Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 farther afield than they realize,’ Arithon assured, to every appearance unperturbed as his extended hand was refused. While Fionn Areth struggled erect on his own, he added, ‘Nor will they guess we’ve an ally waiting to shield us. If fortune favors, they’ll keep the belief we’re given to aimless flight.’ For prudence, he chose not to mention that Dakar would likely need spellcraft to further mislead their pursuit.

      Inured to harsh weather by his moorland upbringing, the young herder stumbled onward. The overwhelming speed of events had left him too numbed to think. Through bitter necessity, he trailed Arithon’s lead through the banked snow of the sheepfold. Another deep ditch, and a slippery crossing over the logs of a stile, then partial respite as they plunged into the fir copse beyond.

      Fionn Areth tripped twice before his dulled mind made sense of his jumbled impressions. In fact, they had covered more ground than he thought. The open land of the farmsteads lay behind them.

      An evergreen canopy closed on all sides. The sky was blank pitch. Each gust shook crusted snow from the spruce, a mere clutch of seedlings before the towering growth that ruched foothills to the west. The tumbled chimney of a cottar’s house jagged under the pillowing drifts, the broken yard gate a mute testament to some cataclysmic misfortune. Beyond the old steading, a ravine razed the dell, where the annual spring snowmelt roared in white cataracts to egress in Eltair Bay.

      Despite the hard freeze, the crossing was arduous, the undercut banks being ice clad. Jutted rocks caved away at each step. Wet to the knees, and wrung wretched with shivering, Fionn Areth cursed the cold rivulets that chased down his boot cuffs and collar. His gloves had soaked through, the fingers inside chilled to lumps of shrill agony. Close on Arithon’s heels, he panted uphill and crossed the exposed crest, harrowed each step by the howling winds off the seacoast. Descent proved as difficult, the stony soil overgrown with young firs cased in glaze ice, and uncut by even a deer path. Raked and slapped by needled boughs, Fionn Areth broke through to a clearing, too miserable to care that Arithon had reached his obscure destination.

      An abandoned mill loomed on the swept shelf of snow, crooked in the oxbow bend of a stream. Its unroofed, square shell carved the gusts into dissonance. The rotted wheel canted in a rimed tumble of frozen waterfall. Nor was the ruin deserted. A stout, muffled figure emerged from its gloom, its waddling stride on the uncertain footing as ungainly as a discomposed duck.

      ‘Dakar!’ hailed Arithon, sounding weary at last. ‘I want––’

      ‘You bastard, you just about killed me with worry! Old storm rips my fixed wardspells to static, and you take a fiend’s sweet time to make rendezvous!’ Halted in huffing distemper, the fat prophet who served as the Shadow Master’s henchman scowled.

      Blown snow frosted his ginger brows and his unkempt bristle of beard. ‘You don’t hear the horn calls? The Mayor of Jaelot’s sent lancers abroad. I had just about written you both off as meat for the headhunter’s mastiffs.’

      ‘Dakar,’ Arithon broke in, wrung by a shiver. ‘Did you bring horses?’

      ‘Dharkaron’s black bollocks! Are you both soaked as rabbits?’ The Mad Prophet flicked his irritated glance from one alike face to the other, spell-carved to match the same chiseled angles under wind-snagged sable hair. Unerringly able to discern the original, he thrust out a forearm to support young Fionn Areth. ‘Yes, I managed to meet your request. We have four geldings, three hacks, and one knock-kneed packhorse. Come in. There’s also a fire and hot gruel, and before you ask, yes. I’ve set masking runes, and have maze wards running against the mayor’s riders at each of the four quarters.’

      Arithon winced at the mention of ward sorceries, which, predictably, balked Fionn Areth.

      Dakar jerked the boy forward in unvarnished exasperation. СКАЧАТЬ