XXXIII. Chasm
MYKKAEL DID NOT TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE WRITHING HOUND, STRUGGLING WITH DESPERATE, MORTAL PAIN THAT DID NOT BRING THE surcease of death. To Anja, without turning, he said, ‘Dismount, Princess, now. Change horses. Quickly!’
He tracked each sound to ensure she obeyed him: the chafe of her clothing as she slid from her saddle, then the tap as her soles touched on to firm ground. Her shuffling step bespoke her sore muscles, a setback that must disadvantage the speed of her reflexes.
‘Can you do nothing to ease that hound’s suffering?’ she pleaded, as her tired hands fumbled with girth buckles.
Mykkael jerked his head, no. ‘Much too dangerous.’ He would have to cut out the hound’s heart, if he could, to ensure the long curse that burned through its corrupt flesh would stay stunned and captive to copper. Yet the near threat of danger did not relent. The shaman’s mark in his sword hilt stayed active. Its keening note razed through his bones, a clear warning the hound just dispatched was no more than the precursor blazing the trail. Something far worse would be following.
‘Ready a fresh horse for me to ride,’ Mykkael said, thankful his voice kept the semblance of calm. ‘Choose carefully, Princess. Also, tie the bundles Fouzette’s bearing on to Kasminna.’
The hound’s piteous agony did not subside. Her whimpering cries drove Anja to shivering fury. ‘Why can’t you serve her the mercy stroke, Captain? I have to know!’
‘Princess!’ Mykkael snapped, his urgency knife-edged. ‘Change mounts. Do it now!‘
He dared not look aside to insist that she hear him. Bow in hand, arrows ready, he watched like a hawk down their back trail. The redoubled pressure of his viziers’ tattoo tightened the skin at his nape. He put aside grief, every harrowing memory. His run through Efandi left too many hard lessons. Time did not permit speech. The forces that now used the hound for a beacon had no word in their language for mercy.
Quivering on the held edge of release, immersed in barqui’ino awareness, Mykkael stood guard. He chafed through each moment, as Anja transferred the surcingle and bundles, then saddled and mounted Covette. Her selection was wise. The little chestnut had the surest feet. Endurance was bred into the mare’s desert lineage, making her the least likely to fail under stress and privation.
‘I’ve tied your reins on to Stormfront’s headstall,’ the princess stated, subdued. ‘He’s ready to go when you are.’
‘Now.’ Mykkael spun with clipped haste. He accepted her cherished black gelding who was, yet again, the best choice. Stormfront had the strength to carry two riders, matched by the fire and heart of a fighter. The affray at the falls had well tested his mettle. He could be forced to stand his ground through the bloodshed and fury of battle.
Bow still in hand, Mykkael settled astride. He heard Anja’s hissed intake of breath, and said, very softly, ‘I know.’
He had seen them already: a swarm of black specks peppered the sky beyond the gap. Winged creatures of any kind must spell trouble. Large eagles avoided the Widow’s Gauntlet, and kerries by their contentious nature did not flock. ‘We have to run, Princess. This site is too open and can’t be defended.’
Anja wheeled Covette, all her arguments silenced. She dug in her heels, pitched the chestnut to a canter over slippery rock, while Mykkael dispatched hurried instructions. ‘Fouzette can’t withstand this. She’ll fall behind. There can be mercy for her, but if so, you have to speak now.’
Anja turned her head. Her eyes showed stark horror. ‘An arrow?’
Mykkael nodded. No kindness could lighten unbending necessity. ‘One treated with copper into the heart.’ He still carried dart poison. ‘I can make the shot painless. She will drop fast, and no sorcery I know of will raise her.’
The tears spilled, whipped down Anja’s cheeks by the breeze of the chestnut mare’s passage. ‘I can’t hold her head?’
‘No.’ Mykkael saw no margin for compromise. ‘Stop here, we die with her.’ He must act, regardless. Yet the trust he preferred at all costs to preserve now relied on her willing consent. ‘Don’t look, Anja!’ as she twisted in her saddle for a desperate glance back.
Fouzette was already trailing, and the wards’ ringing pressure informed well enough: the sorcerer’s airborne sortie would be gaining.
Mykkael balanced Stormfront to effect intervention, but in the end, required no breach of integrity. Those slim, girlish shoulders quivered just once. The reply, when it came, was bravely regal, and delivered with clarity through the tumult as the horses thundered headlong down the narrows. ‘Very well, Captain. If Fouzette must die, I would have you spare her from suffering.’
‘Don’t watch, Anja.’ The captain’s remonstrance this time came gentle, as he undertook the ugly task at grim speed, and treated the requisite arrow.
Mykkael dropped Stormfront back, chose his shot and his moment. The bow sang just once. The arrow arched out at point-blank range. The sturdy bay whose steadfast nature had thrice spared them, and whose bravery had stood down a kerrie’s assault, missed her stride. She pitched out of balance as her forelegs buckled, but not on to cruel stone. Mykkael had not missed his timing. Fouzette crumpled into the foaming race of the flume, a more kindly embrace in fatality. Her sweated, dark coat melded into the spray. A rolled eye sought the bank in heartbreaking reproach. Then the current swallowed her under.
Vashni now ran bereft of his teammate. Mykkael slapped his grey rump. He used force as he must, and drove the flightier gelding ahead, while the animal’s repeated, desolate neighs cast echoes between the rock cliffs.
His distress caused Anja to break discipline and glance back. Yet by then, there was no sign of trauma to see. The chasm was empty, her stout mare no more than a memory.
The narrows closed down to a chill, windy slit, overhung by the dirtied, aqua ice squeezed aside by the Howduin glaciers. Enormous blocks had sheared away, sometimes wedged between the walls of the cleft, where melt and weather carved hanging arches fringed with icicles, and dulled light scattered through glazings of pane ice. In these narrows, the flume rumbled and splashed, fouled with stones and mud as fragments upslope gave way and tumbled more substantial debris into avalanche.
Along with the hazards of slick stone and boulders, the horses now contended with frozen ground. They picked through splintered deadfalls, and the granular patches of snow that lingered in the deep recesses where sun did not penetrate. With night falling, the frigid air bit to the bone. Lathered coats were going to bring lethal chill, if impasse forced them to stop. Lacking fodder, the animals could not stay warm.
Already, Anja was starting to shiver. The wardings still hazed Mykkael to dire tension, incessantly warning the sorcerer’s pursuit pressed ever nearer to closure. Whether the hound’s copper-poisoned demise might delay them, or if such unnatural creatures must take pause to battle the territorial instincts of kerries, Mykkael had no way to guess. He distrusted blind luck. Their winded mounts could not hold the pace. Pushed to the crux, the captain knew he must make a stand, or forfeit his defence altogether.
‘There!’ He pointed towards a jumble of ice that had formed a crude buttress against the stone wall. ‘Ride Covette on. Yes! Take her inside. Bunch the rest of the horses around you, and for the love of your sire, stay mounted!’
Harrying Vashni’s reluctant trot, Mykkael drove the herd from behind. He pushed at their heels until they were crammed shoulder to shoulder inside the precarious shelter. The hollow was scarcely secure, formed as it was of unstable rime, undercut by the sluice of spring rains. Yet no better option existed, with his wardings pitched to the overriding, shrill urgency of a pursuit coming hard at their heels. Barqui’ino awareness heightened his senses to almost hurtful acuity. Tight though it was, the nook in the ice would forestall a strike on his flanks, and prevent an assault from behind.
Mykkael slid off Stormfront’s back. He left the reins looped on the gelding’s neck as he chivvied him in with his teammate. ‘Stay astride,’ he told Anja. ‘Keep the horses as calm as you can. If they bolt, I can’t hope to save them.’
He spared a fast glance, but could not read how she fared. Her face was a pale blur, lost in the gloaming.
When she spoke, her voice was too tired to show fear. ‘Kerries can’t fly here. The walls are too close for their wingspread.’
‘I know.’ Mykkael limped two short steps and snapped a dry bough from a nearby deadfall. He broke the wood into arm lengths, then jabbed each splinter upright in the ice. ‘We’re not hunting kerries, your Grace, a fine point upon which I have some experience.’ Using torn strips from his surcoat, he wound the ends of each billet in rag, which he struck alight with the flint and tinder from his scrip. Under the flickering, wind-rippled flames, he readied his arrows in rows. The copper-marked ones he set to the left, with the untreated shafts opposed, on the right. Last, he tested the tension of the strung bow.
His final instructions were terse. ‘Princess, hold fast. Not everything that you see will be real. Some things that move might seem like illusion. They’re not. You may hear voices. Trust nothing they say. The wards in my presence are your only protection. Hide your eyes. Block your ears. Do whatever you must. Let me attend to your safety. Your sole task will be to stand without breaking.’
‘Be seit shan’jien, Mykkael,’ bade Anja. ‘The target with teeth that bites back.’ Cold, weary, terrified, Sessalie’s princess gave him fierce words, where her Efandi counterpart in the same straits had muffled her sobs behind the torn silk of her headcloth.
Mykkael selected an arrow. Grim as struck bronze in the spill of the flames, he kicked away the loose gravel and set his feet. Then he notched the first shaft to the bowstring, aware he must be no less than deit’jien tah, ‘the target that kills without quarter’.
Then the wave of the sorcerer’s winged minions descended, and barqui’ino awareness left space for no thought at all.
They threaded the narrows in a whistle of sliced air, sinuous and agile and deadly. One saw the eyes, first, red as punched ruby, or orange as live coals, or yellow as fire in opal. They glinted out of the falling dark, lit to sparks as the torchlight caught them. The bodies were reptilian and scaled, and possessed by a murderous need to sate upon blood and slaughter. Where the size of a kerrie made its gliding strength ponderous, these creatures darted like swallows. They hurtled down the chasm in steeply banked flight at a speed that left a man breathless.
Mykkael aimed and shot. His arrow flew straight to the mark. The horror in front kited out of the air with a shriek. Wings flapping, it tumbled. The harrowing cry choked off as it splashed headlong into the flume. The bow sang again. Another shaft hissed skywards. A second abomination folded and slammed into the rock wall, to a rattling shower of gravel. More came behind. Mykkael shot them down, another, then another, nock, draw and release, a flow of continuous motion. His next kills ploughed the ledge a scant stone’s throw away. Like the hound, each casualty writhed and thrashed, squalling in bone-chilling agony. Copper could stun them. That stroke of fortune raised Mykkael’s hope, and also awakened sore grief. His accurate marksmanship would serve no mercy. As apparitions bound by the grip of spelled forces, these wrought minions could never receive the grace of a natural death.
Another bowshot, and another monstrosity plummeted out of flight. The distance had closed enough now to discern the unpleasant details. No two of the creatures seemed formed the same way. Some had fangs and claws, others insectile tails with needle-sharp stings. Some hissed or bellowed. Others swooped down in a silence Mykkael found all the more unnerving. The only consistency to their attack was their single-minded ferocity.
Arrow struck, another corruption cartwheeled downwards. This one’s cry raised the hair, piteous as the wail of a hurt child. Mykkael stood unshaken. He had heard far worse. As he drew the next shaft in unbroken succession, aimed and let fly, he sensed the range, knowing: the incoming pack approached the far edge of the viziers’ protections raised by his tattoo. Next second, the lead creature slammed into contact. Its horned head unravelled into a lick of queer flame, and a burst of maniacal laughter. The sound raised the skin into visceral revolt, and the breeze reeked of sulphur and burning. Mykkael watched, prepared, should the grace of his wardings fail to deflect. He listened to the strained note from his sword hilt. Yet the spurting flares of uncanny energies flowed into themselves and yanked back. In recoil, he watched, horrified, as the monster’s fanged maw re-materialized into animate flesh.
No sorcerer’s work he had encountered before could enact such a seamless recovery.
Mykkael noted the creature’s snarling retreat, first warning he might face a stalemate. If the sorcerer’s fell sending could not cross the barrier and maintain its form, neither did the viziers’ geometry possess the commanding power to effect any lasting banishment. When his arrows ran short, he could be trapped in a stand-off. No way to tell, now, if the shaman’s mark sung into his sword hilt held the lines to break through cold-struck bindings and compensate. He risked far worse danger, once he had to make closure, not any welcome development. For not all of the creatures that now wove and snapped in testing rage at the wardings would be the long-spelled design of an embodied apparition.
Several planted among them could be bone and blood shape-changers, beyond his known scope of experience.
Mykkael loosed his next shaft at near point-blank range. The sorcerous construct crashed through the warding and erupted into a fire burst. Cackling voices reviled his ancestry in three tongues he knew, and spat guttural curses clearly not human in origin. The next shaft he launched brought down something solid that struck earth at his feet, still raging with wounded fight. The bow was now useless. Mykkael ripped sword from scabbard, aware of the bright sting as the warded metal sang in his hand. He parried a clawed fist, sheared off the limb that swiped a rip at his ankle.
Contact raised smoke and spattering, hot blood that seared his cloth breeches like acid. Cut, parry, stab, parry, stab again. The brute horror grew back sheared limbs, and altered form twice before it finally gave way and collapsed. Its spasms fanned up a wind storm as its leathery wings walloped at the crevice, showering Mykkael’s shoulders with dirt and ice. He ducked the debris, swung his sword upwards and severed the head, then kicked aside the snapping, downed jaws. Blade in hand, breathless but poised, he measured the next pair of eyes that advanced behind the hulked corpse just dispatched.
‘Baeyat’ji’in, monster!’ he shouted. ‘I am ready’
The inbound thing howled. Its ranging cry roused primal terror in the mind of any human-born creature. Mykkael fought the sickening clench of his gut. Streaming sweat, he heard Anja’s gasped whimper. The sword in his hand seemed to shudder and wail, until he feared the stress of the warding might cause tempered metal to crack.
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.’