The Curse of the Mistwraith (26 page)

By now half-muffled under bedclothes, Arithon said in startled seriousness, ‘Of course not.’

Lysaer rested his chin on his fists and his damply crumpled shirt. Statesman enough to guess that the meat of the matter sprang from Arithon’s ill-starred heirship of Karthan, and not eased that the thrust of s’Ffalenn wiles now bent toward contention with Asandir, he gently shifted the subject. ‘Well, the loss of your roots doesn’t bother you much.’

One corner of Arithon’s mouth twitched. After a moment, the expression resolved to a smile. ‘If it takes sharing confidences to prove that you’re wrong, there was one young maid. I was never betrothed, as you were. Sithaer, I barely so much as kissed her. I think she was as frightened of my shadows as I was of telling her my feelings.’

‘Perhaps you’ll find your way back to her.’ The wind whined mournfully through the cracks in the shutters and a draft stole through the small room; touched by the chill, Lysaer shrugged. ‘At least, we could ask Asandir to return us to Dascen Elur once we’ve defeated the Mistwraith.’

‘No.’ Arithon rolled over, his face turned unreadably to the wall. ‘Depend on the fact that he won’t.’

‘You found out something in Erdane, didn’t you,’ Lysaer said. But his accusation dangled unanswered. Rebuffed and alone with his thoughts, and hating the fate that left him closeted at the whim of a sorcerer in the fusty lodgings of a second rate roadside tavern, he shook out his damp shirt and blew out the candle for the night.

Two days later the riders in Asandir’s party reached Standing Gate, a rock formation that spanned the road in a lopsided natural arch. Centaurs in past ages had carved the flanking columns into likenesses of the twins who founded their royal dynasty. Since before the memory of man the granite had resisted erosion: the Kings Halmein and Adon reared yet over the highway, their massive, majestic forelegs upraised in the mist and their beards and maned backs stained the verdigris of old bronze with blooms of lichen.

Mortal riders could not pass beneath their shadow without experiencing a chill of profound awe. Here the footfalls of the horses seemed to resound with the echoes of another age, when the earth was fresh with splendour and Paravians nurtured the mysteries. Standing Gate marked the upward ascent to the high valley pass of Orlan, sole access through the Thaldein mountains to Atainia and lands to the east.

But even under the frosts of coming winter, in the years since the fall of the high kings, travellers who fared through Standing Gate never passed unobserved.

Asandir’s party proved no exception, as Arithon discovered in a pause to water his mare on the bank of a fast-flowing creek. Muffled against the stiff breeze, he sat his saddle with both stirrups dropped and his reins slipped loosely through his fingers. Suddenly the dun flung her head up. Her rider did not see what had startled her; the woollen hood of his cloak masked his peripheral vision as she snapped sideways and wheeled. Stalled from bolting by an expert play on the reins, the mare crab-stepped, stopped and blew noisily. Her sable-edged ears pricked toward a stand of scrub pine that rattled and tossed in the gusts.

Nothing moved that did not appear to belong there.

Yet when Arithon urged the mare on she stamped and rigidly resisted. Warned by her keener senses, he recovered his stirrups and stroked her neck in pretence of coaxing her away; at the same time he centred his mind and cast an enchanter’s awareness over the thicket.

A man crouched there, motionless, clad in jerkin and leggings of sewn wolfskin. Weather had roughened his face beyond his years and his ruddy hair had tangled from the wind. The consciousness Arithon touched held a predator’s leashed aggression paired with tempered steel: a matched set of long knives and a javelin with a braided leather grip.

Although to face away from the thicket as if no armed man watched his back was a most unwelcome exercise, Arithon pressed his mare forward in earnest. The instant the rocky footing allowed a faster pace, he trotted his horse and caught up with the others.

Dakar regarded him slantwise as the dun overtook his paint. ‘How was the assignation? Or did you dawdle to swim?’

‘Neither.’ Arithon returned a grin of purest malice. ‘Remind me to recommend you as chaperone for some jealous pervert’s catamite.’

He ignored the Mad Prophet’s thunderous scowl and disturbed Asandir’s preoccupied silence. ‘We’re being watched.’

The sorcerer’s gaze stayed trained ahead, as if he saw beyond the misty road which wound upward between steepening rocky outcrops. ‘That’s not surprising.’

Wise to the subtleties of mages, Arithon withheld unwelcome questions; presently the sorcerer’s steely eyes turned from whatever inward landscape he had been contemplating. ‘This is the townsmen’s most dreaded stretch of highway. The clans that ruled Camris before the rebellion make their stand here. If we were a caravan bearing metals or clothgoods we would require an armed escort. Not being townborn, our party has little to fear.’

‘The Camris clans were subject to the high king of Tysan?’ Arithon asked.

Asandir returned an absent glance. ‘The old earls of Erdane swore fealty. Their descendants will not have forgotten.’

Unfooled by the sorcerer’s apparent inattention, Arithon reined in his mare. As she curvetted and recovered stride by the shoulder of Lysaer’s chestnut, the green eyes of her rider showed a glint of veiled speculation. Covered by the clang of hooves on cleared rock, he said, ‘We’re going to see action in the pass.’

Lysaer rubbed a nose nipped scarlet by the chill, his expression turned gravely merry. ‘Then someone better tell Dakar to tighten his saddle girth, or the first quick move his paint makes will tumble him over on the rocks.’

‘I heard that,’ interjected the Mad Prophet. He flapped his elbows, his reins and his heels, and contrived to overtake the half-brothers without mishap. To Lysaer he said, ‘Let’s be sporting and wager. I say my saddle stays put with no help from buckles, and you’ll kiss the dirt before I do.’ Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. ‘And one thing further – there won’t be any trouble in the pass.’

‘Don’t answer,’ said Arithon to his half-brother. ‘Not unless you fancy pulling cockle burrs from your saddle fleeces.’

‘That’s unfair,’ Dakar retorted, injured. ‘I only cheat when the odds are hard against me.’

‘My point precisely.’ Arithon ducked the swing the Mad Prophet pitched in his direction, then sidled his mount safely clear as the paint’s saddle slid around her barrel and disgorged her fat rider in an ignominious heap on the trail.

By the time the commotion settled and Dakar had righted the paint’s maladjusted tack, flurries eddied around the rocks. The snowfall thickened rapidly. Within minutes all but the nearest landmarks became buried in whirlwinds of white. The storm that had threatened through the past day and a half closed over the mountains, whipped in by a dismal north wind.

The riders continued over ever-steepening terrain. Bothered by Arithon’s mention of trouble, Lysaer urged his horse past a stand of boulders to find opening to speak with Asandir.

‘When we reach the next town, might I sell my jewels to buy a sword?’

The sorcerer returned a look like blank glass, his cragged brow sprinkled with settled snow. ‘We’ll cross no more towns before arrival at Althain Tower.’

More forthright than his half-brother, Lysaer persevered. ‘Perhaps we could find a tavern keeper with a spare blade available for purchase then.’

Asandir’s vagueness crystallized to piercing irritation. ‘When you have need of a weapon, you shall be given one.’

The sorcerer urged his mount on with speed. Concerned lest the road became mired too deeply for travel, he allowed no stop until dusk, and then only for the barest necessities. The riders fed their horses and swallowed a hasty meal. Sent out to assess conditions, Lysaer returned to report that even should the blizzard slacken, the gusts had increased; drifting might render the mountains impassable by daybreak.

‘We’ll be through the pass before then,’ Asandir stated flatly. Despite outspoken resentment from Dakar, the sorcerer quenched the fire and ordered the horses resaddled.

The riders pressed eastward through a long and miserable night. All but blind in the blizzard, they made tortuous headway through the dark. The road narrowed to a trail hedged by knife-edged promontories and sheer drops, each dip and ditch and gully smoothed innocently over by drifts. Horses floundered through heavy footing or clattered perilously across ice-sheened rock. The winds buffeted all the while with heavy, relentless ferocity. Manes and cloaks became mantled in ice. The driving sting of snow crystals needled any exposed patch of flesh and hands and feet ached from the penetrating cold.

The horses forded the icy current of the Valendale and emerged, dusted with hoarfrost from spume thrown off by the waterfalls. In times before the Mistwraith, the cascades could be seen falling like ribbons of liquid starlight as the feed springs of hundreds of freshets tumbled over clefts into the gorge.

Daybreak saw the riders deep into the pass of Orlan. By then the snowfall had eased, but Desh-thiere’s mists sheathed the saw-toothed ridges and the wind still cut like a sword. The riders traversed the high notches submerged in whipping snow-devils as gusts stripped the black rock of the Thaldeins and harried across a desertscape of drifts.

At times visibility closed until only the mage-trained could maintain sure sense of direction. Asandir and Arithon broke trail by turns, relieved on occasion by Dakar; yet despite the cold and the rough, floundering gait of his horse through the snow, the Mad Prophet unreliably tended to fall asleep in his saddle. Since a rider who blundered over a precipice was unlikely to be found before the thaws, and Asandir stayed wrapped in his silences, the chance to take fate by the horns became too tempting for Arithon to resist.

He chose his moment to volunteer, then pressed his dun to the fore. Throughout the next hour he drew gradually ahead, until a lead of fifty paces separated him from the others.

Here, at the storm-choked heart of the pass, the road dropped sheer on the north side, cliffs of trackless granite fallen away into a gulf of impenetrable mist; south, escarpments towered upward to summits buried in storm. The drifts lay chest-deep and packed into layers by the gusts. Curtained in wind-whirled snow, Arithon spoke gently to his mare as she shouldered tiredly ahead. His deadened hands gave rein as she stumbled; he balanced her, coaxed her forward with the promise of shelter and bran as she clawed toward a scoured expanse of rock. Stung by a gust that watered his eyes, Arithon ducked his face behind his hood just as the mare struck out off packed footing. Her legs skated wildly. Pitched against her neck as she scrambled, Arithon kicked free of the stirrups and dismounted. He flung his cloak over her steaming back and freed his dagger. When the mare steadied he lifted a foreleg and chipped out the ice ball that had compacted in the hollow of her hoof. The relentless snows had long since scoured away the preventative smear of grease applied on the banks of the ford.

When a glance backward showed the others halted to tend their own mounts similarly, Arithon straightened. Hopeful the barbarians were still watching, he hooked the dun’s reins and led her off without troubling to dust the accumulated snow from his shoulders. His jerkin had soaked through in any case, with his cloak left draped across the flanks of his mount. The mare was dangerously weary and chilled, and if her reserves became spent, the pass offered no shelter.

Arithon crossed the cleared patch, battered by blasts of driven ice. Beyond, where the gale’s direct force was cut by an overhanging rock spur, the drifts lay piled and deep. The mare sank to her brisket and floundered to an uncertain halt.

While the weather continued to howl outside this one pocket of stillness, a voice called challenge from above.

‘Don’t move.’ The accents were crisp, commanding, and by town standards, purely barbarian. ‘Make one sound and you’ll gain a dead horse.’

The dun snorted hot-headed alarm. Grasping for advantage in mired footing, Arithon dug his knuckles in her ribs. As she shied face-about toward the cliff, he snatched the cloak from her flank, cracked the cloth to fan her alarm, then let the force of her spin fling him sideways. The mare was a fast-moving target when the barbarian made good his threat. An arrow shot from a niche overhead nicked a gash across her shoulder, then buried with a hiss in rucked snow.

The sound and the sting undid the dun. She bolted in panic, her gallop striking sparks from exposed stone as herd instinct impelled her to backtrack. She hit the last expanse of drifts in a white explosion of snow-clods, then disappeared completely as a gust roared like smoke across the trail.

Sheltered under cover of the eddies, Arithon dropped his cloak, drew Alithiel and flattened his back against the underhang. The wind lulled. Tumbling snow winnowed and settled to unveil chaos as the mare charged through the oncoming riders. Her loose reins looped the nose of the chestnut and spun him plunging in a spraddle-legged stagger. Lysaer kept his seat through skilled horsemanship, but could not avoid collision with Asandir’s black. Both mounts floundered sideways. Nose to tail just behind, the paint and the pack pony rocketed back on their hocks. Pans clanged and a poorly-tied tent flapped loose. The pony ripped off a buck that scared the paint, and caught sound asleep in the scramble, Dakar toppled head-first into a snowdrift. He flopped back upright shouting epithets referring to bitch-bred donkeys; while bearing their food-stores and necessities, the pack-pony joined the paint and the dun in headlong stampede down the trail.

Arithon seized the moment while the others were delayed and took swift stock of his surroundings. In a cranny above his sheltered hollow he caught his first glimpse of his attacker: a gloved hand, a sleeve trimmed in wolf-fur and the dangerously levelled tip of a deerarrow, the broad, four-bladed sort designed to rip and kill by internal bleeding. Arithon repressed a shiver through a moment of furious reassessment. Chance had favoured him: his horse had escaped without worse damage than a scratch. But if his spurious ploy was not to bring disaster, he would have to do something about Lysaer. Like the spirited dun, the prince had too much character to meet any threat with complacency.