Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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snippets of silk.
After six weeks of balked circling through desolate territory, men muttered that Arithon s’Ffalenn walked the land far too lightly. Around fires, by night, their talk named him uncanny. By day, braced up by camaraderie and bravado, they scratched their thick beards, and boasted of how they would hang their caught quarry by the heels, and tease him with firebrands just to watch him use shadow to save his bastard’s skin from the cinders.
Loudest were those who kept score by their suffering. ‘As I’m born,’ exclaimed one, ‘I’ll see the fell creature repaid for the frostbite that’s blackened the tips of my toes.’
A comrade hooted. ‘Who cares, for some toes? While we sleep on snow and scratch biting fleas, freezing our bollocks in this wilderness, what’s to stop the wife left at home from warming the bed in our absence? We don’t go back soon, I swear my sweet member will forget it wasn’t made for something better than pissing.’
Someone else guffawed. ‘Your member? Daelion’s justice! That wee slippery thing that doesn’t know a woman from a wet gob of spit in a mitten?’ In rejoinder, chipping ice from his hobnailed boot sole, he added, ‘Or aren’t you the one we hear moaning behind the picket lines those nights when you draw the late watch?’
‘Quiet!’ snapped the sergeant. ‘The pack of you ladies would flush a deaf post with your noise.’
‘If there’s a fugitive left in these thickets to snare, he won’t be the fiend’s get we’re chasing,’ came a sullen grumble from the ranks. ‘Mark me, in this storm, the Spinner of Darkness will have snatched his chance and bolted headlong for Ithamon.’
A testy colleague elbowed the speaker. ‘Would you stake your next ration of beer he’s done that?’
‘Be silent, fool!’ cried the sergeant in rife exasperation. ‘You chattering magpies let the tracker do his work. We wait on his word for my orders. If the Master of Shadow’s for Ithamon, he’ll be caught without any man’s bet on the outcome.’
The men met his glower in foot-shuffling, sheepish quiet. They scarcely needed a tongue-lashing reminder that Jaelot’s most competent officer already had a company of men positioned for ambush at the ruin.
Against the whiteout scream of a gust, the sergeant snapped his conclusion. ‘Sure enough, it’s our task to drive the bold rat into the trap we have waiting. But before we hare off through a blizzard on assumptions, we’ll damned well make sure the bloodsucking sorcerer’s turned west across Daon Ramon Barrens!’
‘He’s turned.’ The tracker wormed his way out of the thicket, then winced at the shower of snow the sprung branches dumped down his collar. ‘Found the hollow where he had his horses tucked up. The tracks when they left lead northwest. He’s gone for the barrens in a cracking hurry. No time before this have I seen him carve a course that ran so infernally straight.’
‘Move out!’ The sergeant hazed his troop to form ranks. ‘We go where the bastard’s trail takes us.’
But the rising storm raised a morass of obstacles, with landmarks obscured, and the far-ranging patrols of outriders too scattered to be found and recalled at short notice. The wind stiffened to a lash of unmitigated misery, lent a scouring edge by the snow driven down in a hissing, whirled maelstrom of dry powder. The horses stumbled ahead, heads low and tails flattened, the men in their saddles cursing the patched skin torn off if they touched mail or weapons bare-handed.
Beyond the sheltering eaves of the forest, the fierce gusts flayed exposed flesh. Snow worked and sifted into everything, from the folds in wool cloaks to the crevices of boot cuffs, then melted into an insidious, numbing dampness that chilled a man’s bones till they ached. The wet spiked the horses’ coats into steaming, soaked redolence, then tipped their long guard hairs in ice. The miserable beasts shivered beneath sorry masters, who slapped sodden thighs, and cursed the name of Arithon s’Ffalenn.
Nor did the wide barrens afford man or mount comfort. The low, rolling landscape wore snagged cornices of rock, with the lee sides of the dales a morass of brush and crabbed briar. The horses ripped the fronts of their cannon bones bloody, and left streaks of pinked snow where the officers called rest halts. Iced streams and gulches snagged the lowlands like torn seams, a hazard masked over by drifts. More than one horse became wrenched to its knees in a floundering, dangerous fall. Inside of an hour, two mounts were lamed. Another had to be shot for meat, reft beyond cure by an ugly, splintered bone shredded through the thick hide of its gaskin.
While men shouldered the work to render the carcass, the officers met in harried conference with the headhunter guides and the trackers.
‘Can’t press on after dark, the terrain is too savage,’ said the garrison quartermaster, his pouched eyes haunted, and his ruddy cheeks sadly thinned from his weeks of tribulation on the Baiyen.
‘Storm’s going to make the light fail early.’ The sergeant slapped numbed hands, just as wearied. ‘A fire and a horse roast will bolster morale.’
The head tracker held his opinion in dour silence, while the more hard-bitten headhunters insisted their wily enemy was certain to widen his lead while Jaelot’s moping sluggards ate and slept.
‘Would you push us on in the dark and see the next man break his neck?’ The patrol captain hunched against the pelt of the storm, his nose a red knob dripping moisture. ‘Hard enough to keep our bearings in this weather with the snow like a witch’s curse upon us.’
‘Stop now, and I tell you,’ the chief headhunter argued, ‘every trace of your quarry will be lost by the morning. Blizzards in this country can spin out for days. Stay on him. Press the chase. Or else throw away what chance you have left.’
Debate raged and resolved, with the patrols on the move through the gloom of a premature dusk. With the failing light, the dirge wail of the wind sawed men’s nerves to uncanny tension. The lead riders lit torches that the roar of the storm fanned down to sullen embers. Their dulled, ruby glare became swallowed by murk, invisible within a few yards. No fire warmed the chill from wet feet and hands. The fresh-slaughtered meat slowly froze, a sore point for men with pinched bellies. Griped on their diet of hard biscuit and cheese, they blundered into night, harried on by a gale like a hell-bound scourge, screaming over the weather-stripped vales.
Midnight downed another horse with a torn tendon. This one they shot with a quarrel through the brain and abandoned in the gully where it lay. Fresh bickering raged over the beast’s steaming carcass. On foot since the morning, the tracker was soaked through his fleece leggings, and grown testy. He questioned the reliability of what scant sign he could glean from the iced-over bogs in the hollows.
‘One bad reading could turn us astray. We’d be drawn leagues off course, come the morning. Could lose our quarry for sure. Might be days before we could find his cold trail. Fresh snow’s an unmerciful disadvantage.’
The chief headhunter rebutted, ‘But the fugitive hasn’t turned. He’s crossing these hillocks on a crow’s course, straight for the towers of Ithamon. The plain fact he’s not paused to lay a false trail means that he’s pressed, even desperate. I say we’re too close at his heels for him to attempt the precautions of a trapped fox.’
A gust raged full force, raking snow like barbed glass against the riders’ bared faces. Through the misery of the moment, while men suffered unspeaking, the shrill neigh of a westbound horse rode the storm like a shred of blown rag.
‘By the dark, that’s none of ours!’ cried the garrison sergeant, wheeling his mount. ‘We’ve got no outriders that far ahead.’ He dug in his spurs without waiting for conference or orders from his fellow officers.
Strung out in disorder, the rest of the company plunged after him. Each man in his way cursed the impulsive action. Yet to pause and deliberate was to risk separation amid the black brew of foul weather. Given scant choice, the captain in charge barked at the laggards to fall in.
The night was a wadded shroud of black felt, knit through by the forces