Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Mortal riders could not pass beneath their shadow without experiencing a chill of profound awe. Here the footfalls of the horses seemed to resound with the echoes of another age, when the earth was fresh with splendour and Paravians nurtured the mysteries. Standing Gate marked the upward ascent to the high valley pass of Orlan, sole access through the Thaldein mountains to Atainia and lands to the east.

But even under the frosts of coming winter, in the years since the fall of the high kings, travellers who fared through Standing Gate never passed unobserved.

Asandir’s party proved no exception, as Arithon discovered in a pause to water his mare on the bank of a fast-flowing creek. Muffled against the stiff breeze, he sat his saddle with both stirrups dropped and his reins slipped loosely through his fingers. Suddenly the dun flung her head up. Her rider did not see what had startled her; the woollen hood of his cloak masked his peripheral vision as she snapped sideways and wheeled. Stalled from bolting by an expert play on the reins, the mare crab-stepped, stopped and blew noisily. Her sable-edged ears pricked toward a stand of scrub pine that rattled and tossed in the gusts.

Nothing moved that did not appear to belong there.

Yet when Arithon urged the mare on she stamped and rigidly resisted. Warned by her keener senses, he recovered his stirrups and stroked her neck in pretence of coaxing her away; at the same time he centred his mind and cast an enchanter’s awareness over the thicket.

A man crouched there, motionless, clad in jerkin and leggings of sewn wolfskin. Weather had roughened his face beyond his years and his ruddy hair had tangled from the wind. The consciousness Arithon touched held a predator’s leashed aggression paired with tempered steel: a matched set of long knives and a javelin with a braided leather grip.

Although to face away from the thicket as if no armed man watched his back was a most unwelcome exercise, Arithon pressed his mare forward in earnest. The instant the rocky footing allowed a faster pace, he trotted his horse and caught up with the others.

Dakar regarded him slantwise as the dun overtook his paint. ‘How was the assignation? Or did you dawdle to swim?’

‘Neither.’ Arithon returned a grin of purest malice. ‘Remind me to recommend you as chaperone for some jealous pervert’s catamite.’

He ignored the Mad Prophet’s thunderous scowl and disturbed Asandir’s preoccupied silence. ‘We’re being watched.’

The sorcerer’s gaze stayed trained ahead, as if he saw beyond the misty road which wound upward between steepening rocky outcrops. ‘That’s not surprising.’

Wise to the subtleties of mages, Arithon withheld unwelcome questions; presently the sorcerer’s steely eyes turned from whatever inward landscape he had been contemplating. ‘This is the townsmen’s most dreaded stretch of highway. The clans that ruled Camris before the rebellion make their stand here. If we were a caravan bearing metals or clothgoods we would require an armed escort. Not being townborn, our party has little to fear.’

‘The Camris clans were subject to the high king of Tysan?’ Arithon asked.

Asandir returned an absent glance. ‘The old earls of Erdane swore fealty. Their descendants will not have forgotten.’

Unfooled by the sorcerer’s apparent inattention, Arithon reined in his mare. As she curvetted and recovered stride by the shoulder of Lysaer’s chestnut, the green eyes of her rider showed a glint of veiled speculation. Covered by the clang of hooves on cleared rock, he said, ‘We’re going to see action in the pass.’

Lysaer rubbed a nose nipped scarlet by the chill, his expression turned gravely merry. ‘Then someone better tell Dakar to tighten his saddle girth, or the first quick move his paint makes will tumble him over on the rocks.’

‘I heard that,’ interjected the Mad Prophet. He flapped his elbows, his reins and his heels, and contrived to overtake the half-brothers without mishap. To Lysaer he said, ‘Let’s be sporting and wager. I say my saddle stays put with no help from buckles, and you’ll kiss the dirt before I do.’ Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. ‘And one thing further – there won’t be any trouble in the pass.’

‘Don’t answer,’ said Arithon to his half-brother. ‘Not unless you fancy pulling cockle burrs from your saddle fleeces.’

‘That’s unfair,’ Dakar retorted, injured. ‘I only cheat when the odds are hard against me.’

‘My point precisely.’ Arithon ducked the swing the Mad Prophet pitched in his direction, then sidled his mount safely clear as the paint’s saddle slid around her barrel and disgorged her fat rider in an ignominious heap on the trail.

By the time the commotion settled and Dakar had righted the paint’s maladjusted tack, flurries eddied around the rocks. The snowfall thickened rapidly. Within minutes all but the nearest landmarks became buried in whirlwinds of white. The storm that had threatened through the past day and a half closed over the mountains, whipped in by a dismal north wind.

The riders continued over ever-steepening terrain. Bothered by Arithon’s mention of trouble, Lysaer urged his horse past a stand of boulders to find opening to speak with Asandir.

‘When we reach the next town, might I sell my jewels to buy a sword?’

The sorcerer returned a look like blank glass, his cragged brow sprinkled with settled snow. ‘We’ll cross no more towns before arrival at Althain Tower.’

More forthright than his half-brother, Lysaer persevered. ‘Perhaps we could find a tavern keeper with a spare blade available for purchase then.’

Asandir’s vagueness crystallized to piercing irritation. ‘When you have need of a weapon, you shall be given one.’

The sorcerer urged his mount on with speed. Concerned lest the road became mired too deeply for travel, he allowed no stop until dusk, and then only for the barest necessities. The riders fed their horses and swallowed a hasty meal. Sent out to assess conditions, Lysaer returned to report that even should the blizzard slacken, the gusts had increased; drifting might render the mountains impassable by daybreak.

‘We’ll be through the pass before then,’ Asandir stated flatly. Despite outspoken resentment from Dakar, the sorcerer quenched the fire and ordered the horses resaddled.

The riders pressed eastward through a long and miserable night. All but blind in the blizzard, they made tortuous headway through the dark. The road narrowed to a trail hedged by knife-edged promontories and sheer drops, each dip and ditch and gully smoothed innocently over by drifts. Horses floundered through heavy footing or clattered perilously across ice-sheened rock. The winds buffeted all the while with heavy, relentless ferocity. Manes and cloaks became mantled in ice. The driving sting of snow crystals needled any exposed patch of flesh and hands and feet ached from the penetrating cold.

The horses forded the icy current of the Valendale and emerged, dusted with hoarfrost from spume thrown off by the waterfalls. In times before the Mistwraith, the cascades could be seen falling like ribbons of liquid starlight as the feed springs of hundreds of freshets tumbled over clefts into the gorge.

Daybreak saw the riders deep into the pass of Orlan. By then the snowfall had eased, but Desh-thiere’s mists sheathed the saw-toothed ridges and the wind still cut like a sword. The riders traversed the high notches submerged in whipping snow-devils as gusts stripped the black rock of the Thaldeins and harried across a desertscape of drifts.

At times visibility closed until only the mage-trained could maintain sure sense of direction. Asandir and Arithon broke trail by turns, relieved on occasion by Dakar; yet despite the cold and the rough, floundering gait of his horse through the snow, the Mad Prophet unreliably tended to fall asleep in his saddle. Since a rider who blundered over a precipice was unlikely to be found before the thaws, and Asandir stayed wrapped in his silences, the chance to take fate by the horns became too tempting for Arithon to resist.