XXXII. Widow’s Gauntlet
IF THE NOSE DID NOT NUMB TO THE SMELL OF THE POACHER’S CONCOCTION, THE KERRIES ALSO FOUND THE ODOUR REPELLENT. THE FEW THAT sailed down to size up the horses flapped and circled, and hissed plumes of smoke, but did not attack. Even with daylight blunting their senses, the breeze of their passage whipped overhead with dauntless frequency. Their hazing inspection reduced Anja to anxious silence. The creatures had hungry, reptilian eyes, and the sliced air fluted over their scales like a knife’s edge parting a gale wind.
Tucked under the shade of a leaning boulder, while the horses grazed at the verge of a marsh, Anja cleared her raw throat, then wiped welling eyes with the back of a grimy wrist. The hair she had neatly rebound that morning flew in torn wisps at her temples, with her braid dried into a shrunken snarl from the morning’s harrowing immersion. Dirty, scraped, and miserable with her own indescribable stench, the princess paused and looked back. The weight of the moment forced her to acknowledge the inspired scope of her victory.
The rickle of ledges at the head of the valley loomed upwards, sliced by the rebounding jet of the falls. Seen from below, the descent seemed to hold more beauty than hazard, spread like a tapestry embellished with gold thread under the fall of noon sunlight. Diminished with distance, the stark memory faded, of the harrowing, steep cliff, and the uncertain footing where the rock face had cracked from seasons of ice melt and frost. That all the horses had emerged unscathed seemed the work of a given miracle.
The accomplishment did not leave Mykkael complacent. He stood vigilant guard beside his strung bow, his hands busy doctoring arrows. Having scrounged for the copper-laced rock he required, he was shaving crumbles of verdigris ore into pine pitch, then moulding a layer of the particulate gum on to the shafts behind each flanged point. Although he seemed engrossed, a predatory tension infused his calm bearing, as thoughtlessly natural as breathing. A man who walked free through hostile territory, he recorded the play of the air through his skin, and attended the rasp of each insect and frog.
Mykkael did not look tired or hurt, only dangerous as the held spear that could be cast at an instant’s notice. Anja strove to encompass that elusive awareness. Tested by her own uncertainty, she tried to measure the volatile nature of a spirit who could not be contained or predicted. She studied the living man, and encountered a presence, a potential whose imprint on the world could not be known through its state of pent stillness. The warrior himself could not be understood. His power could not be analysed. He could only be recognized by his impact, as movement and action begat consequence.
Anja ached to embrace that self-aware vitality. She desired the touch that would describe Mykkael’s being with the same passion that drove her to try to capture the essence of a falcon within a written line of poetry.
The princess observed the transition as the bearing intensity of her regard hooked that superlatively tuned self-awareness. Mykkael raised his head. An inquiring gaze flickered over her. ‘Your Grace?’
Words fell too far short of the question her burdened thoughts sought to express. As the shadow of another passing kerrie raked over the sunlit marsh, Anja blurted, ‘Another man standing here with a bow would think of nothing but slaughtering monsters.’
Mykkael smiled. ‘Because he could? Because they exist? Because they pose the possibility of inflicting a terrible death?’ He slid his finished arrow back into the quiver, then reached for another shaft. ‘An act made in fear is not the same thing as an action taken for necessity.’ He regarded the kerrie, now past their position, as it banked with a crack of spread wings and whipped its streaming, kite tail to sweep over their vantage again. ‘That creature is curious. It is also a predator, testing itself against the unknown. In that respect, the beast and I understand each other quite well.’
‘I don’t,’ Anja said with wretched simplicity.
Mykkael thumbed up another dab of pitch, then set to with the knife and the ore. ‘That is why you are a princess, and I am a man with a sword.’ The arrow point flashed as he turned the shaft between his deft hands. Though he could have retreated into his busyness, he chose not to insult her intelligence.
‘The thread of intent is a moving tapestry between me and that deadly creature. If the kerrie chooses to strike, then it dies, or I will. That is the certainty. Today, I am your defender, and it is the hunter. It must make the first move. That is the order I choose to enact, an important truth to remember. The attacker makes his choice subject to mine. If I know this, then I hold the clear-cut advantage, because I am always prepared. Response is more powerful in the barqui’ino mind, because it places the limitless potential of passive possibility foremost.’
He glanced at her sidelong. Her perplexity raised his quiet smile. ‘Your sire rules. He has charged me to act, even kill, as your protector. My strength, my choice, my will, arise in answer to his Majesty’s demand. Here is the paradox. I am the weapon a king has taken to hand, yet I am not his to possess. My power to act in his name is not his. I know this. He may not. Or he might forget, at his peril. Therefore, the gift of my oath to serve enacts the potential for dangerous consequence. If I misuse his Majesty’s trust, the earned debt is entirely mine. If he misdirects me, there could be a dreadful cost. The balance becomes mine to guard, do you see? I choose when to strike or when to stand upon mercy’
Anja shivered as the shadowing kerrie crossed between her and the sun. ‘You stand upon mercy, more often than not.’
Mykkael’s smile vanished. ‘I am barqui’ino-trained. When I act, death follows. Mine, or your attacker’s, that is the destructive certainty.’ He slid the doctored arrow back into the quiver, then reached in fluid grace for another. ‘Death has no repeal. It is a brute ending that leaves us the legacy of an inscrutable silence. Therefore, I understand the voice of mercy very well.’
The ruler in fact was not truly the master, and the ethic of choice stood or fell by the hand that commanded the sword. Anja regarded the desert-bred captain before her, whose strength and restraint had just redefined her with a mirror’s unflinching honesty. She understood, watching him, that she would not bear a crown the same way, ever again.
She shivered, eyes shut. When she recovered, she encountered Mykkael’s gaze, perhaps measuring. She was not brave in that moment, only daring. Like the kerries, curiosity ventured the question. ‘What do you see?’
A genuine amusement softened his face. Yet whatever he might have said became lost as his skin ruffled up into gooseflesh.
‘Witch thought!’ she cried. ‘You’re having a vision?’
Mykkael managed to nod.
Eyes locked to his, Anja observed the shift as his awareness plunged into a depth beyond conscious reason. His mind went elsewhere, even as the trained pitch of his bodily reflex rose to the trembling forefront. Instinct warned against trying to touch him. Poised in a space only his mind could see, suspended above the abyss, he closed ready fingers over his sword hilt…
Sergeant Jedrey strode forward, shouting, unable to stop the silk-clad volunteers who had challenged his cordon. The women broke through and invaded the courtyard of Dedorth’s observatory before Devall’s exasperated marshal could gather his wits to intervene. Ahead of both men and their flummoxed officers, the enormous matron who had stymied the crossbowmen beckoned to her female colleagues.
‘Ladies, act now!’
Each woman bearing a charity basket bent and whipped off the cover. Beside them, veiled collaborators whisked out flint and steel, striking live sparks to the contents. Flame blossomed. The fuel just ignited was not baked bread, but fronds of green cedar. The smoke billowed into a spreading haze that engulfed the array of armed men. Some of them coughed. Irate expressions transformed into startlement, as though some of the garrison soldiers were slapped into a startled awakening. Others backed away from the fumes as though wary. Foremost among these were the Prince of Devall’s smartly appointed honour guards.
Yet their retreat became blocked from behind. The canvas covers masking five wagons unfurled to reveal a hidden contingent of soldiers rolled in from the Lowergate garrison. Others, salted into the ranks with the women, tore away their concealing white veils.
Smoke drifted, relentless, and immersed Devall’s men. The contact touched off a hideous change, as crossbows fell from hands transformed into ravening claws, and faces dissolved into the flanged aspect of minions. Shouting erupted among Sessalie’s guard. Before their startled, horrified eyes, winged monstrosities emerged out of human concealment, and shrugged off their false covering of armour and clothes. Man and monster closed into rending conflict, while the women flung baskets of blazing evergreen against the demonic attack. Claws raked. Teeth closed. Bloody mayhem ensued. The raw screams of the dying shattered the morning, as from Dedorth’s tower, the first flight of Vensic’s copper-tipped arrows hissed down in a vengeful swarm…
Mykkael’s vision broke, unstrung by the disruptive awareness of Anja’s rising alarm.
‘What’s happened?’ The princess’s frantic gaze searched his face. ‘Captain, what did you see?’
The gyrating spin of turned senses required a moment to reorient. Mykkael shivered, unable to subdue his raw prickle of gooseflesh. Worse, the low thrum of his warded sword poured ranging chills down his spine. He sensed the close pressure as Perincar’s geometry tightened down like a seal on the unseen air. Set under the protection’s resharpened awareness, Anja’s distress snapped like sparks through his unsettled nerves.
His onslaught of witch thought still bled chaotic images across his unshielded mind. His immediate surroundings seemed overlaid by a haze of run blood, punched through by the scream of copper-tipped arrows striking targets of corrupted flesh. Juxtaposed on these gleanings, he beheld Anja’s struggle to handle a destiny outside her familiar experience.
‘What did you see?’ Still the princess, she showed her brave heart, and her selflessness. ‘Has Sessalie fallen in my absence?’
‘No conquest, not yet.’ Mykkael qualified with delicate care. ‘I glimpsed fighting, some bloodshed. A courageous attack by your sire’s subjects has forced the sorcerer’s minions to unmask.’
‘Powers defend us!’ Anja’s ringing cry silenced the noontide drone of the insects. ‘Are you telling me there are more shape-changers?’
‘Minions, surely. Shape-changers? I think so, though how many, I cannot guess.’ Mykkael sensed mounting peril in the roused force of his wards. Yet he dared not voice the extent of the truth, that all of the High Prince of Devall’s armed guard had become hideously corrupted.
‘Your people have been resourcefully staunch,’ he assured her. ‘They have countered the threat of subjugation for a time. The sorcerer has not yet seized his sure foothold to lay down grounding power in Sessalie. He must still work his lines of attack over distance. But if his immediate effort is foiled, his invasion is far from disarmed. A setback against an assault by cold sorcery is not a long-term defeat.’
‘This foothold,’ Anja ventured. ‘If the enemy achieves his triumph, what then?’
Mykkael shut his eyes. Honesty this time came sharpened by grief: the penalty exacted by a high prince’s vain pride, and the glory and grace of the Efandi culture cast into desolate ruin. ‘If Sessalie falls under the heel of this evil? A portal will be opened into the world,’ he admitted, ‘a hot connection to power that will serve to expand the demon’s reach.’ Cedar smoke, simples fashioned of copper and salt—the small charms and banishments would all cease to work. A whole kingdom would become stripped defenceless. The rock and soil that sustained earthly life would be claimed and for ever suborned by the powers of the unseen.
Anja clasped her scraped hands. ‘My people are worthy of this adversary. I have to believe their strength can prevail, no matter the odds set against them.’
Mykkael inclined his head, bereft of encouragement as the pain of the moment shattered and reshaped this young, untried spirit with the cruel force of a hammer. Anja refused despair. She stood upon character, though her inexperienced hands were left empty. Shorn of all power, all comforts, all safety, she embraced understanding of what her role meant, as a royal. There and then, for no hope of personal gain, she shouldered the gift of a people’s raw courage. ‘Promise me, Mykkael! No matter what weakness should overtake me, never let me fall short.’
The captain could do nothing else except bow to her greatness. ‘Your Grace, you shall bear my service.’ He accepted her plea to stand guard in tribute, honouring the commitment that acknowledged the fact she was no more than human, and fallible.
‘No choice, now, Princess. We have to press through.’ Mykkael foresaw with pernicious clarity. First-hand, he had battled the miserable aftermath when the heart of a demon’s creche became hazed. He had walked through the deadly entrapments, as desperation and wrecked plans turned the fell being’s bound sorcerer to atrocities born out of rage. Inevitably, the brunt must fall upon Anja. Her freedom now posed the most urgent impediment to securing her kingdom in long-term conquest.
The wards Mykkael carried did not subside, but flared and pressed at his senses, set in flux by the rise of unnatural currents. The ground underfoot no longer felt safe, and the salt packet confining the shape-changer’s trapped essence seemed to burn like a coal of liability. Spurred on by unease, Mykkael sheathed his knife. He bundled his unfinished arrows into a thong tie, and packed them back into his quiver. ‘Whistle for your horses, your Grace. We can do little but run fast and far, before fresh pursuit overtakes us.’
Remounted at speed, the princess and Mykkael left the boulder-strewn hollow that cradled the marsh. The horses abandoned the grass with reluctance, yet Anja drove them on firmly. Kasminna accepted the hurried trot asked of her with a head-shaking fuss. Fouzette trailed her, resigned, while Mykkael rousted the small band from the rear. He handled Vashni with an expert touch, using herdsman’s yips to turn Stormfront’s efforts to wheel and break free, with Covette as his agile accomplice.
Down Hell’s Chasm they pressed, while the overhead sun branded scalding light over the towering cliffs. Amid that vast setting, stalked by circling kerries, the puny endeavour of two human riders seemed an act of abject futility. Progress was tortuous, with the scrambling clatter of the horses’ strides swallowed by reaching silence. Their cast shadows flowed like spilled ink beneath them, leaving no mark to commemorate the princess who challenged the impossible on behalf of her threatened kingdom.
Mykkael forced the pace. Confronted by his charge’s straight back, and a hardship that strained her sweet-natured intelligence, he could do no less, though exigency pained him. He could not evade the sorrowful cost, as harsh striving wore down and destroyed her young woman’s innocence and beauty. Entrusted to temper her steel-clad resolve, he could not back down. At each stride, through each test of hostile terrain, he endured the price of his warrior’s stewardship: of Anja’s bright hair whipped into sad snarls, and the outrage to her unspoiled flesh, abraded to blistered exhaustion.
The princess had invoked the cruel burden of his service, with her survival pledged beyond compromise. Sessalie’s populace rode on the balance, as well as the lives of who knew how many more innocents who inhabited the lands surrounding this kingdom’s borders. The charge Mykkael guarded was one unformed girl, when a sorcerer run rampant into new territory held the shattering potential to destroy lives by the countless thousands.
No less than the excellence of all that he was demanded that this one woman should enact the full forfeit for the cause of the hapless many. Mykkael ached for necessity. As the forged sword must perform its harsh purpose, oh, he knew: he must force this proud princess to expend all her resource without thought of mercy or quarter.
Again, as he had done for Prince Al-Syn’s daughter, he rose to the bitter, long odds. Although the ordeal yet to come should break Anja, heart or mind, he still must carry forward. His, the task to secure the unbroken integrity of her royal inheritance. The consequences were irrevocable, should he fail. If Anja and the captive remains of the minion fashioned from Prince Kailen’s spirit were not brought under the arcane protection of a learned vizier, or a shaman, Sessalie’s ground would lie open to conquest beyond mortal hope of redemption.
Mykkael denied the raw cry of his grief. Down the stone throat of Hell’s Chasm, he pressured the horses to trot, where even a walk was imprudent. He walked, edging in zigzags over the unsafe, stepped ledges, where reason insisted no living horse should be risked. Anja cringed for their hazard. Sometimes, choked silent, she wept for the sacrifice asked of the animals, again and again, with no pause for praise or acknowledgement. Mykkael dared not slacken. He sat Vashni, cranked to a vigilance that pitched the grey into snorting, volatile tension. The demanding passage forbade conversation. Anja stayed game. Her unflagging spirit matched every demand as the way wended through arched rock, and seamed cliff, and ravine. Peril attended their precarious course over steep slopes and smashed boulders. Other times, they ploughed through sucking mud, where the melt-fed springs sluiced off the rock face and plumed in white sheets towards the flume.
Later, their path hugged the base of the cliffs, streaked with guano and heaped with the fly-buzzing bones dropped from the active kerrie roosts. While crossing one such unsavoury midden, hard under the site of a hatchery, Mykkael saw a kerrie fly in with a stunned buck gripped in its talons. The massive claws had drawn no blood, but cradled the unmarked prey in full flight with a chilling delicacy.
‘Hunt training, for the young,’ Anja explained, a quaver struck through her voice. ‘As the hatchlings grow hardened beaks and sharp claws, the parents fetch them live game. Our foresters say the practice awakens the instinct to chase and kill.’ While the horses picked their way over the noisome rubble of stripped carcasses, the princess shuddered. ‘That deer will suffer, torn and shredded as the inexperienced nestlings indulge their first frenzy of bloodlust. This is the season we’re apt to lose calves from the alpine pastures.’
The captain rode, war-wary, through the next narrows. Horrid as the habits of kerries might be, the creatures were straightforward predators. Their killing was clean beside the vile practice enacted by demon-bound sorcery. Mykkael turned an uneasy glance to the sky, noted the lowering sun, and once again pushed the pace.
Farther on, they had to coax the balked horses over a natural stone bridge spanning the cleft of a gorge. The structure sheared the winds into dissonance. Gusts wailed like damned souls through the vast chains of caverns, wrought by the might of forgotten cataclysm. The scree of smashed granite on the far side turned their course back down slope towards the flume. Here, granite boulders were jumbled like knucklebones, doused by flung spray as the current slammed through the serpentine channel alongside.
Always Mykkael’s urgency pressed extreme limits. If the horses were fit and responsive through hardship, their agility became sorely tested. Walk or trot, they were constantly harried. Willing, they scrambled over the rough obstacles, disregarding their wiser instincts to fare over crumbling ledges, or creeping through fields of unstable boulders only safe for a sure-footed mule. The animals answered their training. Dauntless, they trusted their riders to guide them around the quicksands of the sink pools, while swooping kerries shadowed their progress, blowing fires that hazed them to trembling.
If Mykkael endured the snatched anguish of witch thoughts, showing wounded and dead back in Sessalie, Anja rode with her heart-stopping fear. She was horsewoman enough to perceive every hazard. One sliding misstep would end in disaster. She could give her brave animals nothing else beyond hoarse words of encouragement. She stroked Kasminna’s sweat-soaked neck, raked over by chills as her thoughts grappled the horror of the less tangible menace that stalked her.
Time and again, Mykkael watched her falter. He measured each battle through desperate uncertainty, each bout to curb shaken nerves. She trusted he would not expend horseflesh needlessly. Despite her faith that his handling was imperative, the incessant demand could not turn her nature to callousness. The harsh use of her wicket teams distressed her far more than her own exhausted discomfort.
Whether the princess’s profound quiet was caused by fatigued stupor, or whether she grasped his reluctance to outline the dangers that had forced their flight down Hell’s Chasm, Mykkael could not guess. No reward existed in this terrible place for the virtue of Anja’s resiliency. He brought up the rear, ever vigilant, while her fragile determination relied on his guidance, and surmounted the gruelling course, hour upon wearing hour.
Through the next pause to water at a spring, the princess caught him appraising her silenced anxiety. She sat her mare with hunched shoulders, unable to suppress her visceral flinch as a kerrie razed overhead. Buffeted by the breeze of its passage, the horses snorted and sidled, until she could no longer ignore her crowding suspicion. ‘The trap scent’s wearing off as the animals sweat.’
Mykkael nodded. He had noted the peril long since. ‘We must extend the supply as long as we can.’
Anja assessed his hardened resolve. ‘Blinding glory! What are you saying? We’re not stopping at dusk?’
Understanding flooded Mykkael, sharpened by cruel awareness, that she had pitched herself to endure for only that long. She counted each breath and pushed forward, sustained by that promise of respite. A false hope he must inevitably tear down, as the sun sank past the horizon. There, courage failed him. He gave her the kinder silence of ambiguity, his distress diverted into a needless check on his bow and blade weapons. Yet even that resolute pretence of calm fuelled the princess’s rising unease. In the end, her imploring green eyes forced his honesty. ‘Your Grace,’ he admitted, ‘there can be no question. A pause at this point would kill us.’
‘What do you know?’ Anja whispered. ‘What have you seen?’
Lady Shai, lying dead of a Devall man’s sword thrust. The glass edge of that sorrow, he absorbed, beyond speech. ‘Your Grace. We will face what occurs one obstacle at a time. To do otherwise would exhaust you with worry’
Anja wavered, overdrawn by stark weariness as she grasped the fact that nightfall was not going to bring surcease. ‘Not knowing is better?’
‘But Princess, you do know.’ Leashed by a patience he realized must infuriate her, Mykkael reached out and caught Fouzette’s lead as the mare raised her dripping muzzle. He edged the stolid bay to one side to clear the bank for the black gelding. ‘The next step is always before us, your Grace. Watch how you place your feet. Listen to what your horse tells you. Also, don’t forget to give thanks for the sun. We could be making this passage under a drenching downpour. Without the blessing of today’s clear sky, trap scent would be useless, and I could not rely on the bow.’
Fouzette stood, head drooping, her torn leg wrap oozing fresh blood. Neither was Anja unscathed. She had weeping sores on her knees. Mykkael saw the telltale stains on her breeches as she freed the stirrups to stretch her cramped calves. The strained set to her back would be due to pained hips from too many hours astride. His experienced eye read every sorrowful ache, as her mare shifted footing beneath her.
Although Anja made no complaint for herself, Mykkael braced himself, ready. The terror and the relentless uncertainty must erupt into flashpoint rebellion. Confronted, each step, by Fouzette’s tortured pain, Anja wrestled emotions her pressed resource could not sustain. Snapped at last by the cruelty, that the demonic assault that had unstrung her life must also savage her horses, she struck out in jagged despair.
‘You think you’ll win through this by the use of your weapons?’
‘I don’t know what I can, or cannot do,’ Mykkael admitted, forthright. He regarded her closely. No anger showed in his face or his bearing. ‘Nor will you, Princess, except through hindsight. If I counted the times I should have met death, I would have no joy left for living.’
Anja swallowed, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, Captain.’
He nodded. ‘Leave it there, shall we? There’s no foolishness in being afraid, or tired, or upset by distress or frustration. You can hurt with anger for your horses’ suffering. Just don’t lie to yourself. The emotion you choke when you think yourself helpless always turns in the hand. The original feeling that would prompt you to look for new resource becomes bottled, and sours to rage that doesn’t assist your survival.’
Anja wiped her damp cheek on her sleeve cuff. ‘Barqui’ino philosophy?’
Mykkael returned a rueful shake of his head. ‘Experience.’ Most lately, a month spent flat on his back, raving with fever from a septic wound in his knee. His wry smile followed. ‘The hard school that tends to repeat itself each time the lesson is forgotten. Your Grace, shall we ride from this place, and frustrate a few hungry kerries?’
Anja nodded. Beaten wordless, she gathered up her dropped reins.
The trial resumed, while the afternoon shadows lengthened. The cliff walls converged, once again narrowed down to a slit. Trot, walk, then trot on again, that rhythm interrupted by uncertain terrain, or by the snatched pauses to let the overblown horses recover their wind and heart rate. Worn himself, Mykkael held the pace without mercy. His sword hilt continued to whisper in warning. His viziers’ tattoo plagued him also, raising prickles over his scalp. He rode, jarred by fragments of witch thought: of flying things with sharp claws and red eyes; of women who shed grieving tears for their dead. He glimpsed Benj, snoring drunk with his feet propped on a basket, and saw Mirag’s tight-lipped anxiety for the life of a son still in jeopardy. He felt the raw fire of Taskin’s balked rage, to be strapped in bandaging and unable to stand in armed defence of his king.
The whoosh of a passing kerrie ripped Mykkael back to focused awareness. He surveyed the surrounding country, a stepped vista of rock now turning shadowed and grim as the afternoon fled. Here, the cliff walls choked the channel down to a thundering millrace of foam. Buffeting gusts whistled through the pinched gap, and all but crippled his hearing.
The melodious note of the baying hound was almost missed in the tumult.
‘Halt,’ Mykkael said. ‘Now!’ His grip on Vashni’s nose rope tightened. He had the unslung bow already in hand by the time Anja reined in beside him.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked the princess. ‘Is there trouble?’
Mykkael withheld direct answer. A crawling grue chased over his skin, provoked by his war-sharpened senses. ‘Hold, Princess, very still. Stay at my back. For your life’s sake, I beg you, don’t move.’
He felt her unblinking stare, then her sharp intake of breath. She had noticed the hound. The baying cry was clearer, now, and bearing down by the moment.
Mykkael raised the bow, notching one of the ore-treated arrows from the quiver clipped at his flank. ‘Not ours,’ he whispered. No mortal dog could have crossed the flume’s current, or escaped the predation of the chasm’s swarming kerries. Smooth, silent, deadly, Mykkael slipped off Vashni’s back. He secured his footing on the slick rock, fingers pinched to his strung arrow. ‘Stand fast, your Grace.’
He steeled his resolve, stilled his poised mind, then let go into barqui’ino awareness.
Sunlight still flooded the open country behind, butter-yellow against the twilit gash carved through the cliffs by the watercourse. Mykkael watched that opening. Soon enough, he sighted the hound, an abomination clad in Dalshie’s black-and-tan body. The creature bounded down their backtrail with a heartbreaking show of exuberance. Where the man would have grieved for Benj’s lost hound, inflexible training prevailed. The warrior raised and sighted his bow. Taut-nerved and silent, he waited.
The hound drove through the last of the open ground and entered the gloom of the narrows. Her blunt claws clicked on stone. Rock to rock, she sniffed and unravelled their scent. Her yawling cries as she gave tongue rebounded into the gorge. Through her oncoming noise, Mykkael noted Anja’s rushed breathing. He felt the low vibrations in his sword shift upwards, humming into a whine as the wards shrilled an urgent warning. He drew. And still waited.
Whatever abomination wore the dog’s flesh, it locked instantly on to his movement. Yapping with canine excitement, it raced in, tongue lolling, and white-tipped tail flagging welcome.
Mykkael held. The drawn bow etched a stilled line in the air. The arrow’s tip seemed a nail fixed in time, pinning the moment in hesitation.
And the hound came. Barrelling through the gulch, leaping pooled spray and wet boulders, she bore down on the bunched horses. Closer, one saw the foam dashed from her muzzle. Closer still, one noted her eyes were vacant and utterly mad.
Vashni whuffed a hackled snort. Anja clamped back a whimper of terror, while the unnatural hound bounded nearer, a slavering parody of Benj’s beloved Dalshie.
And still Mykkael held. He might have been stone, devoid of lifeblood and reaction.
Anja cried out, her fear overwhelming. As the ensorcelled creature raced towards her, she had no means to know whether her defender had been just as dangerously beguiled. Stilled as though ensnared by a spell, Mykkael held his drawn bow, but did not release.
‘Blinding glory, Captain!’
The hound scrabbled nearer. Her hurtling rush was now almost on top of them. She coiled her hindquarters and sprang on to the ledge not five strides from Mykkael’s set stance.
The warding invoked by the viziers’ tattoo exploded. A blue ring of light sliced through the senses like the cut of a tempered blade. The eruption signalled Mykkael’s chosen moment. His aimed arrow flew, then vanished across the raised line of active power.
The shaft struck its mark. Beyond that dazzling shower of light, something shrieked. The quavering cry raised the hair at the nape, and wrung the shocked mind into nightmare.
Then the bright curtain of wardings ripped out, doused like a gale-blown candle. The shot hound writhed on the rocks in her death throes, piteously whimpering, the shaft struck clean through her heart.
‘Don’t move,’ Mykkael whispered. ‘Your Grace, I implore you, stand strong.’
Shaking, her clammy hands clenched to the rein to restrain Kasminna’s pawing unease, Anja ached with pity. Though she shut her eyes, no effort could silence the sound of the hound’s dreadful torment.
‘Captain! Show mercy, I beg you.’ Her compassionate instinct cried out to dismount. She had taken game in the hunt too many times to condone the needless suffering of any wounded creature.
‘That’s no dog!’ Mykkael lashed in reprimand.
His sword had not quieted. His adamance enforced the hideous fact, that the death which should follow his fatally placed shaft was taking abnormally long.