To Ride Hell’s Chasm. Janny Wurts
Mykkael, at that moment, had not answered the thunderous knock that pounded the door to his quarters.
‘He won’t trust a lock,’ admitted the fresh young officer standing watch as Vensic’s relief. ‘No bar, either. The latch should open without forcing.’
‘That’s just as well,’ Jussoud answered, ‘since I dislike having to break things.’
The steppelands-bred foreigner seemed not to mind, that Highgate orders had assigned him to handle a demeaning round of service at the garrison. Nor had he asked for a lackey’s assistance. His huge frame was still burdened with his basket of oils, a satchel of strong remedies, and the round, wooden tub the keep laundress used to wash surcoats. With unruffled dignity, he nodded to the stableboys strung out behind, who carried yoked buckets dipped from the horse trough. ‘Open up, lads. We’re all going in.’
The ragged boys shrank back in wide-eyed hesitation, less afraid of the easterner’s slant, silver eyes than of the dire prospect of disrupting the captain’s peace.
‘Damn you for a pack of cowards, boys!’ snapped the officer to the column, that snaked halfway down the dim stairwell. ‘Captain’s not in, or quite likely asleep. And no wonder it is, if he’s out like the deaf. Crazy desert-bred hasn’t been off his feet for all of three days and two nights.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ the head stableboy sniped as his fellows jostled on to the landing behind him. ‘You’re not in front, and anyway, you were off duty the last time a man tried his luck barging in on the captain.’
Jussoud bared his blunt teeth in a grin. ‘He got Mykkael’s knife at his throat for presumption?’
The stableboy scowled. ‘No knife. No sword, either. Just the heel of a hand, fast as lightning. Broke the man’s nose all the same. Captain Mykkael didn’t waste words, wasn’t sorry. “Here’s a rag for the bleeding,” he said, “and what did the brainless grunt think he deserved, for crossing a doorway without taking soldier’s precautions.”‘
‘Here’s proper precautions,’ Jussoud said, agreeable, and offered the base of the wash tub as a shield.
Moved to awe, the skinny stableboy ducked inside the massive nomad’s protection. At Jussoud’s sly urging, he tripped the latch, and breached Mykkael’s guarded privacy.
The captain was asleep, his lean form sprawled like a tiger’s over the blanket that covered his pallet. His sword harness lay flat, at hand’s reach on the mattress beside him. Surcoat, shirt and trousers were cast off on the floor, the heaped cloth exuding the ripe odour of bog slime through a lingering fragrance of hyacinth. Stripped down to his smallclothes, Mykkael had flouted the customs of his forebears and used fresh water to wash. Even there, field habits had trampled over nicety: the grime had been sluiced off with a rag and bucket, left standing in the bar of sunlight that shone through the arrow slit.
Propped at his bare feet, unwrapped, the princess’s portrait regarded him.
Her exquisite likeness struck a note out of place in that rudely furnished chamber. The lush splendour of the oil paint glowed: the lucent sparkle in each rendered jewel, and the rich, velvet fall of her forest-green riding habit set into jarring contrast. Sessalie’s court painter had done the young woman’s grace more than justice; had captured the tilt of her refined chin, triangular as a waif’s beneath her netted blonde hair. The jade eyes all but breathed with inquisitive mischief, the glint that peeked through her midnight-dark lashes seeming entranced by the subject of interest—just now, a fighting man’s sculpted muscle, disfigured where mishap and the ravages of war had imprinted a uniformly brown skin.
The boys bearing the buckets stared agog. Then they elbowed and scrapped to claim the best view, amazed by a breathtaking display of scars no man born in Sessalie could imagine.
Unfazed, Jussoud set down the awkward wooden tub. He flipped back his long braid, shed the straps of his satchel and basket. As though he had ministered to lamed men all his life, he lowered the tools of his trade to the floor, not arousing a single plink from the glass. With the unhurried eyes of a healer, he read every sign of a man dropped prostrate from exhaustion. ‘You say your captain has not slept in three days?’
‘Near enough,’ the duty officer allowed. ‘The drunk and disorderly kept our hands full. We’ve been worked to the bone every watch, a night-and-day grind since the hour of Devall’s arrival. Here, let me.’ He pushed past, insistent. ‘I should rightfully be the one to try waking him.’
Jussoud’s huge hand shot out and caught the officer’s shoulder. ‘Not this way, you won’t. The wrong move with that man could get us both killed.’ Not pleased, as the stableboys burst into giggles, he took brisk charge and gave orders. ‘Set down those buckets. Quietly, mind! Then I want every one of you down those stairs, quick! Tell the cook to brew me a cauldron of hot water. After that, get on back to your chores.’
As the boys shed their burdens and bolted, the nomad steered the duty officer back towards the doorway. ‘When the water boils, you’ll bring it, alone. I’ll fill the tub and make ready, meanwhile. Best we let Mykkael sleep while he can. When the time comes, I’ll waken him wisely, from a distance with a tossed pebble.’
FALLEN ASLEEP UNDER THE BLACK-LASHED STARE OF THE PRINCESS OF SESSALIE’S PORTRAIT, MYKKAEL LAY IMMERSED IN THICK DARKNESS. HE forgot he still breathed. Hurled beyond mere exhaustion, his clogged senses felt sealed in a deadening field of black void. The featureless stillness did not last, but quickened to the unruly prompt of a witch thought. An uncanny movement twined through his mind and unreeled a ribbon of dream…
He knew her, felt the pounding race of her heart. His awareness flowed into the well of her most intimate self, until he felt the raw skin of her heels, chafed to burst blisters through the exertion of her headlong flight. Emotionally buffeted, he rode the crest of her terror, then shared her mind through a breathless interval as she snatched shelter in a hidden glen, touched gold under east-slanting sunlight.
The moving tableau of her thoughts spun and circled, flinching back from examining the grievous discovery that had shattered her life like a flung stone. Threat to Sessalie drove her beyond care for herself. Although sorrow knifed through her, vivid enough to sap her will to keep living, she battled its cry of futility. Through the salt sting of tears, and the ache in her chest caused by hours of running, she laid her head against the sweated neck of the mare who nuzzled her, begging for sweets.
Throughout, the horses surrounded her with their inquisitive warmth. Missing their accustomed ration of grain, they demanded, exploring her with the hay-scented puffs of their breath.
‘You’ll want for nothing,’ she soothed, though her voice cracked.
The horses forgave the actual truth, that she had no such assurance to give. Their empathic herd sense stood as her mainstay against overwhelming despair. All three pairs, the horses’ innate nobility gave her a gift beyond price: the generous trust of their confidence. She bespoke them by name to steady herself Bryajne, the tall buckskin, who tucked his blunt, hammer head over the refined crest of Covette. She, a petite chestnut who flaunted the sculpted grace of her desert breeding; Vashni, the grey who carried on like the stud he was not; and Fouzette, whose stout forelegs still dribbled blood from a recent plunge through the briar; Kasminna, who delighted in nipping any creature caught unsuspecting, and Stormfront, whose dark coat gleamed with a silvery tarnish of dapples under the glare of the sunlight…
Then the flick of a pebble stung Mykkael’s exposed side. Witch thought and dream shattered like glass, hammered through by the prompt of blind reflex. From his prone state of oblivious sleep, an explosion of ingrained physical instincts hurled him half dazed, not yet wakeful, through the practised response of a consciousness tuned by barqui’ino.
He grabbed and threw in one sinuous