Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  "Last messenger?" Korendir never shifted from the frozen tableau through the casement. But his words cut. "How did that man win through?"

  "He was no man, but a dwarf, my Lord of Whitestorm." The chancellor affected a deprecating cough. "That one reached the coast by scaling the peaks of the Hyadons. He survived a great folly. That route has no trail and no pass."

  Now Korendir did turn. He bent his level gaze upon the King of High Kelair and said, "What one dwarf accomplished, determined men can equal."

  The councillor looked askance at this, yet the king stroked his combed silver beard, and his mood of despondency brightened. "I could offer twenty-five men and relief supplies. But their own children are not dying, and the escarpments must be climbed upon ropes. My soldiers are willing and strong, but they have limited experience at mountaineering. What will keep them in heart when the winter peaks tax their endurance?"

  "That can be solved," Korendir said promptly. "But we'll need more men to carry food."

  The Arrax man had followed this exchange with rapt intensity; now he spoke up and cut off rejoinder from the chancellor. "I can find volunteers who are willing. They could be ready to leave by afternoon."

  "And who will guide this rescue mission?" The chancellor sneered his derision. "The dwarf?"

  Korendir returned an expression of surprise, then coldly surveyed the official from the jewelled tips of his slippers to the fur-capped crown of his head. "Who else?"

  The chancellor jutted his chin. "The mission you propose is ill favored, and to consider a dwarf as guide a worse misjudgment yet. Their kind lie. The one who came in was a branded slave. He would just as soon lead humans off the nearest vertical precipice."

  "Not when he stands to gain freedom for his people," Korendir snapped back. "Your thinking's as blighted as a slave master's. The people of Arrax will be dead before spring and the Corrigon by then grown too large for any man's weapon." He spun and faced the old king, who had lifted the toppled pawn and sat turning it mindlessly between his palsied fingers. Yet Korendir framed his address as if the man were not infirm, or indecisive, or half lost in the blankness of advanced age. "Act now, or not at all, Your Grace. I came to your realm to spare lives, not to belabor the obvious."

  The king set the chess piece upright upon the board. He blinked at the very still shadow framed in the brightness of the window. "Let it be now." If he was no longer young, he was still quite capable of command, for his chancellor bowed and kept silence.

  * * *

  Four mornings later, muffled in a jacket of sables sewn skin side out, Korendir stood at the end of the sleigh road and bent to strap snow shoes to his feet. Around him, the king's men-at-arms exchanged gripes, while a cluster of Arrax men and eight mismatched dwarves did the same, but less boisterously, and pointedly at a distance from the rest. The packs the small folk donned were at least as heavy as the humans' and in snowshoes, they waddled like ducks.

  Someone noticed and cracked a jibe. The laughter that resulted was silenced by reprimand from Korendir.

  That moment, in sunlight that glared off of snowdrifts and the blade-sharp peaks that divided the coast from the upland plateaus, the mountain born understood a thing. He traced the honor sigil at his forehead, while around him, his countrymen went still. They watched in disbelief as the one who had been Prince Teadje's envoy prepared to give Korendir his name.

  The Arrax man stepped forward and slapped his patterned jacket with his fist. "Lord of Whitestorm, I am called Echend. Let it be said that you know me in honor." He ended in sarcasm, expectant that his gesture would meet with incomprehension.

  A few kingsmen appointed to the expedition knew something of mountain ways; these paused in their preparations to stare.

  Except the mercenary, who raised passionless eyes from his lacings. Without hesitation he dropped to one knee and scooped snow into his bare right hand. "Echend," he repeated clearly. "Korendir, son of Morien, accepts the honor of your name. May the gifted prove worthy of the hour, and the day, to the crossing into spirit yet to come." In acceptance of sealed pledge, he let droplets of new-melted snow trickle down his collar toward his heart.

  Echend shouted in pleased surprise, for the response was the proper one, and flawlessly executed. "You are my kinsman from this day forward."

  "Let it be so." Korendir recovered his glove and oversaw the final arrangements as if unaware of the eyes that watched his back. The king's soldiers regarded him with faint distrust, while the dwarf guide, Indlvarrn, whispered to his fellows that there was more to this mercenary from Whitestorm than met the casual eye. How he had known mountain tradition, and when he had memorized so obscure a ritual response, no one present could guess.

  On that observation, the expedition to spare beleaguered Arrax set off across a valley of pristine drifts.

  * * *

  At the instant Korendir's party broke trail, a storm breaker boomed on the shores beneath Whitestorm keep. The sound rattled the window glass and shook the timbers of the gates, but the knock upon the panels outside was heard by Haldeth in the forge. He frowned, laid aside his hammer, and stepped out into windy afternoon.

  The knock came again, plain over the thunder of the surf; not an illusion. The smith unbarred the side postern, and the portal swung open to reveal the enchanter, Orame.

  Haldeth recoiled in astonishment.

  "Is my arrival so surprising?" The wizard stepped into the bailey, as groomed as though he had just set forth from his tower. Sunshine struck autumn colored highlights in his hair, and his eyes sparkled with impatience. "Your mistress Ithariel has need of me."

  Haldeth sucked a breath of frosty air and reached around the wizard to draw the bars. "And Korendir?"

  Orame raised his brows. "Crossing the valley of Kashiel, which is logical, since he plans an ascent of the Hyadons by way of the Graley glacier. Now show me to your lady."

  Haldeth dropped the bar with a clank that shook the braces. He had been drinking with sailors often enough to have heard of the Graley, a sparkling, near-vertical couloir whose ridge was always smothered under cloud. "Glaciers?" he said sharply. "Are the passes closed, or has the Corrigon grown so aggressive that the roads are considered unsafe?"

  "Both." Orame's lips thinned with the beginnings of annoyance. Since the smith lacked the manners to desist from questions, the wizard stepped aside and sought the chambers of Ithariel on his own.

  Haldeth remained standing in the gusts that raked the bailey. He should have known better than to badger a wizard. Plagued by rising uneasiness, the smith called the boys from the forge, then hastened ahead to the kitchens for the ordinary bother of Megga's scolding, and hot soup to drive off chills.

  Evening came; Orame stayed on as guest of Whitestorm's lady. By night the wardstone in the watch tower burned a strange and unsettling blue. Haldeth huddled in his blankets, unable to sleep; and the dawn brought a second White Circle initiate asking admittance at the gates. At week's end, the pair became joined by others, bringing the total to five. By the hour that Korendir and his company set foot on the ice beneath the Hyadons, nine enchanters took up residence at Whitestorm. By day and night the keep rang with powers that made the sunlight shimmer strangely, and the fires burn green in the kitchen. Megga baked bread in the ovens undisturbed, but Haldeth was never so complacent. He moved his cot and blankets into the drafty forge. Waking between nightmares in the deeps of winter dark, he swore he would ask the wizards of their purpose. Yet mornings came, sunlit or gray with snow, and always his courage failed him. Whether the wizards opened gateways to Alhaerie or meddled with natural progression, dread undermined his curiosity.

  * * *

  The expedition to relieve Arrax labored ahead through soft snow, and crusted over drifts that grabbed at each stride, and glass hard, wind-scoured glacier. Gusts ripped down from the Graley and caught up gouged ice from the crampons strapped onto each man's boots to prevent slipping; slivers whirled like crystal into the aquamarine depths of the fissures. T
he landscape was white, gray, and steel-blue, the sky frosty; cold bit into the bones of the living without reprieve. Days had passed since anyone could remember being warm. High Kelair grew little timber, and the foothills above the Kashiel valley supported no forest at all.

  Each noon the company halted for a meal of biscuit and sausage, chipped frozen from wrappings cracked to brittleness. The dwarves sat apart; between them and the Arrax men lay a rift no common cause might breach. And the mountain born with their tattoos and sullen silences mingled uneasily with king's men.

  Yet when the pitch of the slope forced the company to pair up, Korendir would tolerate no dissent. The safety of each life in the party was interdependent upon the others; only the dwarves were permitted to form separate teams, and these only due to practicality. A man who tumbled into a crevasse could not be saved if he dragged his partner along with him. Though tough and very strong, a dwarf weighed a great deal less than a mature human. To mingle the races on a perilous traverse would be folly, not when the next step might bring a collapse of soft snow and a sliding fall into fissures that plunged to untold depths. A man might break limbs or spine, or jerk his unwary companion over the brink to lie mangled beyond reach of rescue.

  The valley steepened and the glacier banked upward into a bowl of slashed clefts, capped by snowfields that bore the arrowed scars of avalanche. Worn already from fighting the drifts that mantled the foothills, the rescue party tightened crampons and checked ice axes, and cast doubtful eyes upslope.

  The cloud cover had thickened. Indlvarrn the dwarf guide shook an irascible fist at the sky, his brow crinkled into a frown. "Storm moving in," he observed in his gravelly voice. "Have to be under shelter by then, and not in those first few crevasses. Full of seracs, they are, and thaw rotten ice. To bivouac there would be begging to get ourselves crushed."

  "Seracs?" called one of the king's men-at-arms. "What in Neth's creation are they, that we should be frightened to shaking?"

  Indlvarrn shoved his thumbs under the straps of his rucksack. "Ice peaks, are seracs. And frightened to shaking you will be." The dwarf nodded his fur capped head at the soldier. "Best get on. Storms and nightfall won't wait."

  The guide opened a pouch at his belt and selected an assortment of screws forged for purchase in ice. While he issued ropes, harnesses, and other gear, Echend appeared at his side. Under orders to set aside prejudice, he worked with the dwarf, while Korendir directed redistribution of stores from drag-sleds to packs that could be hoisted in pitches through the ascent.

  Few men joked through the preparations. Threat of snow set a gloom on their mood; many were sobered further by awareness that from this point forward, their lives must be trusted to a whip-scarred dwarf who had no cause to love humans.

  Korendir gave slackers short shrift. The lead team departed. Headed by Indlvarrn, their task was to choose the route, and flag loose footing and hand holds that following parties might proceed with speed and safety. Crags of jutting ice soon hid the three from view. Their progress became marked by puffs of wind-borne snow, and clattering falls of ice fragments; sometimes the acoustics of the mountain returned the clang of Indlvarrn's hammer as he pounded home an ice screw, or the distinctive hiss of rope coils flaking down a precipice.

  The ends were caught and used to belay the trailing members of each team. Progress was slow. Rope-length by rope-length, the less experienced climbers followed to a staging camp on an ice ledge. There, under seracs that glistened with the dangerous beauty of swordblades, the same ropes were used to hoist the supply sacks, then the follow-up team gathered in gear and what pins they could recover without undue waste of stamina. After a restorative ration of chocolate, the process was repeated again, and yet again in failing light as snow began to whirl across the Graley.

  Korendir anchored the trailing teams through the last pitch. By now the dark had thickened, and wind blasted the ice face in the fury of rising storm. Each hand and foot hold became agony to maintain, as muscles shivered and cramped, and fingers raw from abrasion suffered numbness from cold as well. When failing light marred judgment, and vertigo dizzied the senses, the slope seemed relentlessly sheer. Now was the moment when the nerve which sustained the stoutest hearts at daybreak faltered and threatened to fail.

  The wind gusted, demon-shrill; its force gathered until it seemed determined to rip the climbers from the Graley and dash them upon the pressure ridges below. Loosened chunks of debris rattled down and battered a man from his grip. He tumbled, screaming, jerked short as the rope slammed taut. The soldier on belay snarled with strain as his fallen companion spun, whimpering, over an abyss of dark and rushing air. Roped to a ledge to oversee progress from the midpoint, Korendir reached out and grasped jacket. He jerked the man bodily back onto the face, and yelled encouragement as trembling hands scrabbled for new purchase. The rope eased as the man recovered. Above, the teammate who had held through his narrow escape cursed in ragged relief.

  "Too close," somebody exclaimed. "Keep on in these conditions, and people are going to start dying."

  "Then we'll just have to make Indlvarrn's camp," Korendir called back. To descend would in fact be more dangerous, with the ascent screws removed and the snow silted deep in the hollows. The light had failed to the point where a man could not see to secure ropes.

  No one argued the mercenary's decision. All were impatient to press onward, except the soldier who whimpered, paralyzed with panic against the overhang. His partner could not continue until his shaken teammate regained his wits, and ahead, no ledge offered respite for a vertical ascent of thirty yards.

  Korendir's response was instantaneous. "Dalon," he called crisply. "You're on your own." His next words commanded the man above to draw steel and cut the belay rope.

  That the coward now blocked the only safe retreat from Korandir's vantage point made no difference. Conditions were deteriorating rapidly; trapped between blizzard and darkness, the party could not delay without forfeiting a survival already in jeopardy.

  "Move out," snapped the mercenary to the man who led the team. "Don't wait, and on peril of your life, don't turn back."

  The climbers resumed their ascent. As ice chips loosened by their crampons rattled down, Dalon unabashedly started to sob. Voices and the scrape of boots became lost in the wail of the wind, and still, Dalon shivered and balked. Korendir made no attempt to cajole him, but waited, motionless in thickening drifts of snow. When the man failed to master his hysteria, he resumed his climb in grim silence, but over an outcrop Indlvarrn had avoided; no choice remained but to risk that route to regain the known upper trail. The bypass became a nightmare, unroped as Korendir was, suspended by torn gloves and determination over a chasm of storm-whipped air. The ice was unforgiving. It resisted the blows of his axe, sent the blade rebounding back against his hand. His palms chafed bloody as the shock of vibration passed down the oaken shaft. The times the blade caught firmly, Korendir hauled his weight from toe-hold to crumbling toe hold, utterly dependent on the grip of his lacerated hands. Almost, he welcomed the pain as distraction from hostile elements as he inched away from the nook where Dalon cowered.

  "Soldier!" Timed between gusts, Korendir's voice cut downslope through the storm. "There's hot tea waiting topside, I promise you."

  Dalon returned no answer. With a heart that inwardly wept, Korendir reached upward, stabbed his axe into a crevice, and abandoned the man to his fate.

  In an hour, the storm had worsened; blizzard whipped the Graley with near to annihilating force. Korendir advanced by slow inches, blinded by driven snow. His gloves froze to his axe haft; the feet inside his boots numbed until they dragged at his ankles like dead wood. Slipping from a precarious hand hold, he jammed his sole in an ice ridge. A quarter hour was lost as he worked to jerk himself free. By the time he succeeded, he was shivering and spent. His fingers slid from the cleft where he clung and caught, as if by miracle, on the screw that fastened a rope.

  A fixed line had been left, set out of pity by
the dwarf guide when he had ordered young Dalon cut loose. Korendir clung to solid, twisted hemp and gasped in exhausted gratitude. By now, the darkness was complete; without that rope to show the way, he could never have found the bivouac. He dragged upward, aching, but feeling discomfort much less in the encouragement of renewed progress. The gusts carried fragmented sounds of voices, then a flare of yellow torchlight; at most, safety and warmth waited twenty feet above. Korendir thought very little of the soldier abandoned behind. What resource remained he focused on that last, most precarious ascent, when strength was at lowest ebb, and impatience might drive him to carelessness.

  But the storm and the dark did not triumph. A cheer went up as Korendir reached the ledge. Indlvarrn and Echend caught his wrists, dragged him like a brother over the brink. He was given a place by the coal fire, and hot tea, and chocolate. No one asked about Dalon. When the uproar died down, and tired men crawled under peg-secured canvas to sleep, Korendir waited alone. Wrapped in furs by torchlight, he remained until the snow thinned and stopped. Clouds broke; the silvery light of a half-moon bathed the Graley's lofty heights. Korendir sat solitary under sky. In time his vigil was rewarded. The rope creaked on its peg. A wretched, shivering pair of hands clawed upward from the abyss, followed by a frost-bearded face.

  Korendir arose, helped the half-frozen soldier to the ledge, and still without speech, poured hot tea. He stayed while Dalon drank, then offered food and shelter under blankets for rest. Of cowardice, he said no word, nor did any other man, when the camp roused at dawn, and the first to stir noticed the survivor asleep in their midst. Whatever his weakness, Dalon had found his measure by himself in the storm-torn dark. His triumph over fear had taught strength, and a humble, unfailing confidence. He was the first among the king's men to offer to relieve Indlvarrn's overtaxed lead team. Echend and another man from Arrax formed the core of the reserves that spelled the unflagging dwarves.