Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  For Arithon s’Ffalenn, the nights passed in desperate flight, those days he was flushed out of hiding. Time and again he was turned from his course, or hazed between patrols back over terrain just traversed through rugged hardship. The days became patchworked fragments of memory, stitched together by dark intervals spent in furtive flight, or tension that wore like etched acid. One fair afternoon, armed riders overtook him when he went foraging for wintergreen to brew an astringent for his gelding’s puffed fetlock.

  Snow and fierce wind had masked their approach. Caught in the open, Arithon scrambled up rocks and snatched refuge on a cliff ledge scarcely an arm’s reach over their heads. There he panted, chilled and motionless, while one man dismounted to piss in a snowdrift, and three others cut diligent circles below him. In sore misery themselves, the scouts missed the dimpled depressions of his footprints; the drifts, dry and light, were too fluffy to hold outlines. Had a man of them glanced upward, he was utterly exposed. Nor could he attack and kill all of them cleanly before someone sounded the alarm.

  The rider who relieved himself mounted up, whistling, and the patrol moved off up the ridge. Arithon laid his cheek to iced stone, wrung wretched with shivering relief.

  Days and nights, he endeavored to keep faith with Luhaine and reach promised refuge at Ithamon. He dogged his own hunters to steal cached supplies, then set off through seamed cliffs to the high country. Nights, under starlight, he picked his way over the scoured rock past the timberline. Shadow masked him, while his ears rang and burned to the language of wind, singing litanies over bared granite. He weathered gales in the smothered glens of the valleys, and slept under banked drifts, the warmth of his breath pocketed by the laced boughs of the firs that framed the eaves of his crude shelters.

  He tracked deer, and surprised wolverine, and drank bracing waters freed from their armor of gray ice. His beard grew. The jet hair he had no chance to groom whipped in snake tangles over his shoulders. His eyes creased with the squint of haunted apprehension, and constant survey cast down his back trail. The sun shone on him, gold and glaring and without warmth, and the snows howled and stung, lashed by the bitter east wind. Higher, he ranged, into the black-stone summits of the Skyshiels, laddered with glaciers and the cobwebbed patterns of snow trapped in filed bands of sediment. Nor was he free, or alone in that wilderness that could and had torn the sinew out of all but the strongest hearts.

  Against natural odds, beyond the limiting frailties of flesh, Jaelot’s bewitched guardsmen tracked him. He watched them, filing like ants up the valleys, or burning fires of green fir that streamered flags of smudged smoke. He saw them break and run from the queer lights on the Baiyen, and wait, starving, for their supply lines. Like desperate, flushed game, Arithon ran before them, sometimes in the same glass-eyed panic, and other times in nerveless planning that left him as a stranger to himself.

  The hand that stubbornly failed to heal grew a mass of raw, welted scar tissue. He boiled rags for bandages, and rebound the weal, and used his blades left-handed. In tight-focused effort, he mastered the pain and forced his arrow shots accurate. The few times he killed deer, they died cleanly. In their swift death, he found his sole measure of victory: his private, ongoing reassurance he had not been abandoned by mercy, and could still grant the same grace to an enemy.

  Winter deepened. The high peaks wore stainless mantles of white, between storms that ripped them to bare bedrock. Always hungry, never warm, Arithon pressed northwestward, and always, his pursuers dogged him. He lost his brave buckskin down a ravine, had to sacrifice an arrow to dispatch him. Nor could he pause to salvage the meat. The gelding’s scream as it fell had drawn wolves and men in a primal rush for the carcass. But the wolves adhered to natural instinct; they stopped and gorged. The men, geas driven, trampled the streambanks, but found no means to scale the high cliff face.

  Safe on the rimwall, Arithon fled, while the horn calls echoed and reechoed, calling in the reinforcements that kept him dodging throughout a miserable night. Dawn found him sprawled like an animal in a khetienn’s lair, while the displaced feline hissed protest, wedged into the sinkhole where the earth had caved away from a tangle of tree roots. Arithon spoke to her, the magnificent instrument of his voice burred rough with disuse. He wept then for sheer grief, that the grand resonance of his words in the ancient Paravian had lost their skilled music to calm her.

  When he woke, hours later, the enraged cat had fled. Every muscle and sinew in his body had an ache, and cold willowbark tea scarcely tamed them. His trail-hardy mare had long since lost her shoes. Arithon seared the cracks in her hoofwalls with a red-heated knife, lest she split to the quick and go lame. The gelding with the puffed fetlock improved, but still could not bear a rider. He packed the supplies, uncomplaining, his coat rough and lusterless from hard use and an uncertain diet.

  ‘When we reach Daon Ramon, you can paw for dried grass,’ Arithon soothed. He ran his hands down both animals’ ice-crusted legs, checking for heat in the tendons.

  And the day did come finally, when the mountains relented; when the stone-clad heights receded from the cloud hems, and the trees in the valleys stretched tall and majestic with the shelter of lowering altitude. Snow sifted down, deep and smooth in the hollows, storm winds having shrieked and broken their force on the unyielding ramparts of the ridges. Arithon left the lichen-bare rock of the timberline behind him, and saw, from the north-facing gaps between ranges, the white sweep of Daon Ramon below him.

  The triumph of that accomplishment was short-lived as a horn blast from behind set him under close-pressed pursuit. Arithon ran ahead, driving his tiring horses into the dense growth of a thicket. Then he retraced his steps and whisked out their hoofprints, and laid another false trail to a streambed. For a blessing, this time, the swift current had thawed. He plunged in, left the trackers the logical conclusion he had masked his trail in the water, but escaped by hauling himself into the drooping boughs of an evergreen. Tucked in the branches, he waited, unseen, while his hunters gouged the streambed to stirred silt and muck. They moved out at last, split up, north and south, in mistaken belief he would have made egress elsewhere.

  Twilight fell. The drifts lay on the land like iridescent silk, tucked in folds of cobalt and violet beneath a sky deepened to indigo. Under a spattered brilliance of stars, Arithon climbed down from the pine that had sheltered him. He cut a furtive path over the snow his enemies had left trampled to confusion. Masked under shadow, he collected his horses and moved on, toward a plain that, by nightfall, unveiled the hot sparks of a dozen enemy campfires.

  The despair of his straits washed over him then, a powerful force that made even the effort of hope a travail. Alone amid the whine of cold wind through acres of winter-stripped boughs, he longed for Caolle’s hard-bitten advice, or Earl Jieret’s firebrand tolerance. Elaira’s love seemed a figment of dream, and there, too, fate denied him fulfillment. Arithon endured the dismal ache of his solitude, his relief a set litany, that this time no friend would die in heroic effort to spare him. He closed his sound hand over the frozen leather of the lead reins and sought after the comfortless shelter of a south-facing ravine.

  Through the night, he lurked hidden in the deepwood, and kept sleepless watch for patrols. In a day, perhaps two, the next blizzard would roar in. While a storm masked the telltale trace of his footprints, yet again he might seize the advantage and slip past the cordon Jaelot’s men cast ahead of him.

  Three fortnights had elapsed since his flight on the solstice. Arithon scoured the rust from his steel, and took no false heart from the fact he had so far managed to evade capture. The windswept downs of Daon Ramon lay ahead. Thirty leagues of exposed landscape unfolded between the wooded, Skyshiel foothills and the promise of Earl Jieret’s protection at Ithamon. Under deep winter, with inadequate cover, he would stand at the mercy of Jaelot’s trackers. The lame horse would become a dangerous liability, and the sound one, a burden he dared not eliminate. Traveling on foot, if his enemies flushed him,
he could all too easily be run down and killed, or captured by enemy riders. Jaelot’s men dogged him, before and behind. Were he spotted, they need do nothing at all but close in and form ranks and surround him.

  Arithon shot Alithiel home in her scabbard, then oiled his main gauche dagger. He scrounged a meal of stale biscuit and cheese, and smoked jerky from a near-emptied saddle pack. Snugged down in his cloak and his thickest fleece jacket, he measured his dwindling assets. Where Luhaine’s advice had dispatched him inland, no one had factored for the driven tenacity of Jaelot’s spellbound captain. Arithon found the odds on his continued safe passage had become laughably small. His broadscale use of his shadow to seed terror was now his most necessary weapon of expedience.

  Spinner of Darkness, the Alliance had named him. Arithon shut his eyes, wrung to bitterness. If he survived his next crossing, the title was bound to be answered and justified.

  Recalcitrant, the sky held fair through four days. Dawn on the fifth, flat cloud roofed the peaks. The air wore the whetted, crystalline sharpness that presaged another fierce storm. Jaelot’s hard-bitten guardsmen watched the weather close in with trail-weary experience. The company bound to Arithon’s pursuit carped over the aches dropping pressure brought to old scars. Their complaints availed nothing. While the first moaning gusts roared down off the heights, their labored progress was reduced to moving shadows amid the whirling white eddies of snowfall. They saddled their horses, formed up in patrols, and fanned out, seeking the Spinner of Darkness.

  Noon rendezvous found them hunched with their backs to raw wind, while their squint-eyed tracker deliberated over the ground by the glaze of a refrozen streamlet.

  ‘Your man fished for trout here,’ he announced at due length. A jab of his stick broke through snow and revealed the buried ash of a blaze kindled out of pine heartwood that would burn fast and hot, with very little trace of smoke. ‘Here’s where he boiled his catch. The fillets would be dried, or packed in ice and frozen. Won’t need a fire to fill his belly for at least the next several nights.’

  The sergeant in charge cast away the frazzled twig of witch hazel he had plucked to scrub his filmed teeth. ‘Starving or sated, may Dharkaron’s Black Spear rip his vitals in twain in the afterlife. Set chains on the bastard, and we can go home. Just tell us which way he rode out.’

  The tracker straightened, one gloved hand pressed to the stiff joints in the small of his back. He quartered the streambank with mincing steps, musing aloud as he sifted the scanty evidence. Always, the story had to be wrung from the s’Ffalenn demon’s fastidious campsite. ‘Didn’t bring horses here, never that stupid. Want to know where he’s bound, have to uncover the trail that leads where he had his mounts picketed.’ A pause, a poke at a bush with the stick, then a drawn moment while the woodsman knelt and gently blew the new powdering of snowfall away from the sun-crusted layer underneath.

  ‘Got him. This way.’ The grizzled tracker arose and dusted his trousers, his dour face turned toward the sergeant. ‘Might as well dismount now. Yon cursed spawn of evil won’t belike to change his sly habits. Not for the sake of sparing your feet or your comforts.’

  Never had Arithon made the fool’s mistake of staking out horses where his pursuit could launch a mounted foray. He would risk the approach of no enemy horses lest equine herd instinct raise a neigh of greeting and sound a disastrous alarm.

  Afternoon, the patrols were set searching in spirals, while the wind howled down and snow pelted. The west-facing slopes of the foothills soon wore a packed cowl of whiteness. The tracker forged ahead, leaned into the gusts, while his cloak cracked and slapped at his tough, stringy frame, and his beard gathered gray spikes of hoarfrost. As the men on his heels fumed and vented rank oaths, the tracker unraveled the difficult trail, patient as a spider reweaving a web from small clues strung like scattered snippets of silk.

  After six weeks of balked circling through desolate territory, men muttered that Arithon s’Ffalenn walked the land far too lightly. Around fires, by night, their talk named him uncanny. By day, braced up by camaraderie and bravado, they scratched their thick beards, and boasted of how they would hang their caught quarry by the heels, and tease him with firebrands just to watch him use shadow to save his bastard’s skin from the cinders.

  Loudest were those who kept score by their suffering. ‘As I’m born,’ exclaimed one, ‘I’ll see the fell creature repaid for the frostbite that’s blackened the tips of my toes.’

  A comrade hooted. ‘Who cares, for some toes? While we sleep on snow and scratch biting fleas, freezing our bollocks in this wilderness, what’s to stop the wife left at home from warming the bed in our absence? We don’t go back soon, I swear my sweet member will forget it wasn’t made for something better than pissing.’

  Someone else guffawed. ‘Your member? Daelion’s justice! That wee slippery thing that doesn’t know a woman from a wet gob of spit in a mitten?’ In rejoinder, chipping ice from his hobnailed boot sole, he added, ‘Or aren’t you the one we hear moaning behind the picket lines those nights when you draw the late watch?’

  ‘Quiet!’ snapped the sergeant. ‘The pack of you ladies would flush a deaf post with your noise.’

  ‘If there’s a fugitive left in these thickets to snare, he won’t be the fiend’s get we’re chasing,’ came a sullen grumble from the ranks. ‘Mark me, in this storm, the Spinner of Darkness will have snatched his chance and bolted headlong for Ithamon.’

  A testy colleague elbowed the speaker. ‘Would you stake your next ration of beer he’s done that?’

  ‘Be silent, fool!’ cried the sergeant in rife exasperation. ‘You chattering magpies let the tracker do his work. We wait on his word for my orders. If the Master of Shadow’s for Ithamon, he’ll be caught without any man’s bet on the outcome.’

  The men met his glower in foot-shuffling, sheepish quiet. They scarcely needed a tongue-lashing reminder that Jaelot’s most competent officer already had a company of men positioned for ambush at the ruin.

  Against the whiteout scream of a gust, the sergeant snapped his conclusion. ‘Sure enough, it’s our task to drive the bold rat into the trap we have waiting. But before we hare off through a blizzard on assumptions, we’ll damned well make sure the bloodsucking sorcerer’s turned west across Daon Ramon Barrens!’

  ‘He’s turned.’ The tracker wormed his way out of the thicket, then winced at the shower of snow the sprung branches dumped down his collar. ‘Found the hollow where he had his horses tucked up. The tracks when they left lead northwest. He’s gone for the barrens in a cracking hurry. No time before this have I seen him carve a course that ran so infernally straight.’

  ‘Move out!’ The sergeant hazed his troop to form ranks. ‘We go where the bastard’s trail takes us.’

  But the rising storm raised a morass of obstacles, with landmarks obscured, and the far-ranging patrols of outriders too scattered to be found and recalled at short notice. The wind stiffened to a lash of unmitigated misery, lent a scouring edge by the snow driven down in a hissing, whirled maelstrom of dry powder. The horses stumbled ahead, heads low and tails flattened, the men in their saddles cursing the patched skin torn off if they touched mail or weapons bare-handed.

  Beyond the sheltering eaves of the forest, the fierce gusts flayed exposed flesh. Snow worked and sifted into everything, from the folds in wool cloaks to the crevices of boot cuffs, then melted into an insidious, numbing dampness that chilled a man’s bones till they ached. The wet spiked the horses’ coats into steaming, soaked redolence, then tipped their long guard hairs in ice. The miserable beasts shivered beneath sorry masters, who slapped sodden thighs, and cursed the name of Arithon s’Ffalenn.

  Nor did the wide barrens afford man or mount comfort. The low, rolling landscape wore snagged cornices of rock, with the lee sides of the dales a morass of brush and crabbed briar. The horses ripped the fronts of their cannon bones bloody, and left streaks of pinked snow where the officers called rest halts. Iced streams and gulches s
nagged the lowlands like torn seams, a hazard masked over by drifts. More than one horse became wrenched to its knees in a floundering, dangerous fall. Inside of an hour, two mounts were lamed. Another had to be shot for meat, reft beyond cure by an ugly, splintered bone shredded through the thick hide of its gaskin.

  While men shouldered the work to render the carcass, the officers met in harried conference with the headhunter guides and the trackers.

  ‘Can’t press on after dark, the terrain is too savage,’ said the garrison quartermaster, his pouched eyes haunted, and his ruddy cheeks sadly thinned from his weeks of tribulation on the Baiyen.

  ‘Storm’s going to make the light fail early.’ The sergeant slapped numbed hands, just as wearied. ‘A fire and a horse roast will bolster morale.’

  The head tracker held his opinion in dour silence, while the more hard-bitten headhunters insisted their wily enemy was certain to widen his lead while Jaelot’s moping sluggards ate and slept.

  ‘Would you push us on in the dark and see the next man break his neck?’ The patrol captain hunched against the pelt of the storm, his nose a red knob dripping moisture. ‘Hard enough to keep our bearings in this weather with the snow like a witch’s curse upon us.’

  ‘Stop now, and I tell you,’ the chief headhunter argued, ‘every trace of your quarry will be lost by the morning. Blizzards in this country can spin out for days. Stay on him. Press the chase. Or else throw away what chance you have left.’

  Debate raged and resolved, with the patrols on the move through the gloom of a premature dusk. With the failing light, the dirge wail of the wind sawed men’s nerves to uncanny tension. The lead riders lit torches that the roar of the storm fanned down to sullen embers. Their dulled, ruby glare became swallowed by murk, invisible within a few yards. No fire warmed the chill from wet feet and hands. The fresh-slaughtered meat slowly froze, a sore point for men with pinched bellies. Griped on their diet of hard biscuit and cheese, they blundered into night, harried on by a gale like a hell-bound scourge, screaming over the weather-stripped vales.