by Janny Wurts
The black wheeled and clattered through the shoaled creek-bed on iron-shod hooves. Tarens faced north, sick at heart, for no memory in Jieret’s store of experience matched the frayed exhaustion stamped into the Sorcerer’s bearing. Whatever threat Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn faced, wider tragedy swung in the balance. Dread remained, that Cosach’s bad call upon Thunder Ridge may have sprung the cascade to disrupt the compact.
“I should never have left my firm stance at my liege’s back,” Tarens lamented through the black mane whipped against his clenched teeth.
“No,” rebuked Asandir’s voice, arisen from empty air as the stallion splashed up the far bank. “Iyat-thos Tarens, you made the right choice! Had you stayed by Prince Arithon’s side at Tiendarion, you would only have given the Ettinmere shamans the leverage they sought to control him.”
On the hour Iyat-thos Tarens released the black stud at the gorge that rimmed the plateau, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn nursed his stolen mount southward at a flagging trot. After days on the run through the glaring exposure of the open dales at his back, he still led the Light’s dedicate pursuit away from the battered clan war band in Daon Ramon. Isolate terrain and the heightened flux lines of the free wilds had enabled the tenacious Sight of the True Sect cohort’s talent diviner, an advantage first used to draw the chase on, until elite lancers cut off his clean escape route through Ithamon. With a second company closing on his shortened lead, Arithon bolted flat out, every subtle trick brought to bear before their spread net pinned him at bay against Daenfal Lake. The chaotic bustle surrounding the trade town posed his last chance to shake off their arcane tracker.
Which necessity turned him down the notched track through the narrows, where a creek tributary laced through a tight ravine adjacent to the frothed race of the Arwent Gorge. Above loomed the seamed crag overlooking the peaked roofs of Daenfal, site of the crumbled, Second Age amphitheatre, where bygone Paravians once mourned their departed. Rebuilt over the ruin, Mankind had nestled the layer-cake warren of a Third Age necropolis. The silhouettes of the spired memorials erected by wealthy merchants cluttered the monument first carved by the centaurs, dipped bronze against afternoon’s egg-shell-blue haze. Shadow wrapped the grey cliff beneath, the dank gloom grave chill after the Barrens’ parched heat.
The spent gelding stumbled beneath Arithon’s injured weight. The bellows heave of its soaked flanks gusted through the percussive chink of shod hooves, and the echoed thunder of the river-course ahead, careening towards Daenfal’s cove harbour.
Stay astride, and the game beast would founder. Arithon braced in one stirrup, teeth clenched, and swung his pierced leg over the cantle. The jolt to the stuck arrow as he dismounted ripped him to agony. Wrung faint against the gelding’s steamed shoulder, he wrestled off his tattered boots.
The breathless pause snatched in recovery cost time, while the ambient noise funnelled up the ravine masked the sound of the on-coming lancers. Arithon worked fast by necessity. He wedged his footwear into the stirrups, tied the cuffs, then unfastened the bedroll strapped to the cantle and fashioned a scarecrow’s torso. A lancer’s stolen canteen topped the effigy, the uncorked neck propped on an empty scabbard, then hooded with the cerecloth rain-cloak filched from the gelding’s kit. A convincing sham or a fatal mistake, if the rabid dedicates at his heels carried a seeing glass. Arithon lashed his contrivance to the saddle and hastily knotted the reins.
Dusk would not fall fast enough for the ruse to grant more than a handful of minutes. Arithon hazed the blown horse downhill. The poor beast might fall into the caring hands of a hostler if it reached the ferry. Past such respite himself, he checked the field bandage strapping the snapped arrow lodged in his thigh. The embedded broadhead sawed deeper with each movement. No saving the risk to the artery, as a horn blast sounded from the defile, behind.
The True Sect company pounded through the crooked bends, within sight in a matter of seconds. Run or bleed out, Arithon would find himself caught like a dog in the open.
He hobbled off the road and wedged into a seam in the rock, inadequate cover should the company officer dispatch men, searching on foot. But the cranny might be overlooked by his horsemen, driving at speed through deep shade with their attention directed ahead.
Arithon shut his eyes. Light-headed, in pain, he paced his breath, slowed his pulse, and shuttered his mind against the temple diviner. He withstood the relentless trial of nerves as the lance company poured into the notch, yelled, and spurred hell-bent after his decoy.
The column breezed past to the snap of lance pennons and jangling harness. Arithon shoved away from the cleft, reliant on luck, that no riders glanced back. He limped through the brush fanned by their swift passage and slunk, pressed against the scarp on the opposite side. His fresh bleeding redoubled, the makeshift bandage sodden before he reached the narrow foot stair that angled up the vertical cliff. He climbed barefoot, no matter that he blazed a trail for a tracker: horses could not follow, and a man dismounted in leather-soled boots risked a fall where seeped springs grew virid slicks of moss.
Already, the blare of the officer’s horn wheeled the cavalcade. The rag ruse was unmasked, with the only path left for a fugitive the steep ascent to the necropolis. Hope hung on a thread, that the pride and the privilege of elite rank kept the dedicates astride when they drew rein in the roadway below.
Arithon drove upwards, run to the bitter edge of endurance. Behind, the Sunwheel officer’s shout rebounded from the floor of the defile.
“Lancers! Split company! Left wing, form ranks and cordon the stair. Right wing, double file and fall in! We’ll take the roundabout sweep up the carriage-way to contain and close in from above.”
The access road looped behind the escarpment, a league’s distance that finished, uphill. Winded horses would require pauses to breathe, which bought Arithon a tenuous respite but no grace. Emerged from shadow into the feverish warmth of daylight, he laboured upwards in desperate straits. The necropolis posed a problematical refuge, the maze threading the underground chambers without exit as a deterrent to grave robbers. Unless he acquired a stout length of rope, the hundred-yard leap from the face towards the Arwent dropped sheer, the boulder-snagged race underneath churned to white water fit to thrash a swimmer to pulp.
Against macabre death, the prospect of a live capture acquired a glimmer of merit: provided the climb did not defeat him beforehand, crumbled away to gapped risers in places that offered scant purchase. Arithon dragged his wounded leg, jaws clamped against whimpering outcry. Tenacity brought him to the crest on one knee, where an unexpectedly sturdy hand gripped his arm and hoisted him upright.
His surprise met a round, freckled face and an upturned nose flushed like a turnip, a fly-away coil of taupe braid, and a woman’s muscular frame.
Yet the focused assessment that flicked upwards from his bare feet, to the grisly, stained linen wrapped over his breeches, then piercingly surveyed his strained face was too keen. Arithon acknowledged the shock of encounter that identified an adept talent.
“Arrow or steel?” she inquired of his wound, then remarked in withering interest, “Do True Sect dedicates often make a hunter’s sport of their deserters?”
“The next broadhead’s apt to cut short explanation,” Arithon gasped. “If you’re the attendant here, have I your leave?”
His urgent glance assessed the memorial stelae, behind her, then quartered the rotund walls of the mausoleum, with its pillars and plinths perched with statuary; the carved spires with their frozen ribbons of inscriptions, and stone wreaths swagged like fungus above the triple arched portal. No need to plead his desire for sanctuary. The smoked dust kicked up by the double file of horsemen already clouded the flank of the promontory. Their lathered charge up the switched-back approach scattered pedestrians, and pelted through a decorous procession of mourners, black veils flapping like startled birds.
“I’m not the overseer,” the woman allowed, too comfortably imperturbed. “Be glad. That fellow wo
uld pauper you for a bribe, then fatten his dishonest purse on the bounty.” Her alto note of mockery added, “Call me a nameless talent on hire to settle an unquiet shade in transition.”
“And the unrequite living?” Arithon quipped. “Might they also merit the peace of an undeserved rest?”
Her laughter was silvery as a flute. “Well, the niches for the burial urns are useful only to nesting jackdaws, and the catacombs are searched thoroughly when petty thieves try seeking an illicit refuge. Are you squeamish?”
Arithon managed a breathless smile. “Not I.”
Her lips threatened a sly smile. “Then you must recline like the dead.”
Delight lit his blanched features. “A sarcophagus?”
“Quickly, I think.” Her no-nonsense grip shifted. She draped his arm across her sturdy shoulders before his legs crumpled.
Arithon leaned on her pragmatic support. They proceeded, awkwardly paired as puppet-string dancers. She stooped to accommodate his shorter frame, bearing up his hopped strides. Down the windswept walkway, striped in shadows cast by the obelisks, they passed under the weathered span of an archway built by no human hand.
Inside, the mausoleum enveloped them in whispered echoes. Dusty light spilled from slit windows, faced west, with the feeble haloes of fluttering candles scattering flecks in the sepia gloom. A miasma of dank earth, bees-wax, grave oils, and incense clung like stifling velvet, where once, wide open to the night sky, a soaring ring of stepped stone had surrounded a plinth of white marble inlaid with jasper. Gone and forgotten were the spirit-lamps burned there in silent lament for departed Paravians.
Built and rebuilt on the original foundations, the Third Age jumble of mismatched memorials descended the concave depression to a stone catafalque, with pillars spanning a pit to contain the oiled pyres for cremation. The surrounding walls were cheese-holed with niches for funerary urns, with the dim portals leading into the warrens of tunnels burrowed out for the lesser tombs in the catacombs. Fashionable wealth had crowded the terraced tiers with free-standing sarcophagi, broad as tables, and wreathed like confection with house crests, ornate lilies, and supplicant bronze effigies. Blood-red sunset limned an imposing black edifice of stone, where his benefactress directed his halting step. A recumbent figure in tarnished silver languished atop a massive lid embellished with vine leaves.
Arithon measured the daunting tonnage that capped a refuge of frightening permanence. “Please reassure me. You’ve stashed a supply of old grave soot by chance?”
“Why? To blacken your face as the grieving servant, abased at the feet of the interred master?” Her rueful grin matched his morbid wit. “Oh dear. The invention’s too pat. Besides, an artful lackey wears livery, not bloodied rags.” Rushed by the racketing clatter outside as spurred horses crested the last switchback, she parked his sagging frame against the frigid curves of a matron sorrowfully bowed over a cherubic infant. “Try not to drip where the mess can be seen.”
His interested glance followed as she slid back a mechanical latch, withdrew the crank key for a recessed lock, then engaged a hidden mechanism. The massive stone cover rotated to the clicked ratchet of a geared counter-weight.
“Marvel of marvels,” remarked Arithon, entranced.
“Gaemar, in town, does the neat engineering. The Light’s lancers, one hopes, aren’t likely to fathom toy fancies enjoyed by the rich.” Her distress smoothed by chatter, the helper whose kindness raised frightening questions boosted Arithon’s racked torso into the vault. “The tomb’s empty, you see? Its doddering claimant’s still alive, cherished by a wife who fritters his fortune on gestures of appalling sentiment.”
“Tell me her name, and I will sing her praises.” Arithon grimaced, nursed his injured leg over the rim, and courageously settled, arms folded on his chest with satirical irony. “Do you weep for the fallen?”
“I redress their woes, first.” Dead-pan, ruled by unknown intentions, she twisted the key in reverse just shy of disaster. The filtered clatter of hooves and commotion brought the lancers en masse into the outside courtyard. His rescuer’s last warning whispered through the narrowing gap as the lid grated closed. “Lie easy, but don’t fall asleep if you snore. Surely the dead are beyond any mortified officer’s purview to question?”
“Perhaps,” allowed Arithon, faintly bemused, “though I’d rather trust your knack for persuasion. Yon cur pack would maul the bleached bones of the saints. Muzzle their zeal, if you can, before their denned quarry perishes from suffocation.”
“You’ve a quick and irreverent tongue,” she admonished, given the evident fact he would have perceived the fresh draught through the well drilled to house the gears driving the chain. “Serve you right if you don’t rest in peace!”
“Angel, whatever comes, I renounce my ungallant ingratitude.” His last sight, rouged by the blush of day’s afterglow, was the tense oval of her freckled face turned expectantly towards the entry. Then the massive lid of the vault thunked home and sealed him in darkness.
She stowed the key, while the Sunwheel horsemen regrouped at the archway. The officer’s brusque command to dismount added the names of the men detailed to manage the horses. He split the rest into squads and dispatched them to quarter the necropolis. Before their invasion disturbed the mausoleum, the nameless initiate resumed her incomplete work and laid down a ritual circle in white sand. Again, cagey strategy prompted her choice to leave her service smock folded inside her satchel.
When The Hatchet’s dedicates swarmed through the inner portal, they encountered a planted woman, clad in a nondescript linen shift without any badge of authority. “Dolts! Crass animals! Must you elbow and crowd? Creation is eternal! Respect paid to the departed is unseemly, acquitted in brutish haste.”
The obstructed officer brandished his lance. “We’re sworn dedicates to Divine Light, not civilian mourners come here for devotion. Step aside, woman! Your temple shelters a dangerous fugitive. We’ll leave when he’s bound into custody.”
“Temple!” Female outrage raised hackles and bristled. “This is a shrine for the blameless dead, and no place for your armed threats!”
“By the Light of the Canon!” the balked captain swore. “Clear our path before you get hurt.”
“I’ll move for no man with steel in hand.” Chin raised, the woman dug in her heels. “If you insist on a useless search, then disarm yourselves first. At least show the pretence of civilized manners.”
Tossed that dubious compromise, the lance officer unstrapped his helm and scraped a scale gauntlet across his stubbled chin. “You swear you’ve seen nothing? No black-haired prowler on the run like a rat?”
“Do I look blind or foolish?” Scornful, she gestured, “If the crannies behind the funerary urns sheltered pests, we’d have scandalized relatives, and honest groundsmen turned off in shame!”
The harangued lancer waved off the argument. “You lot!” he barked to his craning men. “Get this forsaken mausoleum cordoned. Kill on sight if the wretch bolts from cover. The rest of you, drop your sword-belts and toss this bone-yard as ordered. Stay sharp! If the Spinner of Darkness is holed up here, he’s cornered. Carelessness might see somebody killed, or worse, let the bastard escape.”
While the grumbling search-party shucked their baldrics, the lance captain quibbled over the subject of belt-knives with the recalcitrant shrew in the doorway. “Surely your catacombs are infested with vermin.”
“Beetles, too,” she conceded, sardonic. “Defile their nests down there all you wish. You’ll gratify a few spiders and hungry snakes before autumn’s cold makes them torpid.”
The disparaged company filed over the disputed threshold, those not unsettled by superstition choking their impious laughter behind buttoned lips. The diviner in his white vestment came last, a gaunt man whose match-stick shanks and minced strides propelled a skull face with a chinless jaw. His suspicious glare crossed the woman’s cold regard and took pause.
“Inspect her satchel.”
Exposed under the lancers’ rifling hands, her grey cloth and white ribbons of charitable service stirred a satisfactory round of consternation: for no True Sect talent dared to run afoul of an initiate enchantress of the Koriathain.
“What’s the bother?” a loutish pragmatist scoffed. “Isn’t her order allied with our faith against the Master of Shadow?”
“That may be,” the Canon’s diviner allowed, stiffened by the encroachment of a rival practitioner. “But she’s one of their wandering independents, not answerable to a sisterhouse.”
When the unmasked enchantress said nothing to cool his scorching distrust, the unnerved officer upbraided his slackers before they shirked duty under the distraction. “I don’t care who that witch is! We don’t harken to her above captain’s orders. No one’s relieved until this place is searched.”
The uneasy huddle broke up. Sidled past the bottle-neck, the men fanned out in determined formation. Aware of the enchantress watching their backs, they pried into crannies and corners, ungainly as they bashed into the flourished scrolls with their inscriptions and ran afoul of dolorous statues knelt in vigil over the epitaphs. Men quickly discovered their jokes rang too loud. Undue haste amid the raised tombs tripped them up on carved ivy and barked their shins on heraldic finials.
Progress faltered as the outdoor light failed, then resumed by the purloined store of the gravediggers’ pine torches. Men clumped up the spiralled stairs to the belfries and swept swooping shadows across the louvered cupolas. They cursed the wisped cobwebs that garnished their helms as they scraped the low ceilings in the pillared catacombs down below. Their ransack poked into noisome dark crevices, until the chambered niches breathed wafted smoke, reverberated with the chinks of rowelled spurs, vacant scabbards, and mail shirts.
“The skeletons we disturb aren’t missing their dinner,” a harried lancer groused at due length. When complaints failed to move the relentless diviner, he pressed, “How far must we ride to make up for lost ground when we come up empty-handed?”
