TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  When he woke, hours later, the enraged cat had fled. Every muscle and sinew in his body had an ache, and cold willowbark tea scarcely tamed them. His trail-hardy mare had long since lost her shoes. Arithon seared the cracks in her hoofwalls with a red-heated knife, lest she split to the quick and go lame. The gelding with the puffed fetlock improved, but still could not bear a rider. He packed the supplies, uncomplaining, his coat rough and lusterless from hard use and an uncertain diet.

  'When we reach Daon Ramon, you can paw for dried grass,' Arithon soothed. He ran his hands down both animals' ice-crusted legs, checking for heat in the tendons.

  And the day did come finally, when the mountains relented; when the stone-clad heights receded from the cloud hems, and the trees in the valleys stretched tall and majestic with the shelter of lowering altitude. Snow sifted down, deep and smooth in the hollows, storm winds having shrieked and broken their force on the unyielding ramparts of the ridges. Arithon left the lichen-bare rock of the timberline behind him, and saw, from the north-facing gaps between ranges, the white sweep of Daon Ramon below him.

  The triumph of that accomplishment was short-lived as a horn blast from behind set him under close-pressed pursuit. Arithon ran ahead, driving his tiring horses into the dense growth of a thicket. Then he retraced his steps and whisked out their hoofprints, and laid another false trail to a streambed. For a blessing, this time, the swift current had thawed. He plunged in, left the trackers the logical conclusion he had masked his trail in the water, but escaped by hauling himself into the drooping boughs of an evergreen. Tucked in the branches, he waited, unseen, while his hunters gouged the streambed to stirred silt and muck. They moved out at last, split up, north and south, in mistaken belief he would have made egress elsewhere.

  Twilight fell. The drifts lay on the land like iridescent silk, tucked in folds of cobalt and violet beneath a sky deepened to indigo. Under a spattered brilliance of stars, Arithon climbed down from the pine that had sheltered him. He cut a furtive path over the snow his enemies had left trampled to confusion. Masked under shadow, he collected his horses and moved on, toward a plain that, by nightfall, unveiled the hot sparks of a dozen enemy campfires.

  The despair of his straits washed over him then, a powerful force that made even the effort of hope a travail. Alone amid the whine of cold wind through acres of winter-stripped boughs, he longed for Caolle's hard-bitten advice, or Earl Jieret's firebrand tolerance. Elaira's love seemed a figment of dream, and there, too, fate denied him fulfillment. Arithon endured the dismal ache of his solitude, his relief a set litany, that this time no friend would die in heroic effort to spare him. He closed his sound hand over the frozen leather of the lead reins and sought after the comfortless shelter of a south-facing ravine.

  Through the night, he lurked hidden in the deepwood, and kept sleepless watch for patrols. In a day, perhaps two, the next blizzard would roar in. While a storm masked the telltale trace of his footprints, yet again he might seize the advantage and slip past the cordon Jaelot's men cast ahead of him.

  Three fortnights had elapsed since his flight on the solstice. Arithon scoured the rust from his steel, and took no false heart from the fact he had so far managed to evade capture. The windswept downs of Daon Ramon lay ahead. Thirty leagues of exposed landscape unfolded between the wooded, Skyshiel foothills and the promise of Earl Jieret's protection at Ithamon. Under deep winter, with inadequate cover, he would stand at the mercy of Jaelot's trackers. The lame horse would become a dangerous liability, and the sound one, a burden he dared not eliminate. Traveling on foot, if his enemies flushed him, he could all too easily be run down and killed, or captured by enemy riders. Jaelot's men dogged him, before and behind. Were he spotted, they need do nothing at all but close in and form ranks and surround him.

  Arithon shot Alithiel home in her scabbard, then oiled his main gauche dagger. He scrounged a meal of stale biscuit and cheese, and smoked jerky from a near-emptied saddle pack. Snugged down in his cloak and his thickest fleece jacket, he measured his dwindling assets. Where Luhaine's advice had dispatched him inland, no one had factored for the driven tenacity of Jaelot's spellbound captain. Arithon found the odds on his continued safe passage had become laughably small. His broadscale use of his shadow to seed terror was now his most necessary weapon of expedience.

  Spinner of Darkness, the Alliance had named him. Arithon shut his eyes, wrung to bitterness. If he survived his next crossing, the title was bound to be answered and justified.

  * * *

  Recalcitrant, the sky held fair through four days. Dawn on the fifth, flat cloud roofed the peaks. The air wore the whetted, crystalline sharpness that presaged another fierce storm. Jaelot's hard-bitten guardsmen watched the weather close in with trail-weary experience. The company bound to Arithon's pursuit carped over the aches dropping pressure brought to old scars. Their complaints availed nothing. While the first moaning gusts roared down off the heights, their labored progress was reduced to moving shadows amid the whirling white eddies of snowfall. They saddled their horses, formed up in patrols, and fanned out, seeking the Spinner of Darkness.

  Noon rendezvous found them hunched with their backs to raw wind, while their squint-eyed tracker deliberated over the ground by the glaze of a refrozen streamlet.

  'Your man fished for trout here,' he announced at due length. A jab of his stick broke through snow and revealed the buried ash of a blaze kindled out of pine heartwood that would burn fast and hot, with very little trace of smoke. 'Here's where he boiled his catch. The fillets would be dried, or packed in ice and frozen. Won't need a fire to fill his belly for at least the next several nights.'

  The sergeant in charge cast away the frazzled twig of witch hazel he had plucked to scrub his filmed teeth. 'Starving or sated, may Dharkaron's Black Spear rip his vitals in twain in the afterlife. Set chains on the bastard, and we can go home. Just tell us which way he rode out.'

  The tracker straightened, one gloved hand pressed to the stiff joints in the small of his back. He quartered the streambank with mincing steps, musing aloud as he sifted the scanty evidence. Always, the story had to be wrung from the s'Ffalenn demon's fastidious campsite. 'Didn't bring horses here, never that stupid. Want to know where he's bound, have to uncover the trail that leads where he had his mounts picketed.' A pause, a poke at a bush with the stick, then a drawn moment while the woodsman knelt and gently blew the new powdering of snowfall away from the sun-crusted layer underneath.

  'Got him. This way.' The grizzled tracker arose and dusted his trousers, his dour face turned toward the sergeant. 'Might as well dismount now. Yon cursed spawn of evil won't belike to change his sly habits. Not for the sake of sparing your feet or your comforts.'

  Never had Arithon made the fool's mistake of staking out horses where his pursuit could launch a mounted foray. He would risk the approach of no enemy horses lest equine herd instinct raise a neigh of greeting and sound a disastrous alarm.

  Afternoon, the patrols were set searching in spirals, while the wind howled down and snow pelted. The west-facing slopes of the foothills soon wore a packed cowl of whiteness. The tracker forged ahead, leaned into the gusts, while his cloak cracked and slapped at his tough, stringy frame, and his beard gathered gray spikes of hoarfrost. As the men on his heels fumed and vented rank oaths, the tracker unraveled the difficult trail, patient as a spider reweaving a web from small clues strung like scattered snippets of silk.

  After six weeks of balked circling through desolate territory, men muttered that Arithon s'Ffalenn walked the land far too lightly. Around fires, by night, their talk named him uncanny. By day, braced up by camaraderie and bravado, they scratched their thick beards, and boasted of how they would hang their caught quarry by the heels, and tease him with firebrands just to watch him use shadow to save his bastard's skin from the cinders.

  Loudest were those who kept score by their suffering. 'As I'm born,' exclaimed one, 'I'll see the fell creature repaid for the frostbite that's blac
kened the tips of my toes.'

  A comrade hooted. 'Who cares, for some toes? While we sleep on snow and scratch biting fleas, freezing our bollocks in this wilderness, what's to stop the wife left at home from warming the bed in our absence? We don't go back soon, I swear my sweet member will forget it wasn't made for something better than pissing.'

  Someone else guffawed. 'Your member? Daelion's justice! That wee slippery thing that doesn't know a woman from a wet gob of spit in a mitten?' In rejoinder, chipping ice from his hobnailed boot sole, he added, 'Or aren't you the one we hear moaning behind the picket lines those nights when you draw the late watch?'

  'Quiet!' snapped the sergeant. 'The pack of you ladies would flush a deaf post with your noise.'

  'If there's a fugitive left in these thickets to snare, he won't be the fiend's get we're chasing,' came a sullen grumble from the ranks. 'Mark me, in this storm, the Spinner of Darkness will have snatched his chance and bolted headlong for Ithamon.'

  A testy colleague elbowed the speaker. 'Would you stake your next ration of beer he's done that?'

  'Be silent, fool!' cried the sergeant in rife exasperation. 'You chattering magpies let the tracker do his work. We wait on his word for my orders. If the Master of Shadow's for Ithamon, he'll be caught without any man's bet on the outcome.'

  The men met his glower in foot-shuffling, sheepish quiet. They scarcely needed a tongue-lashing reminder that Jaelot's most competent officer already had a company of men positioned for ambush at the ruin.

  Against the whiteout scream of a gust, the sergeant snapped his conclusion. 'Sure enough, it's our task to drive the bold rat into the trap we have waiting. But before we hare off through a blizzard on assumptions, we'll damned well make sure the bloodsucking sorcerer's turned west across Daon Ramon Barrens!'

  'He's turned.' The tracker wormed his way out of the thicket, then winced at the shower of snow the sprung branches dumped down his collar. 'Found the hollow where he had his horses tucked up. The tracks when they left lead northwest. He's gone for the barrens in a cracking hurry. No time before this have I seen him carve a course that ran so infernally straight.'

  'Move out!' The sergeant hazed his troop to form ranks. 'We go where the bastard's trail takes us.'

  But the rising storm raised a morass of obstacles, with landmarks obscured, and the far-ranging patrols of outriders too scattered to be found and recalled at short notice. The wind stiffened to a lash of unmitigated misery, lent a scouring edge by the snow driven down in a hissing, whirled maelstrom of dry powder. The horses stumbled ahead, heads low and tails flattened, the men in their saddles cursing the patched skin torn off if they touched mail or weapons bare-handed.

  Beyond the sheltering eaves of the forest, the fierce gusts flayed exposed flesh. Snow worked and sifted into everything, from the folds in wool cloaks to the crevices of boot cuffs, then melted into an insidious, numbing dampness that chilled a man's bones till they ached. The wet spiked the horses' coats into steaming, soaked redolence, then tipped their long guard hairs in ice. The miserable beasts shivered beneath sorry masters, who slapped sodden thighs, and cursed the name of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  Nor did the wide barrens afford man or mount comfort. The low, rolling landscape wore snagged cornices of rock, with the lee sides of the dales a morass of brush and crabbed briar. The horses ripped the fronts of their cannon bones bloody, and left streaks of pinked snow where the officers called rest halts. Iced streams and gulches snagged the lowlands like torn seams, a hazard masked over by drifts. More than one horse became wrenched to its knees in a floundering, dangerous fall. Inside of an hour, two mounts were lamed. Another had to be shot for meat, reft beyond cure by an ugly, splintered bone shredded through the thick hide of its gaskin.

  While men shouldered the work to render the carcass, the officers met in harried conference with the headhunter guides, and the trackers.

  'Can't press on after dark, the terrain is too savage.' said the garrison quartermaster, his pouched eyes haunted, and his ruddy cheeks sadly thinned from his weeks of tribulation on the Baiyen.

  'Storm's going to make the light fail early.' The sergeant slapped numbed hands, just as wearied. 'A fire and a horse roast will bolster morale.'

  The head tracker held his opinion in dour silence, while the more hard-bitten headhunters insisted their wily enemy was certain to widen his lead while Jaelot's moping sluggards ate and slept.

  'Would you push us on in the dark and see the next man break his neck?' The patrol captain hunched against the pelt of the storm, his nose a red knob dripping moisture. 'Hard enough to keep our bearings in this weather with the snow like a witch's curse upon us.'

  'Stop now, and I tell you.' the chief headhunter argued, 'every trace of your quarry will be lost by the morning. Blizzards in this country can spin out for days. Stay on him. Press the chase. Or else throw away what chance you have left.'

  Debate raged and resolved, with the patrols on the move through the gloom of a premature dusk. With the failing light, the dirge wail of the wind sawed men's nerves to uncanny tension. The lead riders lit torches that the roar of the storm fanned down to sullen embers. Their dulled, ruby glare became swallowed by murk, invisible within a few yards. No fire warmed the chill from wet feet and hands. The fresh-slaughtered meat slowly froze, a sore point for men with pinched bellies. Griped on their diet of hard biscuit and cheese, they blundered into night, harried on by a gale like a hell-bound scourge, screaming over the weather-stripped vales.

  Midnight downed another horse with a torn tendon. This one they shot with a quarrel through the brain and abandoned in the gully where it lay. Fresh bickering raged over the beast's steaming carcass. On foot since the morning, the tracker was soaked through his fleece leggings, and grown testy. He questioned the reliability of what scant sign he could glean from the iced-over bogs in the hollows.

  'One bad reading could turn us astray. We'd be drawn leagues off course, come the morning. Could lose our quarry for sure. Might be days before we could find his cold trail. Fresh snow's in unmerciful disadvantage.'

  The chief headhunter rebutted, 'But the fugitive hasn't turned.

  He's crossing these hillocks on a crow's course, straight for the towers of Ithamon. The plain fact he's not paused to lay a false trail means that he's pressed, even desperate. I say we're too close at his heels for him to attempt the precautions of a trapped fox.'

  A gust raged full force, raking snow like barbed glass against the riders' bared faces. Through the misery of the moment, while men suffered unspeaking, the shrill neigh of a westbound horse rode the storm like a shred of blown rag.

  'By the dark, that's none of ours!' cried the garrison sergeant, wheeling his mount. 'We've got no outriders that far ahead.' He dug in his spurs without waiting for conference or orders from his fellow officers.

  Strung out in disorder, the rest of the company plunged after him. Each man in his way cursed the impulsive action. Yet to pause and deliberate was to risk separation amid the black brew of foul weather. Given scant choice, the captain in charge barked at the laggards to fall in.

  The night was a wadded shroud of black felt, knit through by the forces of chaos. Ahead, amid the treacherous terrain with its rock crowns and unseen gullies, scouts picked up the muffled drumming of hooves, now sure of the beast they were tracking. The sound came and went like a phantom between gusts, a lure that kept beckoning onward. In a frenzy propelled by spell-driven eagerness, Jaelot's men-at-arms forged ahead. Whipped up to the blood-sport passion of the chase, they pursued the twisting, blind flight of their quarry until their mounts were belabored to exhaustion.

  Their pace slowed to a walk, the hours passed, interminable. Cruel winds bit and snarled. Snow swirled and sifted and stung like edged sleet, the storm's onslaught continuous through air like stirred pitch. Tempers frayed. Two men came to grief, thrown from their saddles when their horses missed stride in the potholes. During the pause while the company healer set and dressed one unfortu
nate's broken arm, the chief headhunter returned with the unwelcome word they had spent a fruitless chase to corner a riderless gelding.

  'What?' snapped the company commander, caught dismounted to examine the withers of a horse chafed raw where the saddle had shifted. 'I thought one of you scouts said he'd sighted someone astride?'

  Shamefaced, the headhunter qualified. 'What he saw was a decoy, a manikin fashioned from old clothing tied and stuffed up with pine needles.'

  To the owner of the galled horse, the commander said, 'Strip the mare's bridle and pack that sore with salve.' His frustration set a lash to his already sharpened speech. 'Nobody rides anywhere until we recover sound wits and a sense of direction!' Then, to the headhunter who shifted from foot to foot in the dark, 'You're here to tell me we've spent the whole night running blind circles for nothing?'

  'We've caught a lame horse,' the man stated, shamefaced. 'The single count we've got going in our favor, our enemy has just one mount left.'

  'Which does us small good. Now the fiend could be anywhere!' The commander did not need the trapper's gloomy confirmation that the fugitive's trail would now be obliterated, perhaps lost beyond all recovery. No option remained but to camp until dawn on the hope the storm would relent. Only the glimpse of the rising sun could reestablish their obscured bearings.

  The men hunkered down, soaked and miserable without fires. The low brush was too thin to sustain a good blaze, and the demon gusts extinguished the sparks the field cook coaxed from dry tinder. The horses were too spent to paw for the grasses that poked spiny clumps through the weather sides of the snowdrifts. Men huddled in blankets amid punishing cold, uncomforted by the knowledge that their enemy endured and suffered the selfsame privations.

  The night roared and howled, possessed in the grip of what seemed an interminable punishment. Dawn did not come. The men in their misery ached and wept pleas for the return of comfort and light. No voice answered. In vain, they held stead-flast. No dark hour in memory had reigned with such force, that the advent of day should stay banished.