Lysaer swore. ‘What sort of predator caused that?’
‘You don’t want to hear,’ said Felirin. He raised his voice and called to Asandir. ‘There are Khadrim in the pass, yes?’
‘I fear so.’ The sorcerer halted the horses. With quick fingers he unbuckled the reins from the black’s bridle and hitched them to the caught stallion’s bit. Then he cut off the ends of the broken pair and offered the animal to the bard. ‘I want everyone mounted.’
The remark included Arithon, who looped his reins over the dun’s ears, while Felirin slid off Lysaer’s chestnut and accepted possession of the grey. The bard asked, and received permission to leave his lyranthe where it was; no sense in trusting a strange horse with an awkward and unaccustomed burden. ‘This was the guard captain’s mount,’ the bard said ruefully as he adjusted the leathers for his much longer legs. ‘This fellow is probably trained handily for war but damn, his saddle was made for a man with narrow buttocks. What little stuffing the Khadrim might have left has blown away on the wind.’
‘Sit down too hard on the armour studs and you’ll find yourself singing soprano,’ Dakar retorted smugly.
The bard shot him a dark look and dabbed at drying bloodstains before he set foot in the stirrup and mounted. ‘At the end of this day’s ride, I’ll be thankful to count only bruises.’ He settled his reins and addressed Asandir. ‘I presume we’re going to be crazy and continue on, not turn back?’
The sorcerer nodded. His gaze fixed on the half-brothers through a brief, measuring moment. ‘There could be danger, but the risk will stay manageable if nobody loses their head. Keep together, whatever happens. Arithon, when I tell you, and only when, draw your blade.’
The Mad Prophet slapped his forehead. ‘Ath!’
Asandir’s eyes went wide with incredulity. ‘Dakar! You scatterbrain, don’t tell me you’d forgotten the sword?’
‘I did.’ The Mad Prophet returned a pouting scowl. ‘Small wonder, with the rest of you conspiring to rig my bets.’
The sorcerer disgustedly turned and remounted his black. ‘Remind me never, ever, to rely on your memory in a pinch.’ He noticed and answered Arithon’s look without pause to turn his head. ‘Boy, your sword was forged ten and a half thousand years past, expressly for war against the Khadrim.’
‘War,’ interjected Lysaer. ‘Then the creatures are intelligent?’
Arithon barely heard Asandir’s affirmative reply; he ignored Felirin’s curious query and the hilt which protruded from the scabbard at his hip with absolute, icy detachment. Whatever curiosity he might once have held for his inherited weapon, he had never owned an inkling that the blade might be so ancient. That he carried spell-wrought steel was undeniable, though the nature of its powers had escaped the wisdom of Dascen Elur’s mages. The chance the sword might bind him further to a duty he wanted no part of became just another weight upon his heart.
Having lost his royal inheritance, Lysaer would treasure the chance to bear a great talisman; Arithon caught the suppressed flash of envy in his brother’s blue eyes. Yet before the Master could offer his last true possession as a gift, Asandir came back with rebuttal.
‘You can never relinquish that blade, except to your own blood heir.’
Arithon knew an inward surge of protest, a fleeting, angry impression that he had cause to take exception to the sorcerer’s words. Yet as had happened before when Felirin had pressured him over music, the Master could not quite frame the concept. As he tried, his thoughts went vague, and his perceptions scattered, disoriented. By now he had learned that if he stopped fighting back, the confusion would quickly pass; the unreliable dun distracted him sufficiently in any case. Yet each successive incident left Arithon less satisfied with Asandir’s explanation in the woodcutter’s cottage. The gaps in his memory were not natural: that Dakar watched him with predatory speculation each time he recovered lent evidence to justify suspicion. Arithon guessed some telling fact had been withheld from him. Before he could be cornered in a position he could not escape, he determined to find out what and why.
Beyond the draw where they captured the runaway horse the road steepened sharply. The crags on either side reared up to ever more jagged promontories, their lofty, looming summits lost in mist. Patches of early snow mottled the northern faces, cut by rockfalls and boulder-choked ravines where vegetation clawed desperate foothold. Here the slate paving showed the abuse of harsh winters, split and heaved crooked by frosts. The horses picked carefully over uneven footing and the air took on the reek of cinders. When they rounded a switched-back curve, they saw why.
The stud balked, snorting with alarm. Ahead, between the smoking wreckage that remained of two dozen wagons, the drovers of the caravan who had ousted Felirin lay strewn across the way like dirtied rags. Man and mount and cart-mule, there were no survivors. Corpses littered the ledge. Charred clothing clung to exposed bones and whatever flesh remained had been mauled to ribbons by something not interested in hunting for the sake of sustenance. Lysaer cupped a hand to his mouth, sickened by the sight of an eviscerated woman and a horse with half its hindquarters seared to stinking, blackened meat. Something with monstrous jaws had snapped the head off the neck.
Stung into memories of strife and battle by the bodies of so many slain, Arithon looked quickly beyond. What drained the blood from his face was something black and scaled that lurked, half-glimpsed in the mist: a creature straight out of legend, with silvery, leathered wings that extended an impossible sixteen spans from the ridge of the armoured breastbone to each outstretched, claw-spurred tip.
‘Stay close,’ commanded Asandir. He reached across one-handed and calmed Felirin’s sidling grey with a touch, then scanned the sky with worried eyes.
‘There are more of them, and not far off,’ Dakar said in an odd and unusual briskness.
That moment a shrill whistle split the mist overhead. The sound was eerie, rich and complex with harmonics that seemed to tantalize the edge of understanding. Other whistles answered, echoing from a gallery of unseen cliffs. A huge, shadowy form shot above the roadway and the acrid breeze of its passage set every horse in the company trembling outright in fear.
‘Now, Arithon,’ Asandir said quietly. ‘Give yourself space and draw your steel.’
The dun mare surged forward the instant her rider gave rein. Arithon set his back against her and curbed her hot impulse to bolt; but the mare was too wild to settle. She skittered sideways, carved an angry pirouette by the overturned hulk of a wagon and bucked. One rebellious hind hoof banged against the wreck and a welter of clothgoods spilled loose from the torn canvas cover. The edges of the bolts were singed and horribly spattered with blood. The sudden movement and the smells of death and burned silks caused the mare to rip into a rear.
‘Arithon!’ shouted Asandir. ‘The sword!’
His cry was cut by a screeling bellow from the mist directly above. The sound reverberated with stinging incalculable fury that wounded the ears with subsonics. The dun mare arched higher, striking the air with her forelegs. There she swayed, ears flattened and tail clamped to her croup in taut panic. Arithon pressed into her neck and soothed with hands and voice to coax her down.
That moment, while horse and rider struggled vulnerably to regain balance, the Khadrim stooped to the attack.
It descended in a rush of furled wings, a bolt of killing black streamlined from the dagger-claws of fang and talon. It arced down as a spear might fall, red-eyed and fork-tailed, and purely bent on murder. Arithon glanced up. Through the mare’s streaming mane, he saw the nightmare in its earthward rush to take him.
‘The sword!’ screamed Asandir. Violet light flashed as he raised his hands to shape wizardry.
The Khadrim saw the spell, snapped out wings broad as sails and sliced into a bank. Before the sorcerer could strike it from the sky its neck curved back, blackly scaled and sinuous as a venomous snake. For an instant the monster’s red eyes turned unwinking on the man and the horse standing