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

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СКАЧАТЬ hours later, the enraged cat had fled. Every muscle and sinew in his body had an ache, and cold willowbark tea scarcely tamed them. His trail-hardy mare had long since lost her shoes. Arithon seared the cracks in her hoofwalls with a red-heated knife, lest she split to the quick and go lame. The gelding with the puffed fetlock improved, but still could not bear a rider. He packed the supplies, uncomplaining, his coat rough and lusterless from hard use and an uncertain diet.

      ‘When we reach Daon Ramon, you can paw for dried grass,’ Arithon soothed. He ran his hands down both animals’ ice-crusted legs, checking for heat in the tendons.

      And the day did come finally, when the mountains relented; when the stone-clad heights receded from the cloud hems, and the trees in the valleys stretched tall and majestic with the shelter of lowering altitude. Snow sifted down, deep and smooth in the hollows, storm winds having shrieked and broken their force on the unyielding ramparts of the ridges. Arithon left the lichen-bare rock of the timberline behind him, and saw, from the north-facing gaps between ranges, the white sweep of Daon Ramon below him.

      The triumph of that accomplishment was short-lived as a horn blast from behind set him under close-pressed pursuit. Arithon ran ahead, driving his tiring horses into the dense growth of a thicket. Then he retraced his steps and whisked out their hoofprints, and laid another false trail to a streambed. For a blessing, this time, the swift current had thawed. He plunged in, left the trackers the logical conclusion he had masked his trail in the water, but escaped by hauling himself into the drooping boughs of an evergreen. Tucked in the branches, he waited, unseen, while his hunters gouged the streambed to stirred silt and muck. They moved out at last, split up, north and south, in mistaken belief he would have made egress elsewhere.

      Twilight fell. The drifts lay on the land like iridescent silk, tucked in folds of cobalt and violet beneath a sky deepened to indigo. Under a spattered brilliance of stars, Arithon climbed down from the pine that had sheltered him. He cut a furtive path over the snow his enemies had left trampled to confusion. Masked under shadow, he collected his horses and moved on, toward a plain that, by nightfall, unveiled the hot sparks of a dozen enemy campfires.

      The despair of his straits washed over him then, a powerful force that made even the effort of hope a travail. Alone amid the whine of cold wind through acres of winter-stripped boughs, he longed for Caolle’s hard-bitten advice, or Earl Jieret’s firebrand tolerance. Elaira’s love seemed a figment of dream, and there, too, fate denied him fulfillment. Arithon endured the dismal ache of his solitude, his relief a set litany, that this time no friend would die in heroic effort to spare him. He closed his sound hand over the frozen leather of the lead reins and sought after the comfortless shelter of a south-facing ravine.

      Through the night, he lurked hidden in the deepwood, and kept sleepless watch for patrols. In a day, perhaps two, the next blizzard would roar in. While a storm masked the telltale trace of his footprints, yet again he might seize the advantage and slip past the cordon Jaelot’s men cast ahead of him.

      Three fortnights had elapsed since his flight on the solstice. Arithon scoured the rust from his steel, and took no false heart from the fact he had so far managed to evade capture. The windswept downs of Daon Ramon lay ahead. Thirty leagues of exposed landscape unfolded between the wooded, Skyshiel foothills and the promise of Earl Jieret’s protection at Ithamon. Under deep winter, with inadequate cover, he would stand at the mercy of Jaelot’s trackers. The lame horse would become a dangerous liability, and the sound one, a burden he dared not eliminate. Traveling on foot, if his enemies flushed him, he could all too easily be run down and killed, or captured by enemy riders. Jaelot’s men dogged him, before and behind. Were he spotted, they need do nothing at all but close in and form ranks and surround him.

      Arithon shot Alithiel home in her scabbard, then oiled his main gauche dagger. He scrounged a meal of stale biscuit and cheese, and smoked jerky from a near-emptied saddle pack. Snugged down in his cloak and his thickest fleece jacket, he measured his dwindling assets. Where Luhaine’s advice had dispatched him inland, no one had factored for the driven tenacity of Jaelot’s spellbound captain. Arithon found the odds on his continued safe passage had become laughably small. His broadscale use of his shadow to seed terror was now his most necessary weapon of expedience.

      Spinner of Darkness, the Alliance had named him. Arithon shut his eyes, wrung to bitterness. If he survived his next crossing, the title was bound to be answered and justified.

      Recalcitrant, the sky held fair through four days. Dawn on the fifth, flat cloud roofed the peaks. The air wore the whetted, crystalline sharpness that presaged another fierce storm. Jaelot’s hard-bitten guardsmen watched the weather close in with trail-weary experience. The company bound to Arithon’s pursuit carped over the aches dropping pressure brought to old scars. Their complaints availed nothing. While the first moaning gusts roared down off the heights, their labored progress was reduced to moving shadows amid the whirling white eddies of snowfall. They saddled their horses, formed up in patrols, and fanned out, seeking the Spinner of Darkness.

      Noon rendezvous found them hunched with their backs to raw wind, while their squint-eyed tracker deliberated over the ground by the glaze of a refrozen streamlet.

      ‘Your man fished for trout here,’ he announced at due length. A jab of his stick broke through snow and revealed the buried ash of a blaze kindled out of pine heartwood that would burn fast and hot, with very little trace of smoke. ‘Here’s where he boiled his catch. The fillets would be dried, or packed in ice and frozen. Won’t need a fire to fill his belly for at least the next several nights.’

      The sergeant in charge cast away the frazzled twig of witch hazel he had plucked to scrub his filmed teeth. ‘Starving or sated, may Dharkaron’s Black Spear rip his vitals in twain in the afterlife. Set chains on the bastard, and we can go home. Just tell us which way he rode out.’

      The tracker straightened, one gloved hand pressed to the stiff joints in the small of his back. He quartered the streambank with mincing steps, musing aloud as he sifted the scanty evidence. Always, the story had to be wrung from the s’Ffalenn demon’s fastidious campsite. ‘Didn’t bring horses here, never that stupid. Want to know where he’s bound, have to uncover the trail that leads where he had his mounts picketed.’ A pause, a poke at a bush with the stick, then a drawn moment while the woodsman knelt and gently blew the new powdering of snowfall away from the sun-crusted layer underneath.

      ‘Got him. This way.’ The grizzled tracker arose and dusted his trousers, his dour face turned toward the sergeant. ‘Might as well dismount now. Yon cursed spawn of evil won’t belike to change his sly habits. Not for the sake of sparing your feet or your comforts.’

      Never had Arithon made the fool’s mistake of staking out horses where his pursuit could launch a mounted foray. He would risk the approach of no enemy horses lest equine herd instinct raise a neigh of greeting and sound a disastrous alarm.

      Afternoon, the patrols were set searching in spirals, while the wind howled down and snow pelted. The west-facing slopes of the foothills soon wore a packed cowl of whiteness. The tracker forged ahead, leaned into the gusts, while his cloak cracked and slapped at his tough, stringy frame, and his beard gathered gray spikes of hoarfrost. As the men on his heels fumed and vented rank oaths, the tracker unraveled the difficult trail, patient as a spider reweaving a web from small clues strung like scattered 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 СКАЧАТЬ