Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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       V.

       Spinner of Darkness

      Morning broke over the Eltair coast, savaged in the black teeth of yet another onshore gale. This pelting storm struck days after the Koriani enchantress, Elaira, took her courage in hand and set forth to seek sanctuary with Ath’s adepts. By then, Arithon s’Ffalenn sheltered in the ramshackle cabin of a fur trader who set traplines in the remote Skyshiel uplands. His host was a solitary, half-breed clansman who had pulled him, unconscious, from a snowdrift.

      On the subject of harboring dangerous fugitives, the huge man proved cross-grained as pig iron. ‘Won’t see a man needy, and not take him in. You want to march out and die of the elements? Then say so. I’ll show you a knife-edged cliff to fall off that’ll save needless bother and suffering.’

      Two armed parties from Jaelot broached his glen. Their harrying, rude search of his humble dwelling did not change his adamant generosity. He hunted as usual, leaving Arithon the tools and new planks to repair the smashed wood of his doorjamb. The traplines replenished his ransacked larder. His rice and his millet he stored elsewhere to foil rats, and the only living creatures he refused to show welcome had hooves and smelled like horse.

      The tough gelding and two extra mounts claimed as spoils from pursuers sent to grief in the Baiyen were turned loose to graze in the deep valleys. From the hour that Arithon regained the strength to stand upright, they were thrown fodder and grain from the store left by Jaelot’s decimated supply train. Today’s whiteout blizzard just made that necessity harder to carry out.

      The valley cleft where the herd of three sheltered was silted chest deep in fine snow. The horses huddled, tail to wind, in a fir copse, visible only if a man knew where to seek them. Arithon doled out their daily ration and chipped the balled ice from their hooves. Then he faced back the way he had come, barraged by the hags’ chorus of weather. He was well clad against the assault, given leggings sewn from second-rate pelts and a hooded bear coat from the trapper. Underneath, he still wore his own fine tunic and hose, torn and repaired many times, but still prized, since silk retained the warmth under furs in peerless comfort. He carried a bow, and tinder, and sharp steel, small precautions that counted in a Skyshiel gale, when cloud and relentless snowfall mantled the high peaks, and strength and experience lent no guarantee in the brute fight to maintain survival.

      Arithon plowed through a drift, the track he had broken scarcely minutes before already erased by the screaming wind. Through the worst gusts, he paused, blind and deafened. The most trail-wise of men could lose his bearings amid such extreme conditions. A wrong turn could drop him over a precipice, or send him sliding down the cleft of a ravine. Nor did he care to stumble headlong into an armed party of guardsmen.

      Ruled by raw nerves and wary care, he slipped under the heaped boughs of a fir copse. Snow funneled in hissing currents around boles scoured clean of summer moss. The high-country weather spared nothing living; browsing deer had pruned the low-hanging branches, and the lichens that clawed out a lee-side existence wore hoarfrost feathers of ice. Here, deadfalls might lurk under covering snow, the stubbed ends of snapped limbs poised like spikes to pierce through a boiled-hide boot sole, or twist an ankle on an incautious step. Arithon carried a staff for safe footing, and a hand compass in a bronze case.

      A gust moaned and built to a shrieking crest. Arithon sheltered his face in his hood through a flaying barrage of sheared ice. He poised while the storm’s ferocity relented, as acutely aware as wild prey that the eye of the hunter would be drawn to movement. Sound reached him, instead, the chiming ring of clashed steel, broken by distant shouts. Then he caught the taint of smoke, borne down the length of the valley.

      ‘Merciful Ath!’ Arithon burst into a flat run, not back toward the horses, but ahead, in a sliding, tree-dodging charge that led toward the fur trapper’s cabin.

      He could make no speed. The deep drifts and precarious, iced footing combined with blinding snowfall to slow him. The healing scar on his wrist bound free movement as he cast off his staff and clawed the strung bow from his shoulder. More clumsy, the right hand: the canker left by Fionn Areth’s sword thrust still oozed and bled through its tightly strapped dressing. Despite tendons that throbbed in fiery pain, and the swelling of traumatized tissues, Arithon groped for an arrow.

      The tang of smoke thickened. Then the baritone voice he knew as the trapper’s climbed into a shredding scream. Arithon plowed ahead, fatally slowed by the uncertain ice of a streamlet. Too late, he knew as the cry shifted pitch. However he sprinted, three hundred yards and a dense copse of fir still separated him from the clearing. He drove himself onward, a punishing effort marked by searing breaths of chill air. Once inside the trees, the low branches hampered him. He fretted, inwardly cursing the care he must take to avoid the whipcrack report of snapped sticks. Each delay cost dearly. Smoke now rolled uphill in charcoal billows, acrid with the resins of burned pine logs. Men called and laughed, and a jangle СКАЧАТЬ