by Janny Wurts
The cold blaze of stars did not change, or the wind, or the barren stone, locked in the tranquillity of earth element’s silence. Yet something in Sessalie shifted, unseen. The change ruffled chills down Mykkael’s spine and nipped gooseflesh over his skin.
The princess detected his hitched pause where she stood, watering her sweat-damp black horse at the cleft of the streamlet. ‘What is it? Captain Mykkael?’
He stirred, ignored the sharp pang from his knee, then shoved to his feet all at once. ‘Mount up, Princess.’
Unwilling to say more, he held out to see if she might protest or argue. Met by his braced quiet, she stared at him, nodded, then promptly made her selection. Some of his tension eased into approval, as she bridled and saddled the diminutive chestnut. Anja had gauged her six animals with a clear eye. The little mare seemed the most fit and rested.
Nor did she cavil at giving him royal orders, in turn. ‘You ride the black, Stormfront. He’s strong, never falters, and was probably foaled with the world’s only set of iron nerves. He’ll handle the nasty surprises in his stride. Once when the boys startled a snake in his path, he stomped the poor creature to paper.’
‘Let us hope we won’t need such staunch strength of character,’ Mykkael said, his heightened uneasiness masked under soft-spoken courtesy. The loan of the gelding was a rare honor, he knew. Also a practicality plain as a steel nail tossed into a chest of gold jewellery. Not being Taskin, he could do little else except bow to her Grace’s bidding. He caught up the prized animal’s ornate headstall, prepared to treat with him as his noble breeding deserved.
Mykkael removed the belt from his surcoat and replaced it with a hacked-off rope length, then buckled the leather to the black gelding’s chin ring to use for a rein. He had ridden with nomads often enough not to mind the lack of a bit or a saddle. Since sword and bow made a vaulting mount awkward, and the ache from his punctured thigh hampered his accustomed agility, he used the advantage of a high rock to settle himself astride.
Anja surveyed each move with critical eyes, then nodded to his tacit request that she handle the ropes leading the other two pairs of horses. As they clattered up the swept ridge under starlight, she pursued his reticent silence. ‘Since you’re thinking you might need your sword hand free, I ought to know what we’re facing.’
Mykkael turned his head, a dark silhouette chisel-cut against the clear sky. ‘If I knew that, Princess, I would hope to use foresight, and plan better tactics than running.’
‘I see.’ Her gaze remained on him, fixed by a steel-clad purpose quite charmingly masked under impish determination. ‘Since you have a tongue that could beat a carved statue for reticence, you don’t leave me much opening for nicety. You are wounded, surely, in the leg?’ His irritable glance downwards met her bright, pealing laugh. ‘Yes. Don’t look nettled. Your bandage has seeped. I know a fresh sword cut, don’t bother to lie. The one on your hand is left in plain view, and you move like a man with a backache.’
Mykkael uttered an abrasive phrase in dialect, then added with stung dignity, ‘I don’t lie, Princess. I have in fact told you already. When I left the citadel, the enemy was using political pressure to divide your father’s supporters. Some were incited to stop me. They failed. The scratches I suffer, meanwhile, are mine. The scar on my knee is an old one.’
Her probing regard did not shift, but sharpened to a keener perception. ‘I saw your performance at last summer’s tourney’ Not playful now, but deadly serious, she pressed, ‘I don’t know the man who could make you afraid.’ When that leading statement also failed to draw him, she tried a frontal assault. ‘What set you off, Captain? A moment ago, you looked fit to leap out of your skin.’
He still had no answer. The wardings he carried remained quiescent. Still hounded by the odd, nascent chill, Mykkael glanced over his shoulder. The view at his back made him rein up short. No good news, but now at least he had the means to defer this tenacious intent to expose him. ‘Your Grace? Have a look.’
The valley below lay battened in mist, except for a distant, fuzzed ring that blazed like a brand of carnelian. Mykkael knew what he saw: the palace of Sessalie was set under demonic attack.
If Anja could not discern with his depth of knowledge, she could scarcely miss the uncanny symmetry of the conflagration. She did not break down, or plead reassurance, but sat amid the warm jostle of her horses, her distress wrung to anguished silence. A moment passed; two; she forced shaken speech. ‘That looks like the opened gateway to hell.’
‘A wound on the earth, near enough,’ Mykkael said, and this time, his acid bitterness rang through.
Anja pressed her mount up beside him. ‘A sorcerer’s balefire touched the palace aflame?’
The captain shook off the haunted recall of old ghosts, and the shadows of past apprehension, to give what reassurance he could. ‘Thank the powers of your trinity, the blaze forms a ring. That means the long spell that raised the assault was shed by an active defence. Your sire is still safe.’
She peered at him closely. ‘You suffer from witch thoughts?’
‘Suffer?’ He laughed. No northerner, ever, had phrased his affliction that way. His teeth flashed in a genuine smile. ‘The tribal mother who disowned me at birth would more likely have counted the instinct a gift.’ He tipped his head forward, still richly amused. ‘After you, Princess. We need to keep moving.’
More shudders savaged him as Anja spurred past. In fact, he wanted her safe in a cave, with his warded sword guarding the entrance. Harrowing experience had well taught him not to disown the prompt of such spurious premonition. Nor would he erode his awareness by dwelling on logical doubts. He held his mind quiet as a pool of stilled water, and opened his senses to the bracing tang of the wind.
The next moment, a prickling grue raked his skin, and his anchored perception dissolved…
He was a crown guardsman, sword drawn, his other fist bearing a torch laced with cedar. He raced up a narrow turnpike stair in pursuit of a black scaled monstrosity. Hot breath rasped his throat. His mouth dried with fear. He rounded the last turn and reached the top floor of a tower observatory.
Amid crawling shadows thrown off by the flames, there were details, all wrong, and laced with a shrill sense of danger. The board floor held a spatter of fresh bloodstains. Yet the heedless swordsman pressed on with his rush, without taking time to investigate.
Beyond the bronze bands of the seeing glass, the fell creature he chased clawed on to the sill of the open casement. Through whirling smoke, and the flutter of flame light, its scaled form continued its horrific metamorphosis. A pair of leathery wings extended from its hunched back. Its vaned tail now wore a spiked knot of spines, which it slashed, raking to stab its oncoming adversary.
‘Mercy!’ gasped a second man, breathlessly arrived at the stairhead. He also was clad in a palace guard surcoat, and bearing both torch and bared sword. ‘Take the thing down before it escapes!’
The pair spread out and advanced. Their raised blades gleamed by fire light. Intent on the demonic threat of the shape-changer, they all but tripped over the shed heap of clothing, abandoned to one side of the seeing glass. The left-hand man who had mired his foot was first to recognize the jewelled doublet that belonged to the High Prince of Devall. His Highness’s shirt was there also, along with knit hose and dark breeches; even his boots with their stamped-gold toecaps. The ruby signet of Devall’s heir apparent glinted, abandoned, on top.
The guardsman gasped, scared. ‘Trinity spare us! Why would his Highness take off his clothes and leave his state seal in this place?’ He poked the garments with an inquisitive foot, and laid bare a queer mark on the floorboards…
‘No!’ Mykkael hurled out of witch thought, his wrung senses spun through a hard spiral that left him sweat-drenched and clinging to the black gelding’s neck. ‘That’s a sorcerer’s short curse.’ The cipher’s infused lines formed a minion’s chain. If its configured patterns were not ones he recognized, he still sensed their omin
ous undertone. A sorcerer’s mark scribed in white river clay and blood was too ugly to be mistaken. ‘Get out of there, now!’ he gasped in distress. ‘The binding connection is active!’
Yet no warning he spoke from the mountains could spare the two victims in Dedorth’s observatory. Only Anja, mounted and riding close by, grasped at his forearm and shook him.
‘What’s wrong? Captain, what’s happening?’
Fully restored to the windy heights, Mykkael bowed his head, tortured speechless. If the wardings about him maintained cool quiescence, his heart found no ease in their calm. He had stood in the path of too much disaster not to recognize the queer, sickly feeling that presaged the unfurling of demonic power. The lurch in the world’s weave as the unnatural flux crossed dimensions ripped his mind into scalding recoil.
He heard Anja’s cry, cranked shrill with distress, ‘Merciful powers, you knew that would happen!’
He nodded, not needing to look as another sheet of balefire bloomed in the valley that cradled the citadel. This time the assault would not be shed by the grace of a standing ring of protection. Where the princess beheld that distant scourge as a flowering star of red light, he experienced the evil impact more fully through the gift of his wild talent…
The explosive eruption of spell-driven flame engulfed the top floor of the tower. Its rage consumed stone, the rare marvel of the seeing glass, and also the flesh of two living men whose tormented screams rang sharpened with the agony of the damned. The influx of the raw element surged forth from the sorcerer’s mark. As though a hole had been torn through the world, it unleashed the fell fury of chaos. Anything in its path not instantly immolated reached flashpoint and ran molten, smelted metal and stone singeing the air into roiling heat. Amid a rain of liquid copper and slagged granite, the shape-changer perched on the flaming sill unfurled leathered wings and launched aloft, trailing a burning wake of shed cinders…
Breathing fast and hard, Mykkael shut stinging eyes, opened them, then took firm hold on his makeshift rein. He jammed down sick nausea, unclamped his scored hand, and soothed the black gelding’s pawing unease. ‘Shelter, now!’ he snapped through scraped nerves. ‘We have to find a cave, or a ledge. Somewhere under cover to stand in defence.’
‘Say what you’ve seen,’ the princess demanded. ‘Let me know what sort of evil we face.’
‘May you live, and never suffer the burden!’ Mykkael faced forward, anguished, and urged the black gelding to a scrambling canter upslope.
The sorcerer’s mark shook the tower observatory while Captain Bennent sought to cram the king’s defenders into the shabby confines of Dedorth’s private quarters. The tiny chamber was already bursting with the elderly scholar’s belongings, its jumble of trestles heaped with unfurled star charts, and teetering stacks of books. The doors of the ambries gaped, stuffed with scrolls, beside candelabra on claw-footed stands, glued in place by old driblets of wax. The stuffed chair cleared off for Lady Phail disgorged a bent pair of spectacles, a squirrel’s cache of mugs, three chewed quill pens, and several dried-up inkwells. On the armillary by the cobwebbed casement hung a mismatched pair of damp socks.
‘Clean, at least,’ pronounced the Fane Street physician, in enterprising search of a place to deposit the trunk of medicinal remedies. Jussoud laboured at speed to make space for Taskin and the king, since the tray left amid the unmade bed held the remains of the astronomer’s supper.
With the floor space choked full, the men bearing the litters had been forced to hold back on the landing, the crates of food and sacks of assembled supplies dumped in disorder around them.
First warning of trouble, a vast, rushing wind screamed up the stairwell and hurled the king’s blankets helter-skelter.
‘Inside!’ screamed Bennent, the flagged cloth of his surcoat clutched in one hand, and his unsheathed sword raised in the other. ‘Move! Now!’
The unbearable screams of men burning, upstairs, entangled with his shouted orders. Within Dedorth’s chamber, the candles snuffed out. Queer light blazed outside, raging orange, as the roaring fires of hell rampaged down, licking the darkness beyond the shut casement.
‘Don’t touch the walls!’ yelled the Fane Street physician.
His saving cry came too late. Caught working the window latch to let in fresh air, one of the Highgate men-at-arms dropped dead on the floorboards.
‘Get back!’ the physician urged, frantic. ‘Move away from all grounded stonework! A sorcerer’s lines draw their current through air and earth. There must be a live craft mark, above us!’
‘Pull together!’ Jussoud called through erupting chaos, as maps and books flapped in the fierce updraught, and guardsmen blundered blindly into furnishings. ‘Everyone! Move into a bunch!’
The panic-stricken rush to comply all but collided with Bennent’s frantic efforts to harry the litters and bearers in from the stairwell. Vensic bundled the duchess out of her chair. Moved on trained instinct, he dragged the half-paralysed seneschal by the crushed pleats of his collar and pelted between tables, scattering books. He reached Jussoud and the physician by the doorway, which move brought the nine talismans fashioned by Perincar’s lore into effective proximity.
The shield locked and sang. Blue light pealed out with a lightning-sharp crack, widening into a sphere. The arcane defence touched the spelled conduit drawn through the tower’s stonework and unleashed a burst of actinic static. Forces from the unseen collided with the vizier’s geometry, and entangled with a booming, concussive report. The massive tower shook. Loose stonework rained down, hammering against the beamed ceiling. Molten stone and melted copper rained after, searing holes through the planking above.
The railing on the landing cracked and gave, with one man yanked back, saved from falling by Bennent’s snatched grip on his mail shirt.
‘Hold firm!’ yelled Jussoud, while the world seemed to rock, and flaming cinders splashed against the glass casement. One of the roundels burst in a flying spray of smashed fragments.
Another deafening blast shook the tower. Then suddenly, all fell silent.
Eleven survivors stood in shaken, pale shock, with two more on braced litters, still breathing.
‘Both the king and Commander Taskin are unharmed,’ the Fane Street physician announced in a tremulous voice.
As Bennent stirred and surged towards the stair, Jussoud yanked him short. ‘Stay here, Captain!’ Distressed as no man had ever seen him, the nomad gathered the duchess’s palsied hand and propped up the sagging seneschal. To snap Bennent out of brash shock, he said, bluntly, ‘Your sentries downstairs are already dead, and the four men upstairs, consumed also. The whole top of the tower is probably gone. All that kept us alive was the closed proximity of Perincar’s geometry. Lacking that grace, the structure that holds us would have gone up like a candle dropped into a forge flame.’
The Fane Street physician backed the nomad’s disastrous assessment. ‘Break the resonance of the copper talismans we carry, and believe it! Your king, and every last one of us, are going to die very horribly’
‘I hear you.’ Bennent sheathed the sword he had drawn on blind reflex, then regarded the party left under his care to defend. ‘Guardsmen!’ he commanded, ‘Clear Dedorth’s quarters. We’ll have to lie in for a siege, and hold out on the hope Captain Mykkael can win through with the princess.’
‘Failed,’ sent the minion, no longer wearing the semblance of the High Prince of Devall. Now a clawed monstrosity, the shape-changer crouched on the slagged rim of stone at the top of Dedorth’s roofless tower, while its winged companion soared in balked fury over the site of the conflict. ‘Our presence has been unmasked beyond salvage, with all hope of subtle conquest brought to impasse by a vizier’s ninefold warding.’ The news, and all it entailed, was heard by the bound sorcerer of Gorgenvain, lying wakeful in the king’s bed in Devall. Curt orders returned on the breath of the moment, graven with the demon’s imperative desire: ‘Take down your antagonist, Mykkael, and after him, obliterate the
last daughter of Isendon’s lineage…’
XXVI. Pursuit
MYKKAEL SENSED THE BACKLASH AS THE FLUX OF THE UNSEEN RECOILED THROUGH ANOTHER RIPPLE OF CHANGE. A GLANCE AT THE mist-covered valley below affirmed the sharp prompt of his instinct. The upsurge of a ring of protection had reduced the distant flare of red balefire to a raggedly flickering circle. The close defeat of the sorcerous assault left a dulled, sullen glow where unnatural forces had caused solid stone to run molten.
The immediate assurance given to Anja, that her royal sire survived, lent Mykkael no false peace of mind. On the contrary, he was forced yet again to revise his already desperate escape plan. King Isendon’s victory would not buy him more time. The princess’s plight was not going to gain respite. Any careful, staged passage across Howduin Gulch now became a sure route to disaster. Scatton’s Pass, also, would take far too long, even had they carried the requisite ropes and equipment.
Trapped by a vicious quandary, Mykkael faced the impossible, last option: the fifty-league passage of sheer rock ravine, infested with kerrie nests, and savaged by the boiling froth of the flume that had pummelled the bones of every rash fool who ever attempted the crossing. Mykkael measured the hazards of riding Hell’s Chasm, and chose certain doom without flinching.
Better to die thrashed to ribbons on a rock spit, any horrible fate to stave off the risk of falling prey to a demon-bound sorcerer. Let his human failure buy Anja a natural death, and not the howling terrors he had glimpsed in the pit of Orannia’s madness.
‘You look grim as the judge forced to hang his own kin,’ the princess observed at due length.
‘I don’t like the country’ Mykkael said, a sore truth. They were riding the knife-edged spine of the rim. The position left them ruthlessly exposed, with the horses forced to pick each precarious step with excruciating caution. Although the captain could have left matters there, Anja’s resourceful character demanded better respect. ‘Nor can I leave you in dangerous ignorance. Your false suitor has unmasked his true form, as well as the crown prince he suborned in liaison. They walk this world as hell’s minions, but reclothed in the altered mortality of their stolen flesh.’