Spell-wrought fear such as this called for voice in redress. Mykkael laughed aloud, then hurled a taunt at the creature’s bared teeth. ‘I do not run from a wind made of lies! Begone, coward. Gnash your teeth for eternity. Do you think I care which?’
A furtive movement, just sensed, arose from the darkness behind him. Mykkael dared not shift his attention to glance back. ‘Anja,’ he whispered. ‘For your life’s sake, do as I asked and stay mounted!’
She had thrown away sense. Mykkael sighted her hand, in peripheral vision. She stood at his flank, reaching to grasp one of his readied arrows. Shaking, determined, moved by courage unparalleled, she must have retrieved the dropped bow.
He adjusted to compensate. No command he could give was going to deter her. When confronted with terror, some women cowered. Other ones charged like a lioness. ‘The pull of the bow will be strong for your arm. You’ll have to draw and loose quickly. Set your aim low, Princess. You know how the close-range arrow will arch.’ He flexed his bad knee, still immersed in swift instructions. ‘I’m going to charge, drop and roll. That creature will pounce. You must shoot for its chest as it leaps.’
Wood rattled on laminate; she had nocked the shaft.
‘Brave lady,’ said Mykkael. ‘Don’t mourn if you miss. The creature’s glance will follow your arrow, even a shot gone badly astray. My strike will use the diversion.’
‘Get ready,’ Anja whispered through clenched teeth.
Mykkael raised his sword in a fractional salute. ‘On your mark, Princess.’
He heard, very clearly, the creak of the bowstring as she flexed her shoulders, testing the tension required to draw. The bow would be difficult. Benj prided himself on his bullish strength. Yet brute muscle was as nothing beside the grit of this young woman’s resolve. Barqui’ino-drilled reflex sensed her intaken breath as a texture, written in air across skin. Before words, Mykkael knew the moment she braced up her nerve and cried, ‘Now, Captain!’
Already, he launched from the cleft. The winged monster sprang. The heavy recurve whapped in release, as he struck the ground, shoulder down and rolling under the arrow that hummed through the space overhead.
Anja did not miss.
The monster’s bellow of rage scattered echoes the length of Hell’s Chasm, simultaneous with the scream of the viziers’ wardings, shocked to furious light at close quarters. Mykkael came to his feet underneath ten feet of coiling, venomous murder. He stabbed upwards. His thrust carried on by the force of momentum. His blade sheared through belly scales and bit deep enough to eviscerate. Mykkael rammed the cut home. Hot blood and offal splashed over his head. His sword shrieked complaint like bolt lightning. He could not see, could not hear, as shaman’s ward and sorcerer’s spell line entangled. The shape-changer’s willed effort to reform its rent tissue came unstrung into billowing smoke. The fumes masked Mykkael’s eyesight and stung his parched membranes as he coughed poisoned air from his throat. He might have been crushed, had the monster’s hind leg not spasmed and smashed him aside. Landed, rolling, the bruise to his hip notwithstanding, he scrambled for balance and regained his feet.
War training and reflex carried on, before thought. While the shape-changer lay in copper-stunned range of his wards, he used his sword to cut tendons and hamstring. Once its dangerous thrashing had been subdued, he moved in, chopped the neck, and severed the head. He lopped the clawed feet, and also the spiked tail. Made aware of Anja’s shocked regard as she pressed a limp hand to her mouth and averted her face, he scarcely took pause.
Such a thorough dismemberment was not done for spite. Awash in gore, Mykkael felt his skin crawl with the forces of the unseen. The sorcerer had active spell lines, still coiling through the carcass. The binding effect of the copper might not last. Alert to his danger, the captain understood he would have to take every part of the creature that might allow it to move, or else run the risk that it could resurrect in changed form and resume its appalling attack. As he dragged his horrific gleanings into a pile, he could not quell the suspicion, that more than one entity had formed this monstrosity. If so, he might not know until far too late, whether his barbaric remedy had succeeded in disarming the corpse.
He hacked through the chest wall, revolted to find the uncanny thing had three hearts. Had language answered his paralysed tongue, he would have begged Mehigrannia’s mercy. Since barqui’ino focus overruled every civilized faculty, he resumed grisly work with the sword.
The hearts were gouged out. Mykkael moved on and recovered the cut head of the smaller monstrosity slain earlier. He did not allow himself respite until he had treated that second corpse to the same ruthless reckoning. Only then did he lower his arm and set his fouled blade back to rest. Hard-breathing, rushed all but berserk by the drive of excessive adrenaline, he touched the wet point to the ground and fought to recoup his scattered reason.
The shape-changer’s remains posed a thorny problem. Lacking the salt he had used on the snake, he had little choice but to improvise a temporary banishment through live fire, laced with cedar ash from the packet kept in his scrip. He arranged the cremation forthwith. Wood from the deadfall must serve for the pyre, set alight with one of the torches, while Anja stood guard with her shaking grip glued to the bow.
‘You were splendid,’ Mykkael ventured, though his voice emerged gruff from the fumes as his select bits of carrion smouldered. Inside the ice cleft, the horses were milling. The princess must have taken steps to secure them. Although they snorted and stamped in distress, they stayed in the confines of shelter.
More sorcerous phantasms flitted through the unwarded surroundings, threading the notch high above. Their shrieks of frustration rang off the rocks. The rushed breeze of their passage fluttered the fire almost into extinction. Though they seemed unable to cause any harm, Mykkael was loath to rely on appearances. Too many times, he had seen sorcerous works transform to the shift in a pattern. Yet no horrors set down. Their wingtips dissolved into bursts of ephemeral smoke each time they grazed against the boundary of his wardings. Awash in their unnatural, flaring light, Anja looked like a street waif, the boy’s shirt and jerkin too large for her shoulders, and the bow a man’s weapon clutched in a doll’s delicate hand.
‘You’re hurt,’ she accused him.
Mykkael glanced down, saw his trousers were shredded. The flesh underneath seemed more bruised than bloodied. ‘Not severely’ Yet he saw well enough, he would probably stiffen like vengeance the moment he stopped moving. His spattered sword still unsheathed in his hand, he thoughtfully braced his pulped flesh on the ice bank, that being the best available remedy to hold down the swelling. ‘I’ve fought with worse.’
‘That’s how you measure the joy in your life?’ Anja forced speech through her chattering teeth. ‘Whether or not you can fight?’
Some women charged danger like the wild lioness; small wonder they should not tame, afterwards. Mykkael would have preferred to give this one space, had he dared. Instead, he watched the small horde of long-spelled monstrosities weave and challenge the ward overhead. ‘Shall I apologize for staying alive? No, Princess. Don’t speak. Your anger is the natural response to a wrenching predicament. It’s a savage force, better off freed.’
She blinked, sucked in an unsteady breath, tried to force her frayed nerves back in hand. ‘Tell me there aren’t going to be more of these things.’
‘I can’t make such a promise.’ Mykkael fiercely wished the guard he maintained could have spared him the resource to measure her.
Anja’s next effort sounded thin and forlorn. ‘How can you do this, again and again?’
Mykkael managed to force a grin through the tangling grip of his tension. While the ribbon of sky over the clifftops lost the last glint of the afterglow, and the sword in his hand whined and murmured, he shrugged. ‘Trust me, Princess, the alternative’s a great deal less civilized.’
Her Grace all but flew at him. ‘You are not a barbarian!’
‘What I am,’ Mykkael said, spattered
head to foot in clotted filth, ‘is not fit company for your sire’s elegant salon.’
Anja drew herself up. Her green eyes stayed furious. ‘You are better educated and better travelled than most of Sessalie’s courtiers. You just don’t wear masks well.’
Mykkael laughed, his good nature dispelling the last tremors of barqui’ino reaction. ‘Then don’t put a mask on me, your Grace.’ He lifted the sword, deliberately wiped off the stained blood and faeces on his already befouled surcoat. Then he gave his slimed hands a vigorous scrub in the granular melt from a snow bank. ‘Admire the pelt of the tiger, your Grace. Forget at your peril, he has teeth.’
‘We’re alive,’ Anja stated. ‘Safe.’ The bow twitched in her hand. ‘My applause, for the teeth.’ Her erect balance suddenly wavered.
Mykkael took a limping step forward. He caught her up with a bracing grip the moment before her knees buckled. ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘We’re not safe at all. But the heat from my fire will soon soften that ice bank. If I’m not going to bury us, we’ve no choice but to move on.’
Anja snorted. The sound was apparently a half-smothered guffaw. ‘Now, see here!’ She wobbled, gave up, and sagged back against him. ‘Now I’m no longer fit company for Sire’s salon, either. Oh, grant me the chance! I’d invite you for dancing. Together, we’d give the Duchess of Phail an apocalyptic case of the fright.’
Hysteria, battle nerves: Mykkael knew the signs. Carefully wary, he tempered his strength, slapped her cheek hard enough to shock her from desperate euphoria, back into her outraged senses. ‘Princess! Bear up.’
She crumpled. Relieved to handle the expected reaction, Mykkael did not sting her pride further with comfort. As the storm broke and her tears welled over, he drew Anja back towards the ice cleft. There, he let her bury her misery in the curve of Covette’s damp neck. He used the time, while she let loose and sobbed, and gathered up the remaining few arrows. Then he stripped the hobbles off Vashni and Stormfront, and unsnarled the incoherent mess of knots she had used to secure the mares’ lead ropes.
When the moment came to ride on, and the princess turned from him, ashamed, Mykkael gave her embarrassment short shrift.
‘I’ve seen many a hero walk off a battlefield, only to fall down and sob like a child. Look at me, Princess!’ He waited, unmoving, until she must freeze, or give way and do as he bade her. ‘Tell me to my face, what unnatural arrogance makes you believe royal birth should make you the exception?’
Anja snapped up her chin. ‘This won’t happen again.’
Mykkael stood back. He allowed her to mount on her own, all stiff back and sharp prickles. ‘Don’t make such a statement,’ he admonished her as he resettled his sword and vaulted bareback astride Stormfront. ‘I can’t, myself. You’ll damned certain slap me when I fall short and show you I’m no more than human.’
She arched her eyebrows. ‘Slap you? I should! How long must I swallow the pretence that you’re made of iron for the sake of your rock-headed pride? Or am I not to notice, you’re bleeding again? Blazing glory, Mykkael!’ The tears threatened, not born of hysteria this time. ‘If you don’t strip that shirt and clean out your hurts, I’m to watch like a fool while you take yourself down with wound fever?’
She was right. Mykkael found her intrusion a scalding irritation. When stymied by a self-righteous woman, he always preferred to submit and have the unpleasantness over forthwith. Though he knew his deferral would seem like an evasion, and probably cost dearly, later, the wardings he carried had not gone mute. Sorcery yet stirred through the air, and the ground, and danger was still present, and closing.
‘We have to ride. Now, Princess!’ Before she could protest, he cut her off. ‘At the first reasonable moment, we’ll seek proper shelter and stop.’
The concession he offered was not enough, Mykkael saw by one glance at her face. He would have to do more than capitulate. Hard set with distaste, he turned Stormfront’s head and pressed onwards.
‘Your Grace, my word, as sworn in your service, the moment I have your royal person secure, I’ll let you attend the tiresome dressings yourself.’
XXXIV. Impasse
THE QUEER LIGHTS THAT FLARED OVER HELL’S CHASM THAT NIGHT-FALL WOULD HAVE BEEN VIVIDLY CLEAR, IF DEDORTH’S GLASS HAD not been destroyed by a conflagration of sorcery. Beyond the Great Divide in the ranges, where the Grand Vizier’s allied shamans did not require the use of a contrivance to view the natural world, or examine events at a distance, the ripple as power flowed from the unseen awakened the gifts of the seers. They sensed disruptions and ominous signs. The wise among them measured the portents and foresaw dire peril: an invasion to challenge Tuinvardia’s northern border, over mountains considered impassable.
Afraid their warnings would meet disbelief, they dispatched an emissary to warn the Grand Vizier.
The audience was brought to the emperor’s court by a woman clairvoyant, trained as a channel to receive distant messages with strict and reliable accuracy.
Under the airy glass-paned cupola of the Grand Vizier’s painted chamber, she appeared child-sized, mantled in the gauze robes and circlet of her time-honoured profession. The flood of the alcove’s candles exposed her distraught pallor. Yet she held her straight stance on the marble star beneath the Grand Vizier’s dais, the hollow sphere of wrought copper used to amplify vision cupped in her delicate hands. ‘My Lord Wisdom, I offer thee tidings from the circle of shamans sent to hallow the ground along the north border.’
The wizened vizier raised his bald head and regarded the emissary with gimlet eyes. ‘Not good news, I see.’ His sigh brought an apprentice scurrying with a pillow to ease his swollen feet. A snap of his fingers summoned two of the three master scribes he kept in constant attendance. Robes rustling, these left the labour of preparing updated amulets. They gathered beneath the dais to hear, ascetic faces lined with concern under sombre black caps with fringed lappets.
‘Deliver the sending,’ bade the Grand Vizier.
‘Lord Wisdom, hear well,’ the seer’s channel opened. ‘These words are Anzbek’s, eldest from Jantii tribe’s fox clan circle. His speech now follows: “Wise one, we have sighted unfavourable portents that warn of a coming invasion. Winged minions wrought by a sorcerer whose demon’s name is unknown fly down the gorge of Hell’s Chasm.”‘
The elder of the two master scribes raised his eyebrows. ‘From the north! Has Anzbek gone mad?’ Even the most powerful sorcerers avoided cold weather and altitude, that exposed all their delicate works to the stifling qualities of snowfall, and the unstringing chaos inherent in dwellings heated by wood fires.
‘How can a new power arise to existence?’ snapped the beak-nosed scribe at the trestle. The Nine demons might crossbreed a new innovation, but their Names and the sorcerers they held in sealed bondage had been exhaustively listed for centuries.
The seer’s channel lifted her chin. ‘Even so, Guardians.’ She resumed, undaunted. ‘Anzbek reads such a peril arising. His dreaming forecasts a danger beyond precedent. He further says this: his shamans have no phrase and no singing to banish the lines he encounters. Since he also expected the Lord Wisdom and masters might presume his sharp wits were failing, Anzbek chose to share counsel concerning the visions his circle has garnered. Be wary, he urges. The fragmented knowledge I bring thee in his name has been gathered at terrible cost to his scryers.’
‘Anzbek’s lore cannot sing a completion!’ The Grand Vizier shoved straight in a disturbed glitter of beaded robes. Beside him, his master scribes exchanged startled glances. ‘The night brings us ill news, indeed.’ Ringed fingers flashed fire as the old conjurer beckoned the channel on to the dais. ‘Thou carriest a sending? Pray show us.’
Gauze rustled. Shadows wavered as the candle flames swayed in the grip of an uneasy draught. The channel ascended the stair. At the Grand Vizier’s bidding, she accepted the cushion just brought to cosset his feet. Then she knelt with the copper sphere offered between her cupped hands. The Grand Vizier laid his palms b
eside hers, fingers spread.
‘As Anzbek sends,’ the channel whispered, then bowed her head. She touched her circlet to the sphere and opened her mind to deliver the record of the tribal elder’s true vision.
The Grand Vizier to the Emperor of Tuinvardia closed his eyes to receive. His brows hooked into a thunderous frown the first moment he accepted the contact. ‘Shape-changers!’ he said, shocked. His seamed face blanched. ‘Ones able to meld and recombine, even dissolve at their sorcerer’s will. They fly across the Great Divide through Hell’s Chasm. The lines that reanimate them…are intensely complex.’ He drew a vexed breath. ‘Record this!’
The master scribe to his right rushed from the dais to the work table. Fingers flying, he assembled parchment, ink, and a quill pen with a fine, copper nib. He barely had the implement dipped before the Grand Vizier started dictation.
‘East to west axis, parallel, doubled. North down to centre pin, then rise north-east, at twelve degrees. Arc to south, run a ground line, six point star at south, then a sunwards spiral, rising. End at heaven point. Lift the pen. Set down at west, now mirror the geometry at ninety degrees.’
‘Murder and mercy!’ murmured the master still seated. He had abandoned his labour over the talismans, stunned by the unprecedented pattern of ward now emerging, line by line, on the parchment. ‘What is that thing?’
‘Abomination,’ whispered the Grand Vizier, never in memory so curt. His forehead broke into alarming sweat as he opened his eyes and fought his breath steady. ‘One we may not have the wisdom to counter; would that Eishwin were still alive.’
‘Eishwin?’ The master scribe who remained on the dais cleared his throat in contempt. ‘That lunatic hermit? But he only expounded on elementary design! A raw junior might consult his text. No one else would see fit to bother.’