite uplands family, handpicked to claim his title at his predecessor’s death. His prowess with the sword was a barracks legend, and his temperament suffered no fool gladly.

  A man groomed to stand at the king’s right hand, on equal footing with the realm’s seneschal, would have small cause to welcome an outsider and ex-mercenary, obliged to prove his fitness in a yearly public tourney until he scrounged the means to fund retirement.

  ‘I hope your sword’s kept campaign-sharp, and without a speck of rust,’ the palace guardsman ventured in snide warning. ‘If not, the commander will tear you to ribbons, in the royal presence, or out of it.’

  Captain Mykkael raised his eyebrows, his sudden laughter ringing off the fluted columns that fronted the thoroughfare. ‘Well, thank the world’s bright powers, I’m a garrison soldier. If I wore a blade in his Majesty’s presence, rust or not, I’d be tried and hung for treason.’

  Stars wheeled above the snow-capped rims of the ranges, their shining undimmed as the face of disaster shrouded the palace in quiet. On the wide, flagstone terrace, still laid for the princess’s feast, a chill breeze riffled the tablecloths. It whispered through the urns of potted flowers, persistent as the stifled conversations of the guests who, even now, refused to retire. Of the thousand gay lanterns, half had gone out, with no servants at hand to trim wicks. Silver cutlery and fine porcelain lay in forlorn disarray, where distraught lady courtiers had purloined linen napkins to stem their silenced onslaught of tears.

  The staunch among them gathered to comfort Lady Shai, whose diamond hair combs and strings of pearls shimmered to her trembling. No one’s calm assurance would assuage her distress, no matter how kindly presented.

  Prince Kailen’s suggestion of practical jokes had roused her gentle nature to fiercely outspoken contradiction. ‘Not Anja. Not this time! Since the very first hour the Prince of Devall started courting her, she has spoken of nothing else! Merciful powers protect her, I know! Never mind her heart, the kingdom’s weal is her lifeblood. She once told me she would have married a monster to acquire seaport access for the tradesmen. She said—oh, bright powers! How fortune had blessed her beyond measure, that the prince was so comely and considerate.’

  A wrenching pause, while Shai sipped the glass of wine thrust
upon her by the elderly Duchess of Phail. The ladies surrounding her collapse glanced up, hopeful, as Commander Taskin ghosted past on his purposeful course for the audience hall.

  ‘Any news?’ asked Lady Phail, her refined cheeks too pale, and her grip on her cane frail with worry.

  Taskin shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  Lady Shai tipped up her face, her violet eyes inflamed and swollen. ‘Commander! I beg you, don’t listen to the crown prince and dismiss my cousin’s absence as a folly. Upon my heart and soul, something awful has befallen. Her Grace would have to be dead to have dealt the man she loves such an insult.’

  The commander paused, his own handkerchief offered to replace the sodden table linen wrung between Shai’s damp fingers. ‘Rest assured, the matter has my undivided attention.’

  He nodded to the others, found a chair for Lady Phail, then proceeded on his way. Ahead, a determined crowd of men accosted the arched entry that led to the grand hall of state. The stout chamberlain sighted the commander’s brisk approach and raised his gold baton. ‘Make way!’ His hoarse shout scarcely carried through the turmoil.

  Commander Taskin lost patience. ‘Stand down!’

  The knot cleared for that voice, fast as any green batch of recruits. The chamberlain pawed at his waist for his keying. ‘You’ve come at last. Thank blazes. The king is with the seneschal.’ Still too rattled to turn the lock quickly, the fat official gabbled to forestall the commander’s impatience. ‘His Majesty sent a herald to the lower keep and summoned that sand-whelped upstart—’

  Taskin interrupted, sharp. ‘The Captain of the Garrison? I already know. He’s a fighter, no matter what she-creature bore him. His record of field warfare deserves your respect.’

  As the double doors parted, Taskin did not immediately walk through. He pivoted instead, catching the petitioners short of their eager surge forward. ‘Go home! All of you. My guardsmen are capable. If your services are needed, I’d have you respond to the crown’s better interests well rested.’

  Through a stirring of brocades, past the craning of necks in pleated collars, a persistent voice arose. ‘Is there crisis?’

  Another chimed in, ‘Have you news?’

  ‘No news!’ Taskin’s bark cut off the rising hysteria. ‘Once the princess is found, the palace guard will send criers. Until then, collect your wives and retire!’

  ‘But Commander, you don’t understand,’ ventured the fox-haired merchant whose dissenting word rose the loudest. ‘Some of us wish to offer our house guards, even lend coin from our personal coffers to further the search for her Grace.’

  Taskin raised his eyebrows. His drilling survey swept the gathering, no man dismissed, even the foreign ambassador from the east, with his bullion brocade and his pleated silk hat, hung with a star sapphire and tassel. ‘Very well. I’ll send out the seneschal. He’ll take down the list of names and offered services.’

  Prepared for the ripple of dismayed consternation, Taskin’s lean mouth turned, perhaps in amusement. The rest of his bearing stayed glass-hard with irony. Now, no man dared to leave, lest he be the first to expose his underlying insincerity. Once each pledge of interest was committed to ink, the commander could winnow the truly loyal from the hypocrites at leisure.

  Beyond the broad doors, the throne and gallery loomed empty. The bronze chandeliers hung dark on their chains, the only light burning in the small sconce by the privy chamber. Outside its thin radiance, the room’s rich appointments sank into gloom, the lion-foot chairs reduced to a whispered gleam of gold leaf, and the crystalline flares off the glass-beaded tassels a glimmer of ice on the curtain pulls.

  Taskin’s brisk footsteps raised scarcely a sound as he passed, a fast-moving shadow against lead-paned windows, faintly burnished by starlight. By contrast, the clash of voices beyond the closed door raised echoes like muffled thunder.

  Taskin acknowledged the six guardsmen, standing motionless duty, then wrenched the panel open without knocking. He sized up the tableau of three men beyond as he would have viewed the pieces on a chessboard.

  In the company of the King of Sessalie and the seneschal, the High Prince of Devall claimed the eye first. He was a young man of striking good looks. The hair firmly tied at his nape with silk ribbon hung dishevelled now, honey strands tugged loose at the temples. Though he sat with his chin propped on laced hands, his presence yet reflected the lively intelligence that exhaustion had thrown into eclipse. He still wore banquet finery: a doublet of azure velvet edged in bronze, and studded with diamonds at the collar. His white shirt with its pearl-buttoned cuffs set off his shapely hands. The signet of Devall, worn by the heir apparent, flashed ruby fire as he straightened to the movement at the doorway.

  Taskin bowed, but as usual, never lowered his head. While the seneschal’s ranting trailed into stiff silence, and the king’s prating quaver sawed on, Devall’s prince appraised the commander’s rapid entry with amber eyes, dark-printed with strain. ‘Lord Taskin, I trust you bring news?’

  ‘None, Highness. Every man I have in the guard is assigned. They are diligent.’

  The seneschal shot the commander a scathing glance for such bluntness. ‘If you’ve heard about the herald dispatched to the lower keep, can I rely on your better sense to restore the realm’s decorum? We scarcely need to raise the garrison to track down an errant girl!’

  Taskin disregarded both the glare and the sarcasm. He would have honesty above empty words and false assurances. Nor would he speak out of turn before his king, whose maundering trailed off in confusion.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ Taskin cracked, striking just the right tone. ‘I have no word as yet on your daughter.’

  A blink from the King of Sessalie, whose gnarled hands tightened on his chair. His gaunt frame sagged beneath the massive state mantle with its marten fur edging, and the circlet of his rank that seemed too weighty for his eggshell head. Nonetheless, the trace of magnificence remained in the craggy architecture of his face; a reduced shadow of the vigorous man who had begotten two bright and comely children, and raised them to perpetuate a dynasty that had lasted for three thousand years.

  An authoritative spark rekindled his glazed eyes. ‘Taskin. I’ve sent for Captain Mysh kael.’ Brief words, short sentences; the king’s speech of late had become wrenchingly laboured, a sorrow to those whose love was constant. ‘You’ll see soon enough. My seneschal objects.’

  ‘I find the choice commendable, your Majesty.’ Taskin kept tight watch on the foreign prince from Devall, and recorded the masked start of surprise. ‘Until we know what’s happened, we are well advised to call out every resource we can muster.’

  The high prince slapped his flattened hands upon the tabletop, but snatched short of shoving to his feet. ‘Then you don’t feel her Grace has played a prank for my embarrassment?’

  ‘I don’t know, Highness. Her women don’t think so.’ Taskin’s shoulders lifted in the barest, sketched shrug. ‘But Princess Anja being something of a law unto herself, her ladies have been wrong as much as right when the girl played truant as a child.’

  The seneschal thrust out his bony, hawk nose, his stick frame bristling with outrage. ‘Well, we don’t need a scandal buzzing through the lower citadel! Find the herald, do. Pull rank at the Highgate, and turn the captain back to mind his garrison.’

  ‘Too late.’ Already alerted by the sound of inbound footsteps, Taskin’s icy gaze fixed on the seneschal as he let fly his own sly dart. ‘In fact, your service is the one that’s needed elsewhere.’ Two crisp sentences explained the gist behind the courtiers held under the chamberlain’s watchful eye.

  ‘Your Majesty, have I leave?’ The seneschal bowed, shrewd enough to forgo his sour rivalry for opportunity. He thrust to his feet, his supple, scribe’s hands all but twitching for the chance to wring advantage from the merchants’ pledge of loyalty.

  A short delay ensued, while King Isendon of Sessalie raised a palsied forearm and excused the gaunt official from his presence. As the seneschal s
talked away, he peered in vague distress at the straight, stilled figure of his ranking guardsman, who now claimed the place left vacant at his right hand. ‘Commander. Do you honestly think we might be facing war?’

  ‘Your Majesty, that’s unlikely’ Taskin’s candour was forthright. What did Sessalie possess, that could be worth a vicious siege, a campaign supplier’s nightmare, destined to be broken by the early winter storms that howled, unforgiving, through the ranges? Only Anja posed the key to disarm such defences. Threat to her could unlock all three of the citadel’s moated gates without a fight.

  Within the royal palace, her loss might break King Isendon’s fragile wits within a week, or a day, or an hour. Prince Kailen lacked the hardened maturity to rein in the fractious council nobles. The seneschal was clever with accounting, but too set in his ways to keep the young blood factions close at heel.

  Sessalie needed the sea trade to sweeten the merchants and bolster a cash-poor council through the uncertainty of the coming succession.

  Yet the petty slights and tangles spun by court dissension were not for Devall’s ears. Anja’s offered hand must not imply a bleeding weakness, or invite the licence to be annexed as a province.

  Lest the pause give the opening to tread dangerous ground, the Commander of the Guard tossed a bone to divert the high prince’s agile perception. ‘The crown needs its eyes and ears in the sewers under Highgate. Captain Mysh kael may be a misbegotten southern mongrel, but he keeps the city garrison trimmed into fighting shape. Knows his job; I checked his background. We want him keen and watchful, and not hackled like a man who’s been insulted.’

  The High Prince of Devall drummed irritable fingers, his ruby seal glaring like spilled blood. ‘I don’t give a rice grain if the man’s low born, or the get of a pox-ridden harlot! Let him find Princess Anja, I’ll give him a villa on the river, a lord’s parcel of mature vineyards, and a tax-free stamp to run a winery’