squealing under his boot soles. The geldings followed, lackluster. Lathered sweat crusted their coats into whorls. Necks to hindquarters, they would have to be curried to free their thick guard hairs for warmth. Yet concern for that added burden of care must give way before the vast grandeur that opened ahead: the swept crown of rock held a mythic weight, instilled in all works wrought by Athera’s blessed races.
Despite the worn state of man and beast, the old Baiyen way stood as a monument to evoke awe.
The trail, with its slope in graceful incline, had been a life artery through two prior Ages of history. Each massive, fitted block underfoot had been laid by Ilitharis Paravians. Their artistry still withstood the battering elements, bulwarked by the awareness of stone wakened to perpetual service. Too narrow to bear the wagons and teams that were the province of man, the stepped ledge had provided First Age Paravian war bands swift passage when marauding packs of Khadrim had made their lairs in the Skyshiels. By fire and sword, drake spawn and Paravian had waged battles over the causeway. At solstice and equinox, when lane tides ran highest, the fallen still danced in perpetual combat. Their haunts could be seen by those born with talent, silent and silver under the frost flood of moonlight. Here and there, tumbled fissures of slagged rock showed where the balefires of Khadrim had melted glassine scars in sheer granite.
Man’s footsteps had never trodden here freely. When the Fellowship’s compact had been sworn to answer humanity’s plea to claim sanctuary, none walked where the old races forbade them, except by strict courtesy and permission. A man broke that law at risk of his sanity, Paravian presence being too bright to bear for those families whose heritage lay outside clan bloodlines. The needs of town trade had been negotiated by the long-past generations of clan chieftains, the old rights of way drawn by Paravian law into harmony with sky and earth. The sites which seated the mysteries stayed reserved in perpetuity.
Baiyen Gap was one of those crossings held sacrosanct, even after the uprising broke charter law, and the town trade guilds ran roughshod over the established tradition of way rights. The Fellowship of Seven still enforced the strict ban against road building, despite fierce opposition, and round upon round of hot argument. Nor was the old law forgotten in the deepest wilds, where the imprint of the mysteries still lingered and centaur guardians had not taken kindly to trespass.
Arithon s’Ffalenn had little to fear, whatever the road’s haunted status. By right of blood, his granted sanction as Rathain’s crown prince set him as spokesman for mankind’s chartered rights on the land. Wherever he walked, if he honored the old ways, the past centaur guardians would have granted him passage. He could but hope, as he set foot on the path of his ancestors, that in his hour of need the enemies riding with Jaelot’s town guard would not be shown the same license.
The level footing allowed faster progress. No strange lights or haunts revisited to trouble him, or startle his flagging horses. The sheer wall of the cliff eased gradually into a milder grade crossing the broken scree slopes between mountains. Arithon traversed a succession of corries, each one thicketed in fir, and slotted with deer tracks where passing herds had paused to browse on the greenery.
Lowering sunlight burnished the high peaks. As eventide shadow tinged the snow-clad hills to a ruckle of lavender silk, he entered a vale and broke the paned ice over a tumbling streamlet. Upland silence wrapped him in the spiced scent of balsam, while the horses sucked down bracing water. Prompted by the punched spoor of a mountain hare, Arithon hitched their reins to a deadfall. A foray into the underbrush led him through the tumbled scar of a rockslide to a spring hidden within a dense copse of aspen. Fir saplings and dead briar cloaked the mouth of an oblate, scraped fissure that had once served Khadrim, and later, untold generations of wolves as a snug summer lair to raise young.
‘Blessed Ath,’ Arithon gasped on a breath of sheer gratitude.
He returned for the horses, then used the last hour before the light faded to sweep down the snow where his tracks left the Baiyen causeway. Twilight saw both geldings curried and fed, and a dead aspen limb chopped for fuel. The fire Arithon laid was economically small, hot enough to boil the water for remedies, but too scant to shed warmth for his body. He dared not risk the least presence of smoke to draw the attention of enemies. By the fragrant, low light of the embers, he shouldered the unpleasant task of attending his injured right hand.
The puncture had bled and scabbed many times, until the dressing tied on in the field had to be soaked away. The wound underneath wept amid angry swelling, stuck with dirt and frayed threads. Sweating in discomfort, wrung from exhaustion and hunger, Arithon was trained healer enough to persist until the raw tissue was clean. As well, he realized he had been lucky. Fionn Areth’s blade had grazed between the long bones. No tendons were severed, but the steel point had entered at an oblique angle and emerged above the heel of his hand. There, the leather-wrapped tang of Alithiel had stopped the thrust and prevented the blade from slicing disastrously home.
Arithon heated the tip of his dagger red-hot, and made his best effort at cautery. The remedy came much too late, he well knew. Already the scarlet streaks of infection ran past his wrist, drawn by the veins in his forearm. The sepsis he dreaded had already set in. Dakar’s forethought had provisioned the saddle packs with a stock of healer’s simples. Arithon sorted the tied packets of herbs, haunted by memory of happier hours, when Elaira had taught him the art of their use in her cottage at Merior by the Sea. The pain in his heart surpassed without contest every hurt to his outraged flesh. He wondered where the next Koriani assignment would send her; then ached for the unendurable fact of her absence through the left-handed clumsiness of fashioning a poultice of drawing astringents. To goldenrod and black betony, he added wild thyme and tansy, whose virtues would help clear the sickness from traumatized tissues.
The aftermath of the bandaging left him weakened and dizzy, the pain running through him in sucking waves that pressed him to the rim of unconsciousness. The call of that blissful, seductive darkness became all too powerfully inviting. There lay rest and peace, and the sublime balm of forgetfulness. In that hour of cold night, with the wind off the summits a whining hag’s chorus, and body and mind half-unstrung, death almost wore the mask of a friend. The crossing promised oblivious freedom, and compassionate severance from care.
‘I have to refuse you,’ Arithon said aloud, his words forced through gritted, locked teeth. Bone weary, driven close to delirium from hunger and lack of sleep, nonetheless he clung to commitment. A blood oath sworn to a Fellowship Sorcerer yet bound him this side of Fate’s Wheel.
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