Air whistled, above him. Mykkael sensed the kerrie’s stooping descent. He snatched up the bow, then retrieved the arrow once readied for Stormfront’s unfinished deliverance. His hurried touch rechecked the rope on the makeshift sling he had fashioned to bear his live weight. Scant seconds ahead of the predator that dived in to seize his laid bait, he leaped into the rock cleft and wormed into the sack he had sewn out of wing leather. In the last, frantic second, Mykkael strapped his waist with the line he had fixed as a safety.
Then the crux was upon him.
The kerrie touched down like the shadow of doom. Buffeted by its turbulence, Mykkael huddled with stopped breath. His skin streamed icy sweat within the suffocating cover of wing leather. If he had misjudged, if the creature he had lured was not starved for meat, it might balk and notice the odd set of his ropes, under the heaped entrails left as a decoy. It might tear up the carcass in a frenzy of rage, or refuse the doctored meal altogether.
Thought suspended, Mykkael awaited the drive of primal instinct that should prompt the kerrie to pluck up the carrion laced with the scent of fresh blood. Pinned by the agony of irreversible decision, he watched the predator fold knife-edged, bronze wings. Armoured talons clashed as the beast stalked and spun, snuffling the breeze with its tasselled tail lashing. Crested head raised, suspicious eye darting, it inspected the ledge at the verge of the basin, then scouted the skyline for rivals.
Finding none, it trumpeted and spat flame, and shook its leonine neck ruff. Then it bent its terrible, scissor-sharp beak, and with a horrific delicacy, snapped up the spilled viscera. The taste whetted its appetite. One stride, and it loomed overtop of the carcass. With a dreadful, finicky strength, its huge talons lifted, settled, bore down. Claws like curved hooks pierced through sorrel hide, and grasped the slabbed muscle at shoulder and croup.
The kerrie bellowed and unfolded broad wings. Its first, driving downbeat hammered the air and launched it to upward flight. It rose amid a gale of ripped wind, bearing the horse in its talons. The attached braid of rope slithered and whumped taut. The strung leather sack containing Mykkael was jerked headlong out of the crevice.
He was dragged, bounced, rolled in a bruising tumult across obstacles of brush and stone. The fear froze his heart, that his improvised rope might snag and snap under the strain. Yet the plaited line held him. The ground spun away in a dizzying rush. His stomach turned over in the wrenching lurch as the airborne predator lofted his slung body upwards. The kerrie clapped down spread wings, then soared over the precipice, angled to glide on the lifting breeze wafting off the high cliffs of the canyon.
Mykkael caught his raced breath. Far below, the diminished landscape reeled under him as the kerrie veered south towards its rookery. Everything now relied on his strength, his agility, and his trained skill to bear weapons in adversity. If his hand, or his wits, or his courage failed now, or if mischance led his tactic amiss, the princess could die screaming, torn apart by the ravenous maws of vile hatchlings, or far worse. Spirit from flesh, she could be flayed into madness, then hurled into bondage for all of eternity. She could still fall as a defenceless pawn to the sorcerer who spearheaded a demon’s invasion.
Her hope of escape irretrievably committed, Mykkael braced his strung nerves. Suspended in the rocking, unstable sling, he freed his hands and readied his weapons.
The blackout faint soon released Anja’s smothered consciousness. She awakened, strapped into tight confines, whirled dizzy and flooded with nausea. The pervasive smell of bloodied meat overwhelmed her turned senses. She choked down her panic, scarcely able to stir amid the wing leather binding her folded limbs to her chest. Aware with sick fury that she had been strapped into the carcass of her dead mare, she gagged for breath.
Mykkael had left her the barest slit opening to let in fresh air. Through the turbulent whistle of wind from outside, she felt the buffeting force of the kerrie’s wing beats. Her effort to peer through the crack showed a reeling view of the canyon below, the shine of flat water coiled across a distanced tapestry of scrub landscape. Anja coughed. Her skin flushed to chill sweat. The surging lift as the predator turned towards the cliff face upended her unsettled gut.
Before she threw up, Anja shoved her face to the gap. She swallowed back the taste of churned bile. The slight change only served to unveil the horrid extent of her straits. She sighted the slender, whipped line of black rope, then the man, suspended above the abyss in a makeshift sling cut from wing leather.
Horror lanced through her. ‘Earthly powers, Mykkael!’
The fear that followed all but unstrung her mind, for what she saw, the monster who bore Kasminna’s carcass must inevitably notice as well. Kerries had rivals. They were wont to snatch game from the claws of their adversaries. Mykkael had taken an unconscionable risk to surmount the dead end at the precipice. Worse, how was he to survive the inevitable crash landing, when the predator that bore them swooped down and alighted upon its inhabited nest in the rookery?
Anja wrestled with drowning horror as her imagination ran rampant. Her desert-bred captain would be crushed, torn apart, or smashed wholesale. The sling gave him no shred of protection. Already, the kerrie swung into approach. The pinnacle with the rookery’s snagged eyries unfolded into clear sight. The excited squawks of the hatchlings arose, shrill and thin on the morning air.
The kerrie banked into a circling descent. Spurred by mortal terror, Anja forced her constricted forearms upwards. She wedged her working fingers into the slit and pried at the roped flesh to widen her range of view.
‘Mykkael,’ she entreated.
Though her voice emerged muffled, he had to hear. The line suspending him was barely a spear shaft in length. If he did not respond through the thundering wind as the kerrie plunged earthwards, he was not oblivious to the predicament that rushed to confront him. Huddled into the sling, he had positioned his bow. His arrow was nocked to the string. As Anja watched, he flexed his shoulders and drew. He took careful aim, striving to compensate for the gyrating swing of his vantage. Anja’s breath caught. The shot he undertook carried desperate, long odds. Chance must play an equal hand to all of his years of trained skill. No matter how seasoned, the warrior must realize that he danced the knife-edge between flagrant risk and sure death.
Mykkael trusted his own measure. He took steady aim, but not without sign of stressed tension. Anja saw the sheen of sweat on his brow. She had never known a man’s face could reflect such savagely intense concentration.
Undone by dread, her shaken will faltered. She could not bear to watch. Eyes shut, she huddled in blood-reeking darkness, and waited for the loosed arrow that would determine the course of her fate.
Mykkael sighted his target. The drag of the wind at his wrist, and the yawing drift of the sling fouled his sighted line. Again and again, he corrected his aim. He resisted impatience; rejected defeat. Against rising frustration, he steadied the drawn shaft, and damped the breeze humming through the taut string. Too much relied on caprice and blind chance: that Benj’s rambling on the habits of kerries held truth, and their talons would reflexively bind to a kill in the same fashion as large birds of prey. That a low dose of dart venom would induce the predicted response in a half-avian monster: slow its reaction and mar the fine balance required for spatial co-ordination. If, in harsh fact, a nerve poison drawn from spiders would affect the dread creature at all.
The list of unknown variables could do nothing but spoil the nerve of the archer who measured his mark.
Mykkael turned his face, blotted streaming sweat on his shoulder. He induced the tight focus of the barqui’ino mind, gauged the drift of his arrow, then judged his moment and released.
The shaft launched, a close shot into the blood-rich muscle of the predator’s pumping wing. The shaft smacked home, sunk down to the fletching. Mykkael braced just in time. The monster recoiled from the needle-sharp sting, and rolled into a lurching wingover.
Mykkael gripped the hurled sling with desperate hands to av
oid being tossed out like flotsam. As the upended world whipped in violent recoil, he clung, while the enraged kerrie righted. It screamed with rage. Then its crested head swivelled downwards. The massive, honed beak snapped at the trailing rope in an effort to shed its bothersome human cargo. As the tug of the wind, and the considered placement of the sling’s tether balked its reach, it convulsed the bulging sacs behind its jaw and hurled a crackling plume of live flame.
The warrior evaded incineration, just barely. Balled up behind shielding wing leather, he ducked his head. The sheltering membrane grew scaldingly hot. His gripped knuckles seared to raised blisters, and he retched from the smell of singed hair. Hurled this way and that as the kerrie wrenched to unload him, he coughed on the oily fumes thrown off by the monster’s incendiary breath. Below him, the roosting ledges tilted and rushed ever closer. If the poison set by his arrow failed now, he would smash into a nest of blood-frenzied, ravenous hatchlings.
Eyes tearing on smoke, Mykkael battled despair. He would not escape injury on the hard rocks, or the spiked dead wood that shored up the eyrie. Long before he could cut himself free, he would find himself torn limb from limb by the predator’s immature young.
Worse, Anja had roused. He had seen her fingers plying the crack he had left to allow her to breathe. Her inevitable state of trapped panic posed a cruelty beyond contemplation. Tossed and spun by the kerrie’s buffeting flight, Mykkael understood he must take futile action. Before the creature hurled downwards to seize its firm stance on a roost, he must risk its fire, climb up the rope, and try to force an alternative landing.
Yet as he groped for the knife to cut himself free, the kerrie’s flight suddenly wobbled. The huge wings above broke their rhythm, then faltered in mid-air. The creature shook its ruffed head, beak parted in panting distress.
The poison was working. Warned as a shudder played through the rope, Mykkael risked a glance outwards. He saw with jolting dread that the cliff wall encompassed his entire field of view. The roosts with their white streaks of guano were all but on top of him. With juggernaut speed, the kerrie plummeted in. It came on too recklessly fast to secure any chance of safe landing.
Survival, now, relied on its instinct for self-preservation. Either it would succumb to confusion and collide headlong with the rocks, or it would seize the more sensible choice and pour its failing strength into a glide. Rather than suffer a suicidal crash into the roost’s narrow precipice, it must attempt the less critical descent, and alight on the open terrain of the vale.
Mykkael forced his breaths even. The sling that suspended him was spinning too wildly to allow a last-ditch intervention. The fate of Anja and Sessalie now rode on the winds of chance-met design.
Whirled breathless with strained nerves and fright, Anja saw the uprushing ground through the laced slit in the carcass. She had heard the release of Mykkael’s bent bow; felt the thump of the arrow’s impact. The wavering dip of the kerrie’s impaired flight turned her stomach. Fighting down nausea, fist pressed to her mouth, she had squeezed her eyes closed to shut out the harsh moment of impact against the reared cliffs of the roost.
Then the kerrie effected a clumsy, banked turn. Wind whistled through its taut pinions as it struggled to brake. Too panicked to look where it tried to set down, Anja heard and felt the drag of the sling as it thrashed through a low stand of trees. Then the trailing rope snagged in green limbs and hooked fast. The monster jerked short in full flight and upended. It slammed downwards, struck earth on its back, and released its clutched grasp on the carcass. Anja felt herself spun upside down. Hurled end over end, until her tumbled senses lost all sense of direction, she whimpered and bit her tongue. Then the dead horse that enclosed her ploughed into the ground with a thump that knocked her breathless.
Shock momentarily darkened her eyesight. Her over-flexed wrist burned from a sprain. The slit in the mare’s abdomen showed a close-up view of shag moss and round pebbles. A trickle of water, not seen, ran over more rocks close by. Lashed to terror by helplessness, Anja screamed Mykkael’s name.
She could hear the kerrie thrashing nearby. Its spat fires flung drifts of black smoke on the breeze. A kicked rattle of rocks, and the clash of its beak evinced its ongoing struggles. But whether it battled a wounded man, or shuddered in the agonized throes of distress from an arrow, Anja could not determine. Coughing oily soot, half choked by nausea, she strained and shoved in crazed need to burst free of the imprisoning carcass.
‘Mykkael!’
He did not come. She would not see rescue. The captain was surely smashed bloody and dead. Anja forced back hysterical sobs and flogged her mind for the means to escape. No solution presented itself. She had no blade or cutting tool on her, not even the skinning knife lost in the gorge. The lapse meant she had no option left but her teeth. She would have to try to gnaw through the wing-leather rope.
‘Blinding merciful powers!’ Her ugly predicament could get no worse. The vile, black sinew revolted her nose. It must inevitably upend her gut as she sampled its sickening taste.
Braced for the worst, whipped on by desperation, Anja shoved her tear-streaked face towards the slit.
Fingers reached through, brown and strong, and restrained her. ‘Your Grace, hold fast! Let my knife cut you free.’
‘Mykkael!’ Undone by her savage flood of relief, Anja hammered at the mare’s ribs with trapped fists. ‘Damn you, Mykkael! I told you I wouldn’t endure this!’
His blade snipped the first rope, then parted the next with deft haste. ‘Yes, I heard you.’ The clipped words sounded strained. ‘You can pummel me later.’ A tug jerked the carcass. The laced ties slithered loose. Another few slashes cleared the bindings away. Mykkael grabbed her shoulder and yanked. Still bundled in the gory wrapping of wing leather, Anja should have landed, secure, clasped into the captain’s locked arms.
His effort went wrong. He fumbled her weight, pinned her to his bent body and let her slither to earth with a grunt. Her fleeting, disconcerted view of his face showed his bronze flesh drained to grey pallor.
‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded.
‘Ribs,’ Mykkael gasped. ‘Cracked some, on landing.’ He forced a breath through the jerk of seized chest muscles, and added, ‘We have to run.’
Smoke streamed on the wind. A stand of nearby trees had caught fire. The stink of smouldering hair and charred feathers surely signalled the kerrie’s demise.
Yet Mykkael drove her on to her feet, wildly urgent. ‘The monster’s not dead. My arrow won’t work deep enough to dispatch it. Come on!’
Belatedly, Anja reasserted her balance. Only as her step met firm ground did her scattered awareness reorient. She realized with giddy exhilaration that she stood on the floor of the canyon. The silhouette of the cliff walls reared overhead, blurred by the haze of the burgeoning dawn.
Wonder unstrung her. ‘We’re over the precipice. Clear of Hell’s Chasm and over the Great Divide.’ The way to Tuinvardia lay open before her, with no insurmountable obstacle left to obstruct their passage into the western plains.
‘Kerries!’ Mykkael snapped. He clamped a blistered hand on her wrist and dealt her a frantic shove forward. ‘This dropped carcass is no less potent a lure. We’re still under threat of predation.’
Nor would the sorcerer’s minions rest, now. Without knowing the Name of the demon that bound them, the captain had no means to estimate how far they must flee to outdistance its line of reach. Anja roused at last, her complacency shattered before Mykkael’s driving concern. The last arrow was spent, and the bow had been smashed amid the tumult of landing. Now, Mykkael possessed little else but his sword and his wardings to secure their journey towards safety.
XXXVII. Trial
THE PRINCESS FOUGHT TO RECOVER HER BURNING, SHORT BREATH. WORMED INTO A NOOK UNDERNEATH A CLUSTER OF TUMBLED BOULDERS to escape hot pursuit by a kerrie, she still clutched the wing leather under her arm. Since Mykkael insisted on keeping the trophy, she had been required to carry the load to keep his
hands free to bear weapons. The sprint to reach shelter left her beaten limp. Anja could do little else but draw gulps of air, and wait for her spinning senses to settle.
‘Just a bit further,’ Mykkael encouraged her from the darkness behind. As though he expected her flare of rebellion, he tapped on the heel of her shoe. ‘Witch thought,’ he gasped, his explanation clipped short by the hitch of his battered ribs. ‘Don’t balk now, Princess. There’s a much better place to take respite.’
Anja spat out a clinging cobweb. Nursing her painfully swollen wrist, she shoved the wing leather ahead and edged forward. Something slimy slithered under her hand, most likely a startled salamander. Anja whispered a shaken curse. The encounter scarcely bolstered her confidence in a rock pile just as likely to harbour a nest of venomous snakes. If her hackled instincts clamoured for her to back up and escape, she had the captain’s straits to consider. His laboured progress evinced his discomfort. Any prone crawl through close quarters would grant his injuries little surcease. Nor would the tight confines permit him the space to slip past her and take the lead.
The princess elbowed ahead, inch by inch. True to Mykkael’s promise, within a few feet, the tortuous passage opened up into a void. The jumbled boulders let in dusty streamers of light, with just enough space to sit upright.
Anja cleared the narrows and made way for Mykkael. He emerged with strained difficulty and crouched on the earth floor, one hand braced to prop his torso erect, while his forearm stayed clutched to cracked ribs. Nonetheless, he kept vigilance, tracking the frustrated bellows of the predator their dash to the bolt hole had thwarted. The downed struggles of its poisoned fellow had swiftly attracted a horde to sate themselves on its weakness. An immature male too inexperienced to fight for a share of the carcass had circled the site, then chased the two humans to earth.