To Ride Hell's Chasm
Anja lasted through the duration, just barely. While Mykkael lashed his unspeakable gleanings into a tight, secure packet, she crept off to seek respite amid the warm press of the horses. Dry heaves overwhelmed her within three steps. She doubled, reeled dizzy, as her empty stomach wrung itself inside out. A soft footfall approached. Mykkael’s embrace gathered her in from behind, hooked under her arm, and resteadied her. His left hand, icy cold from a rinse in the falls, cradled her pounding, flushed forehead.
‘We’ll have a fire,’ he said. ‘Get you warm and dry. But first, some fresh air. The wardings are too short, I can’t leave you alone. Can you manage a foray to fetch driftwood?’
She ripped off a nod, between spasms.
‘Your Grace,’ said Mykkael, something more than impressed, ‘let no one say you’re a coward.’
His strong grasp raised her until she stood, propped against his right shoulder. Too breathless to question, that he should burden his sword arm assisting her wretched infirmity, she let him steer her wobbling steps to the cleft at the edge of the falls. He sat her down on a rock by the opening. Through the pause as he secured the horses with hobbles, the chill spray on her face braced her jangled nerves. Anja breathed in deep gulps of clean air, while her cramping nausea subsided.
Shortly, she was able to walk, even help gather the kindling caught in the boulders where the captain’s limp gave him difficulty. They finished the task as the last daylight faded. Under the sky’s lucent afterglow, streaked with the fire blooms of kerries, Mykkael made no protest as Anja shouldered her share of the load and worked her way back to shelter.
Much later, warmed under Mykkael’s dried-out surcoat, Anja gnawed flaked trout from a stick, almost restored to contentment. The captain lounged across the raked coals, braiding tough strips of wing leather into a rope. He wove eight plies into a round plait, by his casual dexterity accustomed to finishing such an endeavour before.
‘You implied you became a mercenary by choice,’ Anja opened, her musing framed in a different tone from her barrage of questions that morning.
Mykkael looked up, the velvet-brown depths of his eyes rendered fathomless in the firelight. ‘Oh, I chose, all right.’ He leaned to one side, caught up a cut strip, spliced it seamlessly into his weaving. ‘The decision was made with great storm and commotion. Everyone argued. My uncle forbade me. I left to study barqui’ino.’
Anja poked her cleaned stick into the embers, watching him by the flare as the wood caught. Chin cupped in her hands, she said, ‘Why?’
He had marked the softening in her well enough. His quiet pause became weighted. Still, he answered. ‘I realize, to prove I existed. Because my mother exposed me, I had no way to know where I came from. My northern upbringing was not who I was. I wrestled with the hollow question inside, until I became chafed to desperation. I wanted barqui’ino because the training was held to be the most demanding of all attainments.’
‘Most trainees fail?’
His hands resumed, combed through the crossed-over strands, then deftly picked up their rhythm. ‘All but a few.’
The spurt of the fire died back to a flicker, striking ruby glints off the falls. Mykkael’s stubbled face seemed carved from dark sandstone, with the horses behind him a muddle of shadows, standing hipshot with lowered necks.
Anja pressed gently. ‘And after your mastery?’
But this time, Mykkael shook his head. ‘No, Princess. Enough.’ He had blooded his young steel upon sorcerers’ wars, no fit topic for conversation. ‘You would do well to sleep while you can.’
Anja sighed. She could try. Despite the close-woven wool of the surcoat, the cold was likely to keep her awake. How foolish, if she confided her fear, that the looming dread of her nightmares paralysed her with unease.
Mykkael glanced up, startled. Witch thought had surely divined her distress. Anja, in turn, sensed the impact of that intrusively intimate recoil. As though he had reached out and touched her bared mind, she rebounded to flashpoint perception. ‘You want my eyes shut while you rebind your wounds!’
He blinked. ‘Blinding powers of daylight!’ Irritation hardened his rattled response. ‘Your Grace. Should I not?’
Anja coloured. The blush made her eyes a most vivid green. ‘You can’t properly claim you can contend with an opened gash on your back. Captain, what are you guarding?’
‘My dignity.’ Mykkael’s direct stare should have served as a firm deterrent. He had been a mercenary, hired by kings. No man lasted long in close royal service by playing the spineless sycophant.
‘Do you cling to a principle we can afford?’ Fire met live fire, across the fanned coals. Anja clamped dauntless fists over the falcon surcoat. ‘If I try to sleep, Captain, how are you going to stay wakeful, or warm?’
He cursed in his ancestors’ guttural tongue. ‘Do as you please, Princess. For my part, discussion is ended.’ Head stubbornly bent, he resumed his braiding. His face stayed stiffly set. He had to realize she would hold out until she had achieved her dissection.
For an interval, the silence stretched, brittle as glass. The coals hissed and flared, and the white water fell, slicing the night without let-up.
Then, without warning, the mark on the sword hilt roused and sang. Its sudden cry razed the air like tapped crystal. Mykkael surged to his feet amid an explosion of dropped braid and wing leather. Sword in hand, he glared outwards. His skin became pebbled with gooseflesh. Yet the note that chimed through the echoing dark was high, clear and sweet, with a ringing, melodic overtone.
The captain glanced wildly about, but saw nothing. No shadow moved, no sign arose to indicate lurking danger. The vibration struck off his shaman-sung steel did not build or sustain. With an eerie, light whisper, it simply diminished and faded away.
The night held nothing other than the rush of the cataract, jetting over smoothed stone. No smell lingered. Just the mineral tang of wet rock, and wood smoke, infused with the odour of seared trout.
Anja shivered. She tucked the tattered surcoat over her slender shoulders. ‘What caused that?’
Mykkael shook his head, but failed to relax. ‘I don’t know, your Grace.’ He ran questing fingers over the weapon’s marked hilt, then shrugged off a grue that arose through his feet, and played itself through his locked frame. ‘At no time have I heard the warding react to anything that way before.’
He limped from the fireside. His prowling footsteps stayed silent as he quartered the cavern twice over. His survey encountered no trace of a threat. The packet confining the shape-changer’s leavings remained secure in his keeping. Except for pricked ears and turned heads, the horses evinced no distress.
Too riled to stand down, Mykkael stalked through a final round of inspection. He retired at last to the edge of the precipice. There, without ceremony, he laid down his sword and proceeded to unlace and strip off his trousers. Clad in shirt and smallclothes, he sat down on chill stone and began to unwind the stained poultice strapped to his thigh.
Night masked his dark form; but not the puckered shine of old scars, marked one after the other like a row of branded spear points. The imprints progressed with unsettling deliberation, up the sculpted muscle of his upper leg, and vanished under the shirttail that covered the more tender skin of his flank.
Anja sucked a breath of startled embarrassment.
‘Princess?’ He glanced over his shoulder, teeth bared in a combative smile. ‘Puncture,’ he stated in brazen challenge. ‘Since you have neither manners or shame, let’s end the excitement forthwith. The wound is quite clean. It was made by a sword. Cold water should do nicely to take down the swelling, a treatment I trust will make you nod off out of natural boredom.’
Anja discovered she lacked the effrontery to take up the thrown gauntlet, after all. Wrapped in the hard-used cloth of his surcoat, she huddled in silence, drifting from an uneasy catnap into the depths of oblivious sleep.
Both scryings failed. Though a second disturbance from the unseen had distressed the f
low of the earth’s flux, the circle of shamans gleaned little more than the emperor’s vizier, although they sang a mighty power into their striving. A protector walked Hell’s Chasm, they said, his person cloaked by a layered work of warding whose weaving had deafened their seers. Perplexity deepened. For when the tribal enclave retired, the elder among them dreamed a flawless line into the warrior’s heart. He saw the man as a great, cloudy star, his light wracked and riddled by mishap and wounds, and the dross of his unshed tears…
XXX. Crossing
ANJA WAKENED TWICE IN THE NIGHT. THE FIRST TIME HER SLEEP RIPPED TO WHIMPERING SCREAMS, SHE ROUSED, DRAWN BACK FROM THE darkness by a man’s hand, cupping her tear-stained cheek. The same gentle touch stroked the damp hair from her temples. She realized she lay with her head pillowed against Mykkael’s leg. He murmured a phrase that soothed her eyes closed. She submerged once again, lulled by the rhythm of his competent fingers, weaving a wing-leather rope.
Her rest broke the second time closer to dawn. She stirred, vaguely unsettled to find she no longer huddled on chill stone. The noise of the falls thrashed the air without let-up, and the captain was no longer braiding.
‘Your Grace?’ said Mykkael, crisply wakeful above her. ‘You were shivering.’
He sat, his back propped to the cavern wall, her curled body cradled against his waist. The drawn sword in his hand rested across her lap, the war-battered steel of its crossguard glinting against the crumpled device on the garrison surcoat.
That moment, a near spurt of kerrie fire seared into the stream of the falls. Light flared through the cavern, sharp as the burst of a lightning flash.
Anja’s reflexive surge to escape was arrested by Mykkael’s tensed forearm.
‘Lie still, Princess. You are quite safe. The creatures might taste our scent, but they can’t fly or spit flame across falling water.’
Eyes shut, basked in his close warmth, Anja found she could not shed the image of the raised scars she had glimpsed, rowed across the bared skin of his thigh. ‘Those marks were not sword cuts,’ she accused, too drowsy to curb the brash confrontation she had murmured aloud.
‘Sleep, Princess,’ Mykkael said, unoffended. He smoothed the ripped cloth of the surcoat over her shoulders, easing her back into kindlier dreams with an effortless, blanketing calm.
She did not feel him slip from her presence. Aroused at daybreak to the smoke of a fire laid with the last billets of driftwood, Anja smelled fillets roasting over the coals. This time, Mykkael had speared a river pike. The hapless fish flushed over the rip of the falls had no chance against barqui’ino reflex.
The hunter himself seemed nowhere in evidence.
Anja pushed off the sheltering surcoat and sat up, to a spurt of stifled alarm.
‘Princess?’ The captain’s voice issued from amid the horses, where he knelt to attend Fouzette’s injury. ‘Rise and eat. If we’re to allow for a pause to seek fodder, we’ll need to move out very soon.’
Hope raised Anja’s spirits. ‘Do you think we’ll find grazing?’ She peered through the gloom, caught her breath over the progress accomplished through his expert use of cold compresses, then measured the neat work he made of the leg wrap to draw the mare’s swelling.
‘The chasm is wider below the cascade.’ Mykkael stood up and wiped his damp hands, his manner brisk with impatience. ‘Any streamlet with good sunlight is bound to feed a pocket of tender spring grass.’
Anja shook out the tumbled folds of the surcoat, and laid the garment across the cantle of her propped saddle. ‘What about hunting kerries?’
The captain evaded a forthright answer. ‘On that score, I have an idea. We’ll test the result, but after we’ve forded the cataract.’
All but deafened by the thrash of the falls, Anja spotted the rope, finished off into gleaming coils of black braid. The use it might serve through the passage ahead wrecked the healthy pangs of her appetite. Beset by chills, the princess realized she had slept on the shrinking hope they could embrace the safe choice and turn back. The thundering force of the falls seemed an obstacle worthy of forestalling further progress. She had coddled the faint-hearted expectation that even Mykkael must shy back from running the Widow’s Gauntlet.
‘Eat.’ The dauntless desert-bred knelt by his fire, spitted half of his cooked catch on a stick, and shoved the offering into her laggard hand. ‘A sorcerer’s shape-changer still dogs our heels. Your sire stands besieged, as we linger.’
Anja nibbled, scarcely tasting the morsel she made herself chew and swallow. ‘You know he’s alive?’
Mykkael looked sharply back at her. During the night, he had used his small dagger and shaved his dark face clean of stubble. ‘At dawn, yes, he was. I had a witch thought, and saw Jussoud tending him. The Duchess of Phail was holding the king’s hand.’
‘Taskin stood guard for him?’
The captain turned smoothly away, intent on his portion of breakfast. ‘An armed circle of defenders have taken refuge inside Dedorth’s tower. The Commander of the Royal Guard was there at his Majesty’s bedside.’
Though Anja received the distinct impression that Mykkael’s seamless move had posed a minor avoidance, the anxiety at hand overshadowed her impulse to press him.
The perils of Hell’s Chasm were lethal enough, without adding pursuit by a sorcerer. Ahead, every record agreed without variance, the ravine became brutally impassable. No misguided adventurers had ever won through. The ones who escaped outright slaughter by kerries had been battered to rags on the rocks, each one a name on a list of fatalities passed down for generations.
Yet the desert-bred captain who stayed wilfully set to make himself the exception finished his meal of roast fish. He gathered up his coils of rope, then calmly inquired which mount her Grace wanted bridled and saddled.
‘Kasminna.’ More shaken and sore than she cared to admit, Anja rose to match the necessity. She measured her animals’ weaknesses and assets, and made the decision that might seal their lives, or their deaths. ‘Stormfront will keep up if I ride his teammate, and your strength, on Vashni, should drive him on if Fouzette’s bad leg slows her down.’
Too soon, the horses were readied. Anja accepted Kasminna’s reins, aching for her animals’ sad straits. The peppery sorrel was too starved and dispirited to do more than flatten her ears as her rider released the stirrups and mounted. The mare moved out after grey Vashni’s lead, and clattered into the dousing plunge through the cleft. She emerged, soaked and snorting, into the twilight shade of the gorge, where a fresh morning sky painted the rocks with cerulean highlights.
Mykkael checked his bearings, then reined the grey back upstream. The race of the flume was still high with spring melt. He could not expect a tame crossing. The site he selected for least risk of hazard wrung the princess to stark trepidation.
The current narrowed to a raging, white span choked on the near side by a deep shelf of rock. The far bank rose out of a sluiced riffle of shallows, sucking over a potholed ledge. The cavern wall reared high above, cleaved by frost into cragged flaws and niches, and choked by a few tortured evergreens.
Mykkael completed his final assessment, then faced Anja’s mute pallor without flinching. ‘I can’t pace out the distance to make sure of the wardings,’ he said over the rampaging waters. ‘Therefore, you’ll carry my sword.’
Will ruled him as iron. He would part with the weapon without hesitation. While the horses snorted in bunched-up unease, he unslung the bow and hooked the tip on the quiver hanging against Vashni’s shoulder. Then he stripped off his harness, passed the straps and sheathed blade into Anja’s reluctant grasp. Still mounted, he assisted her shaking, cold fingers to tighten the buckles. The task was accomplished with startling speed. Belatedly, Anja discovered the reason. An additional row of holes had been punched, long ago, to accommodate somebody close to her size. ‘You’ve done this before,’ she accused, snatched breathless with apprehension.
He nodded. ‘Just twice.’ He yanked hard, made certain
the straps were secure, then used the light cord unlaced from his cuff to lash the blade into the scabbard. ‘Three times should be lucky’ The grim fact stayed unvoiced, that if the princess should be swept off and drowned, the shaman’s mark founded his desolate hope that the shape-changer could not wreak a sorcerer’s work upon her hapless dead body.
As the captain dismounted, handing off Vashni’s reins, Anja regarded his upturned face with wide-eyed entreaty.
‘Don’t think,’ said Mykkael. He unbuckled his belt, tossed his scrip and shed surcoat aside on the bank. ‘I’ll accomplish what must be done quickly’
Clad in shirt and breeches, he approached the base of the cliff and pried out a loose stone with his dagger. On top, he stacked the grim packet holding the minion’s captive remains. ‘I can’t risk a dunking,’ he explained as he lashed the paired weight of stone and leather on to one end of his braided rope. He affixed several tight coils under the knot, and made them fast. ‘The salt could wash through and release the bound contents.’ If that particular misfortune happened, the terror that emerged would be too dire to contemplate.
Mykkael caught up Fouzette. He threaded the loose end of the rope over her back and between her wide-set forelegs to fashion a crude chest strap and surcingle.
Standing once more, his disquieting bundle laid to one side, he arranged the rope’s coils in broad, open loops, where they would peel off without tangling. He spoke as he worked. ‘Anja! Listen carefully. I will cross first. You’ll count off seconds. If I go under for more than one minute, you’ll back Fouzette and raise the rope taut. When I reach the far bank, I will throw back the rock. You will untie it and fasten the line to the ring under Kasminna’s headstall. Leave two yards of extra line free at the end. That should be enough to knot around your chest at the armpits.’ He stood, gripped her knee, and searched her face with determined brown eyes. ‘Understand?’
She nodded, her throat too choked to reply.