To Ride Hell's Chasm

by Janny Wurts

  Wet rope burned through her hands. ‘Mykkael!’ Anja shouted.

  His sword was moving, already beset. Even through Stormfront’s clatter, and the incessant din of the falls, she picked out the whine of the shaman’s mark, its wasp-angry hum cut again and again as the whickering blade drove at speed through malformed flesh and air. Blood flew. A dollop splashed into Stormfront’s soaked neck, scalding his hide like flung acid.

  Through battering bedlam, half deafened by the gelding’s shrill scream, Anja sighted the captain, still on his feet. The steel in his hand was a flying blur. Somehow, Mykkael had heard her. His warrior’s perception encompassed her dire peril.

  ‘Stay on Stormfront!’ he shouted, still encumbered. An unseen sequence of strokes chopped and slashed. The shape-changer’s bare legs and groin kicked and snagged, scissored in a wrestler’s grip at his waist. When blows failed to break its incessant attack, Mykkael stabbed with precision, cut through a nerve, or a tendon. The appendages flopped loose, then fell away, streaming fog. His sword never faltered. A moving fan of smeared light, the blade cut their ephemeral connection again, and again, and again, snapping the stream as it sought to reform, and shredding the shape-changer’s spellbound wraith into tatters of cobweb.

  And still, the severed fragments came on, striving to assemble and reanimate The hand with the head scrambled onwards. Though it might not have the full use of its eyes, it sensed warmth and spatial connection. Scuttling on nimble fingertips, quickened by a minion’s intelligence, it darted this way and that, in vile effort to trip the princess’s standing protector.

  Mykkael leaped, one-legged, turned his weapon, and came down. His strike impaled Kailen’s cheek on his blade. Where the steel touched, the shape-changer melted. Its jaw peeled away, sublimated back to mist. The dome of the cranium still remained, leering with unimpaired menace. Kailen’s eyes rolled, imploring the severed hand. Fingers answered, then laboured to tug it towards shelter.

  Mykkael reacted on the cascading fury of unleashed barqui’ino reflex. Steel sang, whistled downwards and crunched through the bone. The point pierced the skull and grounded with a shocked clang into bedrock.

  Ward light blossomed in answer. The fog roiled back from the flare, whipping the stream of the shape-changer’s essence into a blasting recoil.

  Stormfront surged, staggering. Again Mykkael snagged the gelding’s wet headstall. He jerked the crazed animal’s neck in a bow, then ruthlessly rammed the foam-flecked muzzle into the black’s sweated shoulder. Hooves skidded. The beleaguered horse lost his footing. His haunches went down and slammed on to rock, while his front limbs splayed out. Through the stinging tangle of mane, Anja saw the three-quarters complete body of the shape-changer lock its hold over the horse’s bent foreleg. If the animal moved, if he followed the drive of his instinct and rose, the minion’s obscene grip could twist and shatter the joint of his knee.

  ‘No!’ The princess pealed out a desolate command. ‘Stormfront! Hold hard! Whoa now! Stormfront!’

  One timely stroke of Mykkael’s blade might free him.

  Yet the desert-bred could not fight his way clear to respond. His saving effort was thwarted as the drumming, downed legs of the shape-changer lashed a crippling blow at his ankles. He evaded. Come whatever cost, he held the pinned cranium grounded to earth, all the while fumbling for something inside the scrip at his belt.

  Anja clung to Stormfront’s quivering back. ‘Hold boy, hold hard.’ She soothed the horse, desperate, while the eyes of her brother winked and postured in mocking parody. Still attached by a tendon, the tongue waggled in suggestive seduction.

  She choked, revolted, her heart raced with terror as Kailen’s hands, Kailen’s face sought her ruin with diabolically enspelled ferocity.

  As she watched, the resummoned hand gave up on its futile tugging. It let go of blond hair, scuttled backwards, and sprang. Crablike, nimble fingers hooked on to Mykkael’s surcoat and climbed.

  The captain shouted. He had no free hand to dislodge the fell thing that scrabbled over his clothing. The shape-changer’s appendage snagged on to his harness, then shinnied upwards to throttle him. Mykkael held to his purpose, unswerving, until his searching fingers found the item he sought in his scrip. His raised fist emerged, clutching a small drawstring packet. He tore through the tied cloth with his teeth, then cast the freed contents into the nearest puddle.

  White powder flew.

  A scatter of granules raked Anja’s damp face. Salt, she realized, the bitter taste sucked in with her burning, sharp breath.

  As the mineral showered into the catchment of water, Mykkael turned his sword. He ignored the strangling grip at his throat, flung the cranium off his weapon point into the salt-treated puddle. The remnant landed with a sickening smack, nose downwards and snorting bubbles. Its substance sagged into jelly. The aware blue eyes burned with demonic hatred, then dissolved like run glass in a smelter’s pot.

  Mykkael drew his belt knife. He stabbed into the choking hand, drove the steel between the wristbones, and pried. The fingertips burrowed under his collar already plumed into smoke, half undone by chance contact with the vizier’s tattoo at his nape. He caught the appendage as it shuddered loose, hurled it into a tumbling arc after the dismantled head. Not pausing to look to see how it landed, Mykkael spun with bared sword. He slashed at the calf of the disjointed leg, then leaped onwards to hack at the partial torso entangling Stormfront’s right foreleg.

  The thing sensed his approach. Perhaps warned by the warding note of the sword blade, it released the black gelding, and writhed into humping retreat. Too swift to prevent, it hurled itself, headless, over the verge, into the tumbling falls. The diced legs left behind sublimated into mist and streamed away in pursuit. Abandoned behind, the dissolute head and left hand boiled into a noisome sludge, entrapped in the salt-treated puddle.

  ‘Whoa! Stormfront! Whoa, now!’ Anja shouted.

  The gelding surged, uncontrollable. In demented terror he regained his feet, hindquarters bunched to explode into blind flight. He met Mykkael’s fist, a hammering blow at the jointure of chest and neck. His staggering recoil bounced him off the stone wall of the cavern. Mykkael dived in, dodged past milling forehooves and snapped the lead rein from Anja’s locked fingers. He flicked the end in a whipcrack report in front of the crazed gelding’s nose.

  Stormfront shied and whirled left. Mykkael sprang back, nearly trampled. He braced his weight to the rein, hauled the horse’s neck in a titanic pull. The impetus jerked Stormfront off balance. Clattering hooves skidded. His huge frame lost purchase. He half reared, neck bent, and keeled into a slow roll, with Anja caught like a burr against his back-falling neck and high withers.

  A hand grabbed her, collar and hair; yanked her clear, as the horse came down like a mountain, rolling and thrashing in primal panic. Mykkael dropped Anja, hard, but safe, on chill stone. Sword drawn, he thrust past her. His face showed intense concentration. He closed, prepared to cut the horse down. No matter the cost, he must forestall the lethal danger posed by Stormfront’s battering hooves.

  The downed gelding rolled over, bellowing in helpless distress. His violent struggles were driven by the most basic of all equine instincts. Every survival urge he possessed insisted he must thrust to his feet and take flight.

  Tear-blind, Anja could not wrench her gaze from the warrior who moved on her terrorized horse. She watched the sword, stunned outside thought, paralysed past reach of emotion. The stroke that would kill seemed inevitable. The gelding’s ungovernable fit must be stopped before his inadvertent thrashing dealt them a crippling injury. Yet the blade did not fall. Its silvered length flicked upwards and back as Mykkael timed his opening, folded his lean frame, and hurled himself headlong against Stormfront’s downed tantrum. His tucked body slammed into the horse, and pinned the black neck hard to the ground.

  Anja shrilled a desperate command. ‘Stormfront, hold hard!’

  But the crisis was over. Danger was checked, with Stormfront save
d. No horse could arise without lifting its neck. Mykkael bore down, fast-breathing and still. He held, while the horse’s wrenching efforts to rise lost impetus, and finally ceased. The man raised his head. He said something breathless into the gelding’s quivering ear. Then he stroked the steamed hide with his fingers. Over the roaring spate of the falls, the horse’s taxed lungs forced moaning air through its larynx. The deep, laboured groans measured off passing seconds, while the black coat sweated and trembled.

  Awareness of peripheral details resurged, as the hot rush of panic subsided. The four other horses cramped against the entry were milling and snorting in trapped fear. Shivering with nerves, miraculous Fouzette had held her braced stance at the bottleneck.

  The discovery broke Anja to flooding tears.

  At last Mykkael moved. Cautiously slow, he allowed the black gelding to raise his scraped head. The horse’s eye ridge was skinned. He had bruised his lower lip. Bloodied foam trailed from his muzzle, and his eyes rolled white with hazed nerves. Yet on his release, he untangled his hooves, gathered his limbs and clattered back upright. Restored, shuddering, to his four legs, he shook like a dog and settled himself with a snort. Banged and shaken, he seemed otherwise unharmed.

  The captain who had effected an impossible salvage hauled himself tenderly upright. His sword had gone quiet. The stained weapon stayed poised in his unrelaxed hand. He turned his head, first of all seeking Anja. She saw he was shaking worse than her horse. The wide-open eyes that raked over her still held a predator’s focus.

  ‘Captain,’ she whispered.

  He did not respond. The unnatural ferocity wound through his being did not subside. Wholly remade as the reflexive killer, he mapped his surroundings as though all that moved posed a potentially lethal target. That absorbed concentration made him a stranger, even as his shocked senses must show him that Sessalie’s princess had come through unharmed.

  Anja gathered her courage. ‘Mykkael, I’m not hurt.’

  His feral gaze tracked her without recognition. Yet after a drawn moment, he relented enough to rest his blade point down on the stone at his feet. The care he required to move without violence seemed all the more chilling, set against the blinding-sharp competence of the defence unleashed seconds before.

  ‘Mykkael?’ Anja ventured. ‘Are you injured?’

  ‘Don’t come,’ he husked. The skin at his collar was bleeding, scored over the darkening bruises left by the shape-changer’s strangling assault. His tremors increased. Their brute force raged through him, shuddering in waves that set him swaying on unsteady feet. ‘Barqui’ino backlash,’ he gritted through locked teeth. ‘A normal reaction to excessive adrenaline. It passes.’

  A gimping step backwards allowed him to brace his seized posture against the stone wall. There, head bent, he waited, while the seizures came on and rocked him with ravaging force. Anja watched, helpless, as each ragged breath hissed through the strained cords of his throat.

  To sit and do nothing seemed an intolerable cruelty. Anja placed her hand, shifted her weight to arise.

  Mykkael’s chin snapped up. His savage eyes pinned her. ‘Don’t come! I ask this.’

  She swallowed. Hurting, she watched him battle himself. His bare-faced effort to recross the abyss that had distanced his ties to reason exposed an unbreakable patience. Mykkael had gone perilously far, to gain mastery over the knife-edged focus that gripped him. The unnatural shift left him a creature at war with the impact of magnified attributes. Anja wept to behold his wretched struggle, as he laboured to subdue the animal instincts that aligned his extreme state of clarity. The raced blood of that exquisitely tuned primal mindset did not release without penalty. Anja measured each shocking, strained second, as Mykkael reclaimed his intellect one disparate strand at a time.

  ‘The horses,’ she said, lamely. ‘Someone should attend them.’

  This time, her speech softened him, just a fraction. A fleeting frown crossed his blank expression, there and gone as stressed thought resurged to wring sense from her simple phrases. Comprehension became a minor victory, the first marker passed on a rough journey he surely had suffered few others to witness by choice. Mykkael ripped out a stiff nod. ‘Go. Please move slowly’

  Anja effected a tender, first step. She paused at his flinch. He arrested the recoiling plunge back into barqui’ino trance, just barely. He shut his eyes, his grounding hand splayed against the cavern wall. The fist on his sword grip would not yet release. The pitched strain on his nerves stayed too volatile.

  ‘Go,’ he insisted. ‘I am not out of hand.’

  She went, though he tracked every step like a predator. Or perhaps in cold fact, she perceived him all wrong. A loyal protector might look the same way, if his defensive instincts were still challenged. Although the cavern appeared clear of hazard, Anja realized Mykkael’s wardings might not be fully quiescent. Her task acquired the driven imperative, to recapture her unsettled horses.

  She reached Stormfront first, caught up his dropped lead, crooning the familiar phrases to instil reassurance.

  The black snorted and blew. He lowered his neck. Anja rubbed his lathered forehead, then edged past his shoulder and recovered Covette’s looped reins. ‘Kasminna, to me!’

  The sorrel stamped, sniffing the cavern floor with uncertainty. On second command, she ventured one step. Then she froze, lacking Bryajne’s solid presence as her accustomed anchor.

  ‘Kasminna, to me.’ Anja edged a cautious stride sideways, stooped, then retrieved the mare’s trailing lead. With the jumpy creature brought firmly in hand, then coaxed in beside Stormfront and Covette, she dared to address her last team. ‘Vashni, to me. Fouzette, hold hard.’

  The flighty grey must be secured before the mare could be recalled from the entry. A stamped pewter shadow outlined by the falls, the gelding sidled. His eye still rolled white. Anja stared elsewhere, pretending boredom. She stuffed her hand in her breeches pocket, feigning a search for a carrot. Curiosity and habitual indulgence won out. The grey came around. He stretched his neck, snuffling at her wet clothes, and her easy reach to scratch under his jaw became a closed grip on his headstall.

  Fouzette responded at first command. Once the princess had captured all five of her animals, she smoothed them down and checked them for injury. The creatures had suffered no worse than a few scrapes. Stormfront thankfully seemed little the worse for his sliding fall on the rocks. Already he shook out his wet mane, and started to lip at the puddles. Scant rations had worn him down to depletion. All the horses were spent from their nervous excitement. Their subsided calm reflected no less than the lassitude of starvation.

  ‘You’ll have hay and oats, all the grass you can eat,’ Anja promised. ‘We just have to get through Hell’s Chasm.’

  Kasminna dared a light nip at her sleeve. Anja slapped her off, gently, then risked a sidelong glance at Mykkael.

  He stood, eyes shut, still propped against the cavern’s rear wall. The tremors that plagued him now seemed more fine-grained. He had released his clamped grip from his weapon. The sword leaned upright beside him, uncleaned. At some point, unnoticed, he had torn a strip of rag from his surcoat.

  ‘You’re not hurt?’ Anja inquired.

  Mykkael looked up, more himself, but not smiling. His answer emerged, almost fluent. ‘I was not bitten, if that’s your concern.’ He regarded the fouled puddle, which still steamed and smoked not far from his planted feet. ‘A close call I prefer not to repeat.’

  Anja forced a conversational tone. ‘The shape-changer’s dead?’

  ‘No, sadly not.’ The captain grimaced, as though the wisped fumes incited foul thoughts. ‘We don’t have the whole body. Even if we did, a fully fledged minion doesn’t banish or die half so easily. We’ll need a vizier or a trained tribal shaman to sever the creature’s connections to the sorcerer who raised its formed will from the darkened realms of the unseen.’

  Anja choked down a sick bolt of fear. ‘That thing could come back?’ She would not, could not,
reconcile herself to an enemy wearing the semblance of her murdered brother.

  Mykkael stirred, took up his fouled sword. As though soothed by rote habit, he plied his rag to the soiled blade. ‘Princess, you are safe. The shape-changer’s head is dissolved in salt water. So is a part of its arm. That binds its powers. It cannot shift form. The fragments that spilled over the falls might reassemble themselves, if they aren’t too widely scattered. But headless, the construct that forms will be blinded and deaf. It can grope, but not mount an effective attack. My due course of vigilance should hold it at bay. Left as an animate, crippled corpse, it can’t cause us serious harm.’

  Still drenched from the dousing, tumultuous entry, Anja spoke through her chattering teeth. ‘Well, even one-handed, it could pound us with rocks.’

  ‘Sightless? It can try.’ Mykkael straightened, sheathed his cleaned sword, then shrugged off the ache of some lingering discomfort. ‘If these caverns have any ore veins bearing copper, I can doctor an arrow and stun it.’ He pushed off the wall, took a shocking, gimped stride, then snatched a pause to resettle his balance. He assayed a next step, reached steadfast Fouzette, and set his hands to untie the noisome bundles strapped to her back. ‘Forgive me, Princess. An unpleasant task remains to be done. I warn, you may not wish to watch.’

  Anja swallowed. ‘The shape-changer’s head?’

  Mykkael nodded. Under the filtered light through the falls, his expression stayed grim as iron. ‘I’m sorry.’ He chose the raw hide, used his dagger to slice off a yard length. ‘Safety must come before nicety, in this case. The contents of that puddle will have to go with us and stay under constant guard.’

  She coughed into her hand. ‘What can I do?’

  Startled, he regarded her, the crude square of horse-hide poised in his unsteady hands. ‘By the nine names of hell, Princess! Are you sure?’ The dawning hint of a smile resurged, sparked by his wry amazement. ‘Very well. I’ve known seasoned fighters who were more faint-hearted. If you hold the hide taut, I will scrape.’