TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (10 page)

That directive prodded him onto his feet, to paw through the packs for provender. He found black beans, which he set soaking in water. Dakar had also packed jerked beef, hard waybread, and a frozen rind of cheese. Although stress had undone inclination and appetite, Arithon wrapped himself in the damp folds of his cloak and pursued the chore of addressing survival and sustenance.

He did not intend to fall short of that goal. But sleep stole in and captured him unaware. He drifted the dark spiral into oblivion with the jerked beef and bread scarcely touched between slackened hands.

* * *

Arithon wakened, untold hours later. His mouth and throat felt packed with dry cotton; his head whirled, on fire with fever. The coals he had used to heat water for poultice were long spent. Drafts sent by the moaning gusts off the peaks had swirled through and scattered the deadened ashes. Nor had the frail links of reason withstood the onslaught as wound sickness claimed him. He did not know who he was; only where. Rock and snow framed the prison where his mind ranged, propelled into dreadful nightmare. The dark and the cold themselves seemed unreal, a fretful presence at war with the forge flame that raked through his shivering limbs. If he raved, none heard but two horses whose forms the shadows remade into creatures outside the familiar.

For hours, he saw faces, adrift in congealed blood: the dead cut down by his strategies at Tal Quorin, Vastmark and the Havens. Hands plucked at him, and whispers lamented the cut threads of lost lives. The haunts shed ghost tears, and multiplied into their legions of sad widows and fatherless children. Dead sailhands came, weed clad, out of the silted deeps of Minderl Bay. They sat at his side, weeping glittering brine and pointing bone fingers in eyeless remonstrance. Arithon addressed their silent condemnation, crying aloud for their pain. He left none of their questions unanswered, though his heart held no power to console them, nor had he the coin to purchase his own absolution. Unlike his half brother Lysaer, he claimed no grand principle; no moral truth; no lofty reason to account for the slaughter spun by Desh-thiere's curse. His apologies rang flat, and the tides of remorse ran in scouring agony straight through him.

His voice cracked. His throat was too parched for the gift of his music, and the right hand that Halliron had trained to high art throbbed and burned, and jetted rank pus through soaked bandages.

The darkness was ink and scalding misery, and finally, in a fevered, terror-filled hour, the night velvet of Dharkaron's cloak of judgment fell over him. Propped on one elbow, eyes wild and wide, Arithon faced down the ebony shaft of the Avenging Angel's Spear of Destiny.

'You've come for me,' he scratched in a desperate whisper. 'I cannot go freely, bound as I am by blood oath to a Fellowship Sorcerer. I swore to live until all resource fails me.' He wheezed through the rags of a laugh, edged in metallic irony. 'If you would claim your due vengeance of me, you must fight. Since I have no sword and no knife at hand, for my part, the contest will end at one parry. Cast your great spear against my bare fists, and be done with this life's useless posturing.'

But Dharkaron's image faded away with the unused spear still in hand. Arithon drifted in half-conscious solitude, while the winds whipped and screamed over the rock fists of the Skyshiels. Once, he opened crusted eyes and saw that the horses had broken their tethers. By sound distorted and magnified by illness, he realized they now wandered at large, browsing among the stripped trees. Thirst drove him to weak-kneed, staggering movement. He rekindled a fire with shaking fingers that could scarcely hold flint and striker. The flames melted fresh snow, which he drank. Runnels slopped down his stubbled chin, rinsing the soured salt of the sweat unwashed since his duel with Fionn Areth. Strength spent, Arithon collapsed in his cloak. In due time, sleep claimed him, ripping him open all over again as the ferocity of suppressed memories served up vengeful dreams.

He wakened to sunshine that cut into vision like the steel blade of a knife. Facedown in cold snow, his limbs sweat-drenched and half-paralyzed, he found Elaira's name on his cracked lips. Behind closed eyes, he could see her, bronze hair unreeled in combed waves down her back, and her eyes the silvered, clear gray of wild sage as the leaves shed their dew of spring rainfall.

'Beloved, don't weep,' he gasped. But her tears did not cease, falling and falling in empathic pain for his suffering.

Her caring lent him the will to flounder back into the cave. He searched out the ruckled cloth of his cloak, sought refuge under its sheltering warmth, and fell unconscious before he stopped shivering.

Lucidity returned, sealed in that ominous stillness that presaged severe winter weather. Arithon opened clogged eyes to awareness the fever had broken and left him weak as a baby. The storm scent in the air hackled his instincts to warning. Still alive through the gift of his body's resilience, he understood he had exhausted every last margin for error. Sapped as he was, he must strike a fire. Whatever the state of his sword-wounded hand, the re-dressing must wait for the more pressing priorities of bodily warmth and nourishment.

He was too spent to stand. Dizziness racked him if he so much as propped on one elbow. Reduced to the struggles of a stricken animal, he crawled, belly down, to the supply packs. He scrounged out dry tinder. Striker and flint were cast willy-nilly on the ground, along with an uneaten portion of bread, and a scrap of jerked beef spiked with hoarfrost. The bucket of soaked beans had frozen solid through who knew how many days. Arithon gave up accounting for time. He passed out twice in the course of laying a straggling fire, concerned as his efforts consumed the last sticks of wood he had gathered the night of his arrival.

The bucket of beans he thawed in the coals. He tossed the bread and meat in to soften and boil along with them, adding fresh snow to keep the gruel thin. Despite that precaution, his shrunken stomach nearly revolted. He closed his eyes, rested, his riled nerves wrapped in patience until the spasms of nausea subsided. Then he picked through the stock of simples, found peppermint leaves, and made a tea to settle his gut. Through the halting course of an afternoon, he managed in slow stages to feed himself. In cold-cast awareness, as warmth returned to his limbs, he knew he owed breathing life to the fact that Dakar had stocked the packhorse for every possible contingency.

Outside, the horses still wandered at large. They had grazed off the tender twigs of the aspens, and now pawed for moss on the ledges. Arithon whistled them in, gave them rations of grain, then restored their halters and tethers. He knew he should also cut and haul wood, but that daunting task lay beyond him. Any effort to stand straight left him reeling. If he fell in the open, or mired in the snow, he might not have the resilience to drag himself back to the cave.

The threatened storm still came on. Already, the clouds smoked over the passes. The dire, death stillness that presaged their arrival soon broke before an ominous north wind. That opening note would swell into a gale before the advent of nightfall. Arithon gathered the loose saddlecloths, his cloak, and every spare shred of clothing contained in the packs. There, also, Dakar's thorough care did not fail him. He found oiled-wool blankets, and a sheepskin jacket packed in cerecloth. Also a thick wax candle that could be used at need to heat water in a tin cup.

The saddle and pack frame, turned over, made a niche for his body, which he lined with blankets and cloak. Tucked into the fleece jacket, and comfortably warm, he drifted into a deep and healing sleep.

Hunger wakened him again just past sundown. Storm winds whined and howled down the ridge, and hissing drafts prowled through the cave mouth. Arithon chewed beef jerky soaked in warm water, then arose, a little more steady. He tended the neglected geldings. If he hoarded the barley and oats just for them, he could keep them alive without fodder at the risk that the rich diet might gripe them with colic. He mixed peppermint leaves with their ration for safeguard, his short, breathless laugh for the fact the Mad Prophet's excesses at least had resulted in horse-sized doses of stomach remedies.

Hunkered back in his nest of blankets, he peeled off the rotted remains of the poultice. His fingers were left in a sorry state of dead skin and purple swelling. The wound, back and palm, was an ugly, gaping hole ridged with necrosed skin and proud flesh. Arithon was not up to performing the task of scraping away the bad tissue. In the end, he made a scalding infusion of betony and let the injured hand soak. Then he dried and dressed the welted puncture in clean linen. The abused flesh could not heal in such state, he knew from war-trained experience. Sick at heart for his music, he forced his tired mind not to dwell on the problem. Tomorrow, in clear light, if his grip was reliably steady on his knife, he could attend to the necessary debridement.

The night passed to the shrill scream of the storm as it broke full force on the Baiyen. By the flickering spill Arithon lit, as he rose at short intervals to feed horses, the mouth of the cave became lost behind a smoking curtain of snowfall. The drifts spilled inside, shelved and sculpted by the backdrafts into layers of ice-crystal sediment. By morning, only diffuse gray light filtered through the small gap at the top of the cleft.

Inside, cut off from the wind, the cruel edge of the cold blunted by the heat of the geldings, Arithon rested. He recouped his strength as he could, in no haste to dig his way out. The thawed snow in the bucket had not refrozen, and with water and small rations of grain given often, the horses kept well enough. By the unsettled glow of the candle, he cursed his way through the hurtful process of cleaning the wound in his hand. The ache that remained after a new poultice and bandage was the healthier sting of fresh healing. He pinched out the wick to conserve precious wax, and sat, chewing jerky, in the dimness. Hour by hour, morning passed to afternoon. The blizzard's snarling gusts blew themselves out, and the light through the chink wore the golden cast of a tenuous, westerly sunshine.

Arithon dozed in his blankets, lazily aware he needed to dig out and gather fresh wood before sundown. The horses would soon require more water than the stub of one candle could thaw. If the ice was not a span thick and rock solid, he must try to lead them down to the spring. While he mulled over the list of chores to be milked from his limited strength, the bay packhorse flung up its head with pricked ears. The buckskin jerked face about on its tether, its high neck taut and attentive.

'Merciful Ath!' Arithon flung off the miring blankets. On his feet with a haste that reeled him dizzy, he launched himself through four unbalanced strides, then fell against the near gelding's neck, desperate to pinch shut its nostrils.

The horse jerked up its nose. Arithon muffled its muzzle scarcely in time, then grabbed the bay and noosed its jaw before it could blast out a full-throated whinny. Wrestling the animals' headshaking resistance, he crooned a masterbard's phrase that would quell agitation and quiet them. Shortly, he shared what their keen equine ears had thankfully detected before him. Up the Baiyen Gap from the low country came a soprano jingle of metal. Then the grate of shod hooves clipped a wind
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scoured rock. A male voice bellowed a testy command, hailing a party of townborn companions to close a gap between stragglers.

Arithon shut his eyes in distress. The impossible had overtaken him as he slept: Jaelot's patrols had fared through the throat of the storm in pursuit of the Spinner of Darkness. Such relentless dedication bespoke a more sinister motive than the hatred of Jaelot's mayor. Luhaine's dire warning had proved true with a vengeance: Koriani sigils no doubt were at play, driving men to the chase past the bounds of practical sense.

Their approach was too close for flight or defense. Shaken to clammy sweat, Arithon had no choice but trust to hope that the banked snowdrift would obscure the rock cranny which sheltered him.

His first hope languished as the lead rider rounded the flank of the hillside. 'There's a crook in this corrie. Best check it out, if only to see if there's game we can flush for the stewpot.'

The snort of a horse ripped the glen's pristine quiet. In the cave's recessed dimness, Arithon kept his tight grip on the restive geldings. The bard's tricks that silenced them would scarcely serve, now. He had to force the animals to stay quiet as the small column of men turned off the Baiyen and wound their way up the gulch toward the spring.

'After five fruitless days scouring the back sides of snowdrifts, hell, it's high time we found something,' one man complained to his fellows.

Someone else cracked a jibe to coarse laughter.

'Praise fate we've seen nothing,' called another. 'Me, I'd far rather an empty trail, than stumbling across a pack o' queer lights and strange haunts.'

'No more loose talk!' reprimanded the captain. 'Next clown who so much as mentions a ghost gets dragged butt side down from his saddle.'

'Why not just press on?' someone else said, disheartened. 'Old storm's whisked away any sign of a track.'

'Demons don't leave tracks,' a companion groused back.

'Well, their horses do.' A purposeful creak of leather punched through the dell as someone else in authority dismounted. Arithon picked up the thin chink of a sword scabbard, then recognized the coastal twang of the mayor's skilled huntsman, apparently signed on as a tracker. An interval passed, filled in by the wind, while the masterful woodsman whisked off the new snow. He took thorough care, and finally encountered a hoof-trodden patch of bared ice. 'Uncanny creatures don't leave behind frozen piles of horse dung, now do they? And look here. That's broken ice. At least two beasts paused and drank at this spring. They stayed for some time. The twigs on those aspens are browsed back to stubs.'

The burred bass of Jaelot's guard captain held a ring of unnatural excitement. 'How long since he left?'

Through the hiss of a gust, the considered reply, 'I'd say the demon sorcerer moved on at least two days ahead of us.' The tracker slapped snow from wet gloves and stood up. 'Press hard, we could overtake him.'

The guard captain responded with a shouted command for the men by the spring to ride on. 'This trail threads the pass across Baiyen Gap. Once through to the barrens, the Spinner of Darkness could go nowhere else but the haunted towers that still stand at Ithamon.'