Janny Wurts - To Ride Hell’s Chasm

The upstairs voice shouted down and upbraided him. ‘You’ll pay for that burst shutter in coin, if the silver comes out of your pay share.’

Then the house matron shuffled down the beam stairway, mantled in mismatched wool blankets. The feet under her night robe were callused and bare, with the lumps of the curling rags hastily stuffed under a drawstring cap. Worse than mortified, she appeared outraged enough to snatch up a game knife and geld the importunate male who had rousted her.

Well warned as the spill of her pricket candle unveiled her purpled complexion, Mykkael spoke quickly. ‘Crown business, madam. Your husband is needed.’

‘Well, your murderer’s bound to evade the law, this time. Benj is no use.’ The woman plonked her broad rump on the settle, while the dutiful girl shoved the door closed. To Mykkael’s raised eyebrows, the matron admitted, ‘He’s drunk. Flopped in a heap in the smokehouse, with my oldest son snoring off whisky beside him. They sipped their fill off the crown’s largesse. Neither one’s likely to budge before noontide, when they’re finally driven to piss. They’ll loll about with sore heads, after that. Take brawn and a handcart to shift them an inch, and not worth the thumping bother.’

‘Where’s the handcart?’ Mykkael inquired, dead earnest.

The huntsman’s raw-boned, vociferous wife stared back at him, gaping.

‘Madam, tonight my quarry’s no murdering felon. Her Grace Princess Anja is missing. I want the riverbanks quartered, but quietly. Taskin has three squads of outriders searching, crown guards, sent from the palace. They have city-bred eyes, and might see what’s obvious, but for nuance, I need a trapper. Nobody other than Benj has the huntsman’s knowledge to track her.’ The pricket flame flared. Light brushed the cut angles of Mykkael’s set face, then subsided, cloaking him back under shadow. ‘I’ll heave your man into the moat if I must, to shake him out of his stupor.’

‘Benj’ll waken, if it’s for the princess.’ The goodwife adjusted her blankets and stood, too canny to test Mykkael’s barbaric temperament, or stall him with badgering questions. ‘Or else, as I’m born, I’ll help douse the layabout under myself.’

She shooed her girl off at a run to haul the handcart out of the shed. ‘We’ll just strap my man into a dog harness, first. Benj, bless his heart, doesn’t swim.’

The adrenaline prickle of raised hair at the nape was not a sensation Commander Taskin experienced often, although hazard had visited many a time through his diligent years of crown service. A poisoning attempt, or an assassin set on the run through the dark might unleash such a primal reaction. Taskin preferred the controlled clarity of sharp wits, applied with objective reason.

Yet the death that had followed Princess Anja’s disappearance roughened his skin with untoward nerves as he pushed open the door to the drudge’s cellar apartment.

The air inside smelled of hot grease and death, musty with closed-in dust. Straight as iron, Taskin peered into gloom scarcely cut by the flare of a tallow dip.

‘Commander? She’s here.’ A striker snapped, setting flame to a second wick in an alcove off to one side.

Taskin crossed over the threshold. He almost tripped as his boot heel mired in a throw rug braided from rags. That ill grace nettled him worse than the exhaustion brought on by a night of extended duty. He pushed past a curtain of strung wooden beads, and at last encountered his duty sergeant.

The man knelt by a box bed tucked into the wall. Taskin stooped under the lintel and squeezed his tall frame into the stifling, close quarters.

The old woman lay straight as a board on stained sheets. Her eyes were wide open, as though the horror that had pinched out her life still lurked in the airless dark.

‘Not a mark on her,’ the sergeant said, his voice pitched taut with unease. ‘Her extremities are cold and she’s started to stiffen.’ He pressed a palm over his nose and mouth to stifle the taint as he added, ‘You know the men claim she was taken by sorcery? They’ve noted the desert-bred captain was the last to be seen in her living company’

Taskin regarded those frozen eyes, gleaming like glass in the flame light. Again, gooseflesh puckered the skin on his arms. ‘They think My sh kael did this?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘Well, our northern stock doesn’t breed the rogue talent for witchery.’

‘We have other foreigners inside our walls,’ Taskin pointed out with acerbity.

‘True enough.’ The sergeant rubbed his bracers as though to shake off a chill. ‘But we have only one of them born to bronze skin.’

Taskin rebuffed that statement with silence. He bent, sniffed at the dead woman’s mouth, then resumed his unflinching inspection. Methodical, he pursued the unsavoury task, undeterred by the stink, or the whisper of draught that set the bead curtain clacking, and winnowed the glow of the unshielded candle.

The sergeant stared elsewhere, transparently anxious. ‘What do you want done with the corpse? She has no close family; we already checked.’

Finished examining the dead woman’s arms for a pox rash or signs of a puncture, Taskin gave his considered answer. ‘Roust the palace steward. Tell him I want the use of a wash tub to pack the body in snow. Then fetch the king’s physician. I’d have his opinion concerning this death, though the cause would seem to be poison.’

‘Who would wish her harm?’ The sergeant raised the candle, cast its wavering light over the poor woman’s ramshackle furnishings. Her work-worn mantle draped, forlorn, on its peg, alongside two raggedy skirts. ‘What did this drudge have that would merit an assassin who carried exotic potions?’

‘If she knew anything about the princess’s clothes, somebody wanted her silenced.’ Taskin straightened, and wiped his long fingers on the corner of the fusty sheet. The glance he delivered along with his summary was stern as forge-hammered steel. ‘If you overhear anyone else passing gossip, I want the talk stopped. No man mentions sorcery unless we have proof. The same rule applies to the matter of Captain My sh kael’s integrity.’

Mykkael returned to the garrison wardroom in the black hour prior to dawn, but not with his usual style of cat-footed anonymity. His errand had left him soaked to the waist. No matter how silent, his presence brought in the miasma of green algae and raw effluent from the stockyards.

Sergeant Cade met him, broad-shouldered and dependable, his gruff face drawn with concern. ‘Bright powers, where were you?’ His wry survey took in Mykkael’s pungent state, and prompted a struck note of horror. ‘Don’t tell me you just dragged the Lowergate moat for somebody’s unlucky corpse?’

‘I was actually dousing a limp body under,’ Mykkael admitted without humour. He pressed ahead by brute will, his exhausted leg dragging, and his voice raised over the screeling wail as the garrison’s armourer refurbished a blade on the sharpening wheel. ‘Is Jedrey down from the Middlegate, and where’s Stennis? You did get my word, that I wanted the reserve roster called up for active duty?’

‘Day watch is already dispatched, with reserves. Jedrey’s back.’ Cade gestured towards a pile of loose slates, jostled aside on a trestle. ‘Assignments are listed for your review. You want them brought upstairs? Very well. I sent Stennis to head the patrol at the Falls Gate. The mad seeress you wanted to question wasn’t asleep in her bed. Since her family couldn’t say where she went, I presumed you’d want a search mounted, soonest.’

Mykkael gave the officer’s choice his approval, then added, ‘Not like the old besom, to wander at night.’

‘Well, you have an immediate problem, right here,’ Cade said, a nettled hand raised to shelter his nose from the stench brought in with his captain.