XXXIV. Impasse

THE QUEER LIGHTS THAT FLARED OVER HELL’S CHASM THAT NIGHT-FALL WOULD HAVE BEEN VIVIDLY CLEAR, IF DEDORTH’S GLASS HAD not been destroyed by a conflagration of sorcery. Beyond the Great Divide in the ranges, where the Grand Vizier’s allied shamans did not require the use of a contrivance to view the natural world, or examine events at a distance, the ripple as power flowed from the unseen awakened the gifts of the seers. They sensed disruptions and ominous signs. The wise among them measured the portents and foresaw dire peril: an invasion to challenge Tuinvardia’s northern border, over mountains considered impassable.

Afraid their warnings would meet disbelief, they dispatched an emissary to warn the Grand Vizier.

The audience was brought to the emperor’s court by a woman clairvoyant, trained as a channel to receive distant messages with strict and reliable accuracy.

Under the airy glass-paned cupola of the Grand Vizier’s painted chamber, she appeared child-sized, mantled in the gauze robes and circlet of her time-honoured profession. The flood of the alcove’s candles exposed her distraught pallor. Yet she held her straight stance on the marble star beneath the Grand Vizier’s dais, the hollow sphere of wrought copper used to amplify vision cupped in her delicate hands. ‘My Lord Wisdom, I offer thee tidings from the circle of shamans sent to hallow the ground along the north border.’

The wizened vizier raised his bald head and regarded the emissary with gimlet eyes. ‘Not good news, I see.’ His sigh brought an apprentice scurrying with a pillow to ease his swollen feet. A snap of his fingers summoned two of the three master scribes he kept in constant attendance. Robes rustling, these left the labour of preparing updated amulets. They gathered beneath the dais to hear, ascetic faces lined with concern under sombre black caps with fringed lappets.

‘Deliver the sending,’ bade the Grand Vizier.

‘Lord Wisdom, hear well,’ the seer’s channel opened. ‘These words are Anzbek’s, eldest from Jantii tribe’s fox clan circle. His speech now follows: “Wise one, we have sighted unfavourable portents that warn of a coming invasion. Winged minions wrought by a sorcerer whose demon’s name is unknown fly down the gorge of Hell’s Chasm.”‘

The elder of the two master scribes raised his eyebrows. ‘From the north! Has Anzbek gone mad?’ Even the most powerful sorcerers avoided cold weather and altitude, that exposed all their delicate works to the stifling qualities of snowfall, and the unstringing chaos inherent in dwellings heated by wood fires.

‘How can a new power arise to existence?’ snapped the beak-nosed scribe at the trestle. The Nine demons might crossbreed a new innovation, but their Names and the sorcerers they held in sealed bondage had been exhaustively listed for centuries.

The seer’s channel lifted her chin. ‘Even so, Guardians.’ She resumed, undaunted. ‘Anzbek reads such a peril arising. His dreaming forecasts a danger beyond precedent. He further says this: his shamans have no phrase and no singing to banish the lines he encounters. Since he also expected the Lord Wisdom and masters might presume his sharp wits were failing, Anzbek chose to share counsel concerning the visions his circle has garnered. Be wary, he urges. The fragmented knowledge I bring thee in his name has been gathered at terrible cost to his scryers.’

‘Anzbek’s lore cannot sing a completion!’ The Grand Vizier shoved straight in a disturbed glitter of beaded robes. Beside him, his master scribes exchanged startled glances. ‘The night brings us ill news, indeed.’ Ringed fingers flashed fire as the old conjurer beckoned the channel on to the dais. ‘Thou carriest a sending? Pray show us.’

Gauze rustled. Shadows wavered as the candle flames swayed in the grip of an uneasy draught. The channel ascended the stair. At the Grand Vizier’s bidding, she accepted the cushion just brought to cosset his feet. Then she knelt with the copper sphere offered between her cupped hands. The Grand Vizier laid his palms beside hers, fingers spread.

‘As Anzbek sends,’ the channel whispered, then bowed her head. She touched her circlet to the sphere and opened her mind to deliver the record of the tribal elder’s true vision.

The Grand Vizier to the Emperor of Tuinvardia closed his eyes to receive. His brows hooked into a thunderous frown the first moment he accepted the contact. ‘Shape-changers!’ he said, shocked. His seamed face blanched. ‘Ones able to meld and recombine, even dissolve at their sorcerer’s will. They fly across the Great Divide through Hell’s Chasm. The lines that reanimate them…are intensely complex.’ He drew a vexed breath. ‘Record this!’

The master scribe to his right rushed from the dais to the work table. Fingers flying, he assembled parchment, ink, and a quill pen with a fine, copper nib. He barely had the implement dipped before the Grand Vizier started dictation.

‘East to west axis, parallel, doubled. North down to centre pin, then rise north-east, at twelve degrees. Arc to south, run a ground line, six point star at south, then a sunwards spiral, rising. End at heaven point. Lift the pen. Set down at west, now mirror the geometry at ninety degrees.’

‘Murder and mercy!’ murmured the master still seated. He had abandoned his labour over the talismans, stunned by the unprecedented pattern of ward now emerging, line by line, on the parchment. ‘What is that thing?’

‘Abomination,’ whispered the Grand Vizier, never in memory so curt. His forehead broke into alarming sweat as he opened his eyes and fought his breath steady. ‘One we may not have the wisdom to counter; would that Eishwin were still alive.’

‘Eishwin?’ The master scribe who remained on the dais cleared his throat in contempt. ‘That lunatic hermit? But he only expounded on elementary design! A raw junior might consult his text. No one else would see fit to bother.’

The Grand Vizier’s lips twitched. ‘Basic text was the only knowledge the crafty old conjurer chose to write down.’ Shaking his head, he said in strained quiet, ‘Not all his workings were executed inside the lines of earthly dimension. The myth lingers, that Eishwin found ways to write as they say the most gifted of shamans can sing, in the language of light, that lies beyond eyesight.’

‘Pure nonsense!’ snapped the master still poised with the pen. All power of pattern was earth-based! How else to influence the subtle flow of the unseen through scribed lines, than to lock its expression in place through physicality’s transfixing stability?

Again the Grand Vizier shook his bald head. ‘I studied for years, and still the key to Eishwin’s perception eludes me.’

Nor was he alone in his failure. The ignorant young might dismiss Eishwin’s lore as absurdly simplistic. Only the most patient of the learned suspected the primal ciphers the conjurer left as his legacy might invoke powers outside of geometry. ‘The Southern Council still holds debate on the subject.’

‘An esoteric waste of time,’ muttered the master scribe taking dictation. He blotted the drying ink from his pen, his lips pressed tight with disdain. ‘The known ways work best. Why trouble with pointless experiments?’

Earth patterns and copper invoked immobility, and froze consciousness into time. That made them reliably stable to work. Air and fire patterns were uselessly volatile. The action of water ran too subtle and slow. The way of the shamans inducted the mysteries through sound, and dissolved standing currents of flow. Yet the knowledge inherent in tribal tradition was kept closely guarded. The course of initiation such people followed demanded a lifetime of ascetic discipline. Just as well, that their nomad ways suited them for work far afield. The emperor’s treasury held wealth enough to buy their help from the Scoraign chieftains. A circle of desert-bred shamans could sing empty-handed. Their lore could be worked in a scouring downpour, in wind storm, in snow, and in darkness. Oral tradition required no pattern books; used no pens, no parchment, no ingots of iron or copper. The tribe folk could patrol the most inhospitable canyons on foot, bearing little beyond a weapon to forage, and a headcloth and robe to stay warm.

The mere thought of leaving the comforts of court for a rough journey into the wastes raised the attendant scribes to consternation. They kept their irritable silence, while the Grand Vizier bent to resume communion with the channel’s copper sphere.

‘Pray the old ways work at all, in this case,’ the old man whispered as, again, he closed his eyes to receive.

‘Dictation,’ he resumed at due length, though his voice shook. ‘At east mark, scribe a half circle to west. Add a sine curve, rising, with the rhythm of the geometry to be one, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen…the same again, but in mirror image…’

The pause that ensued seemed far too prolonged. At the bench, pen in hand, the master scribe prompted, ‘My Lord Wisdom?’

His tacit query drew no response.

The next moment, the sphere shrieked in vibration. Heat followed. The channel yanked herself back with a cry. Forehead blistered, she released her clasped grip and cradled seared hands to her breast. The copper implement clanged down the stair, trailing a wisp of vile smoke.

The emperor’s Grand Vizier made no sound at all. His limp palms draped over his mantled knees, and his robed body slumped, unsupported. All at once, he keeled over and pitched from his chair. The channel caught him, then lost her grip to burned hands. Crying, she fumbled, while the venerable conjurer toppled amid the heaped silk of his robes. His eyes stayed wide open, stilled in the spill of the candlelight. His unbreathing mouth gaped in sudden death, trickled with blood from a tongue bitten through in convulsion.

‘First order of mercy!’ shrieked the shocked scribe on the dais. ‘What unspeakable evil could cause this attack?’ Sunk to his knees, he cradled the purpled face of his mentor. Yet no succour availed. The Grand Vizier was gone, who had handled Tuinvardia’s defence against sorcery through a half century of exemplary service.

His colleagues’ distraught shouts brought the emperor’s guards at a run.

The scribe at the trestle clutched his pen, as armed men crashed the doors and barged into the chamber. No chance was given to disparage the futility of their bared swords. The partially executed defence pattern on the parchment exploded into a whirlwind of conflagration. Screaming, both hands and sleeves set aflame, the vizier’s most advanced master scribe collapsed before help could reach him.

In the deeps of Hell’s Chasm, Mykkael and Princess Anja worked a cautious passage through a chain of ice tunnels. Here, where the gorge split the Great Divide, the continuous tumble of glacial debris often jammed the constricted watercourse. Each year, the raging force of spring melt waters drilled out the channel anew. With summer’s approach, the spate had fallen. The verge offered a narrow, dangerous ledge carved out of compacted ice. Here, the passage became exceptionally hazardous for the horses. Even shod, the animals slipped and skidded. Glassy chips were gouged up by their hooves as they scrambled for purchase beside the boiling race of the current.

Here, even a skilled rider’s weight might unbalance them. Mykkael insisted they proceed on foot. Still pursued by the weaving lights wrought by the sorcerer’s long spell, he held the rearguard with drawn sword. The blade whined aloud. The viziers’ tattoo at his nape stayed unquiet as well, a constant, spiking ache that chafed at his already volatile nerves. He lit the way with a torch, held left-handed, his reflexes cranked to barqui’ino- trained vigilance that reacted to every flicker and jerk of cast shadow. Nimble Covette had cast off a shoe. The bare hoof caused her two scrabbling falls, with only Anja’s shouted commands warding off lethal panic.

To grasp the mare’s reins and try to assist was to invite a disaster. Upon the slick ice, no footing was safe. At the first opportunity, Mykkael cut a stave from a deadfall. He lashed Anja’s skinning knife on to the tip. Throughout his work, the lurid flares of sent spellcraft flashed and wove at the edge of the wardings. Their unsettling colours ghosted over his dark face, and the broken scabs of the sword cut marring his fingers.

‘Use this,’ he ordered. ‘Right-hand side, between you and the water. Spike the blade into the ice like a walking stick. Princess, hear me! You don’t take even a single step without securing your balance beforehand.’

Shivering, her face waxy blue from the cold, Anja nodded. She took the stave in numbed hands and pushed on. Utterly miserable, she withheld from complaint. She jabbed down the knife and moved ahead, while her heart drummed with terror and her frosted breaths plumed in the torchlight. Onwards she pressed, hurting down to the bone, yet too frightened to contemplate stopping. Behind her, Mykkael limped on watchful alert. His scarred knee, and the slap of the bootless foot he had strapped in green leather, demarked his halting progress. His war injury had stiffened, made worse by hard usage and uneven ground. Yet to pause was unthinkable, even to soak the inflamed joint in the ice melt. Not while the shaman’s mark on the sword wailed its incessant warning.

‘Princess! Princess, stop now!’

Mykkael spoke twice more, still unable to break through Anja’s leaden exhaustion. She spiked in the stave, blindly absorbed by the rhythmic punishment of setting one step after the next.

‘Your Grace, hold hard!’ His insistent fingers bit into her shoulder. ‘I should lead the way into the open.’

Anja edged to the side of the treacherous verge. Mykkael squeezed past with precarious care. The hide padding on his foot had torn through. Under the juddering light of the flame, Anja saw bloodied prints on the ice, caused by a gash on his toe. The hip he had bruised just as clearly gave him discomfort.

Yet the chance to seize respite stayed out of the question. The sword’s mark buzzed its relentless alarm, and seen at close quarters, the captain’s skin puckered with wave upon wave of raised gooseflesh.

‘Witch thoughts?’ Anja asked. ‘What do you see?’

Mykkael’s dark eyes flickered towards her, then away. He wrung out a gravel-rough answer. ‘Nothing coherent.’

…an ancient vizier in a robe marked with symbols, lying dead in a ring of shocked faces; a vanguard of riders in exquisite, fine armour, riding hellbent over foreign terrain; an old man wearing tribal knots in his hair, rapidly speaking the desert variation of Scoraign dialect; then the dream-caught image of a warrior, himself? wrapped in what looked like spun silver and shadow, and pursued by horrors fit to bring madness…

‘Mykkael?’ Anja whispered. While the horses’ breath clouded around him, she closed a tacit hand over his forearm. ‘Captain?’

…Jussoud, his deft fingers glistening with burn unguents as he treated a man whose flesh was seared beyond recognition…

Racked by a horrible, lingering chill, Mykkael unwound Anja’s grip. He stared into her eyes, a glance that scoured for its depth of searching intensity. Then he touched her wrist to his forehead, a salute foreign to the northern manners practised in Sessalie. ‘This is not Efandi,’ he whispered. ‘No sorcerer has yet seized a permanent hold on the land.’ The scrape of his words seemed almost a litany, scarcely audible through the shear of the current over its milk-glass bed of ice.

To Anja, the captain’s grasp felt alarmingly hot. She prayed the effect was no more than the contrast posed by her own numbed hand. ‘Mykkael?’

He nodded, moved, stated, ‘Ready the bow. Expect this, we’re going to face ambush.’

Anxiously frightened, Anja called after him, ‘How do you know?’

‘Tattoo,’ he gasped answer. ‘It’s a burning brand on me.’

The poised torch just as much of a weapon as the bared sword clenched in his grasp, he advanced towards the tunnel’s gapped opening. Outside, the darkness hung like draped felt. Mykkael filled the aperture, shoulders cloaked in his spattered surcoat, and his hands chiselled bronze in the fluttering firelight.

Anja fumbled to unsling the bow. Shielded by Mykkael’s readied stance at the forefront, she tugged the quiver at her hip into convenient reach. The scouring slap of whitewater filled the ice cave, with the horses’ steamed presence crowding her back, loud with the scrape of shod hooves.

Mykkael’s fingers tensed in the torchlight. The blade keened, a shrill note that shredded the mists combing off the arched ice overhead. He advanced a tight step, edged one foot on to the gritty rime of moraine laid bare by the thaws.

Something winged and weighty dropped, moving fast. Sword, torch and man exploded into blurred motion. The jerked flame fluttered down to a trailing coal, outlining the warrior against what appeared insubstantial as shadow and smoke. Yet his striking steel chimed. The minion antagonist he fought was unnervingly solid. Claws snatched the frayed hem of Mykkael’s surcoat and opened a howling rip. Thrust, clang! slash, clang! the embattled rhythm of attack and riposte cast ringing echoes back down the cleft.

Anja laboured to close her chilled fist on the bow, then manipulate the nocked arrow. Her grip on the string seemed too numbed to draw, even had the captain’s raging attack not foreclosed her clear view of a target. In darkness, the two-handed battle he sustained moved too swiftly for vision to follow.

The horses stamped and sidled, shaken from their exhausted torpor. Anja spoke, desperate to calm their distress before sliding hooves caused a mishap. She dared not look back, dared not loose the bow. Trembling amid the spun murk of the mist, she watched Mykkael’s defence, a harrowing display of the barqui’ino mind that reforged the body into an engine of relentless ferocity.

The torch struck, raining a scatter of sparks. Teeth clashed and snapped, screeling into a ribbon of jabbing, sharp steel. Impact raised a sulphurous sizzle of flesh, and a horrific, keening howl. Mykkael’s bootless foot came down on ice. He slipped, with the scarred leg unable to compensate. Down on one knee, his cleared sword scarcely wavered, its targeting point all but nailed into space, with his raised arm holding form overhead in a lightning-speed act of recovery.

Anja pulled the bow. She took aim at what appeared empty dark and released, both arrow and pent breath let go with a grunt. The shaft clashed into the black shine of scales. Its feathered nock vanished, hard followed by the streaked silver of Mykkael’s stabbing blade. Fumes roiled. Smoke poured from the minion’s rent flesh, deadly proof that he fought another marauding shape-changer. Leathered wings beat the air, scraped over rock and dislodged a stinging shower of gravel. Mykkael regained his stance and lunged into the pelting assault. Enfolded at once by billowing smoke, his sword dipped and flashed, backed up at each sally by the battering club of the torch shaft.

Through juddering light, and explosions of sparks as the blows thudded home, Anja tracked the captain’s advance. She forced her shaking hand to string the next arrow. By the time she had the shaft firmly nocked, no clean shot was possible. Mist had obscured Mykkael’s moving form. She heard steel clash and skitter, knitted into the minion’s harrowing wails. Set amid failing light, the interlocked contest of man and monster was reduced to chaotic confusion.

That moment, an inrush of flying things pelted into the ring of the wards. They swooped down at suicidal speed, as though trying a concerted attack of sheer numbers to overwhelm its protection. Mykkael surely sensed the unpleasant effects. He shouted, perhaps seeking to turn the assault. Yet the wave of long-spelled abominations kept coming. They converged upon him, unfazed as their fellows struck the viziers’ raised pattern and dissolved, bleeding flames in gyrating colours.

Since archery was futile, Anja stowed the bow and arrow to free her hands. The stick lashed with the knife could serve as a spear. That idea resolved, she began to advance, just as something coiling and heavy crashed with a bellow and carved up a scatter of gravel. Mykkael’s sword clanged. More smoke roiled, clouding her sight, as claws scrabbled over wet rock. The struggle cut short with a thunderous splash. Mykkael reappeared, his steel glistening scarlet, and his left arm torn bloody under the dimmed glow of the torch.

Still immersed in barqui’ino awareness, he plunged out of the smoke, tossed the stubbed wood away, then seized the princess at scruff and waist. His fierce grasp hurled her astride, amid the bundles lashed on to Kasminna. Speech seemed beyond him. The flat of his sword spoke instead, slapping the sorrel’s rump and startling her into a wild-eyed canter. In unbroken stride, Mykkael thrust past the grey gelding and remounted Stormfront. Through the lightning-burst flares as more accursed creatures crashed to destruction against the wardings, he belted his heels into the black gelding’s sides and veered him hard after Anja’s mare into the open darkness.

No sign remained of the horrific creature he had just driven into the spate. The black gorge of Hell’s Chasm opened ahead, a sinister slit bisected by the roaring leap of whitewater. Anja had no choice but to entrust her safety to her mount’s sharper eyesight. She clung for her life to the mare’s wind-whipped mane, repeatedly calling to urge Vashni and Covette to press tired strides and keep pace.

‘Shape-changer,’ gasped Mykkael, his diction strangled by barqui’ino- induced adrenaline. ‘Downstream.’

Anja finished his thought to clarify her understanding. ‘You think the minion will reassemble?’

‘Must. Very quickly’ Mykkael leaned out, yanked the lead rein with his free hand, and swerved Kasminna around an obstruction her distraught rider had missed. ‘Run!’

He steered Stormfront’s surging flight alongside the mare, riding bareback with a skill the princess suspected could only be matched in the heart of the eastern steppelands. He held the horses to their pounding charge, unwilling to let up as they leaped over potholes, and hammered headlong and stumbling across rimed ice and beached mounds of river stones.

Stormfront snorted a rattled warning and shied. The sword’s warding shrieked. Kasminna leaped sideways, blowing with terror, as the stony ground seemed to heave into motion under her back-stepping hooves.

The violent swerve wrenched Anja off her seat. As the mare dropped on her haunches and spun away, urgent hands snatched at her clothing. She felt the vibrating cry as the warded sword’s hilt gouged into the small of her back. Then blank air opened under her, and she slammed with a grunt across the withers of Mykkael’s black gelding.

The precious, copper-tipped arrows slithered, falling out as the quiver upended. Anja shot out a forearm and pinned them. Through the lurch as Stormfront slid on his hocks and fought into scrambling recovery, Mykkael’s left fist remained locked in her jerkin. Battered, face down, her braid whipping her cheek, Anja clung, jolted breathless. Single-minded, she rescued the arrows, her breast jammed to the captain’s straining thigh. The bowstring grated and sawed at her collarbone at each surging, equine stride.

She could see little of the creature the captain confronted, beyond its horrendous talons. Through the violent gyrations of combat, she glimpsed scaled sinews, punch-cut against a spinning view of pressed gravel and gouged ice and raced water. Anja heard the captain’s desperate, fast breaths, as the sword in his hand screamed and clove through barqui’ino attack forms over her head. Something heavy and hot seized her ankle, slapped away in a spray of liquid. The blade’s warding shuddered complaint.

Anja shut her eyes. Dizzied to nausea by the stench of the captain’s fouled surcoat, and the wildly tilting ground, she held like grim death to the sheaf of salvaged arrows. Her other fist clutched the cross-gartered ties binding the leathers to Mykkael’s calf. She hung on to him, desperately mindful that his undisturbed balance was critical for accurate sword work. Both of their lives would be forfeit should she slide off centre, or fall off.

The bruising, rough ride drove the air from her chest each time Stormfront shifted direction. Mykkael kept his seat through superlative horsemanship, a sword wielded astride without use of stirrups a feat few men alive could achieve. Anja endured, from moment to precarious moment. Through the scatter of stones under Stormfront’s hooves, she followed the clang and clatter of steel, aware that one man’s pressured defence was all that forestalled an unspeakable fate. The spelled monster that hissed and snapped overhead lunged for its prey without quarter. She felt the whuff of its breath on her back, and winced to each clash of its teeth. If she chanced to be seized, her form would become a shape-changer’s guise for a sorcerer to deploy at will. She could be worse than dead, with an imposter left to claim Sessalie’s crown uncontested.

Mykkael twisted hard left. His sword struck moving murder. Anja felt the impact shock through his taut body. His hand on her jerkin convulsed with the force of his recovery, as he snapped his entangled blade free. Ducked under a sense of ponderous movement, her person snatched close and sheltered against a smoking pelt of hot fluid, she clung grimly as the captain stabbed in his heels and called out.

Stormfront responded, bunched and shot forward. A descending claw whistled close overhead. The sword clanged again, gave a sliding ring in deflection. Mykkael shouted. ‘Jee!’

Anja braced, prepared, while the gelding wheeled sideways. Tail streaming, hooves pounding rough stone, he avoided the coiling slap of scaled tail, spiked at the end with barbed horns.

Vashni’s shrill scream arose at their back. Anja turned her head, found her view obstructed by Mykkael’s leg. Darkness masked even the partial glimpse of what mishap had just transpired. Claws scuffled on stone, milled through by the clatter of Stormfront’s headlong flight. Then something massive splashed into the flume. The noises of struggle receded behind as the horses opened their stride, hazed into a panic-stricken gallop. Only two sets of hoof beats trailed after the valiant black gelding. Poor Vashni’s demise had opened the way to escape for the riders and the two mares.

Anja blinked through the burn of fresh tears, jounced against her protector. Above her, unending, the whining cry of the sword sustained its pitch through the scrape of Mykkael’s raced breathing.

He did not pull up. Even when Stormfront’s long strides devolved into a choppy canter, and his sweated coat streamed strings of lather, the desert-bred captain shouted to enforce the frantic pace.

‘You’ll kill him,’ railed Anja, afraid for the gelding. Kasminna was flagging, and Covette, one foot shoeless, lagged dangerously far behind.

If Mykkael heard, he did not draw rein. Only when the next ice tunnel forced caution did he slacken from headlong flight. By then, the hard, running tremors brought on by barqui’ino recoil stormed through his overwrought flesh. Warned that his mind might not be coherent, the princess held on in agonized patience. Despite the fact that her midriff was bruised by the ridge of the horse’s withers, she stayed passive in hope that her quiet would help restore the captain’s hazed reason. In his prudent, right mind, surely Mykkael would choose to dismount, and light a torch to traverse the black maw of the passage.

Yet no respite came. Riding the razor’s edge of raw reflex, the warrior stayed astride with drawn sword and drove Stormfront ahead without letup.

‘I’m not harmed,’ Anja ventured.

Mykkael shuddered, head to foot, and managed a stilted reply. ‘I know.’

Anja forced back the hot sting of tears, and doggedly pressed him again. ‘If Stormfront slips, even once, we’re both lost.’

All but deranged by the skittering slide as the black gelding’s forehooves lost purchase, the princess endured with her breath stopped.

‘We daren’t pull up,’ Mykkael stated at length. ‘If that vile thing overtakes us again, we’re foredone.’

‘You’re hurt?’ Anja asked, while the tremors whipped through him, aggravating his hitched shortness of breath. Her query went unanswered. Enveloped by the chasm’s dank blackness, she could see nothing at all. Neither could she dispel her anxiety by touch. Not with her left hand clutching the arrows, and all her security dependent upon her grip on Mykkael’s makeshift footwear. As Stormfront slewed again and again, scrambling for purchase on ice, she dared not risk loosing her grasp for even a fraction of a second.

No choice remained. Equine senses must be entrusted to secure Stormfront’s imperilled riders.

Too long, they traversed the echoing dark, with the race of the current a blast of raw noise, and the horses’ terrible, laboured breaths cruel proof of their overtaxed resource. By the time the far side of the tunnel emerged, a faint oval rinsed grey by starlight, Anja was shaking from overwrought nerves. Her hands were knotted with fiery cramps, and sweat slid in drops down her temples.

‘Hyaa!’ Mykkael’s shout rousted Stormfront to a staggering trot.

Kasminna ripped out a startled snort, laid back her ears, and plunged after him, with Covette in limping pursuit.

‘Are you crazy?’ yelped Anja, pummelled again, her sick fear whipped on to wild outrage.

‘Sword!’ Mykkael gasped.

Too late, Anja realized: the angry, wasp hum of the steel had not slackened.

Horse and paired riders burst into the open. Mykkael shouted again, just as something huge missed its pounce from the back of the ice face. Stone rattled as it landed and launched into frenzied pursuit. The sword’s warding screamed, and the spent horses bolted in a fresh burst of primal terror.

Left, right, left again, Stormfront changed his lead to thread through a maze of shattered boulders. He leaped the frothing seam of a freshet. The bough of a deadfall snagged his left side, gouging at Anja’s legs. She hung on, lashed and battered. Mykkael, crouched above her, used his braced sword to fend off the stinging branches. The cavern around them had widened again, prime ground for a night-hunting kerrie.

Ahead, the change in terrain spelled disaster: the flume crashed down a laddered incline, then whirled with a thunderous roar into the black depths of a basin. Water exploded over the rim at the far side, streaming trailers of spray under starlight. The spillway of the falls overhung the sliced edge of the world, gateway to the impassable cliff that ended the run down Hell’s Chasm.

The drop beyond was sheer, a vertical buttress that cleaved away into vacant air. There the rushing water plumed downwards, winnowed into veils like hurled dust, towards the distant floor of a canyon blanketed under white mist.

Anja beheld that vast drop off, then the gulf to the distant, far side. Upside down, the scope of the view set her mortal senses reeling. Recognition struck like a cry against silence, that she beheld her own certain death, and the bittermost ending of hope.

‘We’re defeated,’ she gasped.

No human means could conquer an obstacle of such overpowering scale.

Her plaintive distress went unheard. Mykkael was not listening. Or else his awareness stayed riveted on the threat that still charged on the heels of the straggling horses.

He slapped the flat of his sword down on Stormfront’s shoulder, turning him, hard, from the sloping drop towards the basin. The gelding slithered on stepped granite. Iron shoes scrabbling, he clawed himself into recovery, and snapped his hocks back under himself. Against chance-met failure, against futile ruin, the black horse rebounded. Dry grass, then brush, then needled branches slapped into Anja’s dangling face. Eyes closed, skin stinging as thorns ripped her cheek, she plunged through the bruised evergreen fragrance of cedar. Then dank stone and darkness swallowed their striving. The horse’s clattering gait dispersed into echoes cast back by a stone enclosure.

‘Hyaa! Stormfront, forward!’ Mykkael pressed the shivering horse into the black cavern carved out by the current in years when the basin swirled higher. The mares clambered after. Hooves splashed underfoot. The horses traversed a small streamlet or pool. Icy droplets splashed Anja’s eyelids. Her dangling braid wicked up moisture. Then Stormfront’s powerful body heaved underneath her as he surged upslope and arrived on a narrow, dry ledge.

Mykkael snatched the back of her jerkin. Without word or warning, he hurled her off the exhausted gelding’s back.

Anja struck ground with a bitten-off cry, winded and scraped and on fire with outrage. The string of the slung bow sawed into her neck, while her salvaged arrows clattered around her.

The captain vaulted on to his feet just behind. ‘Princess! See to your horses!’ No time remained to speak of regrets. Sword raised, Mykkael scrambled on limping, fast strides to contend with the minion still bearing down from outside.