To Ride Hell’s Chasm. Janny Wurts
Or do you presume we’d miss some nuance of testimony out of our northern-born snobbery?’
Mykkael was careful to keep his tone neutral. ‘Actually no. But I might address them in their own language.’
Taskin laughed, a rich chuckle of appreciation. ‘My background check missed that.’ He raised a callused thumb and stroked his cheek. ‘I wonder why?’
‘As a mercenary, sometimes, the pay’s better if you let your employer believe you’re brainless.’ Mykkael watched the commander absorb this, pale eyes introspective with assessment.
‘No doubt, such a pretence also helped your survival.’ Unlike the speed of that formidable mind, the question that followed was measured. ‘How many tongues do you speak, Captain?’
‘Fluently? Five,’ Mykkael lied; in fact, he had passed for native, with eight. The slight caveat distinguished that in the three Serphaidian tongues written in ideographs, he was not literate.
‘I will see, about servants.’ The commander never shifted, but a change swept his posture, like a pit viper poised for a strike. ‘If you don’t trust Devall, please say so, and why’
Mykkael softened the cranked tension in his hands, reluctant and sweating under the cloak he had not snatched the chance to remove. ‘I have no feeling, one way or the other, for her Grace’s suitor, or anyone else. Just that cold start of instinct suggesting your king should not be left unguarded by hands that you know and trust.’ A straight pause, then he added, ‘It’s battle-bred instinct. The sort of gut hunch that’s kept me alive more times than a man wants to count.’
Yet if Taskin held any opinion on what his northern tradition considered a witch thought, no bias showed as he pressed the next point. ‘My runners will keep you apprised of all pertinent facts from the palace. Whatever you find, I want to know yesterday. My duty officer will arrange for a courier’s relay. The dispatches will be verbal. No written loose ends that might fall into wrong hands. If you stumble upon something too sensitive to repeat, you’ll report back to me in person. Wherever I am, whatever the hour, the guard at the Highgate will arrange for an audience.’
Mykkael stirred in a vain effort to ease his scarred leg. His scuffed boots were too soiled to rest on a footstool, though the chamber was furnished with several, carved in flourishes, and sewn with tapestry cushions. Barqui’ino-trained to fight an armed enemy bare-handed, he still felt on edge, stripped of his blades and his sword. His absence from his post unsettled him as well. By now, the Lowergate populace must be seething. The princess’s disappearance was too momentous to stifle, and the lives of Sessalie’s servants too prosaic, to keep such an upset discreet.
Taskin’s focus stayed relentless as he reached his conclusion, a summary drawn like barbed hooks from a spirit that placed little value on sentiment. ‘I don’t believe Princess Anja’s playing pranks. I’ve known her like an uncle since the hour of her birth. Tonight, I fear she’s in grave danger.’
‘Her Grace is Sessalie’s heart, I see that much plainly’ Where trust was concerned, Mykkael preferred truth. ‘I may not know and love her as you do, but as I judge men, no garrison will keep fighting trim with the vital spirit torn out of it. That does concern me. I’ll stay diligent.’
Commander Taskin slid back his chair and arose. A snap of hard fingers brought a page to the door, bearing Mykkael’s worn weapons. ‘If this kingdom relies on you, Captain, on my watch, you will not fall short. A horse is saddled for you in the courtyard, with an escort to see you through Highgate.’ As the nicked harness and bundle of sheathed throwing knives were returned, Taskin delivered his stinging, last word. ‘And clean the damned rust off that steel, soldier. Set against your war record, and your reputation, that negligence is a disgrace!’
The gelding in the courtyard was a raw-boned chestnut, fit and trained for war, but groomed with the high gloss of a tourney horse. Mykkael assessed its rolling eye with trepidation. Its flattened ears and strutting prowess might look impressive on parade. Yet in a drunken, celebratory crowd, its mettlesome temper was going to pose a nasty liability.
‘Commander said not to give you a lady’s mount,’ said the leather-faced stableman, the reins offered up with a sneer. ‘One that could stay in your charge at the keep, and not let you down under need. Your horsemanship’s up to him? Lose your seat, this brute’s apt to stomp you to jelly’
Mykkael took charge of the bridle, annoyed. The challenge pressed on him by Taskin’s guard escort rankled him to the edge of revolt. The smug urge, ubiquitous to men trained at weaponry, to test his mettle, was a trait he missed least from his years as a mercenary. Worse yet, when that puerile proving involved a tradition the more fiercely reviled: the handling of dumb beasts whose innate, trusting nature had been twisted to serve as a weapon.
The horse just straightforwardly hated. Conditioned for battle to use hooves and teeth, it swung muscled hindquarters under the torchlight. The chestnut neck rippled. A blunt, hammer head snaked around, lips peeled and teeth parted to bite.
Mykkael raised a bent elbow, let the creature’s own impetus gouge the soft flesh just behind the flared nostril. ‘Think well, you ugly dragon,’ he murmured, his expert handling primed with a taut rein as the horse tried to jib and lash back. The striking forehoof missed smashing his hip, positioned as he was by the gelding’s shoulder. For the benefit of the avid watchers, he snarled, ‘In hard times, on campaign, I’ve been known to slaughter your four-legged brothers for the stewpot.’
One vault, off his good leg, set him astride before the brute beast could react. A jab of his heel, a braced rein, and he had the first buck contained, then redirected into a surging stride forward.
Behind him, the belated guards set hasty feet in their stirrups and swung into their saddles to catch up. Their dismayed northern faces raised Mykkael’s soft laughter. ‘Who’s lost their beer coin to the rumour I can’t ride?’
Both men looked sheepish.
The garrison captain was quick to commiserate. ‘I’d buy you a brew to remedy your loss, if I had any loose coin myself.’
Yet the prospect of such camaraderie with a foreigner made the guardsmen more uncomfortable still.
Mykkael’s grin widened, a flash of white teeth under the cloak hood just raised to mask the embarrassment of his origins. ‘Think well on that,’ he murmured in the same tone used a moment before on the gelding. He led off, reined the sullen horse through the archway. The clatter of shod hooves rang down the deserted avenue, bouncing echoes off the mortised façade of the wing that housed visiting ambassadors. The four-quartered banner of Devall hung limp by the entry, its gold-fringed trim tarnished with dew. Nor did the pair of ceremonial sentries stir a muscle to mark the passage of Mykkael’s cloaked figure, attended by Taskin’s outriders.
The ill-matched cavalcade passed out of the bailey, into the grey scrim of the fog that rolled off the peaks before dawn light. Stars poked through, a scatter of fuzzed haloes, punch-cut by the spires of the palace. At street level, the torches streamed, their smeared light gleaming over the dull iron sheen of wet cobbles.
That moment, a raggedy figure darted out of the shadows.
Mykkael’s horse skittered, snorting. He slammed his fist into its neck, used the rein, and hauled its proud crest to the side to curb its lunging rear. His gasped oath slipped restraint, while the figure, an old woman, came on and made a suicidal grab for his stirrup.
Her hands groped and locked on his ankle, instead. ‘Young captain,’ she cried in a guttural, thick accent. ‘A boon, I beg you! Please, out of pity, would you lift off a short curse!’
Mykkael kicked her away. As she fell, shrilling outrage, he slammed his heel into the raging horse. Before its raised forehooves came down, he drove it into a clattering sidle. Once clear, he sprang from the saddle, flung his reins to the guards, then forced his racked knee to bear urgent weight.
In two steps, he reached the woman and caught her skinned hands. ‘I’m sorry, old mother.’ Her tattered clothes smelled