To Ride Hell’s Chasm

The gate’s shadow fell over them. Gloom darkened the heir apparent’s maroon velvet to black, and muted the shine of his rubies and gold studs. His profile, trained forward, showed no expression.

‘The suspicion’s unfounded,’ insisted the crown prince. ‘When my sister played pranks, it was always Shai’s face that got her Grace into trouble.’

‘Not this time, to our sorrow.’ The heir apparent of Devall stalked towards the steep stair and began his descent, his fierce steps ringing on the carved granite. ‘You do realize, I will find her Grace, no matter the means or the cost. If an enemy has marked her out for a target, I shall not rest until they are smoked out. Your realm’s honour and mine are as one in this matter. As Devall’s High Prince, I promise this much: when we catch the man who has dared to lay hands on my beloved, I will see him sentenced to the ugliest death allotted by law in my realm.’

By the change in the watch, Commander Taskin had questioned the wine steward’s boys and ascertained that none had seen the sorcerer’s mark on the broom closet. The bottled vintage brought upstairs for the feast had been fetched in the late afternoon the day prior. No one but the drudge who swept and mopped tables had occasion to visit the cellars during the evening. The old woman who was dead of an unknown cause, since the king’s most learned physician had encountered no proof of a poisoning.

The patrols ridden out to search by the river had lamed a good horse, finding nothing. By now, any trail would be chopped to muck, since the seneschal’s move to involve the crown council had posted an official note of reward. Brash adventurers from all walks of life scoured the brush, and talk of a scandal ran rampant. Princess Anja’s plight was bandied by drunks in the taverns, while half of the Middlegate merchants tied black streamers to their doors, given over to premature mourning.

Taskin, short of sleep, weighed out his next options. He dreaded to face another interview with the king, with nothing conclusive in hand. The prospect of forcing a house-to-house search raised his temper to an edge that his officers knew not to cross. They shouldered the orders he saw fit to dispatch, and assigned men to the tasks without grumbling.

Jussoud sensed the subdued atmosphere in the palace wardroom upon his delayed return from his morning call at the garrison. The commander, he learned, had sent the day sergeant to grill the gate watch for the third time.

‘Bright powers, they saw nothing,’ the wizened old servant who polished the parade armour confided. Evidently the gallery above was not occupied, which loosened his garrulous tongue. He spat on his rag, dipped up more grit, and talked, while the helm in his hands acquired the high shine expected of guards in the palace precinct. ‘Last night was a botch-up. All those carriages, coming and going, filled with greatfolk, and each one with their grooms and footmen and lackeys? Can’t keep tight security on the occasion of a royal feast. Anybody forewarned and determined could have slipped in through Highgate unremarked.’

Jussoud set down his burden of remedies, hot and out of sorts from his uphill trek through unusually crowded streets. ‘Where can I find the commander?’

‘Himself?’ The servant returned a glance, bird-bright with sympathy. ‘He’s up the east tower with Dedorth’s seeing glass. You think you’re going up there?’ The oldster pursed his lips in a silent whistle. ‘Brave man. Tread softly, you hear? Last I saw, our commander was in a fit state to spit nails.’

Dedorth’s glass, at that moment, was trained on the fine figures cut by two princes, descending the steep avenue of stairs leading down from the Sanctuary Taskin addressed the officer who stood in attendance without shifting his eye from his vantage. ‘I want a watch set to guard Lady Shai. Also get two more reliable men and assign them to stay with the crown prince. Right now, soldier! As you go, tell the sergeant at large in the wardroom I plan to be down directly’

‘My lord.’ The officer strode off down the steep, spiralled stair, armour scraping the stone wall as he gripped the worn handrail. His footsteps, descending, faded with distance, then subsided to a whisper of echoes.

Alone in the observatory’s stifling heat, as the noon sun beat on the bronze cupola, Taskin swung the seeing glass on its tripod stand. Its cut circle of view swooped over the alpine meadows, then the scrub forests that clothed the rock pinnacles under the glare of the snow line. He scanned the folds of the glens, then the deep, tumbled dells with the leaping, white streamers of waterfalls. Deer moved at their browsing, tails switching flies; hunting peregrines traced their lazy spirals on outstretched slate wings. A mother bear drowsed near her gambolling cubs. Of human activity, he found none.

The trade road, repeatedly quartered, had yielded nothing out of the ordinary, and Dedorth, closely questioned, had been little use, immersed through the night in his vacuous habit of stargazing. The old scholar had not learned of the upset at court until his sleepy servant had fetched up his breakfast at sunrise.

By then, Princess Anja had been over ten hours gone.

Taskin laced frustrated fingers over the bronze tube of the glass. His circling thoughts yielded no fresh ideas; only rammed headlong against his enraging helplessness. Accustomed to direct action, and to successes accomplished through competence, the Commander of the Guard chafed himself raw. Scores of men at his fingertips, and an open note on the king’s treasury, and yet, he could find no lead, no clear-cut outlet to pursue.

King Isendon’s anguish tore at the heart. Taskin fumed, empty-handed, stung to empathy each time he encountered his own daughter, secure with his grandchild at home. Never before this had the quiet realm of Sessalie been rocked to the frightening rim of instability. The very foundation underpinning his life seemed transformed overnight to the tremulous fragility of cobwebs. Nor had the gossip of merchants and farmwives ever carried such a poisonous overtone of potentially treasonous threat.

The bitter sense gnawed him that he dispatched the king’s horsemen over black ice, with no point of access to plumb the deep current that endangered the firm ground under their feet.

‘Powers!’ Taskin whispered, prisoned by the close air, with its bookish must of dried ink and unswept cobwebs, ‘let me not fail in my duty to Isendon, to keep his two offspring from harm.’

Far below, the latch on the outer door clanged. A deliberate tread entered the stairwell. Taskin marked the step as Jussoud’s, the muted slap of woven rush sandals distinct from the hobnailed soles of his guardsmen.

Loath to be caught in maudlin vulnerability, the commander spun the glass and reviewed the vigilance of the garrison watch on the crenels of the lower battlements. He found no man slack at his post, under Mykkael, which lent him no target upon which to vent his trapped anger when Jussoud reached the observatory.

Unmoving, his attention still trained through the glass, Taskin opened at once with a reprimand. ‘You are late, by two hours.’

Jussoud leaned on the door jamb, his empty hands clasped. His reply held slight breathlessness from his climb, but no surprised note of rancour. ‘If you’ve been at the glass since the midday gong, you’ll have seen the press, above Middlegate.’

‘I need not see, to imagine,’ Taskin answered, now stubbornly combing the warren of streets by the Falls Gate. ‘The seneschal’s been very busy, all morning, setting stamps upon royal requisitions.’

‘So I observed,’ said Jussoud. ‘Every man with a grandsire’s rusty sword is abroad, seeking reward gold and adventure. They’ll be clouding your evidence.’

‘If we had any,’ Taskin snapped, suddenly tired of watching the anthill seethe of the commons. ‘Two leads, both of them slipped through our fingers. A dead drudge and a drowned seeress. The loose talk claims Mysh kael killed them. Did you listen?’

‘To what purpose?’ Jussoud sighed. ‘Could his talents enable a sorcerer’s work? I don’t know. Logic argues the desert-bred’s not such a fool. Capable of setting a death bane, or not, why should a man with his training strike to kill in a way that would cause a sensation? As for the seeress, he had been in the moat. I saw his damp clothes cast off on the floor where he left them. For a murderer who supposedly drowned an old woman, he had taken no trouble to hide the incriminating evidence.’

Taskin lifted his head, his regard no less ruthlessly focused as he abandoned the seeing glass. ‘Mysh kael’s true to his oath to the crown, you believe.’

‘If I had to set trust in surface appearances,’ Jussoud admitted, reluctant, ‘the debate could be carried both ways.’

‘I sent down a lancer to bring the man in. He is also delayed, by now well beyond the grace of a plausible excuse.’ Taskin straightened, all business. ‘Do you know what became of him?’

Jussoud stared back, his grey eyes unblinking. ‘He waylaid Mykkael in a darkened stairwell.’

‘Fool.’ The commander’s long fingers tightened on the seeing glass, sole sign of his inward distress. ‘He’s alive to regret?’

The healer nodded. ‘Unharmed, and unmarked, in fact. Mykkael stopped him cold with a blow that stunned the nerves that govern involuntary reflex. Then he used direct pressure and cut off the blood flow through the arteries to the brain only long enough to drop your guardsman unconscious. I find that sort of efficiency chilling, a precision far beyond any nightmare I could imagine.’

‘Barqui’ino drill alters the synapses of the mind.’ Taskin stepped back, leaned against the stone wall, while the pigeons cooed in liquid murmurs from their roosts in the eaves overhead. ‘Then you’ve seen this desertman use skills that can kill, and leave no telltale bruise on the corpse.’

Jussoud said nothing. His sallow skin shone with sweat in the spilled glare of sun off the sills of the casements.

‘Where is my guardsman?’ Taskin said, his probe delicate.

‘On his feet, under orders, as far as I know still searching the town for the captain.’ Reliant on trust earned through years of intelligent service, Jussoud dared a tacit rebuke. ‘Shaken as your guard was, and exhausted after a night of rigorous duty, he was more afraid to return empty-handed. His search at this point will scarcely bear fruit. Mykkael left the garrison, masked under your officer’s purloined cloak. The garment was found later, draped over the drawbridge railing. Even the keep gate watch could not say where the captain went, or what he pursued on his errands.’

Taskin grimaced. ‘I’ll have that guard recalled. How many more men should I send to accomplish the charge of fetching Mysh kael uptown for review?’

‘None.’ Jussoud absorbed the commander’s surprise, unsmiling. ‘You won’t have to collect Mykkael, even if his stiff-necked pride would allow it. The captain asked me to deliver his report from the garrison, and to add, he will meet you himself at the Highgate. You can expect him in person by mid-afternoon.’

The older campaigner’s silvered brows rose. ‘How arrogant of the upstart, to dictate to me. What facts has he chosen to deliver, meanwhile?’

Jussoud recited, choosing Mykkael’s own words, and clipped sentences that did not elaborate. The close details he had overheard from the garrison’s watch officer shed no more useful light on the knotted problems at hand.

‘Nothing and nothing,’ Taskin snapped, eyes shut through the pause as he gathered himself. His ascetic face looked suddenly drawn against its lean framework of bone. Then his eggshell lids opened. Direct as forged steel, he said. ‘So much for bare facts. Now say what you think.’

Prepared for that command, Jussoud nonetheless chose his honest words with reluctance. ‘I think Mykkael knows, or is hardset in pursuit of firm evidence that will reveal the fate that’s befallen her Grace. He said she’s endangered. Not why or how. I’d hazard two guesses. That he’s loyal, but has a strong reason not to trust where he shares his information. Or else he’s involved with an ugly conspiracy, and doing a magnificent job for the party that wants to obstruct us.’

Taskin nodded, relieved, his respect for the healer grown to the stature he would have accorded a peer. ‘We aren’t wont to warm to a man of his breeding. The court gossip condemns him. His background checks clean, but he was a hired sword and a mercenary. He might have been commissioned a long time in advance, and sent here to win his key position through the opening of our summer tourney’

‘He is a weapon, well sharpened to spearhead whatever cause buys his service,’ Jussoud agreed in blunt summary. ‘He could be the best chance we have to find Princess Anja, or he might be the cipher to cast Sessalie to the wolves that would tear her succession asunder.’ A fraught moment later, he braved the soft inquiry, ‘Will you leave the man free, or restrain him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Taskin answered, his trim shoulders set to withstand an unprecedented burden of uncertainty. ‘You’re an astute judge of character, Jussoud. What do you feel this case merits?’

The commander watched, primed and sharp as a predator, and captured the nomad’s split-second hesitation. ‘Ah, Jussoud, you have doubts.’

The easterner sighed. ‘Just one. Not substantial.’ Mykkael had not said his own hand had killed a child; but the flicker of fear that had crossed his dark face well suggested the chance that he might have.

‘No need to elaborate,’ Taskin excused. ‘As always, your thoughts and mine seem to move in lock step. I value that, even if, with this desert-bred, the waters are dangerously clouded.’

‘Then what will you do?’ Jussoud asked, well aware he might not receive a straight answer.

Yet Taskin chose to share his rare confidence. ‘Let’s first see if Captain Mysh kael keeps his promised appointment at Highgate. If he comes in by free will, I plan to hear him. Should he have sound reasons for today’s behaviour, I’ll wait to see whether he chooses to disclose information I can use. The facts he delivers to my discretion had better hold value and substance. Once those hurdles are crossed, last of all, I must weigh the manner in which he answers to justly earned punishment.’

At Jussoud’s wary glance, Taskin said, starkly grim, ‘Oh yes, I will have to take that risk, won’t I? The brazen creature has made sure he’ll be tested. I have no choice but to handle him now that three counts lie against him, with only one of them mine, for an act of direct insubordination. He’s incurred a diplomatic insult, formally registered, that for the realm’s honour, I cannot ignore. You’ve just witnessed the third, a far more serious charge of striking a crown guard in obstruction of a royal duty.’

‘Bright powers avert!’ Jussoud warned. ‘I respect your prowess, my lord, and your sound grasp of command, but I’ve also seen Mykkael in action. Do you actually know he can kill you, that fast, on the strength of an ingrained reflex?’

Taskin drew in a shuddering breath. ‘I doubt my imagination falls short on that score. But Princess Anja’s survival may come to rely on this southern barbarian’s raw instincts. Either he’s our best hope to recover her, alive, or he’s a loose bolt of lightning, too deadly for any man’s hand to restrain. If he’s too volatile to bide under a crown soldier’s discipline, loyal or not, we can’t risk such a weapon among us.’

As the sun’s rays slanted through the early afternoon, she huddled in the dank gloom of a rock cave. The tied horses rested with closed eyes and cocked hips. Chilled and exhausted, she snatched sleep in catnaps. Yet each time she drifted, fear stabbed her awake, sweating from the recurrent nightmare: of familiar faces tirelessly hunting her, their changed eyes ice-hard with cruelty…

VIII. Afternoon

THE GARRISON SENTRY ON WATCH BY THE FALLS GATE SCARCELY SENSED THE WHISPER-LIGHT STEP AT HIS BACK. BEFORE HE COULD TURN, OR set hand to his weapon, a small, furry bundle arrived on his shoulder, its sharp claws digging for balance.

The startled man-at-arms closed one hand on the scruff of what proved to be a young cat. Then he realized just who had crept up behind him. ‘Captain!’

Mykkael flashed a smile from under the penitent’s mantle that covered him from head to foot. He had been to the butcher’s, to judge by the fly-swarming contents of the osier basket slung from one casual hand. ‘Have that kitten sent up to the Middlegate watch officer, along with my updated orders, could you please?’

By now accustomed to the odd ways in which the captain saw fit to assert his command, the sentry secured the unsettled creature thrust into his grasp: a nondescript tabby with white paws and pink nose, sadly bedraggled, but bearing a braided cloth collar. ‘Someone’s lost darling?’

Mykkael nodded. ‘Belongs to the little girl who lives on Spring Street, the house with blue shutters and stone walls smothered in grapevine.’ He kept himself masked in the shadow of the keep, out of sight of the carters who jockeyed their drays past the foot traffic on the planked drawbridge. Through the cries of the vendors peddling grilled sausage, and the hoots of two sotted roisterers, he added, ‘Tell the child not to let her pet wander again. I found him in the hands of the rat killer’s boys.’

‘Powers!’ swore the guardsman, correctly faced straight ahead. ‘I thought you’d ordered a stop to their cruelty?’ Before Mykkael’s tenure, such boys had trapped stray cats in the alleys, and lamed the poor wretches for rodent bait.

‘As of today, those boys have received their last warning.’ The captain’s face hardened beneath the coarse hood. ‘If they persist with their mishandling of animals, here’s my updated word: the next offenders will be culled with a warrant. See that the change gets through to my sergeants.’

The guardsman on duty returned a clipped nod.

‘Now,’ Mykkael resumed, brought around to the business assigned to the watch by the Falls Gate. ‘You have the information I wanted?’

The man’s answer was prompt. ‘The recent list of the seeress’s clients, or at least the ones that her family recalls? The descriptions are scant. No one could agree on the numbers.’

‘I don’t care if the details were mixed up.’ Mykkael measured the sun angle, his cloaked stance touched to scalding impatience. ‘Report.’

The guard understood what his pay share was worth. He delivered the paltry summation. ‘The old besom hosted a wide range of visitors, most of them commons who came to buy charms for luck in love, or talismans for prosperity and safeguard. Yesterday’s list included five to eight merchant women from the Middlegate, all of whom came to her heavily veiled. Beyjall the apothecary visited once, perhaps to ask for a scrying. He often sought readings to locate rare herbs, but since the granddame kept her sessions private, the family can’t swear the presumption in this case was accurate. They all remembered the page from the palace. He came, they said, in a craftsman’s rough smock. But his shoes were a rich boy’s castoffs.’

Mykkael’s question slapped back, fast as ricochet. ‘When?’

Taken aback by a stare of driving intensity, the guard breathed an inward sigh of relief that he was prepared with an answer. ‘Two days ago. The night of the High Prince of Devall’s arrival.’

‘Well done. That will do.’ Mykkael adjusted the hang of his sword blade beneath his voluminous mantle, a sure sign he had concluded the interview and now made ready to depart.

‘Anything else, Captain?’ Given a negative gesture from beneath the enveloping hood, the guardsman cast a distasteful glance over the clotted offal heaped in the basket. ‘You’re off on some errand outside the gates? Surely you aren’t taking that as a gift to feed the blind storyteller who begs by the crossroad market?’

Mykkael tapped his chest, where he had a second wrapped packet stowed, beyond easy reach of the lower town’s scourge of street thieves. ‘The scraps are intended for somebody else. I’ll be back in an hour, two at the latest. Tell your duty officer to have a saddled horse waiting, I expect to be in a hurry.’

Asleep in the sun after quartering the hills through most of the night with a hangover, old Benj the poacher stirred to the jab of a toe in his ribs. The sawing snore that rattled his throat transformed to a grunt of displeasure.

‘Benj!’ screeched a female voice that wrought havoc with his sore head. ‘Benj, you damned layabout, wake up.’

The carping as usual belonged to the wife, shrill as a rusted gate hinge. The toe, which dug in with nailing persuasion and unleashed the fireburst of a pressed nerve, was no woman’s. Benj shut his slack mouth on a curse. Aware enough to interpret the delirious yap of his dogs, he answered without opening his eyes. ‘The only trail that matched your description runs into the western ranges. Six horses, led by a slight person who wore lightweight shoes, with soles stitched by a quality cobbler.’

‘Benj, you rude wastrel, get up!’ The wife caught his limp wrist with a grip like steel pincers and hauled. Her brute effort toppled him sideways off the kennel barrel currently used as his backrest. ‘Benj, at the least, you can hold conversation within doors, like a civilized man of the house.’

‘I’m not civilized,’ the poacher protested. He opened bloodshot grey eyes, peered through his oat-straw frizzle of hair, then winced as the sunlight stabbed into the lingering throb of his hangover. To the cloaked desert-bred who crouched, feeding guts to his fawning hound pack, he appealed, ‘I can talk just as well lying down. We don’t need to go anywhere, do we?’

‘In fact, we do.’ Teeth flashed in the captain’s face, though his grin showed no shred of apology. ‘I’m a bit pressed, and would bless the favour if your woman could heat up a cauldron and boil a slab of raw beef.’

‘You don’t intend to feed a good cut to those dogs!’ the woman yelped in shocked horror.

Mykkael laughed. ‘Evidently not, since the thought seems to threaten you with a stroke! Here, let me.’ He tossed the last gobbet from the basket, wiped his smeared hands on the grass, then replaced the wife’s grip upon Benj’s slack arm with a muscular pull that hoisted the lanky man upright. ‘Come on, my fine fellow.’ He braced the poacher’s wobbling frame and steered a determined course through the dog piles dotting the yard. ‘You’ll be more comfortable inside, anyway, since those beef scraps will draw clouds of flies.’

The mismatched pair trooped into the house, the wife clucking behind, concerned for her rugs and her furnishings. Yet Benj arrived without mishap in his favourite seat by the hearth. Perched on the threadbare, patchworked cushion, he scowled at his feet, perplexed by the fact that the old nag had not forced Mykkael to pause and remove his caked boots at the threshold.

While the woman bustled to hook the cauldron over the hob, the poacher nestled his thin shoulders against the ladderback chair.

Mykkael sat on the settle. At home enough to push back his hood, he washed the suet and blood from his hands in the basin fetched by the poacher’s tongue-tied little daughter. He did not press with questions. A rare man for respect, he stifled his need and waited for Benj to order his thoughts.

As always, that tactful handling caused the poacher to give without stint.

‘Your quarry’s holed up quite high in the hills. As you asked, we did not haze or close in. Just followed the trail from a distance. Good thing you forced me to start tracking last night. With every damn fool out there beating the riverbank, not even my dogs could unriddle the hash that’s left of the scent.’

As though the report were as ordinary as the drone of the bees outside in the melon patch, Mykkael surrendered his packet of meat for the wife to stew over the fire. ‘No one noticed you? No crown riders picked up on your back trail?’

Benj shook his head, cleared his throat, then demanded, ‘Does a guest get no tea or hospitality in this house?’ Before the wife could draw breath and sass back, he answered the captain’s question. ‘No one’s wiser. I left my son in the hills, keeping watch. He will lay down fresh deer scent to turn any dogs, as you asked. If the searchers come near, he’ll divert them.’