Thought of the nomad closed a sharp spark of contact, raising a flicker of witch thought: of searing grief, and the captured impression of the aftermath of a deadly fight: two men had burned, consumed by a sorcerer’s spell line; and a sweet-natured old chancellor taken as catspaw now lay dead. The corpse sprawled alongside two staunch palace guards, brought down by Vensic’s expedient infighting. Jussoud shouldered the weight of Taskin’s litter, his steadfast nature cruelly torn: that necessity had granted no time for a field splint to ease the injured men’s agony…
‘Ah, my brother,’ Mykkael gasped, his astonished relief over Vensic’s survival made bittersweet by the penalty of Jussoud’s remorse. ‘I weep for your sorrows. If we survive to share sennia together, I’ll tell you the sore truth: two men down, but alive, is a blessing beyond measure. And the spell-ridden chancellor was much worse than dead on the sorry moment you struck him.’ Perincar’s mark, and the clean steel of the sword, had actually delivered the old man to the mercy of a natural crossing.
By now high upcountry Mykkael breathed deep to resettle his unruly awareness. The cold air ran thin as a knife-blade into his overtaxed lungs, chilled by the ice on the rims of the peaks. If the sky showed no moon, the snowfields reflected a measure of ambient light. Stars pierced the black zenith between the whispering needles of evergreen.
The scrub was too thick to permit a view downwards. Yet when Mykkael glanced back, he felt a grue of unease chase his spine, as though arcane pursuit searched the ground near his backtrail.
When the saddled horse lifted its dripping muzzle, he urged the pack animal to the streamside, and scratched its soaked neck while it drank. Then he cajoled the tired hound on to her feet and pressed relentlessly onwards, up the boulder-snagged spine of the ridge. To judge by Benj’s description of landmarks, the most likely glen to conceal six horses lay another two leagues further on. Mykkael must decipher the poacher’s instructions and discover that hidden cleft ahead of the questing sorcerer. Four more hours of hard going, provided his knee held, and two winded horses could withstand the rigorous ascent.
Mykkael wound his grip through the gelding’s damp mane, clamped his jaw, and forced his aching leg to bear weight. As he limped through the dark, over flint rocks and gnarled roots, he sensed the distanced, jumbled impression: of stone stairs, walled in by the rippled glass panes of the late queen’s conservatory. Stars shone through, distorted as run silver, as three men, breathing hard, groped upwards by touch. They climbed with urgent, desperate care, bearing a wounded man on a litter. The air wore the humid must of mulched earth and the ethereal fragrance of roses, woven through by the rank tang of danger…
A jarring, slipped step regrounded strayed thoughts. Mykkael hissed a ragged curse through his teeth. No oath could do aught to relieve the pain that lanced through the small of his back. Since the shuddering tremors were not going to release, he chose prudence before pity, and remounted the tired gelding. Higher he wound, through the stands of stunted evergreen, while the lit windows of Sessalie’s scattered farmsteads glimmered through the mist silting the vale far below.
When the ridge back sheared into a near vertical ravine, Mykkael shifted the load off the stumbling pack horse. He slipped the hackamores and let both exhausted animals go free. Hereafter, the clanging scrape of shod hooves and the falls of loose stone dislodged by their passage would cause too much noise. He dared not risk hazing the fugitive princess into a needless, blind panic.
Light flooded out of the council hall windows, a setback Jussoud noted with stark apprehension. By the muffled clamour of voices inside, and the coming and going of servants in Devall’s livery, Collain Herald was losing the thankless task of maintaining lawful order. Like undertow during a shifting tide, the cascade of events had disrupted the secure process of Sessalie’s succession.
‘That’s the guard for the crown prince’s formal retinue, parked over there by the entrance,’ the Fane Street physician pointed out. His gloomy whisper cast echoes off the glass roof, as he mopped his round face with his coat tail. ‘Inevitable, I suppose, that young Kailen should press his right to his father’s authority.’ Worried, since Jussoud still bent over the stilled form of Commander Taskin, he added, ‘His lordship is slipping deeper into shock?’
‘Yes. The foreseeable difficulty.’ Jussoud sighed. ‘His blood pressure’s low from severe loss of blood. The elevated pulse rate won’t come down, I’m afraid, until we have him settled and still.’
‘Well, the bandage is still dry, he’s not started bleeding,’ the physician assured him, his stubborn optimism seeking for good amid an increasingly grim situation.
Paused to rest, with the litter shafts braced on the overhead balcony above the shadowed beds of the queen’s roses, the healers attending the wounded commander faced the raw brunt of their predicament. For the unexpected session held in the council hall made the direct route to the king’s chambers impossible to attempt.
Moments later, Vensic’s light tread returned, grating over the gritted planks under the roof where the royal gardeners forced seedlings in flat boxes. ‘No going by way of the back corridor, either. There are now posted guards flanking each of the doorways. I can’t fight them all.’ His strained distress reflected his dread, that he might face a cold-blooded repeat of the tactics just used in the garden. ‘Bad business to try, since they’re probably sentries following reasonable orders, and not suborned by the enemy’
‘We won’t risk more killing,’ Jussoud agreed, a decision that brought small relief.
For they now confronted the fallback position that Taskin had outlined with bald-faced reluctance: to unseal the ancient brick passage in the walls, then access the concealed vault underlying the late queen’s apartments. ‘Go that route,’ the experienced commander had husked, ‘you’ll be vulnerable. If the king has fallen to the sorcerer’s faction, you could find yourselves trapped without recourse.’
‘Soonest started, then,’ murmured the Fane Street physician. He finished buffing his clouded spectacles. Then he bent and shouldered his end of the litter, even his dauntless nature subdued by the perils lying ahead.
The balcony ended where the glass conservatory met the buttressing wall of the wing that housed the grand ballroom. In daytime, the row of high lancet windows let the light stream downwards in striated patterns across polished hardwood floors. By night, the windows were jet wells, poked with mud-speckled straw where the jackdaws had nested. Vensic was forced to his knees, to grope for the wrought-iron grating.
‘We don’t dare use a candle,’ Jussoud replied to the physician’s disturbed query.
The dusty panes of the upper conservatory could be seen from the guard-post at Highgate. From here, even the briefest struck light would shine far and wide like a beacon.
The grate Vensic encountered was crusted with rust. He scraped his knuckles against rough brick, prying to free the obstruction. Worse, a light bobbed at the far end of the conservatory, trailed by a flurry of voices.
‘If they’re in here, we’ll flush them,’ a searcher assured an unseen commanding officer.
Vensic worked at the jammed grate with desperate focus. The marginal gain when it gave and pulled free was followed by crushing defeat, as the aperture in the wall opened into cobwebs and bottomless darkness. The musty spokes of a ladder descended, too steep to accommodate an unconscious man on a litter.
‘We can’t do this,’ Jussoud gasped, tortured. ‘We can’t carry Taskin down in his state! The shoulder is going to tear.’
‘Surrendered alive, his fate will be worse if he falls to a sorcerer’s minion.’ The physician shook his head, brisk. ‘No choice,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll have to set him into a sling.’ To the eastern nomad, who had not served in war, he added his brusque reassurance. ‘I’ve solved this before. It’s the way wounded men are brought down from high battlements when no one can access the stairs.’
‘I’ve practised the technique,’ Vensic added. Sword drawn, he worked fast, slicing thr
ough the soft ties binding Taskin into the litter. ‘Mykkael’s drills were more thorough than anyone imagined we’d ever need.’
The physician added his agile assistance. In short order, Taskin’s body was shifted, and the canvas drawn from the poles. Quick cuts fashioned two crude leg holes. Another, higher up, was positioned to support the upper body, slung by the unwounded arm. Then the canvas was folded in half, the commander’s slack frame supported within like a child in an oversized nappy. The torn shoulder was left tightly strapped to his chest. The canvas could now be raised by the corners, overlapped at each side. A pair of strong men, from above, and another to guide Taskin’s legs from below, could now ease his unconscious weight down the ladder.
‘Jussoud and I will handle the work from above,’ Vensic instructed the physician. A glance over the balcony showed more lights, streaming steadily closer. ‘You go first, and if you pray, beg the powers of grace we won’t stand on a dry-rotted ladder.’
No time for second thoughts, and no breath for regrets or recriminations, as the three harried men hoisted Taskin and descended into the ink-dark shaft leading down to the hypocaust. From there, they must make their way under the floor, and find the vent that accessed the warren of passageways carved beneath the old wing of the palace.
Nor did they dare, even then, strike a light. A chance gleam cast through a chink or crevice would give their position away. Progress was reduced to a groping trial of cramped quarters and unrelieved darkness, broken by the clomp of the searchers’ boots, or the dusty fall of strayed torchlight through the gaps in the sagging floorboards. The hypocaust was a warren for rats, festooned with dense cobwebs, and shining with foetid puddles leaked by the terracotta pipes. The space was too tight to sit upright. A task force of guardsmen creaked over their heads, showering down grit and stirred spiders. The fugitives made their way at a tortuous crawl, with Taskin inched forward in tender, slow stages, either laid over two men who slid on their backs, or else pulled along on the canvas sling, with one man or another on hands and knees at his side to guard his strapped shoulder from mishap.
They escaped the conservatory through a hatch at the back of the caldarium, then ploughed through the pits where the ashes were piled for fertilizer. Vensic and Jussoud bore up the litter, with the pink-faced physician masked in his handkerchief, in desperate straits not to sneeze. Persistence saw them across the conduit of the old sewer by way of a plank that threatened to crack at each step. From there, they traversed the drain from the laundry, creeping in single file down a narrow ledge of slicked stone, while noisome waters lapped at their ankles.
Beyond, the dank shaft of a stairwell ascended to the wardrobe of the late queen’s apartment.
‘How’s Taskin?’ whispered the physician through the pause at the landing to recoup taxed breath and wrung nerves.
Jussoud sat with the commander’s bare feet in his lap, pressing reflex points with skilled fingers. ‘He can’t handle much more of this.’
‘Two storeys,’ Vensic murmured. Soaked leather squelched as he shifted his weight in the darkness, perhaps to make sure of his weapon. ‘We should go. Delay’s just as likely to kill him.’
For the muffled sound of raised voices carried down through the stairwell, dire warning the binding dispute in the council had ascended to storm the king’s chamber.
‘Taskin’s stable as he’s going to get in these straits.’ Jussoud peeled off the marred silk of his overrobe, and fashioned a sling to support the wounded commander’s dangling legs. ‘Let’s get him up where there’s light, and a bed. I can’t do any more for him here, but watch him lose ground he couldn’t afford in the first place.’
The game little physician shoved erect, faintly wheezing, and muscled his share of the burden. The climb up the narrow, turnpike stair passed with relative ease, while the rising argument in progress above unfolded with alarming clarity.
‘…in league with the sorcerer!’ cried the seneschal’s excitable tenor. ‘The two guardsmen maimed in the garden just swore they saw that steppeland nomad raise balefire and burn two hapless souls to oblivion!’
Bennent’s gravel bass tendered a reply, a rumble too low to decipher.
The seneschal’s ranting broke in again, cranked to the shrill edge of hysteria. ‘…commander told you to burn all this cedar? You know that such smoke could call in fell spirits, even attract the most dangerous of conjury! If you don’t quench that fire and post additional guards to stand watch at the royal bedside, I’ll have to advise Prince Kailen that your better judgement may have been compromised. You could be suborned by the selfsame sorcery that overthrew Taskin this morning!’
‘Hurry!’ gasped Vensic, his steady nerve shaken. ‘If I have to bear steel within the king’s presence, you realize they’ll drop us with crossbows.’
Above the last risers, a chink of light leaked past the concealed panel in the wardrobe. Jussoud squeezed aside to give Vensic space to search for the recessed latch.
Yet the panel gave way without touch or fumbling. The hinges creaked wide, and a candle lamp glared in dazzling brilliance upon them.
The three squinting fugitives made out the gleam of two guardsmen’s helms, then the form of an elegant old woman bearing a cane. ‘I wondered if you’d try to sneak up the back way,’ stated the indomitable Duchess of Phail.
Jussoud bowed his head. He gathered himself, spoke, even through the despair of dashed hope. ‘My lady, Commander Taskin is sinking. Would you deny him the right to his final bequest? He has risked his life for the chance to speak to the king, words he counted above his survival.’
‘To condemn that slinking desert-bred?’ snapped the duchess, past patience. ‘A cause scarcely worthy of his lordship’s last breath!’ Her clipped gesture signalled the guardsmen.
‘Perhaps to clear a staunch man’s defamed character.’ Jussoud matched the aged duchess’s scorn, the grave dignity of his ancestry backed by his courageous regret. ‘Choose wisely, grandmother. For want of the truth, the cost could extend to uncounted innocent lives.’
‘We’ve lost three such already, so I understand.’ The duchess thumped her cane and pronounced with snappish asperity, ‘How fortunate for you Lady Lindya was born with a woman’s good sense! She sent word ahead. We’ve all been anxiously expecting your arrival for the better part of two hours.’
The granddame tipped her white head to the pair of standing guardsmen. ‘Come along, help them through. Glory preserve us, if I’d realized the ruffians planned to traipse through the sewers, I’d have asked the servants to make up Taskin’s sickbed using the second-best linen.’
In Sessalie’s palace, three men escorted their unconscious companion into the royal apartments; and the eight living, who bore talismans fashioned by Perincar’s hand, and a ninth man, who carried another imprinted by resonant transfer into a sword blade, crossed into regional proximity. A circle of power interlaced with itself, and a warding arose, pealing a note whose clear intonation sounded across the unseen world known to shamans…
XXIII. Fugitive
MYKKAEL SENSED THAT BEACON WHERE HE KNELT, SOAKING HIS INFLAMED KNEE IN THE GUSH OF A STREAMLET TUMBLING OFF THE high glaciers. The chill that combed over his skin and ran through him had nothing to do with cold water. His unschooled, blood instinct understood that a change had just knitted through the fabric of the world’s energy. On his feet before thought, he snatched up the trousers and boots left heaped on the bank, and jammed them on over his wet skin.
The hound whined, uneasy, touched by her animal awareness that somewhere, a primary balance had shifted. She circled, anxious to pursue the cold trail picked up amid the grazed grass of the glen.
His soft word restrained her, until he had hoisted the bow and provisions on to his back. If the shaman’s mark on his sword remained silent, he could not shake his vague sense of dread. Stalking powers stirred through the unseen interface between the air and the earth. The drawing pull of that subtle disturbance rippled through the patterns of nat
ural current, sure sign of the demonic powers entrained through the drawn lines of an active sorcerer.
Mykkael hastened onwards. The prod of his urgency increased at each stride. Even without knowledge to read into the flux, his inborn sensitivity was teased by the sense that a point of balance had shifted in Sessalie. Somewhere, the stream had altered against the sorcerer’s favour. Balked on one front, the thrust of the conflict must now narrow its target. Again, the enemy’s attention ranged outwards, the spearpoint of its focus turned in single-minded pursuit of the princess.
Before the insatiable drive of the predator, she would be the hare helplessly running.
By now, she was hungry, tired and worn. Crushed hope left her vulnerably defenceless. The challenge she faced had exhausted her resource, until she had nowhere to turn. Mykkael shared the lit flame of her desperation. Witch thought delivered the cold sweat of her nightmares, sown by the despair that had followed her exhausted collapse. Anja knew she was doomed. Flight into the rugged wilds would break her, a bodily failing that could not keep pace with the unflagging strength of her will. In whimpering sleep, she still bid for escape, stubbornly ploughing ahead through dreamed landscapes of storm-barren rock and scrub balsam. Yet even such adamant courage could no longer stave off the certainty of defeat.
Mykkael pressed upwards, embraced by the high mountain silence. Across weathered stone, and dense mats of fir needles, or ankle-deep cushions of mosses, he followed the trail worked by Benj’s best hound, step by unbalanced, lame step. Survival in war had taught him endurance to match the demands of necessity. Miles of scouting through enemy territory had schooled him to make his way quietly.
In time, Dalshie quickened. The white scythe of her tail threshed the brush as the scent she unravelled grew stronger. Mykkael kept her close. The advantage of using a poacher’s prized hound, she would track without giving tongue. Her exceptional nose at last brought reward: the pawing stamp of a horse broke the stillness ahead, from a hollow screened in by evergreens.