To Ride Hell’s Chasm

Taskin said, frigid, ‘The closets were searched at her brother the crown prince’s insistence. Do you think of his Highness as a boy, and a simpleton?’

Bertarra sniffed. ‘Since when has a title been proof of intelligence? Prince Kailen will be drunken and whoring by morning. Simplistic, male adolescent behaviour, should that earn my applause?’ Her ample chin hoisted a haughty notch higher. ‘His Highness is a layabout who thinks with the brainless, stiff prod in his breeches. All men act the same. Here, our princess has been kidnapped by enemies, and not a sword-bearing soldier among you has the guts in his belly to muster!’

‘Who’s prodding, now?’ Taskin grasped that perfumed, accusatory finger, turned it with charm, and kissed the palm with flawless diplomacy. ‘Lady Bertarra, if you think you can stand between any grown man and his pleasures, you are quite free to curb the excesses of your kin with no help from my men-at-arms.’ He bowed over her hand, his dry smile lined with teeth. ‘As to enemies of the realm, give me names. I am his Majesty’s sword. In her Grace’s defence, I will kill them.’

Yet like the horned cow, the woman seized the last word. She slipped from Taskin’s grasp and fixed again on Mykkael, silent and stilled to one side. ‘That’s why you brought this one? To sweep our sewers for two-legged rats? What did you promise for his compensation? A well-set marriage to raise his mean standing?’

Mykkael’s slow, deep laughter began in his belly, then erupted. ‘Now, that certainly would not be thinking with my man’s parts.’ His dismissive glance encompassed the jewellery, then the cascade of ruffled yellow skirt. ‘A sick shame, don’t you think, to dull a night’s lust stripping off all that useless decoration? And, from some pale Highgate woman, who’s likely to be nothing but fumbling inexperience underneath? That should require an endowment of land as incentive to shoulder the bother.’

Bertarra’s mouth opened; snapped shut. She quickly rebounded from stonewalled shock. ‘Crude creature. Prove your mettle. Find our Anja and bring her home safely’

A gusty flounce of marigold silk, and the matron moved on to upbraid someone else on the dais. Taskin resumed his interrupted course, his stride as sharp as any spoken order that the garrison captain was expected to follow. A pause at the door saw the guard rearranged. Two men-at-arms were asked to stand inside, in direct view of the royal person. The petty officer was dispatched elsewhere, bearing the commander’s instructions.

That man angled his greater size and weight to jostle past Mykkael, standing withdrawn to one side. Taskin just caught the garrison captain’s blurred move in reaction, an attack form begun, then arrested, too fast for the trained eye to follow. The ex-mercenary had already resettled his stance, when the commander’s viper-quick reach caught the tall guardsman’s wrist, and wrenched him back to a standstill.

‘You give that one distance,’ he cracked in rebuke. ‘I won’t forgive you a broken bone because you’re careless on duty.’

The huge guardsman reddened.

Taskin cut off the flood of excuses. ‘Not armed,’ he agreed. ‘Still lethal. Blowhard assumptions like that get you killed. Now carry on.’

Then, as though such a shaming display was routine, he finished his rapid instructions. ‘I want to know who comes and who goes in my absence. If Bertarra leaves, or the seneschal returns, detail someone to fetch me.’

Moved off again, Mykkael’s limp dragging after, the commander turned down a side corridor and whipped open the door to the closet chamber furnished for the king’s private audiences. ‘Sit,’ he said, brisk, then rummaged through an ivory-inlaid escritoire for a striker to brighten the sconces. ‘My man was a fool. Please accept my apology.’

Confronted by a marble-top table, and gold-leafed, lion-foot chairs, Mykkael eyed the plush velvet seat he was offered. The scents he brought with him, of oiled steel, uncouth liniment, and greased leather, made strident war with the genteel perfumes of beeswax, citrus polish and patchouli. Since he saw no other option, he did as he was told; arranged his game leg, and perched.

Taskin chose a chair opposite, his squared shoulders and resplendent court appointments nothing short of imperial. His subordinate was dealt the same unflinching survey just given to his royal guards. ‘I’d heard you had studied barqui’ino, but not the name of the master who trained you.’

Mykkael seemed less relaxed than tightly coiled, under the strap of his empty shoulder scabbard. ‘There were only two living when I earned my accolade,’ he admitted, his shadowed gaze regarding his rough hands, rested loose on the table before him. ‘Both were my teachers, an awkwardness no one admits.’

‘They both disowned you?’ said Taskin, surprised.

Mykkael’s sardonic smile split his face, there and gone like midsummer lightning. ‘A northern man might say as much.’

‘A vast oversimplification,’ Taskin surmised. ‘A stickler might ask you to explain. I will not.’ With startling brevity, he cut to the chase. ‘Our princess is in trouble. What do you need?’

As close as he came to being shocked off balance, Mykkael spread his fingers, lined by the shine of old scars. He delivered the gist. ‘A boy runner, for a start, to ask my watch at the Middlegate to keep a list of who comes and goes. Next, I don’t know what her Grace looks like, up close. A view of her face, if she sat for a portrait, could be sent on loan to the barracks.’ He sucked a slow breath, then broached the unpopular subject dead last. ‘An endowment for bribes, and extra pay shares for men whose extended duties keep them from spending due time with their families.’

‘I expected you’d ask that.’ Taskin was brusquely dismissive. ‘The requisition to draw funds from the treasury is already set in motion. As to your runner, he’s not needed. My sentries at the Highgate record all traffic to and from the palace precinct. They’ll supply names until you can rearrange the Middlegate security to your satisfaction. As more thoughts arise, you’ll send me the list.’ Then, with a subject shift that rocked for its tactical perception, ‘Now, how do you think your resource can help me?’

Thinking fast, Mykkael closed his fingers. ‘If the Prince of Devall has foreigners in his retinue, I’d like permission to question them.’

Taskin sustained his stripping regard. Nothing moved, nothing showed. His aristocratic features stayed boot-leather still. ‘You want to try cowing them by intimidation? Or do you presume we’d miss some nuance of testimony out of our northern-born snobbery?’

Mykkael was careful to keep his tone neutral. ‘Actually no. But I might address them in their own language.’

Taskin laughed, a rich chuckle of appreciation. ‘My background check missed that.’ He raised a callused thumb and stroked his cheek. ‘I wonder why?’

‘As a mercenary, sometimes, the pay’s better if you let your employer believe you’re brainless.’ Mykkael watched the commander absorb this, pale eyes introspective with assessment.

‘No doubt, such a pretence also helped your survival.’ Unlike the speed of that formidable mind, the question that followed was measured. ‘How many tongues do you speak, Captain?’

‘Fluently? Five,’ Mykkael lied; in fact, he had passed for native, with eight. The slight caveat distinguished that in the three Serphaidian tongues written in ideographs, he was not literate.

‘I will see, about servants.’ The commander never shifted, but a change swept his posture, like a pit viper poised for a strike. ‘If you don’t trust Devall, please say so, and why’

Mykkael softened the cranked tension in his hands, reluctant and sweating under the cloak he had not snatched the chance to remove. ‘I have no feeling, one way or the other, for her Grace’s suitor, or anyone else. Just that cold start of instinct suggesting your king should not be left unguarded by hands that you know and trust.’ A straight pause, then he added, ‘It’s battle-bred instinct. The sort of gut hunch that’s kept me alive more times than a man wants to count.’

Yet if Taskin held any opinion on what his northern tradition considered a witch thought, no bias showed as he pressed the next point. ‘My runners will keep you apprised of all pertinent facts from the palace. Whatever you find, I want to know yesterday. My duty officer will arrange for a courier’s relay. The dispatches will be verbal. No written loose ends that might fall into wrong hands. If you stumble upon something too sensitive to repeat, you’ll report back to me in person. Wherever I am, whatever the hour, the guard at the Highgate will arrange for an audience.’

Mykkael stirred in a vain effort to ease his scarred leg. His scuffed boots were too soiled to rest on a footstool, though the chamber was furnished with several, carved in flourishes, and sewn with tapestry cushions. Barqui’ino-trained to fight an armed enemy bare-handed, he still felt on edge, stripped of his blades and his sword. His absence from his post unsettled him as well. By now, the Lowergate populace must be seething. The princess’s disappearance was too momentous to stifle, and the lives of Sessalie’s servants too prosaic, to keep such an upset discreet.

Taskin’s focus stayed relentless as he reached his conclusion, a summary drawn like barbed hooks from a spirit that placed little value on sentiment. ‘I don’t believe Princess Anja’s playing pranks. I’ve known her like an uncle since the hour of her birth. Tonight, I fear she’s in grave danger.’

‘Her Grace is Sessalie’s heart, I see that much plainly’ Where trust was concerned, Mykkael preferred truth. ‘I may not know and love her as you do, but as I judge men, no garrison will keep fighting trim with the vital spirit torn out of it. That does concern me. I’ll stay diligent.’

Commander Taskin slid back his chair and arose. A snap of hard fingers brought a page to the door, bearing Mykkael’s worn weapons. ‘If this kingdom relies on you, Captain, on my watch, you will not fall short. A horse is saddled for you in the courtyard, with an escort to see you through Highgate.’ As the nicked harness and bundle of sheathed throwing knives were returned, Taskin delivered his stinging, last word. ‘And clean the damned rust off that steel, soldier. Set against your war record, and your reputation, that negligence is a disgrace!’

The gelding in the courtyard was a raw-boned chestnut, fit and trained for war, but groomed with the high gloss of a tourney horse. Mykkael assessed its rolling eye with trepidation. Its flattened ears and strutting prowess might look impressive on parade. Yet in a drunken, celebratory crowd, its mettlesome temper was going to pose a nasty liability.

‘Commander said not to give you a lady’s mount,’ said the leather-faced stableman, the reins offered up with a sneer. ‘One that could stay in your charge at the keep, and not let you down under need. Your horsemanship’s up to him? Lose your seat, this brute’s apt to stomp you to jelly’

Mykkael took charge of the bridle, annoyed. The challenge pressed on him by Taskin’s guard escort rankled him to the edge of revolt. The smug urge, ubiquitous to men trained at weaponry, to test his mettle, was a trait he missed least from his years as a mercenary. Worse yet, when that puerile proving involved a tradition the more fiercely reviled: the handling of dumb beasts whose innate, trusting nature had been twisted to serve as a weapon.

The horse just straightforwardly hated. Conditioned for battle to use hooves and teeth, it swung muscled hindquarters under the torchlight. The chestnut neck rippled. A blunt, hammer head snaked around, lips peeled and teeth parted to bite.

Mykkael raised a bent elbow, let the creature’s own impetus gouge the soft flesh just behind the flared nostril. ‘Think well, you ugly dragon,’ he murmured, his expert handling primed with a taut rein as the horse tried to jib and lash back. The striking forehoof missed smashing his hip, positioned as he was by the gelding’s shoulder. For the benefit of the avid watchers, he snarled, ‘In hard times, on campaign, I’ve been known to slaughter your four-legged brothers for the stewpot.’

One vault, off his good leg, set him astride before the brute beast could react. A jab of his heel, a braced rein, and he had the first buck contained, then redirected into a surging stride forward.

Behind him, the belated guards set hasty feet in their stirrups and swung into their saddles to catch up. Their dismayed northern faces raised Mykkael’s soft laughter. ‘Who’s lost their beer coin to the rumour I can’t ride?’

Both men looked sheepish.

The garrison captain was quick to commiserate. ‘I’d buy you a brew to remedy your loss, if I had any loose coin myself.’

Yet the prospect of such camaraderie with a foreigner made the guardsmen more uncomfortable still.

Mykkael’s grin widened, a flash of white teeth under the cloak hood just raised to mask the embarrassment of his origins. ‘Think well on that,’ he murmured in the same tone used a moment before on the gelding. He led off, reined the sullen horse through the archway. The clatter of shod hooves rang down the deserted avenue, bouncing echoes off the mortised façade of the wing that housed visiting ambassadors. The four-quartered banner of Devall hung limp by the entry, its gold-fringed trim tarnished with dew. Nor did the pair of ceremonial sentries stir a muscle to mark the passage of Mykkael’s cloaked figure, attended by Taskin’s outriders.

The ill-matched cavalcade passed out of the bailey, into the grey scrim of the fog that rolled off the peaks before dawn light. Stars poked through, a scatter of fuzzed haloes, punch-cut by the spires of the palace. At street level, the torches streamed, their smeared light gleaming over the dull iron sheen of wet cobbles.

That moment, a raggedy figure darted out of the shadows.

Mykkael’s horse skittered, snorting. He slammed his fist into its neck, used the rein, and hauled its proud crest to the side to curb its lunging rear. His gasped oath slipped restraint, while the figure, an old woman, came on and made a suicidal grab for his stirrup.

Her hands groped and locked on his ankle, instead. ‘Young captain,’ she cried in a guttural, thick accent. ‘A boon, I beg you! Please, out of pity, would you lift off a short curse!’

Mykkael kicked her away. As she fell, shrilling outrage, he slammed his heel into the raging horse. Before its raised forehooves came down, he drove it into a clattering sidle. Once clear, he sprang from the saddle, flung his reins to the guards, then forced his racked knee to bear urgent weight.

In two steps, he reached the woman and caught her skinned hands. ‘I’m sorry, old mother.’ Her tattered clothes smelled of dust and floor wax, and her hands wore the callus of a labourer. A cleaning drudge, bent and stiff with arthritis; his heart felt nothing but pity. ‘My roughness aside, that horse would have killed you, leaving your family bereft. I regret also, for your disappointment. But I cannot lift any curses, short or long form.’ Through her hiss of displeasure, he reached under the outraged tension of thin shoulders and braced her attempt to sit upright. ‘Put simply, I lack the background.’

She rolled off a rude phrase in dialect; would have pulled away in her rage, had he let her. Instead, firmly gentle, he raised her to her feet, and steadied her through the shaken aftermath as she dusted her skirts back to rights.

The next question was his, spoken in the Scoraign tongue inferred by her lilting accent.

She raised filmed eyes, and stared at him, furious. The next insult she uttered was clipped.

While the guards watched, dumbfounded, Mykkael shut his eyes. He let her go. Masterfully calm, he repeated himself.

The drudge spat at his feet. She said five spaced words, then stalked away, the rustle of her threadbare garments lost in the muffling mist.

‘Why did you lie to her?’ The ruddy guard was forced to speak sharply to be heard through the gelding’s rank stamping.

Mykkael snapped up his chin, aroused from blind thought, his brow knitted in puzzlement. ‘Lie to her?’ Then his incomprehension broke. He swore under his breath. ‘I can’t raise curses! Powers of fury! I wouldn’t know a desert shaman’s singing if the spell weave it held slapped me breathless!’

When the guardsman stayed sceptical, and his husky colleague muttered a timeworn slur, Mykkael’s temper frayed. He limped forward, snapped up the chestnut’s rein, and glared in unvarnished disgust. ‘I was raised by an uplands merchant who spoke the same milk tongue you did.’

Silence reflected the men’s towering disbelief; Mykkael drew his irritation sharply in backhand, made aware by the ragged intensity of his feelings that he was bone-tired. Two nights on duty without decent sleep would fray any man’s judgement, never mind wreck the grace for diplomacy. He ignored the screaming twinge of his leg, fended off another snap from the horse, and, without mounting, marched it straight back towards the archway.

‘Captain! Where do you think you are going?’ Flustered again, no small bit annoyed, the pair of palace guardsmen spurred after him. ‘The Highgate is down slope!

‘So it is. But I’m going back to the bailey’ While the ornery chestnut slopped foam on his wrists, and lashed its tail in thwarted temper, Mykkael turned his head. This time his smile held no easy humour; only purpose keen as a knife’s edge. ‘Or don’t you believe Commander Taskin should be told that the storeroom closet where that drudge keeps her brooms has been scribed with a sorcerer’s mark?’

III. Craftmark

THE RICH TRAPPINGS OF FINE MARBLE AND CITRUS-OILED PARQUET DID NOT EXTEND TO THE WARREN OF STORE CELLARS UNDERNEATH THE king’s palace. Here, the close-set corridors had been chiselled into the mountain granite underlying the bedrock foundations. Cobwebs streamed from the soot-blackened ceiling, rippling sheet gold in the torch light. The floors lit by that flickering glow were rough stone, levelled with footprinted clay.

Mykkael lifted the flame of his borrowed spill and arose from his hurried survey. ‘No tracks here but servants’ clogs, and ones made by a heavyset fellow wearing hard-soled boots.’

‘That would be the wine steward,’ said the bearded soldier, standing with folded arms beside him. ‘He’s grown too fat for clogs. Can’t see over his huge belly any more. Bercie—that’s his wife—she bought him the boots. She feared he was likely to trip one day, and bash his old pan in a tumble.’

‘Wise woman,’ Mykkael murmured, cautious himself, as the yawning servant indicated the way towards a shaft with another frame stairway. The obstacle posed an unwelcome hazard for a man afflicted with lameness. ‘We go down here?’

The disgruntled lackey bobbed his tow head, the pompom on his sleeping cap a dab of bright scarlet amid the oppressive gloom. ‘For the store cellar, yes. Broom closet’s just past the landing.’

Mykkael caught the sleeve of the fellow’s striped nightshirt. ‘Thank you. Keep the light. Go on back to bed.’

As the surlier of the two men-at-arms drew breath to disagree, the captain silenced him with a glance. His clipped nod dispatched the servant on his way. Then Mykkael waited, while the wavering glow of the rush light receded out of immediate earshot. ‘You don’t want more gossip.’ His low voice emphatic, he added, ‘Don’t tell me, soldier, you aren’t under discipline to keep tinder and spill in your scrip?’

The other guard stiffened, affronted. ‘You don’t give us orders, you sand-bred cur.’

Mykkael ignored the insult. ‘Get busy with that flint! A sorcerer’s mark can smoulder like wildfire. You don’t leave one burning, once you know it’s there. If you’re frightened, just say so. I’ll go on alone if need be.’

‘But the light,’ the bearded guard blustered, his ruddy face lost amid gathering shadow as the servant set foot on the upper stair and continued his shuffling ascent. ‘We just carry birch bark. Burns out in seconds.’

‘Stall a bit more, then you’ll stand in the dark.’ Mykkael shrugged, sardonic. ‘Not a comfortable risk to be taking, where there might be a line of dark craft set at work.’

One balky man at last stirred to comply.

Patience gone, Mykkael reached out with blurring speed. He snaked a hand past the guard’s fumbling fingers, and dug flint and spill from the unbuckled scrip. ‘Don’t you trust your commander? I doubt very much we’ll expend what we have before Taskin arrives with pine torches. I hope he also brings men with strong nerves who will act without foolish argument.’

‘We should wait till he gets here,’ the surly guard snapped.

But Mykkael had already lit the rolled birch bark. He pressed the pace down the creaky board staircase, not caring if anyone followed. The recalcitrant guardsmen soon tramped at his heels, their grumbling stilled as they crowded the landing, and the broom-closet door emerged out of veiling darkness. The unvarnished planking had been inscribed: the scrawled figure demarked a crudely shaped lightning bolt, cut diagonally through an array of interlocked circles.

Mykkael loosed a hissed breath, rolled his shoulders, then forged ahead, resolute. He held up the spill. Bronze features expressionless, he traced the light over the wood, giving each chalky line his relentless inspection. No distraction moved him, even the fresh influx of voices and light, slicing down from the upper corridor. Taskin arrived. Five immaculate guardsmen marched at his heels, bearing oiled rag torches. Boots thundered on wood, the last stretch of stairway descended at a cracking sprint.

The commander rammed past the shrinking pair detailed as the captain’s escort. He reached Mykkael’s side in a glitter of braid and smartly polished accoutrements. There, he stopped, scarcely winded. His brushed grey head bent, stilled as filed steel, while the crawling progress of the hand-held spill inched over the outermost circle.

Then, ‘No informative tracks, left pressed in the dirt,’ Taskin observed in clipped opening.

Mykkael matched that brevity. ‘I saw.’ He pinched the flame out with his fingers, wiped the smutch of soot on his sleeve, then stated, ‘The mark is a fake.’

‘How are you certain?’

‘It was done with dry chalk, not white river clay’ Mykkael raised his wrist, blotted the beaded sweat from his brow, then swiped his thumb through the pattern. He sniffed carefully. ‘No spittle to bind it. No blood, or worse, urine. A sorcerer’s lines can’t hold any power without a minion’s imprint to lift them to active resonance.’

‘That’s detailed knowledge for a man who just claimed he lacked the touch to shift curses.’

Before the garrison captain could snatch pause to wonder how that fact had changed hands at short notice, Taskin’s glance shifted. He took merciless note, when Mykkael braced a needful hand to the wall to forestall a sharp loss of balance.

‘I can’t lift curses,’ the captain restated. He retreated an irritable, dragging step, not quite fast enough to shadow his fingers, which were splayed rigid and quivering. Taskin’s stillness continued to jab at his reserve. Hazed like a fresh recruit, Mykkael found himself pressured to give far more than the simple answer. That loss of control ripped through his aplomb, raising temper just barely leashed. ‘With luck, sometimes, I can ground them.’

Ice-cool, Taskin queried, ‘At what cost to yourself, soldier?’

Mykkael flung up his head. The spark of trapped light in his eyes was chipped fire, under the crowding torches. ‘I don’t know!’ Anger doused, he had less success with his exhausted, recalcitrant body. The seizing cramp from his overstressed knee rocked his frame through a running spasm. ‘Trust me, if that mark had been a live cipher, you don’t want the nightmare of guessing.’

A torch wavered, behind, as a man shifted grip to make a sign against evil.

The commander cracked, ‘Hold that light steady! The man who just faltered, fetch this one a chair!’

Someone else muttered, ‘That malformed get of a desert-whelped bitch?’