To Ride Hell’s Chasm. Janny Wurts
rough hands.
Princess Anja came alive to him in that moment.
Her presence combed over him, mind and spirit, and infused his rocked senses with the intimate essence of her exotic perfume. The aromatic blend of sandalwood and desert flowers framed a memory so vivid and distant, Mykkael knew of no tongue that had enough life in its spoken phrasing to capture it.
He sucked in a breath, overtaken by storm. The young woman, Anja, assumed tangible weight, a ghost presence spun from his living contact with the slipper cupped in his palms. Witch thoughts, Mykkael realized, then understood further: Taskin was deliberately testing him for wild talent.
Despite his fierce anger, he could not fight back. His fragmented awareness already dissolved, sucked down by a vortex of terror…
…clogging fear, filled with the sweat scent of horses, and fog, swirling dank off the river…Soaked clothes, dripping and clammy cold…A woman’s heart pounding, her breaths jerked in gasps as she runs through the dark in hazed flight. She is desperate. Her taut hands grip damp strap leather, while behind her, the horses bump and jostle, their eager hooves clipping her lightly shod heels, and crushing the early spring grasses…
Drowning in horror, Mykkael wrenched his mind clear. Wrung dizzy, then falling, he spiralled back into the dusty cellar, and recovered his spinning wits. Enclosed by stone walls, and the scouring smoke thrown off the oiled rag torches, he crumpled. The shoe dropped from his grasp. It tumbled, clattering. Curled in a tight and shivering crouch, Mykkael fought back nausea, his nostrils clouded by the oiled sweat reek rising off his own skin.
His eyes were dry. Not blurred by a young girl’s salt tears, shed in shattered panic as she fled headlong through the night.
Someone’s fist clamped his elbow, jerked him back upright. The bruising grip savaged Mykkael’s slipped senses with a wrench like the bite of cold iron.
‘What did you see?’ Taskin hissed in his ear.
Mykkael shut his eyes, still battling vertigo. ‘Dark. She’s outside. In flight for her life.’
‘Witch thoughts!’ someone gasped, close beside him. Light shifted as a torchbearer recoiled. Boots grated on gravel, as other men stirred and exchanged rounds of sullen whispers.
Then another torch, flaring, thrust into his face. ‘What did you see?’ the commander repeated.
‘Country clothes. Lightweight shoes. She’s wet. Swam the river.’ A shudder raked Mykkael. He thought about horses, then flinched as a sharp flood of warning coiled through him. Pierced by an icy stab of raw instinct, he closed his mind, hard, and shook off Taskin’s probing. ‘Witch thoughts,’ Mykkael dismissed. ‘Only fools trust them. I might be seeing a moment recaptured from the princess’s early childhood. Or nothing more than a fanciful shadow, pulled in from one of her nightmares.’
‘You claimed you weren’t a slinking shaman,’ the red-haired sergeant accused.
Mykkael shook his head. He swallowed back nausea. ‘No shaman at all,’ he insisted, his leaden tiredness pressing his scraped voice inflectionless. ‘Not trained. Not brought up in tradition.’
Taskin’s relentless gaze still bored into him. Mykkael sighed. He forced his scarred knee to bear weight, then reached out, very gently, and pried off the commander’s insistent grasp. ‘I never said, did I, that I had not inherited a pack of unruly, fresh instincts.’
Mykkael sensed sudden movement at the corner of his eye. He surged into a spin, hands raised, while the draped cloak gaped open at his waist. He caught a man’s gesture to avert evil spellcraft, full on, then the sight of another signed curse, not completed. ‘I am no sorcerer!’ he cracked in fired rage. ‘Don’t you dare, in your ignorance, mistake that!’
Stares ringed him, unwavering. From men fully armed, and impeccably turned out, while he stood weaponless, half unclad, slicked in stale sweat and the itching residue of beast liniment and medicinal oil.
Mykkael uttered a word Jussoud would have appreciated, had the huge man still lingered in the corridor. Then, disgusted, he shrugged the slipped cloak back in place. To Taskin, he suggested, ‘Find that drudge. Question her. She might have seen someone snooping here, earlier. If a witch thought bears weight, her Grace was not overpowered, nor was she smuggled out, naked. I’d guess your princess might have made her own way, masked in a servant’s plain dress. See if someone else noticed the clothing.’
The ruddy sergeant bristled with outrage. ‘Princess Anja would never indulge in foolish pranks! Nor would she be childishly stupid enough to leave Highgate without an armed escort.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Mykkael agreed. ‘No harm, though, in checking.’
Taskin’s searing regard on him lingered. ‘The drudge has already been sent for,’ he allowed. ‘She could arrive in my wardroom at any moment. You ought to get dressed, or lie down before you fall over.’
Still fighting queasiness, Mykkael shot back a racked quip. ‘No order, which?’
‘Your call, soldier,’ Taskin said, less generous than rigidly practical. ‘If you drop, I won’t waste a man, picking you up off the floor. Jussoud’s gone home. He’s sent back to bed. Can’t lose the edge off him to exhaustion. Respect that, since I want you upright and alert, and for that, you’ll need his attention tomorrow.’
‘You do keep the rust polished off your swords,’ Mykkael dug back without rancour. He rallied, gathered the trailing hem of the cloak, then ploughed ahead on unsteady feet until he won free of the closet. His scathing reply floated back from the corridor. ‘You would have made a first-rate field captain, if you weren’t cooped up guarding a citadel.’
Two men snapped fists to their swords, for the insolence; the arrogant sergeant bit back another slur.
Taskin, rod straight, took the ribbing in his stride. ‘You serve under me, here above Highgate. Don’t forget that. Do you need a litter to reach your home turf? My groom can deliver the gelding.’
‘No litter, no groom.’ Caught with one leg thrust into his trousers, and his bad knee aching like vengeance, Mykkael unlocked the offended clench of his teeth. ‘And forgetting your style of service is right tough, you highhanded, pale-faced bastard.’
But his heated, last insult was respectfully masked, its phrasing couched in the intricate tongue spoken in Jussoud’s eastern steppes.
Two hours before dawn, the mist clung like wool, masking the snow-clad spires of the peaks that would restore her sense of direction. She huddled, shivering, in a pussywillow thicket, eyes shut to contain the fraught pitch of her fear, while patrols from the palace thundered past on the road, the smoke from their torches streaming…
RETURNED TO THE PALACE ARMOURY, AND THE CANDLELIT ALCOVE THAT SERVED AS HIS TACTICAL HEADQUARTERS, TASKIN RESISTED THE URGE to run agitated fingers through his hair. Before him, spread flat, lay the list of merchants’ names and promises outlined in the seneschal’s fussy script. A second sheet, sent from the Highgate watch officer, detailed the traffic moving to and from the palace. Beyond the balcony, Taskin also commanded a view of the wardroom, below. At this hour, the chequered floor was crowded by the relief watch, donning surcoats and arms for the upcoming change of the guard.
A hovering aide raised a question over the jingle of mail. ‘Commander, you wanted the watch’s list sent on to the Lowergate garrison?’
‘To Captain Mysh kael, yes. No need to waste time for a copy’ Taskin selected the rice-paper sheet, which dutifully recorded his own dispatched messengers bearing the locked chest from the treasury, along with a wrapped oil painting; Mykkael himself, and his two-man escort; then disparate groups of Middlegate merchants with their wives, their grooms