Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
enraged at being made the political pawn in the feud that pitched the enchantresses against the authority of the Fellowship Sorcerers. Since bare-bones survival perforce must come first, he took ruthless stock of bad circumstance.
While night settled like impenetrable felt over the Eltair Bay coastline, he wrested the lay of the land from his reluctant memory. Northward, past the black spur of Jaelot’s walled headland, small farmsteads patched the land like paned glass. The occupants were suspicious and ill set toward strangers, the ancient codes of hospitality long lost since the rising that threw down the high kings. Nor did the countryside offer safe prospects. Tangled cedar windbreaks and hedgerows of red thorn squared the rough, fallow fields. Two vagrants in flight from the mayor’s justice dared not ply the lanes, with their drystone walls high enough to entrap, and their rutted mazes of crossroads. To the east, the salt waves of Eltair Bay thrashed a raked stretch of shingle, and a wind-razed, shelterless marshland. To the west rose the forbidding stone ramparts of the Skyshiels, sliced by ravines of weather-scabbed rock, and mantled in glaze ice and fir.
Fitful gusts already stirred the stilled air, first warning whisper of the bass-note howl yet to build to an oncoming gale. Arithon tucked frozen hands under his cloak. He held no illusions. The snowfall that helpfully covered their tracks, and disrupted the Koriani scryers carried a double-edged threat. The night ahead would bring lethal cold, and blinding, bewildering drifts. Inadequately clothed to withstand hostile elements, he and the victimized herder he had rescued could easily die from exposure.
For the storm that drove in had not arisen out of natural forces. Arithon sensed its song deep in his bones. The subliminal, whining vibration of dropped pressure came exacerbated by the imbalance wrought by disturbed magnetics. Earlier, Dakar the Mad Prophet had served him hard warning: the Fellowship Sorcerers were themselves caught in crisis, distracted by some larger upset. The illicit magics Dakar had engaged to unravel the Koriani defenses in Jaelot had assuredly added more stress to the roiled currents of lane flux. With the surge of winter solstice cresting at midnight, Arithon lacked accurate means to measure the backlash that might follow. As he chewed over that burden of worry, Fionn Areth stirred in the darkness.
Warned by a muffled, metallic ring, Arithon spun. He clamped the boy’s wrist in a strangling grip and arrested the sword halfway pulled from the scabbard. ‘Eighth hell of Sithaer, are you insane?’
‘I should kill you here!’ Fionn Areth gasped through locked teeth. ‘There are widows across the five kingdoms who’d thank me.’
‘They might,’ Arithon agreed, his annoyance turned acid. ‘But a blade in my back won’t see you safe. The opposite in fact. My blood in the snow would act as a beacon for Koriani scryers. If you think you can manage to evade their spelled snares, Dakar has the food and the horses we’ll need. You aren’t going to find him without my guidance. Better to salve your fool’s craving for justice after we’ve scrambled to safety.’
Fionn Areth’s murderous resistance failed to slacken under restraint. Darker truth eclipsed reason. He knew this creature who entreated in pressed self-defense was unnatural, an unprincipled sorcerer whose guileful strategies had slaughtered three dedicated war hosts. Across the continent, men flocked to Lysaer’s sunwheel standard and pledged to the Light to destroy him.
‘Then swear me your bond,’ Fionn Areth insisted. ‘As Prince of Rathain, prove you meant what you said when you offered me trial by combat.’
‘Very well. Accept my given word. We’ll cross swords at the first opportunity, but after we’ve slipped our pursuit.’ Solemnity spoiled by a stressed thread of laughter, Arithon provoked with glib melodrama, ‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear strike me dead should I fail you, though the point will likely prove moot. Koriathain and Jaelot’s guards would end Rathain’s royal line with no help from Ath’s angel of vengeance.’
Fionn Areth found his sword arm released, though his volatile temper stayed unsettled. Ice showered down in cracked shards from the branches as Arithon ducked free of the hedgerow. All animal grace and dangerous focus, he cast no glance backward to ascertain whether his oath was accepted. On the insufferable assumption his young double must follow, he pursued his route across country. Brisk progress was sustained in swift bursts that utilized each quirk of terrain for masking cover.
Fionn Areth flanked him through closing curtains of wet snow, dreading the oncoming thud of hooves, and fearing, each step, the clarion cry of the gate watch’s horn at his back. Led on by a felon whose motives were suspect, he nursed his distrust through the erratic sprints between hayrick and thicket and cowshed. The low-lying fields confounded simplicity. The verges were crosscut with dikes and ditches, or brush brakes riddled with badger setts. The ice-capped stone walls could turn a man’s ankle. Despite such hazards, Arithon stayed clear of the cottages with their inviting, gold-glazed windows. The byres and yards with penned sheep and loose dogs were avoided, no matter the punishment exacted by chilled hands and feet and the limits of flagging stamina.
Another pause, snatched in a thicket, while snow sighed and winnowed through the frost-brittle brambles. Under lidded sky, wrapped in lead-sheeted darkness, Fionn Areth sensed Arithon’s measuring scrutiny. However he strove, he could not hide his weakness. Jaelot’s abusive confinement had worn him, and the relentless pace of their flight left him battered half-prostrate.
Each passing second redoubled their risks. The storm would grow worse, and the snow pile deeper. They struggled ahead on borrowed time, against the inevitable odds: at any moment, the town gates would disgorge mounted patrols with pine torches. Guardsmen would ride with the trained trackers lent by Eltair’s league of headhunters. For the prospect of claiming the bounty on royalty, they would unleash their dread packs of mastiffs, cut mute as pups to course human quarry in silence.
In uncanny answer to brooding thoughts, Arithon whispered encouragement. ‘If there are dogs, they won’t scent well in snow. Can you manage? Let’s go then.’ He forged onward, the tenuous landmarks he steered by scarcely recognizable after a quarter century of change. Stone markers and storm-bent sentinel oaks were masked by snowfall and darkness; buildings and bylanes appeared blurred into maddening sameness. No margin remained for mistakes. A single wrong turn would lose his bearings amid the flat apron of coastal landscape. Nor did Arithon dare slacken. Koriathain might guide the mayor’s patrols, intent on recouping their losses. They knew, as he did, the storm would not wait. Posed the grave danger of being outflanked, Arithon chivvied his stumbling double into the lash of the wind.
A dike almost tripped the herder. His sliding descent fetched him short in a drain ditch. The skin of ice smashed underfoot. Muddy water soaked through his fleece boots. Fionn Areth swore in grasslands dialect, his consonants rattled by chattering teeth. As chilled himself, Arithon forged ahead. The mismatched pair splashed over the slough and labored up the eroded berm. A field of corn stubble speared through the snow, rutted mud frozen underneath. Past an osier fence, they flushed a herd of belled ewes, who bolted in jangling terror.
The wind had gained force. Its bite chilled their wet feet and keened through snow-sodden clothing.
‘Not far, now,’ Arithon murmured, then broke off. ‘Get down!’
Dazed to plodding exhaustion, Fionn Areth missed the cue. Jerked back, then knocked prone as Arithon felled him, he stifled a shrill cry of outrage. Disastrously late, he reached understanding: the drumming he heard was not caused by the thrash of bare branches. Flattened beneath the frail sticks of a hazel thicket, shivering under his wadded wool cloak, he held breathlessly still while the torch of an outrider flittered by.
‘Well, we had to expect this.’ Arithon stirred, shaking out clotted snow spooned up by his oversize cuffs.
With the mayor’s guard now sounding the alarm, the countryside offered no haven. Uneasy farmsteaders would be out, scouring their hay byres for fugitives. They would unchain their dogs and round up their horses, and stab pitchforks through the mesh of their cornricks.
Nor did the worsening storm sustain its fickle gift of respite. The snow had already piled too deep. Once a search party stumbled across their plowed prints, they were going to become hunted animals.
‘We’re