Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

Above the seething wrack of the storm, the sun was lifting her crown above the jagged mountains, and day crept forth on dragging feet to infuse the plateau with a feeble, ghostly half-light. Across the meadow the prisoners were approaching, bound and desolate, between their guards.

Phalihas, glad to be distracted from his dawn-bleak thoughts, observed the Outlanders as they were cast down before him and forced to kneel on the iron-hard ground. They made a strange group—the wiry little man whose very posture spoke defiance; the tall, fair warrior-maid, whose ripe body promised joys uncounted, but whose eyes were cold and hard as an unsheathed blade; the old man, sick and fevered unto death, unless the Herdlord missed his guess—and the other. The bony woman with the mad, fey eyes. Merely to look at her sent chills down the Hereford’s spine. He tore his eyes from her and forced himself to speak, rushing through the sentencing in his hurry to get as far away as possible from her relentless, burning stare.

“You are here to answer the charge of trespass and invasion,” he told them. As he spoke, he wondered whether he should have had that wretch the Windeye present, in order that his words could be translated for the prisoners. Truth to tell, since Chiamh had pronounced the words that cast Iscalda forever into equine shape, he had not been able to bear the sight of the half-blind Seer. The knowledge that he was being grossly unfair to the Windeye—after all, Chiamh had only been acting under his own orders—did nothing to improve the Herdlord’s mood. What does it matter, he thought. Within hours, these strangers will be dead—and whether they understand the reasons for their execution or not, it will scarcely matter then!

Straightening his shoulders, Phalihas continued, in the age-old formula: “You need not speak, for you have no defense: you were caught by my warriors in the midst of an illegal act. The penalty for your crime is death . . .”

“How dare you!” The strident voice, cutting abruptly across his own, robbed Phalihas of his carefully prepared phrases. The madwoman! How did she come to know the Xandim tongue? Her eyes grew larger—they were burning into his soul as her voice shrilled on and on ...

When Chiamh arrived, late and panting, on the plateau, he found utter confusion. The Herdlord, looking shaken, his gray face twisted with rage, stood in a knot of Elders who were gesticulating wildly and shouting at the tops of their voices. What in the world had happened? The Windeye strained his weak-sighted gaze, but could see no trace of the prisoners. Had they been executed already? Had they escaped somehow? “Gracious Goddess,” Chiamh muttered.

“Iriana of the Beasts—don’t let me be too late!” He took one look at the stricken Herdlord, and gave up any hope of speaking to Phalihas. Instead he found a wizened old grandsire, who was standing to one side, sucking his gums and watching the commotion with avid interest. “What happened? Chiamh demanded, clutching at his sleeve.

“Hola, young Windeye! Missed the trial? You missed a sight!” the dotard confided with relish. “Herdlord was passing sentence when up speaks that skinny witch, and demands safe passage through our lands, if you can credit it!” The oldster was frowning with the effort of recalling the madwoman’s words, “She has business in the south, she says, that can’t wait on the whims of a bunch of savages!”

“What?” Chiamh yelped, horrified,

“It’s true as I’m standing here!” The gransire nodded sagely, delighted with his role as the imparter of such momentous news. “That big bonny wench is nudging her, trying to shut her up, and the little fellow is shaking his head like he can’t it! Then the witch says if our Herdlord tries to stop her, she’ll curse him, to the end of his days! Well, stirred like a hornets’ nest the Elders was! But the Herdlord put his foot down, and they’ve taken the foreigners up to Steelclaw, to stake them out on the Field of Stones to be breakfast for the slinking Black Ghosts, an’—Hey, come back ...”

Chiamh heard the whining voice trail off into the distance as he ran, as fast as he could, past the standing stones toward his valley. Luckily the guards wouldn’t dare take the straighter route through the Vale of the Dead. As Windeye, he had access to a shortcut . . .

The Field of Stones was not, in fact, a field at all, but an unusually level area of the mountainside that was littered with more of the low, flat-topped hollow boulders that appeared to be dwellings, though they were never used as such by the Xandim, for the altitude was too great, and the climate too harsh. Instead, the Horselords had found a more sinister use for the structures. Manacles and chains had been bolted to the flattened tops, and Outland prisoners (usually marauding Khazalim, captured on raids) were staked out here as sacrifices to appease the fearful Black Ghosts of the mountains.

The Field, with its grim associations of death and bloodshed, was located on a long spur, high up the mountain, where the Wyndveil was joined to its neighbor, Steelclaw, by a saddle of high, broken rock known to the Xandim as the Dragon’s Tail. Like the tortured stone of ruined Steelclaw, this sheer, knife-edge ridge was twisted and fractured partway along its length, preventing human access to the other peak, but that was fine by the Xandim, who never set foot there in any case. Steelclaw was the haunt of the fearsome Black Ghosts who ate human flesh—and the Ghosts could cross the ridge with no trouble at all.

Chiamh’s shortcut took him through his own valley, and so he was able to stop briefly at his cave and put on an extra tunic and a warmer cloak, against the freezing air of the higher altitudes. He bundled up some of his blankets, with a flask of strong spirits packed carefully in the center of the roll, and fastened the resulting bulky package to his back with rope. Then picking up a staff shod with an iron spike, to assist him up the icy reaches of the mountain, the Windeye set off to rescue the strangers.

The secret way up the flanks of the Wyndveil led past the place where the flimsy rope bridge to Chiarnh’s Chamber of Winds was attached to the mountain. First came the icy flywalk ledge that led as far as his bridge, then the cliff seemed to fold over upon itself to form a narrow gully with towering walls that was invisible from the plateau below. It slanted up the mountain’s flank to eventually merge with the main trail that zigzagged up from the plateau round an outthrust spur of the Wyndveil. For Chiamh, with his blurred, chancy vision, it was a dreadful journey. Though he was accustomed to climbing the cliff, its slender ledges were glassy with ice. Even so, he preferred the perilous scramble up slippery, precipitous rocks to the heavy going in the gully, where the way was darkened by the steep walls of stone, and he was forced to plough his way through waist-deep pockets of drifted snow, and scramble around thickets of stunted firs that had rooted themselves in this sheltered place wherever there was a crack in the rock. Weary and panting, his limbs numbed and aching with cold, the Windeye finally arrived at the junction with the main trail—and found, as he had expected, that this would be the worst part of the climb.

The gale slammed into Chiamh like a giant fist as he left the sheltered gully for the faint, icy track that snaked across the exposed mountainside. On his left, the bleak snowfields sloped steeply upward, with nothing, not even a tree, to break the force of the wind. On his right—the Windeye shuddered. Better not to think of it! Stray too far in that direction, and he would be falling down a slope that, though not a cliff exactly, was far too steep to let him stop. There would be an ever-quickening slithering plunge—until he reached the edge of the cliff and hurtled to oblivion on the rocks at the bottom. For the first time since he had experienced his Vision, Chiamh began to have serious doubts about whether the strangers were worth this trouble. Nonetheless . . . Cursing under his breath, the Windeye drove the spike of his staff down hard into the ice, and took his first, tentative step along the perilous trail.