Janny Wurts - To Ride Hell’s Chasm

‘Fair enough.’ The storyteller dusted crumbs from his lap. ‘Vangyar often drinks at the Bull Trough, by Falls Gate. One of the girls there’s his favourite. If you can corner him, he’ll know your horse. But I’ll lay your king’s silver against one of my tales, you don’t catch him to pitch the first question.’

‘Oh, you’re on.’ The garrison captain grinned under his hood. ‘But I’ll need a forthright description to have a fair shot at the take.’

‘From a blind man? That’s a joke.’ But the storyteller delivered from the stock of detail he was wont to pick up from overhearing stray talk.

Mykkael listened, his sharpened gaze caught by the sudden moil of activity that swirled through the gaggle of potters, the stacks of grass basketry and the hunched cluster of women who laced oat straw into cheap pallets.

When a shout punctuated that burst of disturbed movement, the captain uncoiled to his feet. ‘My friend, we have a sealed wager between us. For now, I regret, I must leave you.’

The beggar returned a companionable nod, content to resume spinning tales from his dusty blanket.

Mykkael strode downhill. With brisk hands, he peeled off the penitent’s robe and flagged down the man from the garrison, just reined in from a gallop, and towing a second mount on a lead rein.

‘Captain! Thank the powers that be, the gate watch said you might be here.’ Sergeant Cade spun his snorting, bald-faced gelding, and tossed Mykkael the bridle of the riderless grey.

‘What’s amiss?’ Mykkael settled the reins and vaulted astride without touching the stirrup. Wheeled back towards the town, he heard out his sergeant’s breathless report.

‘Physician from Fane Street’s showed up at the keep. They’ve got him in your private quarters, you asked that?’

‘I sent him.’ Mykkael pressed the horse from a walk to a canter, then dug in his heels for more speed. ‘Only one man? The apothecary’s not with him?’

Sergeant Cade spurred his lathered mount to keep pace. ‘The apothecary’s dead, and your physician’s not coherent. No one’s been able to get him calmed down to explain how the tragedy happened.’

Mykkael swore. His face drained to a queer, greyish pallor, a precedent no man from the garrison had seen through any prior disaster. ‘No help for the setback, I’m going to be late for my promised appointment with Taskin.’ He hammered his dappled horse to a gallop, still shouting his fast-paced instructions. ‘Go through the Falls Gate, pick up a task squad of eight men. I want the apothecary’s house sealed off. No one goes in, do you hear me? No matter what seems to have happened inside, I want nothing disturbed by the ignorant.’

‘Too late for that,’ the sergeant yelled back, his words breathlessly pitched over the rolling thunder of hooves. ‘There’s been a small fire. Burned like merry hell. No brigade dumping water could douse it. Went out by itself, finally, and left an unnatural, smoking crater that destroyed the back wall of the house.’

‘Get the bucket brigade out.’ Mykkael leaned over his mount’s wind-whipped mane, still urgently snapping directions. ‘Take a list of their names. Round up each one. Force them to step through the smoke of a cedar bonfire, then bathe head to foot in salt water.’

Sergeant Cade stared. ‘Have you gone mad?’ The cost of pure salt, this far inland, was extortionate.

‘No, soldier. Forget about questions. Just follow my plainspoken order!’ Mykkael balanced his horse, then changed its lead to sweep right at the moat and take the main road through the Lowergate. ‘I’m off to the keep to settle the physician and secure his immediate safety. If you can, dispatch a rider to Highgate. Tell Taskin I’ll be delayed.’

‘Done, Captain.’ Cade veered his mount and set off.

Mykkael urged the grey underneath him still faster, railing at fate in snatched curses. Beyjall’s sudden death carried damnable timing. The chance was slim to non-existent that a message passed through the watch at the Falls Gate could be relayed uptown in time to defer Taskin’s rendezvous. Mykkael resigned himself. The reprimand he would earn for the lapse seemed hellbound to become an ordeal of savage unpleasantness.

HOT, SOAKED IN SWEAT, MYKKAEL FORCED HIS GAME KNEE AT A RUN UP THE KEEP STAIR, THEN BURST THROUGH THE DOOR TO HIS QUARTERS. He swept the chamber with one raking glance and fixed on the forlorn figure perched on the edge of his pallet.

Sadly rumpled, the physician slumped in his shirtsleeves. He looked like a fluffed robin blown in by a storm, elbows set on his knees, and hands pressed to his brow.

The scuff of the captain’s lame step aroused him. He bounded upright with a cry, palms raised in startlement. Behind the skewed glass of his spectacles, his china-blue eyes were dilated to black from the adrenaline jolt of his terror.

Mykkael stepped back. Checked to thoughtful calm, he tipped his head past the lintel and directed a shout down the stairwell. ‘Vensic! Send one of the armourer’s boys up here at once with a torch!’

Relief suffused the physician’s blanched face. ‘Light of deliverance!’ he gasped, all but sobbing. ‘On my soul, now I know you’re not one of them.’ His wobbling knees gave way all at once. Dropped back to his seat on the captain’s coarse blankets, he rushed on in breathless hysteria. ‘At least, the word goes that most sorcerers’ minions will avoid the sight of a natural fire.’

‘Some will flinch from an unshielded flame,’ Mykkael agreed. He watched with the fixated stare of a lynx, his wary hands poised at his sides. ‘Except for the oldest, and most powerful. But even ones bound to the dark arts for centuries can’t abide the smoke from green cedar.’ Cued by the tap of the boy’s running footstep crossing the landing downstairs, the captain spun and moved back past the threshold. He returned in an eye blink, a lit torch in hand, which he touched to the frond of cut evergreen, stashed out of sight on his hurried way in.

Smoke billowed as twigs and needles ignited. ‘Forgive me,’ Mykkael snapped, as the resinous fumes caught the draught. The scented blue smoke billowed up in a cloud and wafted over the rattled physician. ‘I had to make certain you carried no taint.’

‘No bother at all,’ croaked the neat little man, lightly coughing. ‘Precautions are nothing but rock-hard good sense. Dear me. Until now, I thought Sessalie lay too far north to be threatened by demonic plotting and craftwork. That’s why I chose to retire here. Very peaceful.’ But horror had shattered his idyllic complacency. He trembled to realize that his days of tranquil practice might be for ever undone.

While the cedar smoke thinned in the breeze through the arrow slit, the physician removed his fogged spectacles. He buffed the glass with a limp handkerchief pulled from his waistcoat pocket. Shaky fingers restored the wire frames. Behind thick lenses, his bright, blinking gaze tracked the desert-bred captain, each move. Mykkael doused the torch. Then he crouched by his pallet to drag out a strongbox tucked underneath. The lock had no key, but worked through a puzzle array of brass levers fashioned by artisans from the far east.

‘You seem to possess an impressive experience,’ the physician observed at due length. ‘That’s most reassuring. I suppose, in your past, you were probably hired to fight in a sorcerers’ war?’

Mykkael nodded, terse, head bent and hands busy sorting the contents of his opened coffer. ‘Against the Sushagos, yes, and after them, Quidjen and Rathtet.’

‘You fought against Rathtet?’ The physician dropped his crushed linen, startled. ‘I didn’t know any defenders had survived that unspeakable bloodbath.’