Mykkael twisted hard left. His sword struck moving murder. Anja felt the impact shock through his taut body. His hand on her jerkin convulsed with the force of his recovery, as he snapped his entangled blade free. Ducked under a sense of ponderous movement, her person snatched close and sheltered against a smoking pelt of hot fluid, she clung grimly as the captain stabbed in his heels and called out.
Stormfront responded, bunched and shot forward. A descending claw whistled close overhead. The sword clanged again, gave a sliding ring in deflection. Mykkael shouted. ‘Jee!’
Anja braced, prepared, while the gelding wheeled sideways. Tail streaming, hooves pounding rough stone, he avoided the coiling slap of scaled tail, spiked at the end with barbed horns.
Vashni’s shrill scream arose at their back. Anja turned her head, found her view obstructed by Mykkael’s leg. Darkness masked even the partial glimpse of what mishap had just transpired. Claws scuffled on stone, milled through by the clatter of Stormfront’s headlong flight. Then something massive splashed into the flume. The noises of struggle receded behind as the horses opened their stride, hazed into a panic-stricken gallop. Only two sets of hoof beats trailed after the valiant black gelding. Poor Vashni’s demise had opened the way to escape for the riders and the two mares.
Anja blinked through the burn of fresh tears, jounced against her protector. Above her, unending, the whining cry of the sword sustained its pitch through the scrape of Mykkael’s raced breathing.
He did not pull up. Even when Stormfront’s long strides devolved into a choppy canter, and his sweated coat streamed strings of lather, the desert-bred captain shouted to enforce the frantic pace.
‘You’ll kill him,’ railed Anja, afraid for the gelding. Kasminna was flagging, and Covette, one foot shoeless, lagged dangerously far behind.
If Mykkael heard, he did not draw rein. Only when the next ice tunnel forced caution did he slacken from headlong flight. By then, the hard, running tremors brought on by barqui’ino recoil stormed through his overwrought flesh. Warned that his mind might not be coherent, the princess held on in agonized patience. Despite the fact that her midriff was bruised by the ridge of the horse’s withers, she stayed passive in hope that her quiet would help restore the captain’s hazed reason. In his prudent, right mind, surely Mykkael would choose to dismount, and light a torch to traverse the black maw of the passage.
Yet no respite came. Riding the razor’s edge of raw reflex, the warrior stayed astride with drawn sword and drove Stormfront ahead without letup.
‘I’m not harmed,’ Anja ventured.
Mykkael shuddered, head to foot, and managed a stilted reply. ‘I know.’
Anja forced back the hot sting of tears, and doggedly pressed him again. ‘If Stormfront slips, even once, we’re both lost.’
All but deranged by the skittering slide as the black gelding’s forehooves lost purchase, the princess endured with her breath stopped.
‘We daren’t pull up,’ Mykkael stated at length. ‘If that vile thing overtakes us again, we’re foredone.’
‘You’re hurt?’ Anja asked, while the tremors whipped through him, aggravating his hitched shortness of breath. Her query went unanswered. Enveloped by the chasm’s dank blackness, she could see nothing at all. Neither could she dispel her anxiety by touch. Not with her left hand clutching the arrows, and all her security dependent upon her grip on Mykkael’s makeshift footwear. As Stormfront slewed again and again, scrambling for purchase on ice, she dared not risk loosing her grasp for even a fraction of a second.
No choice remained. Equine senses must be entrusted to secure Stormfront’s imperilled riders.
Too long, they traversed the echoing dark, with the race of the current a blast of raw noise, and the horses’ terrible, laboured breaths cruel proof of their overtaxed resource. By the time the far side of the tunnel emerged, a faint oval rinsed grey by starlight, Anja was shaking from overwrought nerves. Her hands were knotted with fiery cramps, and sweat slid in drops down her temples.
‘Hyaa!’ Mykkael’s shout rousted Stormfront to a staggering trot.
Kasminna ripped out a startled snort, laid back her ears, and plunged after him, with Covette in limping pursuit.
‘Are you crazy?’ yelped Anja, pummelled again, her sick fear whipped on to wild outrage.
‘Sword!’ Mykkael gasped.
Too late, Anja realized: the angry, wasp hum of the steel had not slackened.
Horse and paired riders burst into the open. Mykkael shouted again, just as something huge missed its pounce from the back of the ice face. Stone rattled as it landed and launched into frenzied pursuit. The sword’s warding screamed, and the spent horses bolted in a fresh burst of primal terror.
Left, right, left again, Stormfront changed his lead to thread through a maze of shattered boulders. He leaped the frothing seam of a freshet. The bough of a deadfall snagged his left side, gouging at Anja’s legs. She hung on, lashed and battered. Mykkael, crouched above her, used his braced sword to fend off the stinging branches. The cavern around them had widened again, prime ground for a night-hunting kerrie.
Ahead, the change in terrain spelled disaster: the flume crashed down a laddered incline, then whirled with a thunderous roar into the black depths of a basin. Water exploded over the rim at the far side, streaming trailers of spray under starlight. The spillway of the falls overhung the sliced edge of the world, gateway to the impassable cliff that ended the run down Hell’s Chasm.
The drop beyond was sheer, a vertical buttress that cleaved away into vacant air. There the rushing water plumed downwards, winnowed into veils like hurled dust, towards the distant floor of a canyon blanketed under white mist.
Anja beheld that vast drop off, then the gulf to the distant, far side. Upside down, the scope of the view set her mortal senses reeling. Recognition struck like a cry against silence, that she beheld her own certain death, and the bittermost ending of hope.
‘We’re defeated,’ she gasped.
No human means could conquer an obstacle of such overpowering scale.
Her plaintive distress went unheard. Mykkael was not listening. Or else his awareness stayed riveted on the threat that still charged on the heels of the straggling horses.
He slapped the flat of his sword down on Stormfront’s shoulder, turning him, hard, from the sloping drop towards the basin. The gelding slithered on stepped granite. Iron shoes scrabbling, he clawed himself into recovery, and snapped his hocks back under himself. Against chance-met failure, against futile ruin, the black horse rebounded. Dry grass, then brush, then needled branches slapped into Anja’s dangling face. Eyes closed, skin stinging as thorns ripped her cheek, she plunged through the bruised evergreen fragrance of cedar. Then dank stone and darkness swallowed their striving. The horse’s clattering gait dispersed into echoes cast back by a stone enclosure.
‘Hyaa! Stormfront, forward!’ Mykkael pressed the shivering horse into the black cavern carved out by the current in years when the basin swirled higher. The mares clambered after. Hooves splashed underfoot. The horses traversed a small streamlet or pool. Icy droplets splashed Anja’s eyelids. Her dangling braid wicked up moisture. Then Stormfront’s powerful body heaved underneath her as he surged upslope and arrived on a narrow, dry ledge.
Mykkael snatched the back of her jerkin. Without word or warning, he hurled her off the exhausted gelding’s back.
Anja struck ground with a bitten-off cry, winded and scraped and on fire with outrage. The string of the slung bow sawed into her neck, while her salvaged arrows clattered around her.
The captain vaulted on to his feet just behind. ‘Princess! See to your horses!’ No time remained to speak of regrets. Sword raised, Mykkael scrambled on limping, fast strides to contend with the minion still bearing down from outside.
XXXV. Precipice
THE HORSES WERE NOW TOO EXHAUSTIVELY SPENT TO FALL PREY TO CHANCE MISADVENTURE. ANJA LEFT STORMFRONT’S FALLEN REINS trailing. Too winded to stray, the gelding co
uld be trusted to recover at will in the company of his teammate. As Kasminna, and finally Covette, straggled in, sorely limping, the princess shoved aside pity for their battered plight. Consumed by necessity, she groped on hands and knees in the darkness, seeking her scattered arrows. She located three, ripped the bow from her shoulder, then pushed her bruised body back upright and rushed downslope after Mykkael.
Alone, he could scarcely defend the cleft’s entrance with no more at hand than his sword.
She reached him, wrung breathless, and slid to a stop in a scatter of gravel. He held his blade raised. Eyes searching the darkness, he dug into his scrip, while, outside, the sorcerer’s minion gave chase across the rock verge. It caught their scent with scarcely a pause, and veered into the brush at the mouth of the cavern. As before, the captain acknowledged Anja’s presence without breaking his active focus. Never turning his head, he fished out the twist of leather holding his flint and dry tinder.
‘Pluck a spray of cedar and light the green needles,’ he ordered, then offered the packet. His voice did not shake, or his hand, though the burgeoning wail of the sword signified urgent peril.
Awkward and fumbling, Anja juggled to free her burdened hands. ‘The bow,’ she gasped hoarsely.
‘At my feet! Drop it!’ Mykkael plucked the arrows from her clutched fist with the speed of a striking adder. ‘The fire comes first!’
Anja shed the weapon with a clatter and shouldered the task he demanded. Limned against the swirling pool of the basin, the fell minion that hunted charged in. Its glimpsed form was black-scaled, and sinuously fleet under the thin gleam of starlight. Anja wrenched off an evergreen bough and doggedly wielded the flint. Cold and near panic had dulled her dexterity. She could scarcely command her dazed fingers.
Mykkael sensed her difficulty. While the sorcerer’s sending hurtled up-slope, the captain pinned the wasp hum of his blade flat to his side with his elbow. He snatched flint and striker out of her hands, and thrust a raked spark to the cedar. The frond caught. Flame blossomed, fanning a billow of smoke. Mykkael snapped another branch from a sapling, touched that alight also. Then he hurled the spill into the path of the oncoming monster.
Smoke spun on the wind. The creature bellowed and yanked back as though grazed by flung poison. Its sinuous form lost definition, then dissolved into whirling mist. Yet this time, the change brought no moment of respite. Warned by the relentless buzz of the shaman’s mark, Mykkael secured his drawn sword and snatched up the bow. Fast as he moved, the shape-changer’s tactic outmatched him. With diabolical speed, the minion recondensed and shifted into the known form of a man.
He stepped out of the night empty-handed and helpless, with no stitch of state finery upon him.
‘Anja, beloved,’ called the High Prince of Devall. Exquisitely handsome, clean-limbed as fine marble, he extended his opened arms in appeal, entreating the princess to spare him.
The bowstring twanged in release. Mykkael’s aimed shaft slapped through defenceless flesh, simultaneous with Anja’s choked outcry. Though reason insisted the fell creature was tainted, the wrenching sight of such beauty, cut down, stunned the heart with unparalleled savagery.
As the princess crumpled, hands pressed to her face, Mykkael left her side. He accomplished his butcher’s work with the sword with what seemed an undaunted efficiency. While the princess wept for grief, mourning the suitor she once might have honoured in matrimony, the desert-bred captain who guarded her life disallowed any pause for condolence. Relentlessly silent, he destroyed the gristly remains there and then with a blaze set from dead wood and cedar.
The pyre burned bright, overseen by the ice-chip gleam of the stars. The roil of the chasm’s black waters thundered on the stilled air, with no sanctuary rites to honour the dead, or sing the eulogy to grace passing royalty. Anja observed, shuddering in the windy cold, alone and distressed and uncomforted.
Mykkael prowled the brush at the mouth of the cavern. Though the whine of his blade had subsided to a whisper, he remained too cranked with tension to settle. He paused more than once to crouch in the shadows, forehead braced on crossed wrists at his sword hilt. The restless gesture seemed natural, until Anja realized the posture masked an ungovernable onset of dry heaves.
‘Mykkael?’ She arose, crossed the hard, stony soil, but no careful approach could disarm his flinching recoil.
On his feet, his weapon hilt cradled tight to his breast, he gasped, ‘No. Princess, I beg you, go back and stand with your horses.’
‘They don’t need me.’ Steadfast, Anja continued to offer her hand. ‘Come away, Mykkael.’
He shook through a horrible, wracking tremor. ‘You do understand, that minion was no man.’ Fear seized his voice, or an undisguised pain, from a source that could not be fathomed as he turned his face from her and finished, ‘Nothing remained of the person you knew. Only an abomination.’
Anja realized she had seen more clearly than he. Through the gift that her sire described as a cold start, she had discerned the false apparition was not sourced in a human awareness. ‘Captain, leave be,’ she admonished. ‘I already saw the distinction.’
But revolted nerves could not always be reconciled through logic. Mykkael coughed behind his raised wrist, the ripped shreds of his sleeve dark with blood. ‘One doesn’t grow hardened. If you can find comfort, the cedar is proof. Your suitor won’t rise from these ashes tonight.’
Anja grasped his tensed fingers. ‘Come away, Mykkael. The fire can accomplish its purpose without us.’ Her tears came then, fast and hot in release as he permitted her touch, and allowed her to draw him aside.
The kerrie descended just as they turned to re-enter the mouth of the cleft. It swooped down in a rushing tumult of air from the cliff face above their heads. Mykkael hurled back into barqui’ino mind. His shove tumbled Anja ahead into shelter. The move marked the start of a seamless pivot as he spun to engage a defence. His effort appeared foredoomed at the outset, with the sword his sole weapon at hand.
Against fire and talon, one man with a blade would have to be sorely outmatched.
Choked silent by horror, Anja embarked on a hands-and-knees search to reclaim the dropped bow. Too late, she recalled she held no more arrows. Crushed to despair, she could only pause, numb, while the kerrie snap-folded spread wings in descent.
Its powerful, deadly strike seemed inevitable. Her valiant protector would be cut down before her anguished, stunned eyes. If Mykkael had regrets, his thoughts did not show. He did not cry out, or turn craven. Sword lightly raised, his stance set in readiness, he maintained his trained form. His battle-hard nerve engaged no wasted motion. Against the backdrop of plummeting predator and starred sky, his poised state of preparedness defied fate.
Mykkael held to life against all threat of ending, without rage, without recoil, without fear.
Had the kerrie been fixed upon human prey, that windy escarpment might have become the tragic site for a final stand. As events unfolded, the warrior’s quiet acceptance itself framed his grace of salvation. Mykkael awaited his moment, unmoving; while the marauding creature ripped out of its plunge, aimed for its intended, first target. It struck the whirlpool in the basin with a splash that cast up an explosion of spray.
Massive pinions deployed, and fanned up a stinging barrage of forced air. Through back-bent brush and gust-flattened evergreens, Anja saw the predator arise from the depths with Vashni’s corpse seized in mailed talons.
The dead gelding, not Mykkael, would be taken to sate its ravenous hatchlings. The kerrie soared upwards, bugling triumph. It carved a steep circle and dipped over the ledge, streaming flame and roiled sparks in its gliding wake as it soared down the night-dark canyon.
The severity of subsequent barqui’ino reaction left Mykkael unfit for close company. Every move, every breath made him flinch with hazed nerves. He countered the affliction the best way he could, and immersed himself in the frenetic activity of setting arcane defences. If Anja feared his efforts with fire and cedar
ash might not be sufficient to repel the demonic forces that sought her destruction, she knew not to speak. The warrior drew steel at her least untoward movement. He could not be approached, far less withstand human contact or touch. His given promise to attend to his wounds must wait until the throes of raw backlash subsided.
Anja herself had small will to face her own toll of aches and bruises. To stave off the crushing despair of defeat, and escape morbid thoughts of the precipice that surely crushed every option but death, she bent her scraped knees and climbed back to her feet. Then she hobbled in aching, uneven steps to look after her exhausted horses.
They numbered three, of the six exceptional creatures she had sequestered in Farmer Gurley’s back meadow. As hard-run survivors, how sorrowfully they had changed, standing with lowered heads, sides heaving, with their proud tails hanging limp and snarled and mud-stained. Anja ran her stinging, scraped fingers over the crusted salt matting their coats. She accounted the sad tally: of staring ribs, and sunken flanks, and the heartbreaking list of more hurtful damages. Never before had Kasminna been too dispirited to head butt and nip. Her hind fetlocks were puffy, and her near shoulder skinned bloody from a crash on the sticks of a deadfall. Covette had a bashed knee, hot and sore with tight swelling. Her bare hoof had split to the quick. She stood three-legged, unwilling to put weight on the crack. Stormfront, proud creature, had claw wounds in his neck. If Mykkael’s superb horsemanship had spared his legs, the gelding was wretchedly muscle-sore.
Anja laid her cheek on the black’s steaming side, too drawn and weary to weep. She had no liniments, no bran mash, no flannel leg wraps or restoratives. For her horses’ suffering, she had no balm to bring them relief. Their sacrifice found her worse than empty-handed. Her fingers were too raw and clumsy with cold to manage girth buckles or knots.