‘Close up that gap!’ snapped the sergeant in charge to a laggard who held up the pack train. ‘What’s the matter? Think you see more of those blighted lights following you?’
The burly drover shook off his unease and plowed onward. ‘No lights. I’ve got no barbarian blood in my family, to be cursed with visions of haunts in broad daylight.’
‘Better we could see the queer thing that plagues us,’ grumbled his bearded companion. He sawed at his reins, swearing as his sidling horse persistently shied at what surely was only a shadow crossing the trail. ‘Worse, the creepy sense somebody’s watching your back. Or you feel solid footing’s about to give way, and the trail’s an uncanny illusion.’
‘No niche for a spy on these forsaken cliffs,’ the sergeant said in snarling annoyance. ‘If you fall, that’s your fault for not keeping your eyes straight ahead. You want to sleep in the open? Then get that beast moving. I’ll strip hide from the man who keeps us from reaching that sheltered campsite by sundown.’
The supply train reached the dell with the aspen grove under the lucent gleam of twilight. They settled in, boisterous with noise as horses and mules were stripped of packs and harness, and trees were cut to lay campfires. Jerked meat and rice were set boiling in pots, while the cold flecks of stars scattered the upland darkness. Night deepened, filled by the dirge of the winds that quashed ribald conversation. The men huddled closer to their flickering fires. On the ridges above, the wisped whirl of the snow devils seemed stirred by the restive ghosts. The skeletal tap of bare aspens framed a language too wild for mankind’s tamed comprehension.
Worse, perhaps, the deep silence between gusts, vast enough to drown thought and swallow the petty, thin sounds of their presence. In this place, the bygone Ages of time lay on the land like poured crystal. The armed men and drovers clung to their fellows, uneasily aware the trail through the Baiyen did not welcome intrusion.
That moment, a deep, groaning note issued from the side of the mountain. The camp sentries spun, hands clapped to their weapons, while the men by the cookfires leaped to their feet.
For a tense, unsettled moment, the darkness seemed to intensify. Then the snowbank lapped over the rocks exploded. Flying clods and debris disgorged the forms of two galloping centaurs. Massive, immense, and bent upon murder for the trespass of heedless humanity, they drove headlong into the picket lines. Panicked horses screamed and snapped tethers. Their milling stampede swept behind startled masters, hazed into panicked retreat. In darkness, in fear, shouting in terror, men and beasts fled the corrie. The smooth trail beyond was a narrow ribbon of ice. Sliding, falling, unable to stop as their horses mowed haplessly over them, Jaelot’s invaders plunged screaming and clawing over the brink of the cliff face and dashed on the fangs of the rock slopes below…
Braced on the rumpled snow at the rim, Arithon s’Ffalenn dispersed his wrought weaving of shadows. Trembling, he gathered his revolted nerves. His body the rebellious servant of will, he stood up. He soothed his overwrought geldings until their flaring snorts finally quieted.
The frigid night had forfeited peace, the pristine stillness of the Baiyen defiled as mangled men and smashed horses shuddered and cried. Pulped flesh and white snow commingled in bloodstains, snagged on fouled rock, and the stilled hulks of the murdered dead, fallen.
Arithon tied up the horses. Gut sick, unsure of his balance, he unslung a slim bundle from his shoulder. Then he struggled and strung the heavy, horn recurve Dakar had selected to hunt deer. The arrows were a hunter’s, broad-bladed and sharp. They would kill by internal bleeding.
Unaware that he pleaded forgiveness in Paravian, his words a scratched utterance without grace, Arithon knelt in the trampled snow. Twice, overcome, he folded and rendered his gorge. Nor was his eyesight trustworthy, blurred as it was by the bitter well of his tears.
The pull of the bow pained his infected hand. Determined, he nocked the first arrow. Wood rattled against horn, tempo to his trembling, and the snatched sob of unsteady breath. Yet the will behind each move was pure iron. Integrity required that he must not falter, whatever his bodily failings. The fabric of self, curse torn and sullied, demanded no less than to finish in mercy the cruel act imposed by oathsworn survival.
At the end, as he hauled the bow into full draw, his rage at the binding proscribing his life became the fuel that set his hand steady. The ache as his mangled right hand took the strain and the sudden spurt of fresh bleeding became a pittance beside the wounding affliction of conscience.
‘Myself, the sole enemy,’ he gasped in Paravian. ‘Dharkaron Avenger forgive.’
He released. On the smeared rocks below, one less voice cried out. Arithon dashed back the burn of salt tears. Again, he nocked feathered broadhead to string. Arrow by arrow, he dispatched the groaning wounded downslope. Each careful, clean shot snuffed another cry of suffering, but woke in him recall of an unquiet past, and a summer dell known as the Havens. He quashed the revolt of his clamoring mind, but could not repress the shattering screams of the dying. Pain and will could do nothing to erase final agony.
Alone in the Baiyen, against a sere mountain silence Mankind had no right to break, a night’s waking nightmare dropped Rathain’s prince like a spearcast run through the heart.
At the end, the bow fell from his nerveless hands. No strength and no passion of temper remained, to hurl the hated weapon away. Arithon crumpled, brought to his knees by the anguish of immutable truth: that no centaur guardian had ever used lethal force against any man who offended. More wounding still, no matter whose war host harried his back, the toll of his dead had unmanned him. He could not shoulder the tactics of massacre again, except at the cost of his sanity.
Winter 5670
Diviner
Far removed from the blizzards that savaged Baiyen Gap, and the fugitive crown prince who fled Jaelot’s guard, the forerunner of war set foot on the western coast of Rathain. The fated arrival came deep in the night, on the decks of an oared galley rowed at forced speed through the narrows of Instrell Bay.
A fortnight had passed since the solstice. Oblivious to the flare of contention between Koriathain and Fellowship Sorcerers, untroubled by threats posed by grimwards or bindings containing the rampaging hungers of wraiths, the Mayor of Narms awoke in snug blankets. Someone who had a fist like a battering ram hammered the door to his chamber. He blinked, reluctant to complete the transition between dreams and the burdens of cognizance.
The pounding continued, relentless. ‘Hell’s blighted minions!’ The mayor sat up. Blinking in owlish distemper, he croaked, ‘Which trade guild’s been raided this time?’
Two more hours remained before dawn. An ice flood of light from the waning moon threw shadow from the mullions in cut diamonds over his counterpane. Faint shouts echoed up from the courtyard. Then the door panel cracked, and his snub-nosed chamber steward peered past the jamb in fussed inquiry. ‘My lord, you’ll be needed. A galley from Tysan just tied up at the docks, flying sunwheel banners and bearing no less than a royal delegation.’
‘Royal? The Prince Exalted, himself?’ Narms’s mayor shot out of bed, while a gapped seam in the quilt exhaled a flurry of goosedown.
Past the whirl of feathers, the house steward returned a blunt shrug. ‘I’m sorry. The banners suggest so.’
‘Loose fiends and Dharkaron’s Black Chariot!’ An unannounced crossing in the depths of winter suggested a breaking disaster. Gruff even when fully wakeful, the mayor batted snagged fluff from his beard and hushed his wife’s drowsy inquiry.
‘State visitors. Ring the bell for your maid. We need to be dressed very quickly.’ To his steward, he added, ‘Have you heard what’s afoot?’
The pink, balding man bobbed his head like a turtle. ‘Lord, the dock runner who fetched me knew nothing. The night watch hauls wood to light fires in the hall. There won’t be time to rehang proper tapestries.’