* * *
Lights seared the dark from Ithariel's chamber each night since Orame's arrival. Rays speared like blades from the casements of the upper tower, shining and silver as moonbeams, but bright enough to blind any mortal who lingered too long in awed wonder. That nine White Circle enchanters raised their powers to generate the phenomenon brought scant comfort to Haldeth. Huddled on his cot in the forge, and muffled under blankets and counterpane, he strove to escape into dreams. Yet sleep would not come. His feet went sweaty and cold by turns, and the hours dragged without relief.
The smith rolled over yet again. He kicked at an offending fold of blanket and stubbornly forced himself still. The familiar tang of iron and woodfire failed to lull his senses to forgetfulness. When the first, creeping sensation that he was not alone pricked at the nerves along his spine, Haldeth screwed his eyes closed and concentrated upon the whine of the wind across the eaves.
He would not yield to the impulse that urged him to shove back the bed clothes and rise.
In time that early, inward suspicion became an itch; Haldeth clamped his fists between his knees. The particulars of the weather outside suddenly acquired critical importance. Focused on the moment the next gust would peak, he considered prayer, while the itch became an ache, then swelled into compulsion that stung his mind like a burn. Finally harried past conscious volition, the smith flung off the covers.
"You sleep soundly," Orame commented from the dark. His robed form shifted like shadow against the cherry glow of the forge coals.
Hot where he had earlier been cold, Haldeth kicked clear of his bedclothes. The knife he kept to trim leather tumbled out, unsheathed, from the cranny between mattress and forearm. The pommel struck with a clang that condemned on the swept stones of the floor.
"Remarkable you should sleep at all, for a man whose distrust abides with him even in bed." The enchanter gestured disparagingly. "That lump of a crossguard looks hefty enough to put your back out."
It had in fact done exactly that, but Haldeth was too flustered to retort. That magic had made him uneasy in the first place was reason enough to be peevish. "What do you want, wizard?" The smith ducked the sorcerer's look of rebuke by raking the hair from his brow. An afterthought troubled him. "And you didn't waken me."
"Certainly not." Deceptively agreeable, Orame flicked one hand. The forge coals flared up into flame. "I wish you to dress yourself, master smith. In precisely one hour a midwife will come calling at the gate. Someone must be up to let her in."
Haldeth shot upright in his quilts and a rip in the patchwork loosed a puff of goose down in the draft. "Midwife? Who for? Ithariel's due to bear at spring equinox, not solstice. I know we've had blizzards, but hasn't your pack of conjurers bothered to look out and check the stars?"
Orame shrugged. "What does a star know? Whitestorm's daughter, now, she will be naming her own hour."
"Neth forsake us, not three months early." Haldeth swiped at a drifting bit of lint. He missed.
The feather shot aside in the rush of disturbed air, then angled through the space which should have been occupied by Orame. But the wizard had silently disappeared.
The smith muttered the rude phrase he should have thought of earlier; then he swung his feet from sweaty sheets and stood erect. His first step set him skidding on the haft of his forgotten knife. He escaped being skewered in a fall, but consoled himself without expletives. Shaken at last to straight thinking, Haldeth interpreted the only possible reason for Ithariel's labor to defy nature.
His heart missed a beat from comprehension.
When the curses came, they were each and every one for the Master of Whitestorm, and whatever lofty folly had sent him on a harebrained chase into the Hyadons to slay the Corrigon.
* * *
Korendir must have forsaken the ice cleft immediately after his departure; at least Dalon had been unable to overtake him, or find any trace of human passing as he set off to lead the first pitch. Behind came the grieving Fhingold, and Echend, who had given his Name, and intended to honor the significance of the deed whether he died in the attempt. Snow swirled off the heights, blindingly dense, and without any sign of abating. Visibility closed down to inches during gusts, when the white of blown drifts added to the flakes already falling. Conditions were too severe to locate a man alone on the mountain, Dalon knew this. He shifted grip on his axe and scrabbled under snowfall to find footholds. Pursuit of Korendir at this point was stubborn folly, with darkness nigh and not so much as a track to affirm their purpose. Yet when the team of three paused in a cranny to rotate leaders, no one suggested turning back.
"I say we climb past the Corrigon's lair, then traverse the open slope," suggested Echend. "He'll be there, if he hasn't fallen, and my feeling is that he won't."
"Not that one." Dalon slapped his glove in frustration. "But after dark, how will we know the place where the Corrigon nests?"
Fhingold snorted. "You can't smell it?" He scrubbed his knuckles over the ice which fleeced his eyebrows, that his frown of contempt not be wasted. Each gust since noon had carried the stink of putrescent meat; only a stone-headed human could miss it. But the soldier and the mountain born could hardly be ranked among the selfish, if they would venture up these rocks in a blizzard. The dwarf adjusted his harness and relented. "Anyway, Indlvarrn's notes were very clear. The ice near the Corrigon's lair will be streaked with frozen blood."
"How reassuring." Dalon glanced through falling snow to Echend, and received an unsmiling affirmation. "Off we go, then, to yon haven of stench in the clouds."
"Not funny, soldier." Echend flicked the belay line clear of his knees and shouldered forward to lead. "Not funny at all, when by dawn all our bones might be beak fodder."
"Hell,'-' muttered Fhingold as he jammed up his snow-crusted hood. "Better that than drink coward's broth with the rest of them."
Echend hauled himself with a chink and a grate of crampons into the teeth of the storm. "Hope you still feel that way later, dwarf."
Dalon waited while the diminutive, broad-shouldered bundle tackled the ice face ahead of him. "Just hope we're alive to feel anything at all. Damn Korendir for recklessness, I say we make him stand us to a barrel of jack cider. The night we get down off these peaks, I definitely want to get drunk."
Conversation died after that, as the climb demanded total concentration. Here the cleft was choked with icicles from melt streams, and springs which seeped from the rocks. The footing was rotten and undependable; Echend, leading, had to test and triple test the screws he set for his safety rope; the water had frozen in layers that faulted at the slightest bit of pressure. The only relief to offset the dangerous ascent was the fact that the storm began to slacken. Snowfall tapered off, and the gusts subsided to the barest whisper of a breeze. Clouds drifted clear of a sky vaulted aquamarine and citrine in the afterglow of sunset, and silence settled over the mountains. Uncanny and complete, it enfolded the climbers in comfortless isolation. Companions, warmth, and memories of family and home seemed more like a dream in the midst of waking nightmare.
The cleft narrowed. Coarse-grained slate closed until even Fhingold, who had labored in mines, cursed the confines and the dark. The climbers wedged between butting stone walls and clumsily fumbled off crampons. Here hands had to scratch to find holds, and ropes looped the ankles, or turned under bootsoles, a constant and much cursed impediment.
The chimney narrowed, showed the sky as a deepening slit of cobalt at their backs. Clothing scraped and tore on frost-split quartz, and even leather gloves sprouted holes like old socks at the fingertips. Dalon slipped and wedged his shin; minutes were lost as he tried to work free, an interval of worry made miserable by the overpowering taint of carrion that wafted down the shaft. Threaded through rotten meat came another smell, rank enough to make the stomach turn.
"Stinks like damned old gull spatters in here," muttered Echend, to whom things of the sea were thrice hated.
In process of jerking off sweat soggy
gloves with his teeth, Fhingold enunciated thickly, "TTiat has to mean we're close." The gloves ripped free. He added more clearly to Dalon, "Catch this and pass it under your knee."
A line uncoiled in the darkness and lashed the lowlands swordsman in the cheek. His voice echoed faintly up the shaft.
Gravely smiling, Fhingold waited until the blasphemies stopped. "Ready, Dal?"
A rustle issued from below. "Yes, may the frostbite shrivel your member at the roots."
Fhingold clamped the line around chapped palms and heaved something more than gently. Cloth tore, and DaIon's jammed knee scraped free.
"Hellfire, Fhin. Ye've ripped my breeks. Want me to perish of the draft?"
The dwarf slacked the line and set after restoring his gloves. "Watch the frostbite."
Bruised and scuffed and angrily determined, Dalon bound up his ripped leggings. "Next time you want a whore, I'll buy for us both. We'll see then who lasts the night."
Fhingold stifled a bark of laughter and scrambled to continue the ascent. "Got a wife who'd outlast us both, you giant. If she ever gets free of the mines. Five years, it's been, since my woman's seen the sun."
Which reminded them both of Korendir, somewhere ahead in his solitary quest to slay the Corrigon. The fissure cut deeper into the mountain, became yet more narrow and crooked. The climbers moved blind, shut off from any glimmer of sky. For what seemed hours their existence became limited by grunts of exertion, the scuff of boots over stone, and the bone-deep ache as exhausted muscles dragged the body from cranny to crevice to the skin-rasping stone of shallow ledges. Twice they blundered up shafts that ended in cul-de-sacs of blocked stone. Tortuously they doubled back, worked around, started over. Echend continued to lead because Fhingold had no space to scrape by to relieve him.
At long last the terrain opened up again. The clouds had cleared off the face. Mare's tails marked the air where the winds met the thermals off the valley, entangled with stars like sequins. Elsewhere the heavens were sapphire. Night enfolded the Hyadons and shadowed the saw-toothed cut where two stubborn men and one dwarf emerged.
The summit rose up in front of them, a serried pinnacle mantled under pristine ridges of snow.
Dalon, last out, crammed back his cap and scanned the vista with narrowed eyes. "Neth! What happened to the Corrigon's lair?"
At silence from the dwarf and the mountain born, he turned and surveyed the route mapped out by Indlvarrn. Beneath the cleft, the terrain fell steeply to form a gully, chiselled by the assaults of uncounted winters and seamed by prying frosts. The jutting shoulder of an outcrop cradled eddied snow, and also a log jam of timbers inconsistent with its setting. Like a festered scar underneath ran the cleft that had sheltered their ascent. Dalon shuddered. The shaft they had climbed in damp darkness had been no true cave at all. The crevice had been blocked, not by rock, or ice, nor even the frozen seep of spring waters, but by a jumble of horrific debris that had no place in the clean winds off the peaks.
The truth was shatteringly revealed: Indlvarm's route had sent them through a seam that cut directly beneath the Corrigon's nest.
Dalon recovered a shivering breath of air. Cold clawed his lungs, made his sinuses ache, and he clenched his teeth through an interval of outraged futility. "We've overshot," he gasped in an amazement that was half compounded with fright. The thought followed that Korendir must inevitably have done the same.
"Not there." Nervelessly practical, Fhingold scanned the upper slopes and pronounced them empty. "The man had to have known about the nest site. He probably never entered the cleft."
Echend could not help voicing the other possibility. "Unless he fell."
But all of them remembered crossing the chaotic vista of the plateau; evenings, exhausted from the day's trek, they had huddled against companions to share warmth that perpetually seemed inadequate. Each one recalled falling miserably asleep to the sound of voices, Korendir's and Indlvarrn's, exchanging Neth only cared what ideas through the purpled shadows before dawn. Dwarf guide and mercenary had debated every irrelevance from crop growing to treatises on experimental navigation. Echend did not read. Fhingold had been born a slave in the mines, and Dalon was solely a swordsman; only a fanatic or a scholar would have bothered to follow those overheard snatches of conversation. Too late, on a desolate upper scarp in the Hyadons, two men and one dwarf recalled that Indlvarrn Keth's get was at heart a hunter and forester. The deceit behind his ruse was unraveled painfully late, that in fact he had been revealing the route to the mercenary from White Rock Head; but the particulars had been shared with no one else.
"Our company would've balked on the Graley, else," Echend concluded for all of them. "Sky and storm, I'd have let them, if I'd guessed our path would cross within spit of a Corrigon's nest."
Only Fhingold stayed silent.
"You knew," Dalon accused suddenly. Sharp, even hostile with suspicion, he spun on his dwarf companion. "Your talk of blood-flecked ice was just lies. You could have warned us where the route led, all along!"
A fatalist to the end, Fhingold shrugged his resignation. "I'd hoped Korendir didn't know, and that we'd find him blundering about on the summit." As Echend stiffened, lividly offended, the dwarf added, "Neth's damnation on you, man, there was nothing at all we could do if we tried to go topside! One sword or four against the Corrigon quite simply adds up to suicide. For the freedom of my kind, and the survival of your children, I hoped we'd find our mercenary above the chimney. Then we might've talked him back to scare sense into those whining dogs below."
Echend snapped back a contradiction. "Not that one. Got a mind as set as a priest's tattoo, and never one thought of a compromise. Damn you, dwarf, we trusted you! Give us a line for rappel down to the nest, or I swear I'll draw steel and unwind your guts for the purpose."
"Too late," Fhingold said, and he pointed.
The waning moon had edged over the saddle above the Graley. Light polished the snowfields and snagged black swaths of shadow off buttressed escarpments; the wildest range of the Hyadons stood revealed in unspoiled splendor, except where oiled steel flashed reflection and vanished into dark. Guided by that anomaly, and by Fhingold's dwarvish eyesight, Dalon and Echend could just make out a figure crouched on the face. Korendir had discarded his crampons at the edge of the ice. His sable jacket blended almost invisibly with the slate which jutted beneath the monster's eyrie. Dalon drew breath to argue that they still might have time to descend when steel flashed again. Both men saw the Master of Whitestorm arch out over windless air, set his foot, and cock his crossbow.
Moonlight fell also on jumbled timbers, reeking and blackened with spills of old blood. It silvered splinters of white that were the bones of countless kills, and shone also in eyes like faceted quartz, but vicious, and deathly cruel. The Corrigon raised its head. Horny scales glimmered in crescents as, watchful, its hooked beak turned toward the glint of metal on the slope that abutted its nest.
"Almighty Neth," breathed Dalon.
Echend fumbled after the amulet he wore strapped to his wrist.
Fhingold did nothing but stare, heartbroken, for upon the frailty of one man rested the freedom of his wife and race. To watch that hope die was worse than any loss he could contemplate.
Korendir stared upward into the ice-splinter gaze of the Corrigon. If he trembled, no man was near enough to see. The wire-wrapped string of his crossbow caught on the trigger latch with a clear, metallic ping.
The Corrigon ruffled its crest feathers. It bobbed once, then unfurled black wings with a gusty rush of air. Its terrible cry shivered over the valley as it thrust horned legs and launched aloft. The twenty-span breadth of its primaries raised gusts that plumed the drifts; one beat, two, and it cleared the ridge. Korendir was lost in whipping drafts of blown snow. Clothed in a nightmare grace, the adversary he swore to destroy soared and banked in a tight arc, then drove direct for his position, a scythe that carved downward to kill. The moon etched scales and feathers with a beauty that had no mercy
, as sword-sharp talons rose to rake and impale.
That moment, Korendir notched the bolt; one had time to recall that although he seldom smiled, he never failed to be courteous. He endured through what seemed the impossible by exhibiting courage that daunted, and then most pitilessly inspired. He dealt both life and death with a precision that repeatedly seemed inhuman, and yet, they all knew—the mountains stripped a man to his naked, most grasping self—Korendir did not risk for fame. He did not belittle with his competence; he had no pride in him at all. Only Echend had seen him in his chosen setting, with wife and son in the home left behind at Whitestorm; almost, the mountain born had missed the compassion that shaped the man. Nearly too late he had offered Name, only to have his honor forsworn by the misdirected mercy of a dwarf.
Dalon wept, shattered to shame by recognition. The manhood he had earned on the Graley, here in the Hyadons seemed dwindled to insignificance by the act of one fool with a crossbow.
For the breast of the monster offered no target. No steel-tipped quarrel ever forged could pierce those ungodly scales. Korendir endured, perhaps hoping for opening to fire into the softer tissue beneath the wing; but even an accurate shot to the heart could not possibly kill in time. The mercenary would be plucked from the rock and skewered, and not even miracle might save him.
In the instant the Corrigon swooped, Fhingold alone managed speech. Impelled beyond grief for kinsfolk still shackled in slavery, he howled his abject despair. "What are my people, and the children of Arrax, to be worth such sacrifice as this?"
His cry rang out over snowfields, swelled by a sorrow that shattered Neth's most perfect quiet. Distracted, the Corrigon turned its head.
Korendir squeezed his trigger. The crossbow fired with a whap and a hiss of taut cable through air. The bolt leapt out, a needle against the blue dark of the abyss.