To Ride Hell's Chasm
He lived as himself. Moment to moment, he surmounted his impaired strength through trained skill, and the unshakable self-trust of a man who had been put to the extreme test, and who had won triumph through the unflagging use of his wits.
Two kerries flew overhead. Uneasy within sight of the massacre, they circled, but did not alight. Anja minded the restive horses. She cajoled them steady until Mykkael returned, the unwieldy bundle of cut membrane draped over his shoulder, and tied with a length of scraped tendon.
‘Princess, I ask you to let Fouzette bear the burden,’ he said the moment he reached her. ‘The load isn’t nearly as heavy as it looks.’
When she did not argue, he looked at her straitly ‘Your Grace?’
Anja stirred out of suspended stillness. Why, before this, had she never noticed the deep sorrow ingrained in his face? Hoping her hesitation would be taken for grief, she gave her consent.
A fractional tension eased from his shoulders, that he need not contend with sentimental recalcitrance. His choice was not cruel, but strategic good sense. Fouzette had the stoic temperament to manage the unusual load without fuss. If flight became necessary, she was already slowed by her injured leg. By attempting to cosset one impaired horse, the risk of loss might shadow two. Mykkael would spare Anja the agony of losing her teams, in every way that he could. The hand that had pulled the bow for Bryajne had not been heartless, but driven to act out of inflexible expediency.
Anja used her voice to quiet Fouzette, while Mykkael strapped his horrific gleanings on to her back. He could not spare the time to be overly fastidious. Yet he did rinse his hands and clean off his knife before he remounted Kasminna.
His smile of encouragement remained sincere as he gestured downstream. ‘Onwards. I promise your Grace, if we find the right pool, I’ll try to spear trout for our dinner.’
They rode on, the horses picking their uncertain path between canted boulders, and through the drifts of back-fallen spray shot to gold by the shafts of noon sunbeams. The warm air seemed filled with the flitter of dragonflies, and the cheep of the black-and-white swallows nesting high in the cliffs. Then the sun passed the zenith. The chasm plunged into the chilly, premature twilight that extended through late afternoon. Only the crown of the rim rocks stayed sunlit, with the cloudless sky of high altitude an indigo ribbon between.
Anja rode, all her questions stunned silent, which raised more than one concerned inquiry from Mykkael. She noticed what had escaped her before: that the captain relied on her tone of voice more than words to measure her state of mind. He listened much the same way to the horses, and to the sword hilt strapped on his back. If the striking care behind such attentiveness might have begun as a trader’s boy, brought up amid foreign cultures, the formidable skills he had displayed on the tourney field framed too stark an extreme. To see him move with a weapon in hand exposed what he was: a killer honed to an edge that eclipsed the humanity of his birthright.
The dichotomy sparked Anja’s fascination, a puzzle that engaged her eclectic interest as never before.
Her observation underwent a rapt change in focus, while the daylight waned towards a sunset that must find them snugged down under cover. If the cavern walls had grown too narrow for the wingspan of diving kerries, the sorcerer’s shape-changer would not be tied to any one form. Each crevice with its pocket of shadow might harbour an enemy ambush.
Mykkael’s wary vigilance tightened to match the increased chance of threat. Kasminna reflected his mood in her high-set neck and lifted tail. As the last sunlight licked the top of the cliff wall, dipping the rock faces scarlet, the desert-bred rode with his sword unsheathed, the flat of the blade lightly rested across his opposite wrist.
His senses detected no untoward warning, which did nothing to settle the uneasy clamour of his more subtle instincts.
The rush of the water grew louder, then swelled to a shattering roar that foreclosed all attempt at conversation. Mykkael kept his mount close behind Covette, often signalling for the princess to pause as he scouted past leaning boulders. Then the cavern crooked, and the race of the flume hurled itself off the edge of the world.
‘Tie the horses.’ Mykkael dismounted to reconnoitre on foot. Unasked, the princess went with him. The animals would be safe enough in the narrows, as they could not be, exposed on the rim. Beyond the cataract, the open sky teemed with wheeling kerries. Below the falls, the chasm widened into a vast stone basin, sliced at the skyline with snow-clad peaks. Tier upon tier, the stepped ledges were riddled with the caverns that sheltered the Hell’s Chasm rookery.
‘The Widow’s Gauntlet,’ Anja said, referring to the name given the site by an unknown, past prospector who had wisely turned back from the folly of a doomed enterprise. ‘Unless the season has been lean, and the kerries are starving, we’re not likely to see a mobbing attack where we’re standing.’
Mykkael turned his head, his bared sword in hand. ‘There’s a reason?’
Anja nodded. ‘Fortune seekers who’ve attempted to mine in the caverns sometimes try poisoning animals as bait in an effort to clear out the rookeries. Kerries are intelligent enough not to be tempted by domesticated stock if bad experience has shown them it’s tainted. Provided they haven’t forgotten the last incident, they’ll watch, and hang back. With luck, they could leave us alone until they realize we don’t match the exact pattern they hold in memory.’
‘A strategic point,’ Mykkael allowed. One they might have to press for advantage through the difficult, open terrain in the valley lying ahead. Intent, he resumed his close-up review of the landscape.
The head of the falls was relentlessly exposed, a lip carved into water-worn bedrock, raked clean by the surge of the thaws. The cliff wall near at hand posed an impasse, since the bend in the gorge skewed the jet of the falls into a pummelling vortex. The cataract slammed across the right wall of the channel. Age upon age of its scouring force had rinsed the rock satin-smooth. The only accessible route for the horses must be launched from the opposite bank, where the tumbled faults in the cliff face offered a precarious, zigzag descent.
‘This is as far as we go before nightfall.’ The crossing they must backtrack upstream to try could not be launched until morning. Beset by the thundering might of the cataract, Mykkael had to shout to be heard. ‘There will likely be some form of hollow or cave under the ledge where the current spills over. Once I find the best way to get in, you must move your teams quickly. No looking back if they falter!’
Anja nodded. She swiped back the soaked hair plastered against her face by the barrage of wind-driven spray, then retreated to untie the horses. Until Mykkael signalled, she could but strive to meet his dauntless effort with courage.
The edge of the falls lay five paces distant, well inside the reach of his wardings. Anja was caught unprepared, all the same. A desolate feeling of emptiness half crushed her as the captain passed over the rocks out of sight. Alone as she had never been in her life, the princess was shocked to find herself shuddering through an onslaught of violent chills. Terror and cold could not fully explain this explosive storm of reaction. Such desperate, raw need lay outside her experience. The loss of her love for the High Prince of Devall had never touched her like this.
‘Merciful powers of daylight!’ she swore through her chattering teeth. ‘This cannot be happening.’ Her wretched denial brought no release. The worth she had come to attach to one man in the course of a single day outstripped every concept of decency.
The Princess of Sessalie railed at herself, stunned into dumbstruck fury. How could she have lapsed from the mores of state wisdom and due vigilance? Unconscionable, to realize she might fall prey to such an unguarded self-betrayal. Sessalie’s future rode on her power to bargain. Every subject under her sire’s crown relied on her honour to secure the protection of an alliance. Far wiser, to handle what must be done without wrenching the strings of her heart.
Anja tucked her crossed arms, aware she must find the strength from somewhere to blin
dside the captain’s relentless perception. During her moment of preoccupied thought, Kasminna’s boisterous head butt all but pitched her on to her knees.
Saved from a fall by Stormfront’s black shoulder, she realized, distressed, that Mykkael was shouting. He had found a safe access into the cavern under the jet of the falls. Anja reddened, shamed to the quick for missing his urgent summons.
Fast as she recovered her paralysed wits, Mykkael’s reaction outpaced her. He launched from the rocks. Not sparing his scarred leg, he reached her side with the seamless speed of unbound barqui’ino reaction. The lead ropes were snapped from her fingers. Then his hard, muscled shoulder slammed into her waist. Anja folded, draped over his back like a grain sack, with the back of her knees pinned under his iron forearm.
‘Hai! Stormfront, Kasminna, to me!’ He used his voice and the flat of his blade to prod the horses to moving flight. ‘Hai! Hai! Covette, Vashni, Fouzette! Haw now! To me!’
Across the rocks, towards the thundering waters, he drove them in bunched, herd-bound urgency. No chance did he give them to balk or shy back. He hammered them, clattering, to a notch in the brink, then called upon Stormfront’s inexhaustible nerve to lead the sliding plunge down the steep ledge. Swordsman and princess and five wild-eyed horses rammed through the roiling curtain of spray. They broke through, into fish-pungent air, whipped to windy turbulence by the rampaging spate of cold water. The noise deafened. Enclosed by the silvery shimmer of the falls, the shallow cavern was a mosaic of sheened puddles and gloom. Skin wet and shivering, Anja heaved in a taxed breath. Her indignant request to be set on her feet had no chance to be heard.
The shaman’s mark upon Mykkael’s bared sword came alive with a tingling buzz. Anja sensed the wasp hum of the warding as a stinging ache through her bones. In split-second response, the captain’s hold shifted. She found herself hurled with jarring force over Stormfront’s soaked back.
‘Hold him!’ Mykkael’s shout pealed through the tumbling waters. ‘Steady the others as best you can, or let them all go if they scramble! At all cost, bail off if the black gelding bolts.’
Anja scrambled, wormed, unhooked her hung ankle off Stormfront’s scrabbling hindquarters. She seized his mane, achieved her erect balance astride, all the while calling out to steady the horses’ jostling panic. ‘Whoa! Whoa now!’ Her cry sounded thin as a bird’s through the roar of the cataract. Frantic, she persisted. ‘Hold hard! Fouzette, Vashni, whoa now!’
The blessed bay mare answered her training. Eyes rolling white, her mane snagged with droplets, she flung up her blazed head and braced her planted legs, foursquare. Though Vashni battered into her shoulder, her broad-chested bulk blocked the narrow egress. The other horses jammed into milling turmoil, unable to shove past and take flight. Anja entrusted their fates to Fouzette’s obedience. She slapped Stormfront’s neck to get his attention, made him listen to her commands. She urged the trembling gelding with words, drubbed his flank with her heel, compelled him to wheel and face forward. She would see what lethal danger had roused the marked sword. Terrified as the horse underneath her, she refused the horror of being stalked from behind.
‘Captain?’ Hackled to gooseflesh, Anja sighted a flicker of movement past the soaked cloth of his surcoat. Patterned hide gleamed, pebbled with scales. The coiled viper that lurked in the gloom of a cranny launched a pre-emptive strike at Mykkael.
The eyes Anja glimpsed were no serpent’s, but lit from within by the ephemeral spark of a power drawn from the unseen. Like Devall’s heir apparent, like her brother, what moved inside the skin of the creature was not any natural snake. Nor had its vile awareness been born under the clean light of day.
‘Beware, Captain!’ she screamed, already knowing that words were too clumsy and slow.
The shape-changer must have laired in the cavern all day, waiting in cold-blooded ambush.
XXIX. Shape-changer
THE SHINING ARC CARVED BY MYKKAEL’S SWORD MOVED TOO FAST FOR THE EYE. HIS BLOW SHEARED OFF THE SNAKE’S HEAD, BUT COULD NOT deflect its attacking momentum. The severed appendage maintained its trajectory, venomed fangs still extended. The strike should have taken Mykkael in the face. Except that his interposed body was gone, dropped into a crouching spin that blurred with the speed of trained reflex.
The launched threat sailed on, unimpeded, towards Anja’s unguarded breast. The emptied span of air in between left no space to scream or react.
A sheet of flared silver, the captain’s sword re-entered the scope of her vision. Too swiftly to follow, his cut scribed an arc, and thrust upwards with fearsome precision. The point jabbed the serpent head’s lower jaw and speared through. The impaled skull jerked short of impact, a horrific trophy the size of a man’s fist, snatched out of mid-flight.
Mykkael backstepped to absorb the unspent force of impetus. The cleaved air sang over moving steel as he reversed his extended stroke not a handspan from Anja’s blanched face. He surged upright, flicked the noisome prize off the tip of his weapon. The serpent head landed, still snapping. His lightning-fast reflex stamped down a heel and crushed skull and jaws under his boot. The captain did not release the remains, even then. Ongoing threat faced him. The decapitated snake flailed in fatal spasm, and snapped a wrap around his bad knee.
Once, twice, his sword moved. Dulled steel scattered steaming blood. The severed coils parted. Mykkael turned the back of his wrist, slapped the upper coil as it let go. His strike batted its writhing, furious length under Stormfront’s clattering hooves. The gelding snorted. Neck bowed, ears flattened, he trampled until the remains became chopped to red pulp.
Yet the dismembered fragments at Mykkael’s feet did not shudder limp and fall lifeless. Instead, like the wakened shadow of nightmare, they flowed into uncanny change.
The scaled skin greyed, melted, sublimated into a wisping mist. The unclean emanation streamed along the ground, seeking, until it re-encountered its severed parts. Where the foggy clouds gathered, the substance of the felled serpent began to shift from scaled coils into something grotesquely man-shaped. The transformation gained speed as the tendrils of fog enveloped each part and reforged a cohesive connection.
Anja jammed back a whimper, then grabbed for the skinning knife, her effort already too late. The gore mashed underneath Stormfront’s enraged hooves coalesced into quickened flesh. A monstrosity reformed as a human hand, grasping fingers attached to a forearm. The dreadful thing was alive and moving. It dragged itself in an insectile scuttle over the cavern floor. As though it sensed Stormfront’s animal warmth, it snatched the black’s fetlock, and hung on.
The princess screamed, ‘Stormfront! Hold hard!’ Her full-throated cry re-echoed off the rock walls, but the horse was too maddened to heed.
Anja clung, desperate, while the gelding beneath her stamped, spun and sidled across the cavern’s treacherous confines. A fly caught in a wringer, she risked being crushed as the panic-struck horse fought to free his entrapped front pastern. When the shape-changer’s clasp could not be dislodged, Stormfront went berserk.
His lunge to bolt should have shot him over the rim, straight through the white rush of the falls. Instead, a blurred form thrust in between. The horse crashed a glancing course off Mykkael, who hooked his left fist over the headstall and hauled the black’s head hard around. The gelding skittered. Yanked short of his mindless plunge towards disaster, he spun. His streamered tail slashed through the jet of the falls and re-emerged, spattering droplets. The whiplash of unspent inertia slammed his heaving rump against the back wall of the cavern. Stormfront jounced into rebound. Anja fought his lurching strength as he bucked and scrabbled, hooves sliding on puddled stone.
The minion continued to mass into form. While the horse rampaged in lathered distress, it steadily drew and gathered its spilled essence, flowing into horrific change. The snake head dislodged from beneath Mykkael’s boot plumped and rounded into a human skull. Naked bone grew a covering of skin, then a glossy shock of blond hair. Eye sockets and jaw fles
hed over and mirrored the semblance of Kailen’s fair features. The lids opened. Blue eyes rolled, intelligent, and located Anja, and the animate lips turned and smiled.
The princess screamed again, all but deranged by panic. She could not see Mykkael. Stormfront’s mane slapped and blinded her. Whipped like a rag to the black’s plunging neck, she just missed slamming into the cavern’s low ceiling as the horse struck out its forelegs and reared. Even still, the evil hand clung. The gelding thrashed and staggered to throw off its clamping weight. Anja glanced downwards, her breath stopped with fright. For the detached fingers and forearm had now been augmented, joined into a headless, bare torso.
She fought to stay astride, and unhurt, while an evil beyond all imagining continued unfolding before her.
The shape-changer’s essence streamed underfoot, drawing itself into an obscene replication of her brother’s naked form. The head on the floor shoved off with its tongue, rolled itself sideways, until it found and was seized by the wandering hand. The gristly appendage crab-walked along, trailing a draggle of wristbones and sinew. It rattled across stone and through puddles, hauling the head by a gripped twist of hair. Self-aware, determined, it groped to close with the half-assembled monstrosity wrestling Stormfront’s front leg.
Anja strove to master the black gelding, now transformed by his fear to a heaving juggernaut. She held her seat, flung and tossed; wrestled against the hampering disadvantage, that she rode with nothing beyond a headstall and single lead rein. She could not hold the horse, but only turn him in desperate, tight circles. The effort could not avert disaster. Stormfront’s skating plunges inexorably drove him up to the verge of the brink, with its curtain of thundering water. Curbed by no more than a silver-bossed noseband, the gelding’s crazed strength overmatched her.