He led them in, too exhausted to muster the grace of diplomacy as he enacted precautions to make sure of the ground. Keeping the princess and all of her horses inside the close range of his wardings, he explored by the light of a flaming, dry branch. The place was scarcely hospitable, strewn with brackish puddles and cobwebs. The only dry crannies were fragrantly sprayed, or else fouled by fish-eating muskrats.
Anja met Mykkael’s anxious glance with a smile worn thin by fatigue. ‘I can sweep out the animal droppings, and chase a few nesting spiders, but Fouzette’s cut leg must come first.’
‘I’ll help tend your mare the moment I’m sure no sorcerer’s minion has visited this place before us.’ Mykkael passed over the lead holding Stormfront and Kasminna, shocked to discover the chill in her fumbling hand. The princess had endured uncomplaining for hours. Doubtless she had been frozen since the last stop at the spring. ‘Stay behind me, your Grace.’
No help for the fact she must wait a bit longer before her discomfort could be redressed. Remiss for his failure, since the hazard of cold might fatally dull her reactions, Mykkael shed his surcoat and bundled the cloth over her shoulders forthwith. Then he moved ahead with drawn sword, the crude brand raised overhead. Back turned, all business, he began a meticulous inspection of the cavern’s rock walls.
Every petty distraction was cast aside. Using all five senses, and sounding the well of deep instinct, the captain sustained his acute concentration until he was satisfied the place held no watchers, and no trace of a sorcerer’s mark.
The princess’s dumbstruck silence passed unnoticed until after Mykkael stood down. The cause raised dismay. For of course, the torchlight betrayed him. If a scatter of bloodstains had seeped through his surcoat, his shirt and jerkin must display graphic evidence concerning the state of his back. ‘Let’s have a small fire,’ he suggested, flat crisp.
Anja stared at him, wide-eyed.
‘Your mare’s leg?’ Mykkael reminded her, hoping the intensity of her regard was evoked by the brand, which also provided her first clear-cut view of his desert-bred features.
‘Fouzette. Yes.’ Anja turned away, brisk. She helped him unfasten lead ropes, then watched in stout silence as he tied makeshift hobbles beneath the horses’ front fetlocks.
‘Sit,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll care for Fouzette.’
For blessing, the princess was tired enough to obey him without foolish protest.
The cavern had driftwood, wedged in the cracks. Mykkael worked with the speed of a man who had foraged on the run, inside enemy territory. He gathered kindling and laid a discreet, smokeless blaze just inside the narrow entry. Although the mare’s injury was no pleasant sight, he had tended worse. He used his sharp dagger, cut away the flap of torn skin, then mixed a dilute dose of his dart poison in warm water. The infusion numbed the exposed gash as he cleansed the dirt and stuck gravel. The contusion had most likely been caused by Vashni’s trampling shoe. Bruising had made the mare lame, not direct damage to the ligaments and tendons exposed beneath the stripped flesh.
Anja helped bind the wound with a compress soaked in ice water drawn from the cataract. Relief coloured her voice as she secured the bandage, torn off the hem of the captain’s surcoat. ‘Brave Fouzette. She never once faltered. I expect she’ll pull through with no worse than a scar, if we can hold down the infection.’
Mykkael said nothing. The suppressed quaver in the princess’s tone showed that she knew well enough: a horse with a ripped leg would more likely be kerrie bait, in the course of their flight through Hell’s Chasm. What else a mare with the blood-scent of a wound might become, he prayed Sessalie’s princess might never find out. The wise course was to make an end of the problem, and let the carcass be washed far downstream.
Yet he could not embrace that grim proposition. More than Anja’s sentiment stayed his hand from the sword. Mykkael had never practised the thoughtless habit of using dumb beasts for convenience. Perhaps as a remnant of his tribal ancestry, he could not bring himself to destroy Fouzette’s courage, which had saved both their lives in the breach.
‘Rest,’ he told Anja. ‘I’ll rub down the horses and fix something to eat.’
She rejected the suggestion, would have none of his solicitude, though in practical fact, the condition of the animals was of vital importance to his charge of defending her safety. She insisted he accompany her outside to stand guard, while she gathered the razor-edged marsh grass that grew at the verge of the gulch. Anja proceeded to wind and braid two stout wisps as competently as any stablehand. She handed him one, wordless, and together, they set to, burnishing the crusted sweat from fine coats. The day’s exertion had come at high cost. Proud heads drooped with weariness. The staring bones of ribs and hips bespoke the sorrowful lack of high-quality grazing. Mykkael shared out the mixed grain with the animals, soaking his portion and Anja’s into a gruel that he warmed in a cloth sack, slung from a string dangled over the fire.
The princess dozed where she sat, long before the grain had cooked enough to consume. He woke her when the first serving was ready, then watched like a hawk to see that she ate, and did not succumb to misplaced pity and sneak the hot mash to her horses.
For himself, he withheld a share from his ration, in case Benj’s hound might come straggling in. Dalshie had not caught up since the chase with the kerrie, a sore point he dared not pursue. Best, if the dog had limped homewards. Far more likely, the chance she had fallen prey to the shape-changer, killed as a casual meal. Worse, if she should be claimed in possession, with her exceptional talent for tracking suborned as the tool of the enemy.
As long as he could, the captain sat wakeful, watching until the stars paled above the black maw of the chasm. Sleep claimed him, inevitably, where he hunched beside the dying embers at the cave’s entry. Knowing his limits, he had taken precautions. The strung bow and quiver of arrows lay beside him, and his unsheathed blade rested under his listening hand. Since exhaustion would only impair his sound judgement and rob the keen edge from his reflexes, he had no choice but rely on the shaman’s ward in his blade to stand guard. Its vibration could be trusted to rouse him if the sorcerer’s minion ranged close, or launched a surprise attack.
Mykkael woke to the mid-morning sun in his eyes. He pushed himself erect, rubbed the crust from his lids, then winced to the scream of stiff muscles. Movement roused the multiple complaint of his wounds. He hissed through shut teeth, raked a searching glance over the dank recess of the cavern. The disastrous discovery met his first sweep: only five horses remained in the rock cleft.
The rambunctious buckskin, Bryajne, had chewed the knots on his hobbles and strayed. Mykkael’s warded sword would speak warning for inbound demons; not for a horse stepping over him on an inquisitive ramble outside.
Mykkael’s soft-spoken swearing aroused Princess Anja from sleep.
‘What’s wrong?’ She stirred from her curled refuge under his surcoat. Shoved erect, she flicked back wisps of tumbled hair and blinked to clear puffy eyesight.
Mykkael did not answer, but reached for the bow. He snatched an arrow from the quiver, set the nock to the string. With the notched shaft locked in place with his forefinger, he squinted past the bright fall of sunlight and into the shadowed ravine.
‘Bryajne!’ Anja’s exclamation showed fond exasperation as she tossed off rumpled cloth and arose. ‘The clown! I should have realized he would play the escape artist.’ She shouted the gelding’s name, the cry split into echoes between the high cliffs of the chasm.
The good-natured gelding answered her call. Mykkael sighted the movement as the horse raised his head from a tough stand of sedge a stone’s throw down the throat of the chasm. He whinnied, ears pricked. Content to abandon the unsavoury forage, he ambled upstream, no doubt expecting the carrot he often received as a handout.
Mykkael let the horse come. His watchful perception also encompassed the princess, who now approached his placed stance from behind, to welcome in her errant favourite. Endearing despi
te his bumptious head, the buckskin’s sly antics could melt the hardest of hearts. Against hope, Mykkael leashed back his dread. He permitted Anja’s eager advance, until necessity demanded precaution.
Before she could step past his guard at the entry, he clamped her wrist in restraint. ‘Stay behind me, Princess. You must. That gelding has wandered outside the wardings, with no one awake to stand guard.’
‘I don’t see a thing wrong with him,’ Anja insisted. ‘The look in his eye is quite sane.’
‘Your horse may be himself,’ Mykkael agreed. ‘That does not mean he is untouched, or harmless.’
She was not convinced; lacked experience to listen. Annoyed as her tug met his solid resistance, Anja whirled on him, furious. He never learned how her balked temper might revile him. The gelding had closed within fifteen yards, when the shaman’s mark buzzed in his sword hilt.
Mykkael shouted. He dropped his protective grasp on her arm, raised the strung bow and hauled the nocked arrow to full draw. His release followed, seamless. He took the horse down with a shot through the neck, ripping through the great vein, then the artery just under the hollow where the jaw lapped over the throatlatch.
Death caused by bleeding was not pretty or quick. The buckskin horse staggered, screaming in shocked pain. His treble cry sounded eerily human. He reared, lashing out and shaking his neck. His mane snapped and flew to his panicked snorts, yet he could not dislodge the deeply set arrow. His thrashing forced the shaft’s point to tear through the thick muscle, and finally, fatally, to entangle amid the interlocked bones of the spine. Pressure disrupted the nerves sheathed inside. Bryajne lurched sideways, his shining coat quivering. Within a few heartbeats, his splendid strength came undone, reduced to a jerking spasm that pitched him headlong to his knees.
Anja’s tormented outcry shattered across the dying horse’s wheezing shrieks. Heedless of danger, she bolted, determined to reach the stricken animal’s side.
Mykkael extended his good leg and tripped her. She fell, weeping curses. Her palms ripped on cruel stone. He shoved her flat, his handling ruthless as she fought to rise. When she did not subside, he pinned her struggling shoulders on the explosion of barqui’ino reflex.
‘Stay!’ he gasped, breathless.
Her green eyes raked over him, stormed to reasonless fury. She was not going to listen, not going meekly to stay put as he asked, though his drawn sword came alive with the whine that signalled desperate danger. Mykkael let Anja go, then raced ahead to reach the downed gelding before her. He leaped over the shuddering horse, avoided the kicking thrash of shod hooves. Poised by the wither, he thrust the blade in a stabbing stroke through the crest just behind the buckskin’s ears. The point pierced through the back of the skull, ending the animal’s suffering. What seizures remained were the reflex of an expiring carcass.
‘Anja, stay clear!’ Mykkael knelt, his knee jammed into the soaked, streaming neck. He flipped back the black mane, and there, saw his dread fully realized.
Scribed on the hide, where the long hair had masked sight, the sorcerer’s minion had patterned his craftmark. The short curse it carried was as virulent as anything the captain had witnessed in all his dread years of experience.
Worse, the headstrong princess had reached her slain horse. White with agony, she folded at Bryajne’s head. His blood-splattered muzzle gusted his last breath in the grip of her desperately clenched arms.
‘Bryajne! Bryajne!’ Her grief unstrung thought. All riven loss, the pain for her lost brother and her beloved suitor became wrenched into razor-edged focus by the horse’s violent passage.
Mykkael had no choice, and no time to win distance. The sword in his hand shrilled to a harmonic peak: the craftmark laid to entrap them had wakened. Power welled up. An unstoppable force of demonic energy opened into the world as the spell-framed gateway surged active. The blinding, first spark hurled Mykkael beyond horror. He would have to shoulder the unspeakable risk, could do nothing else, now, except seek to ground the balefires as they erupted.
He raised his stained blade, drove it down through the clay spiral inscribed on the dead horse’s neck. He rammed the steel through meat and bone until it slammed with a grate against the stone slab underneath. Keeping one hand clenched to the hilt, he reached, grabbed Anja’s collar, yanked her up like a doll and jerked her against his braced flank. He pinned her there with all of his strength, unable to care if he bruised her.
Whatever she shouted, her words became lost. The maelstrom arose, bloomed and brightened into a fountainhead of loosed flame. The eruption reached resonance and became fully manifest, exploded like an untamed, hot star, a shrieking, clawing, rage of wrong forces that assaulted the unfurled net of his wardings. The conflagration spun wild, then snatched short, balked in midstream from its warped course of expansion. Mykkael fought to stay upright. Ripped by the very whirlwinds of hell, he kept his hand locked on the sword. His left arm crushed Anja, breathless, against him, while the song inlaid by the Sanouk shamans collided headlong with the sorcerer’s curse of destruction.
The tattooed geometry seared into his scalp like etched acid, as the patterns laid down by two learned viziers aroused and strove to match, then recarve the forces of chaos unleashed. Mykkael held on. He clung to raw will, and to wailing, stressed metal, rocked half senseless as the uprushing powers were routed, then rechannelled back through him. He became the sealed vessel of fire itself. Every nerve, every born instinct of desert-bred heritage became torn into raging turmoil. He felt pummelled to rags, as the cascade of turned energies poured back down through the blade that transfixed the live craftmark. Solid ground shook. Stones crashed from the rim walls as the traumatized earth received the unnatural current and reclaimed its raw force in absorption.
Flame wrapped flesh and bone, a vicious scourge that surged to escape the wire-strung ties of the wardings. Active lines tangled with counter-spun patterns of guard, and plunged into vital contention. The wise safeguards invoked by two disparate viziers and a circle of initiate mystics sang out their peal of demand: to reseal the portal a sorcerer had wedged open to tap the fell forces of the unseen.
Mykkael clung to Anja, held her fast, though she struggled. Despite her shrill cries and her battering fists, he kept his hold on the vibrating sword grip. Both of their lives were cast into the breach. He must not give way, no matter how strongly his instincts shrilled ruin. No matter how desperately helpless he felt, he must bridge the gap between sanity and horror. He must let himself hang in trusting suspension above the abyss, while demonic powers threatened to drag him down into the limitless void. The cold-cast awareness abraded his will, that if the wards failed him, he would be lost, with Anja taken along with him.
Through the clash of the elements, Mykkael felt the sorcerer’s purposeful groping. The ruthless, warped creature clawed, seeking purchase, pressing the limit of his extended reach to capture a hold upon Isendon’s daughter. That striving promised him limitless pain, then an unending fury for the claim to her spirit, denied. Mykkael tasted a hunger that savaged his mind, knew the voracious craving of an intelligence that desired to waste his warm flesh, then chain the steadfast flame of his being in torment for all of eternity. He howled in denial, refused the ending of hope, pinned all the while by the crushing awareness that he was no more than a moth set against the loosed blast of a gale.
Somewhere, everywhere, voices screamed along with him: all the sorry, damned souls claimed in thrall by the sorcerer’s self-serving bargain. Bound to the insatiable demands of a demon, the warped creature must continuously wrest living spirits away from their natural mortality. Beyond lost, the sorcerer knowingly enacted such evil to sate an awareness that played him, then his minions, on puppet strings. Such power bought immortality in exchange for the coin of immeasurable human suffering.
Mykkael fought despair. He had known horrors, but none such as this: Devall had succumbed to worse than Rathtet. The sorcerer who bade for expansion through Sessalie was ruled by a demon who craved
the demise of all rivals. It planned to defeat and consume its own brethren.
Mykkael sensed the vast forces that hounded him, shaken to unimaginable terror. Orannia’s madness had reflected the hideous truth: that humanity’s captive pain sourced a demon’s inexhaustible strength. Its hoard of trapped spirits and its rooted foothold on land determined the scope of its dominance. This contender outmatched the rest for ambition; sought a spell line that would circle the earth, then expand until every soul born to woman became fodder to feed its ambition. Worse, the lines’ origin did not begin here. Before this fair world, this demon’s shape-changing pawns had taken another; and after this conquest, would reach between stars, seeking the next target to set under attack.
Against the dread sorcerer who enabled this demon’s first foothold in Devall, one man’s naked will seemed a cry of abject futility.
Mykkael wept, for grief. He trembled, while the storm raging through his marked sword blade bespoke the bared might of Gorgenvain, whose name was the essence of fear itself, and whose reach cast a terrible shadow across even the darkest realms of the unseen.
Then the short curse in the craft-mark exhausted its limit. The maelstrom of uncanny fires snuffed out, leaving a fair, sunlit morning marred across by the sickening taint of scorched meat. The clay pattern inscribed on the animal’s skin had finally failed, having consumed its own substance. Bryajne’s pierced neck had crisped to dry carbon where the weapon had rechannelled the destructive charge downwards into the earth.
Shaking, Mykkael withdrew his silenced steel. The blade slipped clear of papered ash without resistance. His palm was not burned. Throughout, the shaman-marked steel had stayed cool. Bared weapon in hand, he hauled Anja erect. She clung to him, limp, all the fight battered out of her by the impact of numbing terror. He caught her chin, turned her face, stared into her opened green eyes.