Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  As one of the halberdiers masked a snigger, he tipped his head toward the motionless form sheeted under the sunwheel mantle. ‘Dorik knew.’ Helped by the grace of Etarran vanity, Braggen had found the fallen officer’s name stamped in gold on his saddle.

  ‘The eighth patrol’s Dorik?’ A tall man shoved from the press of his fellows, his gloved hand clenched to his sword grip. ‘He’s dead, then?’

  ‘Probably will be,’ Braggen answered, resigned. ‘He wasn’t good when I pulled him out of the snow. We were ambushed,’ he added in redundant afterthought. As though stupid with shock, or chilled witless by cold, he hunkered against the vicious barrage of the wind. ‘I was going for a healer.’ Eyes shut in forbearance, though every nerve crawled, he forced himself still as someone else shoved his way into the packed mass of horses. Enemy hands pulled back the cloak hood. Arithon’s wrapped head was examined in the darkness, with no chance of reprieve if the ruse with stained bandages roused the watch officer’s suspicion.

  ‘Head wound,’ someone murmured. ‘It appears to be Dorik, and yes, he’s breathing, just barely.’

  Braggen let his horse feel the kiss of a spur, then reined its startled bound short with impatience. ‘I’ve said Dorik’s hurt badly. Hold me up, and you’ll throw away his last chance if he can’t hang on.’

  ‘Where did this happen?’ the sergeant demanded, cutting through the distressed clamor as other men crowded around.

  ‘His pulse is too sluggish,’ the observer reported. ‘Won’t see the morning, most likely.’

  Braggen jabbed another rude heel to his horse, on the far side, where no one would see. Obliging, it sidled. The speaker was driven back before any further examination unmasked his desperate subterfuge.

  But the sergeant was not so easily discouraged. ‘Where did this happen?’

  The milling horses lent Braggen the excuse to be terse. ‘Back there, a touch over three leagues, in a gully. You can’t miss the bodies.’

  That moment, the other prisoner gagged under the splashed bandage aroused and started a round of muffled screaming.

  ‘Light’s grace! Let me ride, he’s in pain,’ Braggen begged.

  Another man with a bristle of blond beard elbowed the onlookers back in sharp pity. ‘Let the man pass! If that’s Hadge, Dorik’s tracker, he’s got a pretty wife who’s going to be grieving.’

  ‘Can we leave?’ Braggen snapped. ‘Else I’ll be hauling three stiffs for my pains. Where’s the main camp? Someone point me toward a warm tent and the hands of a competent healer.’

  The gruff sergeant relented. ‘We’ll do better. I’ll dispatch an escort to take you.’

  ‘The barbarian dogs had crack bowmen,’ Braggen cautioned. ‘Might need your men here, in case I was followed. I’d feel better if you used your damned escort to run down the murdering bastards.’

  ‘The more reason not to send you on alone,’ the sergeant insisted.

  A nerve-wracking delay, while Braggen was offered a drink from a flask, and the man to ride with him was chosen. To save time, the Etarran-bred horse with the least bloodstained saddle was cut from the bunch for his use.

  ‘Hurry on, man. Catch up as soon as you’re mounted.’ Before the scout who came forward could settle astride, or adjust the length of his stirrups, the disguised clansman spurred away at a canter.

  Beyond the next range of hills Braggen sharply reined up. ‘Here,’ he called, while his escort fell in, breathless with annoyance alongside. ‘Come and take charge of some of these lead reins.’

  ‘Well, didn’t I just try?’ The fellow edged his gelding into the press, leaned out and extended his arm to shoulder his share of the burden.

  He received no gift of reins, but Braggen’s mailed hand on his wrist, and a yank that dragged him half out of his saddle. While his horse plunged and jostled at the sharp shift in weight, he sucked in a gasped breath.

  The knife took him before he could yell, a punching stab through the neck. He struggled, gagging, while the blade’s point sawed deep and sliced through the artery under his jaw.

  Rushing dizziness followed the hot jet of his blood. The jolt of pure panic raced his heart and sped the ebb of his dying strength. He bled out his life, choking through a hacked windpipe, helpless to vent the undignified rage of being tied like killed game to the neck of his distressed horse.

  ‘Ath’s mercy, let you be the last of them,’ Braggen pleaded when the victim he strapped down had ceased breathing. Now informed where the camp was, he made swift disposition and cut loose the bay laden down with the corpse. The two others with their burden of wounded, he freed also. A sharp smack with the flat of a sword drove them off at a violent gallop. Let them lay down confused trails for the trackers. With luck the needy wretches they carried would preoccupy the patrol who finally chased down the strays.

  Bone chilled, and wretchedly trembling, Braggen wiped clean his sticky knife. He sheathed the weapon, then dragged at the lead reins, towing his remaining band of horses north and west. He risked precious time, keeping the animals’ pace to a prudent trot. A few he let loose at intervals when he pulled back to a resting walk. These obliged by seeding meandering loops and a jagged chain of back tracks. On short notice, this was the best could be done to suggest the whole band made their aimless way without riders.

  Once he judged he had passed well beyond the Alliance encampment without drawing the perimeter scouts, he changed horses and veered due north.

  The cold settled in. A crystalline clear sky lidded the downs like a jar of rare indigo glass. Braggen hunched against the buffeting gusts, chilled to relentless discomfort. The spilled blood of the killed man on his forearm and shoulder froze the cloth to crackling stiffness. The damp sleeve beneath did not dry, but let the remorseless cold burn straight through to the skin. He understood he would need to get dry, or else suffer crippling frostbite.

  He drew rein under an outcrop, dogged by the hagridden certainty that each passing second of delay would later come to cost dearly.

  Yet if his right hand became too numbed to grasp weapons, no lead he could wrest would be enough to draw his prince clear of armed enemies. Without pause to dismount, Braggen did as he must: unstrapped the silk-wrapped sword from his shoulder. Clutched in an agony of strung tension, he peeled off the sodden Alliance cloak, then the tunic and shirt with its gold ribbon and sunwheel badges. Eyes roving the horizon, each sense primed and listening for the patrol that could trap him in this moment of vulnerability, he crumpled the fine cloth, blotted sweat from his horse’s neck and rubbed down his gore-stained skin.

  The wind lashed his bare flesh. The cruel stinging was recorded by each exposed nerve. The risk as he dressed half unhinged him with fear. His hands, uncooperative, had long since lost the dexterity to contend with bone buttons and laces. Wrapped shuddering at last in the reclaimed comfort of his original garments, Braggen caught the sword back. Spurred by desperate haste, he slung its silk-clad hilt once again close to hand’s reach. Then he ducked his head before the ceaseless, sharp wind, and swung his mount northward again, driving the remounts ahead.

  The gelding entrusted with its sunwheel-wrapped burden he kept strapped in tandem with his own.

  Setting moon rimmed the hills to the west in cobwebs of ghostly light. The brush and scrub trees had long since rattled clean of the past night’s tracery of snow. The curved backs of the drifts wore a sheen of faint silver. Under the ongoing hooves of the horses, the bite and crunch of packed ice punched through the risen scream of each gust. Smashed fragments of crust skittered downwind like thrown cullet. Braggen pressed on with his head turned, face shielded behind the furred rim of his hood. His feet were feelingless lumps in the stirrups. His hands fared no better buried wrist deep in his gelding’s tangled mane. If danger arose, and he needed Alithiel unsheathed, he would be forced to cut through the silk wrappings to draw her. The slipknotted bindings Jieret had tied were beyond his fumbling cold grip.

  The threat at his back seemed an abstract dream,
but for the caked stains on the sunwheel mantle cast over Arithon’s body.

  Braggen moved by brute will. He prodded his tired horse onward, guided by the yellowed, setting moon until its wan lamp extinguished behind by the fretted hills to the west. The sky overhead was black enamel and chipped diamond, the rock-clad gullies smoothed over by night, treacherous as deadfalls underfoot.

  Not long past moonset, Braggen had to cut loose the roan mare. A stumble had lamed her. Despite the pain of a severely wrenched fetlock, she refused to be left, breasting the deepest footing three-legged. Shredded by pity, Braggen found her a sheltered gulch. There, he paused to let the other mounts drink from the black current of an open streamlet. He could do no more. The surcease from the wind offered the mare blandishment to stay, and trailing willow fronds provided her browsing.

  He dismounted to blazing pain in both hips from too many hours astride. Limping and stiff, he performed the chore of changing mounts, while the gusts roared over the lip of the ravine and hurled slivered ice through the rattling branches. He stamped circulation back into his feet and dug out a meal of dried meat and biscuit. While he chewed, he checked Arithon. The slow breathing masked under the gore-crusted dressings remained reassuringly warm and regular.

  Braggen transferred his prince’s slack weight onto the back of a fresh horse. The bandaged hand was still dry, though the bindings keeping his Grace in the saddle had chafed a sore in one wrist. Braggen eased the raw patch with salve, then wound a torn strip from a dead man’s shirt around the cord to make padding.

  By the time he set foot in the stirrup and remounted, his pulse raced. Fear and tension had filmed him in clammy sweat that was going to chill bitterly, later. Worse, the horses stopped short in refusal to leave the protected ravine. Shrinking himself, crying curses for the necessity, Braggen lashed their balked rumps with the ends of his reins and drove them to forsake their sound instincts.

  For now the cold posed an enemy more deadly than any two-legged tracker the Etarrans might set on his back trail. Weariness compounded the incessant chill, hazing the mind toward dozing sleep and leaching away better judgment. Braggen bludgeoned his thick wits, agonized between choices: whether to stop and seek shelter, or press onward into the terrible wind, at the risk of fatal exposure.

  Overhead, the stately turn of the stars told him three hours remained before sunrise.

  Braggen scraped the frost rime from his beard, his breath a white plume in the darkness. A glance backward showed the rumpled swath of his passage. The scarred prints stitched over the pristine hills left a beacon for enemies to follow.

  He made his decision in grim understanding that Daon Ramon’s bitter cold at least posed an element of uncertainty. The threat at his heels held no sweet ambiguity. If a company of Etarrans came on in pursuit, and caught him dismounted to rest, he and the prince he was charged to safeguard would be dead in a matter of minutes.

  In the end, the torments of unremitting winter lent the gift that spared the s’Ffalenn lineage from extinction. For when the past night’s bloody ruse was unraveled, and the slaughtered patrol left unhorsed in the gulch had been tracked down and accounted, only one party of Etarran men-at-arms was dispatched to ride out and retaliate. The accounts matched the evidence with inarguable impeccability: the task force was assured they pursued a lone killer, burdened down with a wounded henchman. Because their presumed quarry was likely no more than a scout strayed from Jieret’s war band, they avoided the savage discomfort of mounting the chase until dawn broke.

  Under the knives of pallid new sunlight, the patrol of ten lancers saddled up and turned windward. They broke ground, pushing hard, inside a few hours covering the same ground that Braggen had passed through the night. They recognized the lamed mare they found in the ravine, and also, to an outbreak of curses and threats, the stained cloak jammed in her saddle pack. Enraged, primed for vengeance, they thundered ahead, plowing the barbarian’s insolent trail into ripped gouts of torn snow.

  The prints they were following yielded no fugitive, but diabolically converged with the chopped slurry of the Mathorn Road.

  The patrol pulled up, milling. Amid frozen ruts, the trampled mishmash of cart tracks, and the ice-rimmed hoof marks of galloping couriers riding post from the inland cities to Narms, they could not decipher which way, east or west, their benighted quarry had turned.

  ‘Sithaer’s breeding fiends!’ cracked the distempered officer, compelled to draw rein and split forces. His men dispersed under orders to detain and question every wagon and rider they encountered. Yet no merchant’s caravan reported anything untoward. The message couriers who might have distinguished the barbarian were long since away down the road.

  The search party encountered no other loose horses; none bearing a bearded and bandaged officer, and none ridden by a reiving clansman disguised in a bloodstained town mantle. Nor did they find any telltale sign that the fugitives had turned off the thoroughfare. The pair might have slipped northward into the mountains, or swung south again in fiendish deception, to hide in the boggy, briar-thatched bottomlands carved by the frozen Aiyenne.

  The officer hammered an enraged fist into his horse’s wet neck. He swore until he ran short of breath, not one whit appeased when his unhelpful scout suggested the clansman was quite likely a Companion from Deshir.

  ‘A right demon for cleverness, and worse, on this route, he’ll be a well-seasoned raider.’ The veteran slapped his whip against his gloved palm in balked fury. ‘Send too many men to beating the bushes, we could see them blunder into a right mess of set traps. If not, very likely you’ll see what slender evidence he’s left become ground underfoot and obliterated.’

  The sergeant shut his mouth, his frown like strapped lead. Inexcusably, this setback was going to serve him a serious delay. ‘Call the patrol in, then!’ he snapped in the teeth of his exasperated scout. ‘Find our three fastest men. They go back to fetch trackers. Tell them, better blister their butts at a gallop! Each minute we hang back, that clan butcher’s widening his lead. I could strip hide for the blighted night watch and their pussyfoot shirking! We’re not going to close on this murderer now without help from the headhunters’ damned dogs!’

  Late Winter 5670

  Penalty

  The Prime’s summons reached the sisterhouse in the early afternoon, with Lirenda immersed in the distasteful task of rendering sulfur for plague talismans. Highscarp’s wealthy merchants preferred such wards for their southbound trade ships. Naught else, they believed, would repel the suborned humors that carried the virulent summer pestilence that plagued galley crews sent around Scimlade Tip.

  Lips tucked in grim distaste, her patrician nose wrinkled under the assaulting odor of rotten eggs, Lirenda batted away a fallen strand of jet hair with the back of a humid wrist. Detesting the stench, left rumpled and sweaty from the heat thrown off by three boiling pots set on braziers, she would have given the plump, beringed customer the sharp side of her tongue, had he stood there: that the eight-penny casks filled in the marshes by the Ippash delta caused more running flux than any seasonal change in the air. The pinchfisted fool could have saved the bother of talismans, and spared the silk guild a needless oath of debt had he underwritten the silver to pay for clean water drawn from the city cisterns.

  Immersed within her black cloud of irritation, Lirenda failed to notice the liveried page at the doorway until he had spoken in direct address.

  ‘Initiate Lirenda, you are asked to present yourself to the Prime.’

  Called in the act of weighing an ounce of ground sulfur piled on a twist of rice paper, the enchantress who had fallen from senior privilege startled abruptly erect. Her sleeve snagged the chain suspending the scale pan. A chiming spill of tipped weights clattered across the sheets of stamped copper on the tabletop. One struck the glass flask, and the sulfur upset. Arisen with her lap streaked with reeking yellow powder, Lirenda all but spat the requisite words of formality. ‘You may lead me to the Matriarch.’ Bristled with anger
to be caught in a common laborer’s state of disarray, a frosty edge sharpened her aristocrat’s hauteur. ‘I shall follow the moment I’ve refreshed my appearance.’

  ‘You’ll come now,’ an icier voice interrupted. Arrived behind the page, her cowled robe missed in the gloom of the corridor, Senior Cadgia touched the boy’s shoulder in kindly dismissal. No such softened sentiment eased her brisk manner as she surveyed her former superior. ‘I have been sent as your escort this time. The Prime is ill disposed, and will not be kept waiting on a charge of disobedience.’

  A moment, while threat flooded dread like poured ice through her veins; Lirenda bent her head. The onyx sheen of her hair dipped into the shadow as she grasped the tongs and emptied the coals from the braziers into the fire pail. Steam billowed in clouds of silvery vapor that drafts from the high windows dispersed. Her tawny eyes an unblinking tiger’s upon her triumphant elder, Lirenda said, ‘I bow to the Prime’s will on the matter, of course.’

  The audience was not held in the customary ground-floor chamber, with the wide, breakfront windows overlooking the whitecapped vista of Eltair Bay. The doubled doors to that room were latched closed as Lirenda was ushered past. Muffled by the carved panels of curly maple, she heard the scrape of industrious brushes, as complaining drudges inside scrubbed and waxed the parquet floor. An acrid odor hung on the air, reminiscent of recent smoke. Had the enchantress not been consumed by the need to stifle her rising anxiety, she might have asked after the irregularity. But Cadgia’s tread hustled her down the wainscoted hallway, then up the stair with its brass rods and red runner. A clipped gesture warned Lirenda to follow without pause, sure sign any questions would be rebuffed.