TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (9 page)

III. Baiyen Gap

B
y
morning, true to Luhaine's promise, the two horses Dakar had picked for hard journeying had exhausted the last of their stamina. Dismounted, as wearied himself from breasting the pocketed gullies and crossing ridges cloaked with stunted trees, Arithon paused to take stock. His night of brisk riding had carried him well into the Skyshiel uplands. Here, the forested foothills of the coast gave way to slab-sided ravines, notched with the gashed seams of past rockfalls and spindled thickets of fir. The relentless winds funneled through the high gaps, driving plumed streamers of snow. The steep vales yielded poor prospect of shelter, deserted except for the pine sparrows that chirped and fluttered in the branches, dauntlessly pecking for seeds.

Bone tired and chilled, with his boots sodden from crossing a fast-flowing stream, Arithon acknowledged his stark need for rest. He had descended from the scoured stone of the heights, driven by threat of exposure; the subtle inroads carved by exhaustion could creep up on a man unawares. Cold dulled the wits. Many a traveler perished in these wilds, lulled into the stupefied peace of fogged judgment. Every gut instinct for survival, and the seasoned experience of woods wisdom, urged Arithon to find a snug hollow and hunker down.

Yet the forbidding, flint spine of the Skyshiels balked preference. The terrain offered no secure cranny. He required dry ground, a windbreak, and a fire, and a fold in the hills where two horses could be tucked out of sight.

Arithon rested his forehead against the steaming crest of the gelding that had borne him through most of the night. 'Onward, brother,' he whispered. Wary, even here, since incautious sound might travel an untold distance, he addressed the back-turned ear of the packhorse lagging behind. 'I promise we'll stop at the first safe place. You'll both get the grain and the rubdown you've earned.'

He tugged on the lead rein, heart torn as the wearied animals resisted his effort to urge them ahead. Yet now was no time to hang back out of pity. Jaelot's patrols would be dogging his track. Should they overtake, the chase would be short. Exhaustion had claimed all his resources. His best chance to grant his horses reprieve lay in keeping the lead seized during the night.

With his bandaged hand cradled in the crook of his left elbow, Arithon firmed his tired grip on the reins. 'Bear up, little brothers.' He used voice to coax the recalcitrant horses and prayed he would not have to goad them. The buckskin released a long-suffering sigh, then yielded a molasses step forward. The packhorse complied out of ingrained habit, its flagging stride muffled amid pristine snowdrifts.

Arithon broke the ground before them on foot, prodded by bald-faced urgency. The wound in his hand languished in sore neglect. The angry, stinging pain of fresh injury had long since progressed to the pounding throb of edema. His stopgap field bandage was dirtied and blood-soaked, frayed the more ragged each time he bent to chip the balled ice packed in the horses' shod hooves. No wound fared well under such constant usage. He had lost the immediate, opportune chance to flush the clean puncture with spirits. Warned by the onset of harsh, fevered heat, and swelling that strained at the dressing, he fretted. Inflammation would have already set in. Arithon fought the blind urge to curse fate. His hands shaped his Masterbard's skill on the lyranthe. At the earliest moment, he must draw the infection with infusions of heat and strong poultices.

He cajoled the horses across the next ridge. Unfolded beyond lay the glacial scar of another rock-strewn valley. The space was too open, as evinced by the circling flight of a hawk, and the indignant chitters of a red squirrel startled to rage by his trespass. Overhead, the sky shone lucent turquoise, serrated by the snowcapped boughs of rank upon rank of tall fir trees. Game was not scarce. Arithon noted the lock-stitched tracks of hare. Later, he flushed an antlered stag. Beside the black current of another mountain freshet, he carved a parallel course with the pug marks left by a
khetienn,
the compact, northern leopard that hunted the deep wilds of Rathain.

The drifts on the bank lay piled waist deep. Forced to carve a tortured course back to the high ground, where the north gusts flayed off the snow cover, Arithon winced to the report of shod hooves clanging over bare granite. He cast a sharp glance down his back trail. Although he detected no sign of pursuit, he dared not bide in complacency. His narrow lead must be carefully hoarded, each hour snatched from the jaws of adversity his margin for rest and recovery.

Noon found him atop a raked notch in the foothills. The frigid air knifed his laboring lungs, and the geldings, heads drooping, puffed beside him. The vista ahead showed no promise of surcease. Downslope, and northwest, the land sheared away into weathered ledges of rimrock. The disused Baiyen trail that the centaurs had built hugged the scarp, a narrow ribbon cut into forbidding, black granite. The firs clung in pruned patches, culled by ice and storms until their whipped trunks jabbed the slopes like stuck needles. Sun sheened the drifts to pearlescent silk. Defined by the altitude's rarefied clarity, a deer could not move unseen by the eyes of a hunter.

Shivering against the cut of the breeze, Arithon searched to find a descent with some semblance of trustworthy footing. He could ill afford a turned ankle himself, far less risk laming the horses. Exhaustion had slowed his reflexes to poured lead. The smallest misstep might trip him. Unable to find a secure passage down, he veered westward, a moving target framed by clear sky, with the shod horses slipping and scrambling over the weather-stripped slabs of worn bedrock.

Two arduous hours later, he traversed a ravine bordered with lopsided hemlock. He picked his way, gasping with pain each time the horses jerked on the reins to snatch for a mouthful of forage. The needles were poison, and would induce colic. Yet the demand of their empty bellies overrode the precaution of instinct.

Beneath jutting rock, striped in the shadow of a spindly stand of birch, Arithon stopped. He broached the supply packs and scrounged out the nose bags, then measured a sparing ration of grain. The horses munched. He took stock, perils and assets, while the sun dipped in the sky to the west, and a quilting of shade crept across the timbered valley. Daylight waned strikingly fast in the high country. Already the wind gained an edge. Under darkness, the gusts turned unbearably bitter. Though to choose the sure route down the Baiyen trail would leave tracks for oncoming patrols, Arithon bowed to necessity. He had to find shelter before sundown. None would be found in this vista of steep cliffs and raked scree, which harbored no shred of ground cover.

A zigzagged descent down a snow-clad embankment disgorged horses and rider onto the ancient, shored causeway that traversed the Skyshiels to Daon Ramon. Here, the incessant blast of the wind had mercifully raked off the drifts. Arithon turned northwestward, the dry-packed snow squealing under his boot soles. The geldings followed, lackluster. Lathered sweat crusted their coats into whorls. Necks to hindquarters, they would have to be curried to free their thick guard hairs for warmth. Yet concern for that added burden of care must give way before the vast grandeur that opened ahead: the swept crown of rock held a mythic weight, instilled in all works wrought by Athera's blessed races.

Despite the worn state of man and beast, the old Baiyen way stood as a monument to evoke awe.

The trail, with its slope in graceful incline, had been a life artery through two prior Ages of history. Each massive, fitted block underfoot had been laid by Ilitharis Paravians. Their artistry still withstood the battering elements, bulwarked by the awareness of stone wakened to perpetual service. Too narrow to bear the wagons and teams that were the province of man, the stepped ledge had provided First Age Paravian war bands swift passage when marauding packs of Khadrim had made their lairs in the Skyshiels. By fire and sword, drake spawn and Paravian had waged battles over the causeway. At solstice and equinox, when lane tides ran highest, the fallen still danced in perpetual combat. Their haunts could be seen by those born with talent, silent and silver under the frost flood of moonlight. Here and there, tumbled fissures of slagged rock showed where the balefires of Khadrim had melted glassine scars in sheer granite.

Man's footsteps had never trodden here freely. When the Fellowship's compact had been sworn to answer humanity's plea to claim sanctuary, none walked where the old races forbade them, except by strict courtesy and permission. A man broke that law at risk of his sanity, Paravian presence being too bright to bear for those families whose heritage lay outside clan bloodlines. The needs of town trade had been negotiated by the long-past generations of clan chieftains, the old rights of way drawn by Paravian law into harmony with sky and earth. The sites which seated the mysteries stayed reserved in perpetuity.

Baiyen Gap was one of those crossings held sacrosanct, even after the uprising broke charter law, and the town trade guilds ran roughshod over the established tradition of way rights. The Fellowship of Seven still enforced the strict ban against road building, despite fierce opposition, and round upon round of hot argument. Nor was the old law forgotten in the deepest wilds, where the imprint of the mysteries still lingered and centaur guardians had not taken kindly to trespass.

Arithon s'Ffalenn had little to fear, whatever the road's haunted status. By right of blood, his granted sanction as Rathain's crown prince set him as spokesman for mankind's chartered rights on the land. Wherever he walked, if he honored the old ways, the past centaur guardians would have granted him passage. He could but hope, as he set foot on the path of his ancestors, that in his hour of need the enemies riding with Jaelot's town guard would not be shown the same license.

The level footing allowed faster progress. No strange lights or haunts revisited to trouble him, or startle his flagging horses. The sheer wall of the cliff eased gradually into a milder grade crossing the broken scree slopes between mountains. Arithon traversed a succession of corries, each one thicketed in fir, and slotted with deer tracks where passing herds had paused to browse on the greenery.

Lowering sunlight burnished the high peaks. As eventide shadow tinged the snow-clad hills to a ruckle of lavender silk, he entered a vale and broke the paned ice over a tumbling streamlet. Upland silence wrapped him in the spiced scent of balsam, while the horses sucked down bracing water. Prompted by the punched spoor of a mountain hare, Arithon hitched their reins to a deadfall. A foray into the underbrush led him through the tumbled scar of a rockslide to a spring hidden within a dense copse of aspen. Fir saplings and dead briar cloaked the mouth of an oblate, scraped fissure that had once served Khadrim, and later, untold generations of wolves as a snug summer lair to raise young.

'Blessed Ath,' Arithon gasped on a breath of sheer gratitude.

He returned for the horses, then used the last hour before the light faded to sweep down the snow where his tracks left the Baiyen causeway. Twilight saw both geldings curried and fed, and a dead aspen limb chopped for fuel. The fire Arithon laid was economically small, hot enough to boil the water for remedies, but too scant to shed warmth for his body. He dared not risk the least presence of smoke to draw the attention of enemies. By the fragrant, low light of the embers, he shouldered the unpleasant task of attending his injured right hand.

The puncture had bled and scabbed many times, until the dressing tied on in the field had to be soaked away. The wound underneath wept amid angry swelling, stuck with dirt and frayed threads. Sweating in discomfort, wrung from exhaustion and hunger, Arithon was trained healer enough to persist until the raw tissue was clean. As well, he realized he had been lucky. Fionn Areth's blade had grazed between the long bones. No tendons were severed, but the steel point had entered at an oblique angle and emerged above the heel of his hand. There, the leather-wrapped tang of Alithiel had stopped the thrust and prevented the blade from slicing disastrously home.

Arithon heated the tip of his dagger red-hot, and made his best effort at cautery. The remedy came much too late, he well knew. Already the scarlet streaks of infection ran past his wrist, drawn by the veins in his forearm. The sepsis he dreaded had already set in. Dakar's forethought had provisioned the saddle packs with a stock of healer's simples. Arithon sorted the tied packets of herbs, haunted by memory of happier hours, when Elaira had taught him the art of their use in her cottage at Merior by the Sea. The pain in his heart surpassed without contest every hurt to his outraged flesh. He wondered where the next Koriani assignment would send her; then ached for the unendurable fact of her absence through the left-handed clumsiness of fashioning a poultice of drawing astringents. To goldenrod and black betony, he added wild thyme and tansy, whose virtues would help clear the sickness from traumatized tissues.

The aftermath of the bandaging left him weakened and dizzy, the pain running through him in sucking waves that pressed him to the rim of unconsciousness. The call of that blissful, seductive darkness became all too powerfully inviting. There lay rest and peace, and the sublime balm of forgetfulness. In that hour of cold night, with the wind off the summits a whining hag's chorus, and body and mind half-unstrung, death almost wore the mask of a friend. The crossing promised oblivious freedom, and compassionate severance from care.

'I have to refuse you,' Arithon said aloud, his words forced through gritted, locked teeth. Bone weary, driven close to delirium from hunger and lack of sleep, nonetheless he clung to commitment. A blood oath sworn to a Fellowship Sorcerer yet bound him this side of Fate's Wheel.