Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  The bucket of beans he thawed in the coals. He tossed the bread and meat in to soften and boil along with them, adding fresh snow to keep the gruel thin. Despite that precaution, his shrunken stomach nearly revolted. He closed his eyes, rested, his riled nerves wrapped in patience until the spasms of nausea subsided. Then he picked through the stock of simples, found peppermint leaves, and made a tea to settle his gut. Through the halting course of an afternoon, he managed in slow stages to feed himself. In cold-cast awareness, as warmth returned to his limbs, he knew he owed breathing life to the fact that Dakar had stocked the packhorse for every possible contingency.

  Outside, the horses still wandered at large. They had grazed off the tender twigs of the aspens, and now pawed for moss on the ledges. Arithon whistled them in, gave them rations of grain, then restored their halters and tethers. He knew he should also cut and haul wood, but that daunting task lay beyond him. Any effort to stand straight left him reeling. If he fell in the open, or mired in the snow, he might not have the resilience to drag himself back to the cave.

  The threatened storm still came on. Already, the clouds smoked over the passes. The dire, death stillness that presaged their arrival soon broke before an ominous north wind. That opening note would swell into a gale before the advent of nightfall.

  Arithon gathered the loose saddlecloths, his cloak, and every spare shred of clothing contained in the packs. There, also, Dakar’s thorough care did not fail him. He found oiled-wool blankets, and a sheepskin jacket packed in cerecloth. Also a thick wax candle that could be used at need to heat water in a tin cup.

  The saddle and pack frame, turned over, made a niche for his body, which he lined with blankets and cloak. Tucked into the fleece jacket, and comfortably warm, he drifted into a deep and healing sleep.

  Hunger wakened him again just past sundown. Storm winds whined and howled down the ridge, and hissing drafts prowled through the cave mouth. Arithon chewed beef jerky soaked in warm water, then arose, a little more steady. He tended the neglected geldings. If he hoarded the barley and oats just for them, he could keep them alive without fodder at the risk that the rich diet might gripe them with colic. He mixed peppermint leaves with their ration for safeguard, his short, breathless laugh for the fact the Mad Prophet’s excesses at least had resulted in horse-sized doses of stomach remedies.

  Hunkered back in his nest of blankets, he peeled off the rotted remains of the poultice. His fingers were left in a sorry state of dead skin and purple swelling. The wound, back and palm, was an ugly, gaping hole ridged with necrosed skin and proud flesh. Arithon was not up to performing the task of scraping away the bad tissue. In the end, he made a scalding infusion of betony and let the injured hand soak. Then he dried and dressed the welted puncture in clean linen. The abused flesh could not heal in such state, he knew from war-trained experience. Sick at heart for his music, he forced his tired mind not to dwell on the problem. Tomorrow, in clear light, if his grip was reliably steady on his knife, he could attend to the necessary debridement.

  The night passed to the shrill scream of the storm as it broke full force on the Baiyen. By the flickering spill Arithon lit, as he rose at short intervals to feed horses, the mouth of the cave became lost behind a smoking curtain of snowfall. The drifts spilled inside, shelved and sculpted by the backdrafts into layers of ice-crystal sediment. By morning, only diffuse gray light filtered through the small gap at the top of the cleft.

  Inside, cut off from the wind, the cruel edge of the cold blunted by the heat of the geldings, Arithon rested. He recouped his strength as he could, in no haste to dig his way out. The thawed snow in the bucket had not refrozen, and with water and small rations of grain given often, the horses kept well enough. By the unsettled glow of the candle, he cursed his way through the hurtful process of cleaning the wound in his hand. The ache that remained after a new poultice and bandage was the healthier sting of fresh healing. He pinched out the wick to conserve precious wax, and sat, chewing jerky, in the dimness. Hour by hour, morning passed to afternoon. The blizzard’s snarling gusts blew themselves out, and the light through the chink wore the golden cast of a tenuous, westerly sunshine.

  Arithon dozed in his blankets, lazily aware he needed to dig out and gather fresh wood before sundown. The horses would soon require more water than the stub of one candle could thaw. If the ice was not a span thick and rock solid, he must try to lead them down to the spring. While he mulled over the list of chores to be milked from his limited strength, the bay packhorse flung up its head with pricked ears. The buckskin jerked face about on its tether, its high neck taut and attentive.

  ‘Merciful Ath!’ Arithon flung off the miring blankets. On his feet with a haste that reeled him dizzy, he launched himself through four unbalanced strides, then fell against the near gelding’s neck, desperate to pinch shut its nostrils.

  The horse jerked up its nose. Arithon muffled its muzzle scarcely in time, then grabbed the bay and noosed its jaw before it could blast out a full-throated whinny. Wrestling the animals’ headshaking resistance, he crooned a masterbard’s phrase that would quell agitation and quiet them. Shortly, he shared what their keen equine ears had thankfully detected before him. Up the Baiyen Gap from the low country came a soprano jingle of metal. Then the grate of shod hooves clipped a wind-scoured rock. A male voice bellowed a testy command, hailing a party of townborn companions to close a gap between stragglers.

  Arithon shut his eyes in distress. The impossible had overtaken him as he slept: Jaelot’s patrols had fared through the throat of the storm in pursuit of the Spinner of Darkness. Such relentless dedication bespoke a more sinister motive than the hatred of Jaelot’s mayor. Luhaine’s dire warning had proved true with a vengeance: Koriani sigils no doubt were at play, driving men to the chase past the bounds of practical sense.

  Their approach was too close for flight or defense. Shaken to clammy sweat, Arithon had no choice but trust to hope that the banked snowdrift would obscure the rock cranny which sheltered him.

  His first hope languished as the lead rider rounded the flank of the hillside. ‘There’s a crook in this corrie. Best check it out, if only to see if there’s game we can flush for the stewpot.’

  The snort of a horse ripped the glen’s pristine quiet. In the cave’s recessed dimness, Arithon kept his tight grip on the restive geldings. The bard’s tricks that silenced them would scarcely serve, now. He had to force the animals to stay quiet as the small column of men turned off the Baiyen and wound their way up the gulch toward the spring.

  ‘After five fruitless days scouring the back sides of snowdrifts, hell, it’s high time we found something,’ one man complained to his fellows.

  Someone else cracked a jibe to coarse laughter.

  ‘Praise fate we’ve seen nothing,’ called another. ‘Me, I’d far rather an empty trail, than stumbling across a pack o’ queer lights and strange haunts.’

  ‘No more loose talk!’ reprimanded the captain. ‘Next clown who so much as mentions a ghost gets dragged butt side down from his saddle.’

  ‘Why not just press on?’ someone else said, disheartened. ‘Old storm’s whisked away any sign of a track.’

  ‘Demons don’t leave tracks,’ a companion groused back.

  ‘Well, their horses do.’ A purposeful creak of leather punched through the dell as someone else in authority dismounted.

  Arithon picked up the thin chink of a sword scabbard, then recognized the coastal twang of the mayor’s skilled huntsman, apparently signed on as a tracker. An interval passed, filled in by the wind, while the masterful woodsman whisked off the new snow. He took thorough care, and finally encountered a hoof-trodden patch of bared ice. ‘Uncanny creatures don’t leave behind frozen piles of horse dung, now do they? And look here. That’s broken ice. At least two beasts paused and drank at this spring. They stayed for some time. The twigs on those aspens are browsed back to stubs.’

  The burred bass of Jaelot’s guard captain held a ring of unnatural
excitement. ‘How long since he left?’

  Through the hiss of a gust, the considered reply, ‘I’d say the demon sorcerer moved on at least two days ahead of us.’ The tracker slapped snow from wet gloves and stood up. ‘Press hard, we could overtake him.’

  The guard captain responded with a shouted command for the men by the spring to ride on. ‘This trail threads the pass across Baiyen Gap. Once through to the barrens, the Spinner of Darkness could go nowhere else but the haunted towers that still stand at Ithamon.’

  ‘We don’t get to camp here?’ the whiner said, hopeful, while his mount guzzled water. ‘Just once, we could sleep out of the Ath-forsaken wind. Why not take advantage of shelter?’

  ‘No camp!’ snapped the captain before the suggestion started a pleading chorus. ‘We’ve got maybe six hours left before sundown, and no cause to waste a clear day. Too soon, we’ll be facing the teeth of the next storm.’

  ‘Send a messenger back to guide the supply train,’ the huntsman suggested, too pragmatic to waste opportunity. ‘They can make good use of this campsite, and chop a few logs to bolster our store of firewood.’

  ‘Carlis!’ barked the captain above the descant jingle of bits, and the thuds as the horses were wheeled about in departure. ‘Carry the word back, and warn the supply sergeant I don’t want to run short of fodder!’

  The noise of the retreating company diminished, combed through by the sigh of the wind. In the cave, wrung to shaking, Arithon released the noses of his two geldings. He sat, faint and dizzied, his first rush of relief accompanied by tearing anxiety. The rock lair had hidden him, just barely. Saved by the fact he was too ill to move, and sheltered behind an ephemeral veiling of snowdrift, he knew his bolt-hole could never withstand the close presence of an encamped supply train. He needed to move, and far worse than that: he dared not allow the precarious position of being caught between two hostile companies.

  ‘Damn and damn, as Dakar would say.’ His straits had gone from bad to untenable. Baiyen Gap offered the only fast route through the Skyshiels, and his pursuit, now ahead, blocked the way to his haven at Ithamon. Their armed numbers posed an unknown impediment. He could not fight through them, however few; not by himself with his sword hand crippled. Nor could he hope to outmatch their pace if he left the known gap and tried the rough passage through the storm-whipped peaks of the Skyshiels.

  That problem a looming, insoluble impasse, he confronted the immediate danger of the supply company due to arrive in his lap before nightfall.

  His promise to Luhaine seemed an act of blind folly. Wretched and shivering and weak at the knees, Arithon rested his forehead against his crossed wrists and fought back crushing disheartenment. Each step led him on to more bitter setback. The taint of fresh blood on his hand informed that his stopgap handling of the geldings had undone his fresh job of bandaging. A clench of nausea roiled his gut. He suppressed it, his will fueled by savage, deep rage. The prospect of what lay ahead of him sickened him more than the pain of his mangled hand. Nor would he weep, though regret burned bone deep for the words he had spoken before Asandir, years past on the desolate sands of Athir.

  ‘To stay alive, to survive by any expedient …’ he had whispered over the sting of the knife that bound him to irreversible blood-bonded surety.

  The cost of Athera’s need must be paid, yet again, in an untold number of lives. Rathain’s prince railed at fate. His rage had no target. His heart could but cry, hagridden by the royal gift of compassion bred into the breath and the bone of him.

  ‘Forgive,’ he whispered to the stolid pair of geldings, who asked nothing more than grain and animal comfort. For there was no kind turning, no gentle release. Once again, s’Ffalenn cleverness must spin deadly traps, ever condemned to a curse-fated dance with the fervor of Alliance hatred.

  ‘Ath, oh Ath Creator, forgive!’ Racked by a despair beyond words or expression, Arithon forced himself to his feet. In aching sorrow, he turned his mind and scant resources to master the most ugly expedient.

  The strategy he designed was disarmingly simple; and sickened him, body and mind through each step required in advance preparation.

  The supply train labored, beasts mired to the hocks in fresh drifts, while their drovers startled and cursed. The Baiyen Gap was no place for the townborn. Even the wind through the firs seemed ill set, moaning in voices against them. The high peaks laddered with ice frowned and brooded, standing sentinel over the ledged ribbon of road laid by the great centaur masons. Words seemed an intrusion the gusts whisked away, and the clangor of shod hooves upon uncanny stone rang with ill-omened warning.

  Nerve jumpy men glanced over their shoulders, or tripped upon ground that held neither loose rocks nor deadfalls.

  ‘Close up that gap!’ snapped the sergeant in charge to a laggard who held up the pack train. ‘What’s the matter? Think you see more of those blighted lights following you?’

  The burly drover shook off his unease and plowed onward. ‘No lights. I’ve got no barbarian blood in my family, to be cursed with visions of haunts in broad daylight.’

  ‘Better we could see the queer thing that plagues us,’ grumbled his bearded companion. He sawed at his reins, swearing as his sidling horse persistently shied at what surely was only a shadow crossing the trail. ‘Worse, the creepy sense somebody’s watching your back. Or you feel solid footing’s about to give way, and the trail’s an uncanny illusion.’

  ‘No niche for a spy on these forsaken cliffs,’ the sergeant said in snarling annoyance. ‘If you fall, that’s your fault for not keeping your eyes straight ahead. You want to sleep in the open? Then get that beast moving. I’ll strip hide from the man who keeps us from reaching that sheltered campsite by sundown.’

  The supply train reached the dell with the aspen grove under the lucent gleam of twilight. They settled in, boisterous with noise as horses and mules were stripped of packs and harness, and trees were cut to lay campfires. Jerked meat and rice were set boiling in pots, while the cold flecks of stars scattered the upland darkness. Night deepened, filled by the dirge of the winds that quashed ribald conversation. The men huddled closer to their flickering fires. On the ridges above, the wisped whirl of the snow devils seemed stirred by the restive ghosts. The skeletal tap of bare aspens framed a language too wild for mankind’s tamed comprehension.

  Worse, perhaps, the deep silence between gusts, vast enough to drown thought and swallow the petty, thin sounds of their presence. In this place, the bygone Ages of time lay on the land like poured crystal. The armed men and drovers clung to their fellows, uneasily aware the trail through the Baiyen did not welcome intrusion.

  That moment, a deep, groaning note issued from the side of the mountain. The camp sentries spun, hands clapped to their weapons, while the men by the cookfires leaped to their feet.

  For a tense, unsettled moment, the darkness seemed to intensify. Then the snowbank lapped over the rocks exploded. Flying clods and debris disgorged the forms of two galloping centaurs. Massive, immense, and bent upon murder for the trespass of heedless humanity, they drove headlong into the picket lines. Panicked horses screamed and snapped tethers. Their milling stampede swept behind startled masters, hazed into panicked retreat. In darkness, in fear, shouting in terror, men and beasts fled the corrie. The smooth trail beyond was a narrow ribbon of ice. Sliding, falling, unable to stop as their horses mowed haplessly over them, Jaelot’s invaders plunged screaming and clawing over the brink of the cliff face and dashed on the fangs of the rock slopes below…

  Braced on the rumpled snow at the rim, Arithon s’Ffalenn dispersed his wrought weaving of shadows. Trembling, he gathered his revolted nerves. His body the rebellious servant of will, he stood up. He soothed his overwrought geldings until their flaring snorts finally quieted.

  The frigid night had forfeited peace, the pristine stillness of the Baiyen defiled as mangled men and smashed horses shuddered and cried. Pulped flesh and white snow commingled in bloodstains, snagged on fouled rock, and the
stilled hulks of the murdered dead, fallen.

  Arithon tied up the horses. Gut sick, unsure of his balance, he unslung a slim bundle from his shoulder. Then he struggled and strung the heavy, horn recurve Dakar had selected to hunt deer. The arrows were a hunter’s, broad-bladed and sharp. They would kill by internal bleeding.

  Unaware that he pleaded forgiveness in Paravian, his words a scratched utterance without grace, Arithon knelt in the trampled snow. Twice, overcome, he folded and rendered his gorge. Nor was his eyesight trustworthy, blurred as it was by the bitter well of his tears.

  The pull of the bow pained his infected hand. Determined, he nocked the first arrow. Wood rattled against horn, tempo to his trembling, and the snatched sob of unsteady breath. Yet the will behind each move was pure iron. Integrity required that he must not falter, whatever his bodily failings. The fabric of self, curse torn and sullied, demanded no less than to finish in mercy the cruel act imposed by oathsworn survival.

  At the end, as he hauled the bow into full draw, his rage at the binding proscribing his life became the fuel that set his hand steady. The ache as his mangled right hand took the strain and the sudden spurt of fresh bleeding became a pittance beside the wounding affliction of conscience.

  ‘Myself, the sole enemy,’ he gasped in Paravian. ‘Dharkaron Avenger forgive.’

  He released. On the smeared rocks below, one less voice cried out. Arithon dashed back the burn of salt tears. Again, he nocked feathered broadhead to string. Arrow by arrow, he dispatched the groaning wounded downslope. Each careful, clean shot snuffed another cry of suffering, but woke in him recall of an unquiet past, and a summer dell known as the Havens. He quashed the revolt of his clamoring mind, but could not repress the shattering screams of the dying. Pain and will could do nothing to erase final agony.

  Alone in the Baiyen, against a sere mountain silence Mankind had no right to break, a night’s waking nightmare dropped Rathain’s prince like a spearcast run through the heart.