Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  Behind, flurried in a backwash of winnowed snow, the raptor left the elegant, clear imprint of two naked human feet.

  Shortly there came a gyrating wind, which blurred their edges, then fully erased them.

  Late Winter 5670

  Second Dawn

  Winter’s latest rank blizzard slowly wore itself out. Early daylight painted the cloud banks over Daon Ramon to a sea of raging vermilion. The muffled hills were loaf sugar beneath, veined black where the swift, open streamlets carved through the meandering seams of the gullies. For Braggen, holed up under the clotted boughs of a thicket with three blown-out horses on lead reins, the storm’s ending increased the potential for lethal setback. He had been forced to pause in his flight with Prince Arithon since several hours before, as the heavy drifts piled too high.

  No horse could gallop, mired to the chest. Set to awkward flight, he could not risk becoming a slow-moving target for Etarra’s crack teams of archers. While the blizzard tapered off, he had shivered in wait, hoping the lessening snowfall would mask his rucked trail, plain as a plowed furrow across the pristine curve of the swales. Braggen took stringent steps to evade chance discovery. He blindfolded the horses. Then he smeared their nostrils with a wintergreen salve and strapped on burlap nose bags to smother their keen sense of smell. Should mounted riders close in, he could ill afford the prompt of a whinny if his small herd called in challenge. The country was too riddled with headhunter trackers to countenance the exposure. If he chanced to be flushed, the prince in his charge would be doomed; even to inexperienced eyes, the drifts disclosed each sign of disturbance as cleanly as inked lines on a manuscript.

  The day brightened, affirming as fact that Braggen’s restraint had been nothing but stark necessity.

  Beyond the screening lattice of caked branches, the stitched tracks of several mounted patrols scored the hillsides, basted with the zigzagged game trails of deer and the skipped prints of winter-furred hare. The clansman resigned himself. He had no choice but bide. At least the ditch where he sheltered was snagged in wild briar. The tangle formed a vicious bulwark of thorn, nearly impassable to a horse, and for a man, a snagging trap that invited scored flesh and ripped clothing.

  Braggen had needed spur and whip to drive his three animals through. That harsh foresight, and his hunter’s instinct for weather, had let him seek cover in time. The prints of his back trail lay well buried before the snow dwindled and the gusts backed down to a breeze.

  Through the inactive hours, the gruff clansman did what he could, shifting his gear onto the cream gelding and rubbing down the tired animal he had ridden. The horse bearing Arithon could not be relieved. The far ridge had sparkled with torches, before dawn. By now the Alliance scouts ranged out in force, the deep-winter silence marred by the occasional snatched fragments of their hailing shouts. Should a passing patrol flush him from cover, Braggen refused to be set on the run with his prince caught in the change between one mount and the next.

  For a mercy, the royal body wrapped in Jieret’s bearskin was warm, if scarcely breathing. Now and again, Braggen bared the pale face, inanimate as death in repose. Not even an eyelash would flicker when he dripped melted snow to moisten the slack-jawed mouth. The blued eyelids stayed closed, and the unbandaged hand remained slack in the bindings that secured the scarred forearm against the horse’s wet neck. The fine, sculptured bones and spare symmetry of each knuckle gave graphic testament to the disastrous confrontation that had so narrowly missed costing Earl Jieret his life. What liegeman could behold the startling grace of those fingers and not grasp the tragic truth: that this prince was not and never had been a man made for wielding the sword.

  ‘My liege, I am sorry,’ Braggen whispered, though he harbored no fondness for sentiment. Yet even against his hardened sensibilities, he saw that Arithon s’Ffalenn should be nowhere near this brutal setting. The crime lay beyond words, that a bard of his stature had been born at the crux of a conflict. Such talent as his should have been cosseted in comfort, surrounded by gentle company. Throughout a long lifetime, this Masterbard should have shouldered no other burden than setting his matchless voice to the extraordinary gift of his music.

  Discomfited, Braggen coughed behind his wet glove. For a nerve-wracked moment, he faced away. Then, with bearded lips compressed to a dogged line, he checked the wounded right hand to make certain no stains had leaked through the dressing. Jieret’s cautery had been thorough. The measure was holding despite rough usage and the desperate, jolting ride.

  ‘Give his Grace no sustenance,’ the High Earl had told Braggen, though the instruction seemed queerly unnatural. That any creature could survive in suspension, apparently more dead than alive, made this charge an unsettling watch duty.

  Braggen folded those too-eloquent hands under the generous cover of the bearskin. A man of visceral emotion who had been molded to austerity by bitter experience, he ate his biscuit and jerked meat stubbornly facing the hills. Bare survival demanded his unswerving attention. He tried not to dwell on the royalty strapped to the back of the horse like a sackful of raider’s booty.

  Late morning, a changed wind swept the sky to clear cobalt. Braggen aroused from a catnap with sun in his eyes, and cursed the untrustworthy weather. Risen temperature had already laddered the clumped ice on the branches to plinking, glass droplets. The snow silvered also, glazed to a crust where the shade fell. Even the slight thaw brought conditions from ugly to worse. By nightfall, the drifts would be armored with ice, an outright gift to a tracker since an old trail would seal with the freeze. The fluffy light snow and churned clods where horses breasted a fresh passage were going to become impossible to conceal.

  Braggen saw no alternative, had already faced the flat recognition that he could not remain tucked in hiding. Each passing hour let his enemies close in, among them Lysaer s’Ilessid. Only two days remained of the grace period that allowed Arithon’s spirit to stay safely bound in the sword blade. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn was not carried beyond range of Desh-thiere’s curse before then, the disaster that followed would lie beyond all hope of mending. Braggen fretted, weighed his dearth of unlovely options, then committed his resource to the one that looked the most promising.

  The Alliance patrols combed the brush for clan fugitives. His best chance of upset lay in contrary action: he would not give them a skulking target.

  Committed to peril, Braggen waxed the string and bent his yew longbow. While the sun slowly climbed the arc to the zenith and dipped past the high mark of noon, he subjected each one of his arrows to an exhaustive inspection. The ones with worn fletching and uneven shafts, he discarded. The rest, he punched into the snow in neat rows, the best ones ranked nearest to hand. An old hunter’s trick, he slit a thread off the cuff of Arithon’s silk shirt and snagged it to one of the branches. The streamer would act as a telltale to read every minor shift in the wind.

  He checked the blindfolded horses again and filled their nose bags with grain. Lastly, he waited. Not temperamental when his task involved raiding, he held his nerves vised to a serpent’s cold patience. He stood his ground, stilled, with only the day’s shadows moving.

  The next patrol happened by in the late afternoon, a half dozen of Etarra’s elite troops whose field experience included the reiving habits of headhunters. As the curve of the hill steered their progress, Braggen could see bloodstains pinking the sweat on their horses’ flanks. Each man’s saddlecloth wore a fringework of scalps, the ripped hide raw red where some late victim’s clan braid had been hacked off as a trophy.

  Nearer, the six came. Their course was going to pass the thicket quite closely. Braggen held fast, unafraid of detection. Around him, for clear yards on all sides, the drifted snow lay unbroken. The trampled passage of two earlier patrols crossed the slopes, right and left, an imprinted reassurance that nothing untoward had entered the vale since the scouts had made their last sweep.

  The men bearing in, their reins looped at a walk, had just survived a fresh skirmish. If th
eir bullish senior officer looked bothered by saddle sores, his underlings were cocky, loudmouthed with high spirits and victory. They moved upwind as well; their horses were not going to be first to scent the bunched geldings masked in the thicket. The party drew nearer. Engrossed in a moment of jocular pantomime, they entrusted their mounts to pick their own footing. Predictably, their track skirted the far rim of the gully where the wind-razed dusting of snow offered easier passage for animals whose legs were scraped raw from punching through ice-crusted drifts.

  The late sunlight picked out detail with merciless clarity: of clotted swords jammed into scabbards, uncleaned, and saddle packs bulging with booty. Braggen recognized one of the braids, the seal brown one with the black-diamond snakeskin knotting the end as a tie. He had seen that marsh krait tanned by a young girl from Halwythwood as a gift to bring her sweetheart fair luck.

  She would grieve to learn that Dame Fortune had looked elsewhere this sad morning on Daon Ramon Barrens.

  His rage locked and barred behind cold-blooded purpose, Braggen firmed his grip on his bow. His movement stayed imperceptibly slow as he caught up the first, flawless arrow. He nocked the end to the string. Patient as a plaster-cast statue, he held. Coiled in a state of light, relaxed balance, he watched the oncoming riders whoop and boast, laughing as they described the favors they would claim from the ladies at home, once their purses jingled with bounty gold.

  Deadly silent, Braggen bent back his bow. As locked on his course as the draw of moon and sun, raising the unstoppable tide, he sighted his mark through the lattice of crusted branches. The steadfast word of apology he whispered was the same one accorded the deer he brought down for the stewpot. ‘Forgive.’

  He released. His shaft took a rider in the middle of the pack at point-blank range through the throat.

  Another arrow; another shot, and the man behind tumbled from his saddle. The rear guard reined up in shouting surprise. A third arrow, released, slammed and folded the officer as he spun back to address the confusion.

  By then, the last man in line had belatedly noted the launching site of the bowfire.

  ‘There!’ he screamed. ‘In that thicket!’ Flattened against his horse’s neck, with a stout companion sharp at his heels, he charged downslope and drove his mount into the gulch.

  Ruled by nerveless experience, Braggen ignored them. His fourth arrow tracked the cool veteran on the bank who had kept his head in the crisis. No fool, that one jabbed spurs to his chestnut with intent to seek reinforcements. His good sense was hampered by his officer’s mount, left riderless in his path. The beast wheeled and crow-hopped, both forefeet snagged in dropped reins.

  A disastrous, forced check on the part of the veteran; and Braggen’s bow thwapped in release. The man fell, transfixed in the groin through the slit hem of his mail shirt.

  The other pair who had rushed to attack had dependably mired in the gully, their horses bucking the chest-deep drifts. Braggen had time to measure his shots. The trailing man was cut down, wounded, as his mare foundered, stumbling; the companion ahead clawed up the near bank under cover of his mount’s neck, to be tossed forward at the shuddering pitch as the horse under him sharply missed stride. The animal went down hard, the shaft nestled into its seal-dark coat buried to the fletching behind the jaw. As its gurgling scream shattered the quiet, the rider kicked free of his stirrups. Trained in countless drills, he cast free, running; and tripped, both ankles noosed by Daon Ramon’s vicious coils of briar.

  Sword out, pale with the awareness he sprawled at the mercy of the hidden clan marksman, he dropped flat and tried to kick free.

  His killed horse cost a small penalty. The blindfolded animals at Braggen’s back now snorted and sidled in alarm. In jeopardy of being jostled if one broke a tether, the clansman slipped forward. At the verge of the thicket, he nocked his next arrow and took aim with exacting care.

  He wounded the last man, also. Again, on a fleeting word of apology, he shot and fully dispatched the expiring horse.

  Then, another shaft ready to draw, he waited. The two men he had deliberately crippled floundered and thrashed through the snow. Five horses, cast loose, circled and chuffed, and finally bunched up, facing the strange herd in the thicket. They snorted and tossed heads, the sharp smell of blood warring with herdbound curiosity.

  Braggen watched only the felled men. One sprawled still in a stain of spreading crimson, determinedly playing dead. The other, moaning through clenched teeth, made no effort to shout and bring help; as sure a sign as a raider would get that no allies lay within earshot. These had not been outriders, but routine scouts, with no company marching at hand.

  Braggen lowered his bow. He bundled his last arrows back into his quiver, then soothed his unsettled geldings, a difficulty: reaction to his late round of butchery left his hands badly unsteady. Lilting soft nonsense, he untied equine blindfolds and stowed the nose bags to let the animals breathe unimpaired. Then, in no hurry, but without wasted motion, he picked his way from the thicket. His thick, stag-hide leathers let him plow through the thorns with small penalty beyond a few scratches. An ugly but unavoidable cruelty, he adhered to his plan by strict order of priority.

  Both the wounded were disarmed. The man with the arrow through his thigh cursed him steadily, until faintness rendered him speechless. Braggen stood by, wretched and clammy with his own distressed sweat, until blood loss finally drove the man senseless. Then he snapped off the arrow shaft and bound up the wound. The other man did not quiet until he was forcibly gagged. He was left where he lay, while Braggen attended the loose horses, catching the one which had entangled its bridle, then mounting to herd in the others. He secured all five, then tied three to a scrub tree, while the one he sat and another in hand were wheeled and trotted this way and that. Before long, the torn snow in the gulch wore a mishmash of overlaid tracks. Braggen reined up satisfied when he judged the site wore the appearance of a hard-fought skirmish.

  Shaking now, chilled to the bone as the ripping winds robbed the warmth from the lowering sun, the clansman dismounted. He had little time, and no chance at all, if another patrol happened by and flushed him before his grisly round of artifice was finished. The dead he stripped to the skin, rings and clothing. He ripped out the shafts that had killed the first two, leaving a reiver’s toll of cut throats and sword wounds. As though the officer’s corpse had been clanborn, hacked down by headhunters, he drew his knife. Retching, he forced himself to follow through. He bludgeoned the face and hacked off the scalp.

  The hair he jammed under a sizable boulder, and the clothes left too blood-soaked to disguise. He saved one blotched shirt, used the linen to bind up the head and face of the gagged man. The wretch slowed his progress with useless struggle, until a kick in the belly dropped him limp. While he choked through an unnerving interval of recovery, Braggen lashed him, wrist and ankle, and secured him across his own horse. The stout companion received the same treatment. Limp from his draining wound, that one draped like a sack, stertorously breathing and pale. His less-damaged comrade thrashed and moaned, while the chestnut mare under him stamped and sidled, jibbing against the lead rein looped around her high-set neck.

  Braggen barred his heart against mercy. Their lives against Arithon’s, his choice was clear-cut. He left them. Bearing an armload of filched clothing, he burrowed back into the thicket. A handful of minutes, and he reemerged, clad in the weapons and clothing of an Alliance man-at-arms. He had done the unthinkable and cut off his clan braid. His stout leathers and furred cloak were stuffed as additional booty in the saddle pack borne by one of the Etarran horses. The officer’s sunwheel mantle now covered Arithon, the bearskin beneath kept for warmth. A last touch, the royal feet dangling from the hemline no longer wore soft-soled boots. Those, too, had been shoved in the supply pack and replaced with square-toed black ones, too large, and buckled with an engraved set of roweled spurs.

  His Grace had been splashed with blood. Since he was not bearded or gray, a stained dressing s
wathed his mouth and jaw, and all of his raven hair. The few strands which spiked through were gore-soaked, and whitened, a piece of invention done with a filched lock clipped from one of the clan trophy braids.

  ‘A more honorable end,’ Braggen snapped to himself, a bit breathless. Strung-up nerves and the effort of swallowing back nausea were turning him faintly dizzy. Numb in the feet since the largest man’s boots were too tight for his muscular calf, he banded the horses together and set off. He rode up the ridge line, to every appearance an Alliance survivor whose patrol had been set upon, with himself left to bear up the wounded and drive in their salvaged mounts.

  Just past sundown, he was challenged at the first checkpoint. The cleared air by then had brought in vicious cold. Each stinging breath feathered tendrils of hoarfrost on beard and hood. A northerly wind sang over the hills, stamped calcine white under flooding moonlight. The men at the posts were permitted no fire. Every miserable one of them huddled on watch, faces cowled in wool, and backs turned to the punishing chill.

  The halberdiers who barred Braggen’s way were loath to stand out in the wind, or brandish their steel-studded weapons.

  ‘Password!’ snapped the sergeant as the disorganized cavalcade shambled toward him. He wore a blanket under his cloak that covered the oiled links of his hauberk. His gauntlets were left off for comfort. On a night too cruel to sustain suspicion, he tucked his gloved hands beneath his crossed arms and held back, keeping his numbed feet well clear of maceration as the horses with emptied saddles shoved and stamped, barging against the ones burdened.

  Braggen wrangled with the reins, engrossed by the trials of keeping the three mounts bearing bodies clear of the jostling press. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized, his phrasing slurred to sound townborn. ‘I don’t know the watchword.’ The deception enhanced by the loosely wrapped cloth of his muffler, he affected a show of self-conscious embarrassment. ‘I was griped from bad meat, had the runs in the ditch. Wasn’t listening up at the time we rode out, for the worry I’d brown my own breeches.’