Master of Whitestorm (51 page)

The cleft narrowed. Coarse-grained slate closed until even Fhingold, who had labored in mines, cursed the confines and the dark. The climbers wedged between butting stone walls and clumsily fumbled off crampons. Here hands had to scratch to find holds, and ropes looped the ankles, or turned under bootsoles, a constant and much cursed impediment.

The chimney narrowed, showed the sky as a deepening slit of cobalt at their backs. Clothing scraped and tore on frost-split quartz, and even leather gloves sprouted holes like old socks at the fingertips. Dalon slipped and wedged his shin; minutes were lost as he tried to work free, an interval of worry made miserable by the overpowering taint of carrion that wafted down the shaft. Threaded through rotten meat came another smell, rank enough to make the stomach turn.

“Stinks like damned old gull spatters in here,” muttered Echend, to whom things of the sea were thrice hated.

In process of jerking off sweat-soggy gloves with his teeth, Fhingold enunciated thickly, “That has to mean we’re close.” The gloves ripped free. He added more clearly to Dalon, “Catch this and pass it under your knee.”

A line uncoiled in the darkness and lashed the lowlands swordsman in the cheek. His voice echoed faintly up the shaft.

Gravely smiling, Fhingold waited until the blasphemies stopped. “Ready, Dal?”

A rustle issued from below. “Yes, may the frostbite shrivel your member at the roots.”

Fhingold clamped the line around chapped palms and heaved something more than gently. Cloth tore, and Dalon’s jammed knee scraped free.

“Hellfire, Fhin. Ye’ve ripped my breeks. Want me to perish of the draft?”

The dwarf slacked the line and set after restoring his gloves. “Watch the frostbite.”

Bruised and scuffed and angrily determined, Dalon bound up his ripped leggings. “Next time you want a whore, I’ll buy for us both. We’ll see then who lasts the night.”

Fhingold stifled a bark of laughter and scrambled to continue the ascent. “Got a wife who’d outlast us both, you giant. If she ever gets free of the mines. Five years, it’s been, since my woman’s seen the sun.”

Which reminded them both of Korendir, somewhere ahead in his solitary quest to slay the Corrigon. The fissure cut deeper into the mountain, became yet more narrow and crooked. The climbers moved blind, shut off from any glimmer of sky. For what seemed hours their existence became limited by grunts of exertion, the scuff of boots over stone, and the bone-deep ache as exhausted muscles dragged the body from cranny to crevice to the skin-rasping stone of shallow ledges. Twice they blundered up shafts that ended in cul-de-sacs of blocked stone. Tortuously they doubled back, worked around, started over. Echend continued to lead because Fhingold had no space to scrape by to relieve him.

At long last the terrain opened up again. The clouds had cleared off the face. Mare’s tails marked the air where the winds met the thermals off the valley, entangled with stars like sequins. Elsewhere the heavens were sapphire. Night enfolded the Hyadons and shadowed the saw-toothed cut where two stubborn men and one dwarf emerged.

The summit rose up in front of them, a serried pinnacle mantled under pristine ridges of snow.

Dalon, last out, crammed back his cap and scanned the vista with narrowed eyes. “Neth! What happened to the Corrigon’s lair?”

At silence from the dwarf and the mountain born, he turned and surveyed the route mapped out by Indlvarrn. Beneath the cleft, the terrain fell steeply to form a gully, chiselled by the assaults of uncounted winters and seamed by prying frosts. The jutting shoulder of an outcrop cradled eddied snow, and also a log jam of timbers inconsistent with its setting. Like a festered scar underneath ran the cleft that had sheltered their ascent. Dalon shuddered. The shaft they had climbed in damp darkness had been no true cave at all. The crevice had been blocked, not by rock, or ice, nor even the frozen seep of spring waters, but by a jumble of horrific debris that had no place in the clean winds off the peaks.

The truth was shatteringly revealed:
Indlvarrn’s route had sent them through a seam that cut directly beneath the Corrigon’s nest.

Dalon recovered a shivering breath of air. Cold clawed his lungs, made his sinuses ache, and he clenched his teeth through an interval of outraged futility. “We’ve overshot,” he gasped in an amazement that was half compounded with fright. The thought followed that Korendir must inevitably have done the same.

“Not there.” Nervelessly practical, Fhingold scanned the upper slopes and pronounced them empty. “The man had to have known about the nest site. He probably never entered the cleft.”

Echend could not help voicing the other possibility. “Unless he fell.”

But all of them remembered crossing the chaotic vista of the plateau; evenings, exhausted from the day’s trek, they had huddled against companions to share warmth that perpetually seemed inadequate. Each one recalled falling miserably asleep to the sound of voices, Korendir’s and Indlvarrn’s, exchanging Neth only cared what ideas through the purpled shadows before dawn. Dwarf guide and mercenary had debated every irrelevance from crop growing to treatises on experimental navigation. Echend did not read. Fhingold had been born a slave in the mines, and Dalon was solely a swordsman; only a fanatic or a scholar would have bothered to follow those overheard snatches of conversation. Too late, on a desolate upper scarp in the Hyadons, two men and one dwarf recalled that Indlvarrn Keth’s get was at heart a hunter and forester. The deceit behind his ruse was unraveled painfully late, that in fact he had been revealing the route to the mercenary from White Rock Head; but the particulars had been shared with no one else.

“Our company would’ve balked on the Graley, else,” Echend concluded for all of them. “Sky and storm, I’d have let them, if I’d guessed our path would cross within spit of a Corrigon’s nest.”

Only Fhingold stayed silent.

“You knew,” Dalon accused suddenly. Sharp, even hostile with suspicion, he spun on his dwarf companion. “Your talk of blood-flecked ice was just lies. You could have warned us where the route led, all along!”

A fatalist to the end, Fhingold shrugged his resignation. “I’d hoped Korendir didn’t know, and that we’d find him blundering about on the summit.” As Echend stiffened, lividly offended, the dwarf added, “Neth’s damnation on you, man, there was nothing at all we could do if we tried to go topside! One sword or four against the Corrigon quite simply adds up to suicide. For the freedom of my kind, and the survival of your children, I hoped we’d find our mercenary above the chimney. Then we might’ve talked him back to scare sense into those whining dogs below.”

Echend snapped back a contradiction. “Not that one. Got a mind as set as a priest’s tattoo, and never one thought of a compromise. Damn you, dwarf, we trusted you! Give us a line for rappel down to the nest, or I swear I’ll draw steel and unwind your guts for the purpose.”

“Too late,” Fhingold said, and he pointed.

The waning moon had edged over the saddle above the Graley. Light polished the snowfields and snagged black swaths of shadow off buttressed escarpments; the wildest range of the Hyadons stood revealed in unspoiled splendor, except where oiled steel flashed reflection and vanished into dark. Guided by that anomaly, and by Fhingold’s dwarvish eyesight, Dalon and Echend could just make out a figure crouched on the face. Korendir had discarded his crampons at the edge of the ice. His sable jacket blended almost invisibly with the slate which jutted beneath the monster’s eyrie. Dalon drew breath to argue that they still might have time to descend when steel flashed again. Both men saw the Master of Whitestorm arch out over windless air, set his foot, and cock his crossbow.

Moonlight fell also on jumbled timbers, reeking and blackened with spills of old blood. It silvered splinters of white that were the bones of countless kills, and shone also in eyes like faceted quartz, but vicious, and deathly cruel. The Corrigon raised its head. Horny scales glimmered in crescents as, watchful, its hooked beak turned toward the glint of metal on the slope that abutted its nest.

“Almighty Neth,” breathed Dalon.

Echend fumbled after the amulet he wore strapped to his wrist.

Fhingold did nothing but stare, heartbroken, for upon the frailty of one man rested the freedom of his wife and race. To watch that hope die was worse than any loss he could contemplate.

Korendir stared upward into the ice-splinter gaze of the Corrigon. If he trembled, no man was near enough to see. The wire-wrapped string of his crossbow caught on the trigger latch with a clear, metallic ping.

The Corrigon ruffled its crest feathers. It bobbed once, then unfurled black wings with a gusty rush of air. Its terrible cry shivered over the valley as it thrust horned legs and launched aloft. The twenty-span breadth of its primaries raised gusts that plumed the drifts; one beat, two, and it cleared the ridge. Korendir was lost in whipping drafts of blown snow. Clothed in a nightmare grace, the adversary he swore to destroy soared and banked in a tight arc, then drove direct for his position, a scythe that carved downward to kill. The moon etched scales and feathers with a beauty that had no mercy, as sword-sharp talons rose to rake and impale.

That moment, Korendir notched the bolt; one had time to recall that although he seldom smiled, he never failed to be courteous. He endured through what seemed the impossible by exhibiting courage that daunted, and then most pitilessly inspired. He dealt both life and death with a precision that repeatedly seemed inhuman, and yet, they all knew—the mountains stripped a man to his naked, most grasping self—Korendir did not risk for fame. He did not belittle with his competence; he had no pride in him at all. Only Echend had seen him in his chosen setting, with wife and son in the home left behind at Whitestorm; almost, the mountain born had missed the compassion that shaped the man. Nearly too late he had offered Name, only to have his honor forsworn by the misdirected mercy of a dwarf.

Dalon wept, shattered to shame by recognition. The manhood he had earned on the Graley, here in the Hyadons seemed dwindled to insignificance by the act of one fool with a crossbow.

For the breast of the monster offered no target. No steel-tipped quarrel ever forged could pierce those ungodly scales. Korendir endured, perhaps hoping for opening to fire into the softer tissue beneath the wing; but even an accurate shot to the heart could not possibly kill in time. The mercenary would be plucked from the rock and skewered, and not even miracle might save him.

In the instant the Corrigon swooped, Fhingold alone managed speech. Impelled beyond grief for kinsfolk still shackled in slavery, he howled his abject despair. “What are my people, and the children of Arrax, to be worth such sacrifice as this?”

His cry rang out over snowfields, swelled by a sorrow that shattered Neth’s most perfect quiet. Distracted, the Corrigon turned its head.

Korendir squeezed his trigger. The crossbow fired with a whap and a hiss of taut cable through air. The bolt leapt out, a needle against the blue dark of the abyss.

It struck the monster in the center of its eye and stabbed on through to the brain.

The great wings clapped down in spasm. Primaries whipped and closed an arc that sheared up snow from the slope. Ice crystals whirled like smoke, and the beak clashed closed with a crack. Korendir flung himself flat. The crossbow dropped from his hand. Steel fell, turning in rhythmic flashes, lost into shadow as the Corrigan crashed against the peak.

Feathers crumpled and snapped, and scales grated shrilly over stone. The body of the monster hit with a thud of burst bones against slate, and also the vulnerable, exposed, and helpless human body that comprised the measure of its bane.

Korendir of Whitestorm took the brunt of the Corrigon’s fall. Hammered into rock by the force of momentum and mass, he was smashed and then ripped from his hold. The slain beast rebounded and tumbled, a crushed mass of sable and scarlet. Like a mote, the man fell with it.

“Neth,” choked Dalon. “Oh great Neth.”

Numbly Echend drew his dagger and scratched a cross of shame over the tattoo on his forehead. His blood ran, fell in drops on stainless snow, while far below, a great evil and a tragic loss plunged in a shared rush of air toward the distant valley.

One had time to remember that Korendir of Whitestorm had not failed this, his final contract.

Fhingold crumpled with his cheek against ice and wept. Blind with tears, overcome with sadness and a conflicting release of joy too overpowering to deny in the same moment, he was the only one of the three who missed the searing flash. Light ripped out of nowhere and obliterated the smaller of two falling rags of black.

When the disturbance cleared, the corpse of the Corrigon tumbled alone to final impact.

* * *

The horrified scream of the midwife echoed over the wind-battered towers of Whitestorm. Waiting with his guts clenched in tension, Haldeth recoiled against the balustrade that headed the stair beyond the lady’s chambers. Sorcery burned like a beacon from the slit beneath the door; dazzled, sweating, and harrowed by unnatural dread, Haldeth could bear ignorance no more. Knowing surely was better than this shredding, tormented strain. He unhooked the latch and flung wide the chamber door.

Chaos met him, a confusion of searing light, shot through with steam from basins that brimmed with heated water. The midwife screamed again, and someone, possibly Orame, snapped out a reprimand to quiet her. From the far side of the place where the bed should be—Haldeth strained to see through the hedging brilliance of sorceries—a child hiccoughed and wailed.

Someone arose with a bundle that squirmed amid bloodied sheets. Confused by contradictions of brightest light and bleak shadow, Haldeth hurried forward and tripped.

His fall threw him headlong into a spell-circle woven by sorcerers, just as the counterbalance to the miracle of Ithariel’s early birthing flashed and achieved full fruition.

“We have him!” cried Dethmark’s newmade Archmaster. He rose from the dark in one corner and raised hands that seemed rinsed with white light.