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.
He chose his moment to volunteer, then pressed his dun to the fore. Throughout the next hour he drew gradually ahead, until a lead of fifty paces separated him from the others.
Here, at the storm-choked heart of the pass, the road dropped sheer on the north side, cliffs of trackless granite fallen away into a gulf of impenetrable mist; south, escarpments towered upward to summits buried in storm. The drifts lay chest-deep and packed into layers by the gusts. Curtained in wind-whirled snow, Arithon spoke gently to his mare as she shouldered tiredly ahead. His deadened hands gave rein as she stumbled; he balanced her, coaxed her forward with the promise of shelter and bran as she clawed toward a scoured expanse of rock. Stung by a gust that watered his eyes, Arithon ducked his face behind his hood just as the mare struck out off packed footing. Her legs skated wildly. Pitched against her neck as she scrambled, Arithon kicked free of the stirrups and dismounted. He flung his cloak over her steaming back and freed his dagger. When the mare steadied he lifted a foreleg and chipped out the ice ball that had compacted in the hollow of her hoof. The relentless snows had long since scoured away the preventative smear of grease applied on the banks of the ford.
When a glance backward showed the others halted to tend their own mounts similarly, Arithon straightened. Hopeful the barbarians were still watching, he hooked the dun’s reins and led her off without troubling to dust the accumulated snow from his shoulders. His jerkin had soaked through in any case, with his cloak left draped across the flanks of his mount. The mare was dangerously weary and chilled, and if her reserves became spent, the pass offered no shelter.
Arithon crossed the cleared patch, battered by blasts of driven ice. Beyond, where the gale’s direct force was cut by an overhanging rock spur, the drifts lay piled and deep. The mare sank to her brisket and floundered to an uncertain halt.
While the weather continued to howl outside this one pocket of stillness, a voice called challenge from above.
‘Don’t move.’ The accents were crisp, commanding, and by town standards, purely barbarian. ‘Make one sound and you’ll gain a dead horse.’
The dun snorted hot-headed alarm. Grasping for advantage in mired footing, Arithon dug his knuckles in her ribs. As she shied face-about toward the cliff, he snatched the cloak from her flank, cracked the cloth to fan her alarm, then let the force of her spin fling him sideways. The mare was a fast-moving target when the barbarian made good his threat. An arrow shot from a niche overhead nicked a gash across her shoulder, then buried with a hiss in rucked snow.
The sound and the sting undid the dun. She bolted in panic, her gallop striking sparks from exposed stone as herd instinct impelled her to backtrack. She hit the last expanse of drifts in a white explosion of snow-clods, then disappeared completely as a gust roared like smoke across the trail.
Sheltered under cover of the eddies, Arithon dropped his cloak, drew Alithiel and flattened his back against the underhang. The wind lulled. Tumbling snow winnowed and settled to unveil chaos as the mare charged through the oncoming riders. Her loose reins looped the nose of the chestnut and spun him plunging in a spraddle-legged stagger. Lysaer kept his seat through skilled horsemanship, but could not avoid collision with Asandir’s black. Both mounts floundered sideways. Nose to tail just behind, the paint and the pack pony rocketed back on their hocks. Pans clanged and a poorly-tied tent flapped loose. The pony ripped off a buck that scared the paint, and caught sound asleep in the scramble, Dakar toppled head-first into a snowdrift. He flopped back upright shouting epithets referring to bitch-bred donkeys; while bearing their food-stores and necessities, the pack-pony joined the paint and the dun in headlong stampede down the trail.
Arithon seized the moment while the others were delayed and took swift stock of his surroundings. In a cranny above his sheltered hollow he caught his first glimpse of his attacker: a gloved hand, a sleeve trimmed in wolf-fur and the dangerously levelled tip of a deerarrow, the broad, four-bladed sort designed to rip and kill by internal bleeding. Arithon repressed a shiver through a moment of furious reassessment. Chance had favoured him: his horse had escaped without worse damage than a scratch. But if his spurious ploy was not to bring disaster, he would have to do something about Lysaer. Like the spirited dun, the prince had too much character to meet any
