LITMIR.BIZ

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of hooves, now sure of the beast they were tracking. The sound came and went like a phantom between gusts, a lure that kept beckoning onward. In a frenzy propelled by spell-driven eagerness, Jaelot’s men-at-arms forged ahead. Whipped up to the blood-sport passion of the chase, they pursued the twisting, blind flight of their quarry until their mounts were belabored to exhaustion.

      Their pace slowed to a walk, the hours passed, interminable. Cruel winds bit and snarled. Snow swirled and sifted and stung like edged sleet, the storm’s onslaught continuous through air like stirred pitch. Tempers frayed. Two men came to grief, thrown from their saddles when their horses missed stride in the potholes. During the pause while the company healer set and dressed one unfortunate’s broken arm, the chief headhunter returned with the unwelcome word they had spent a fruitless chase to corner a riderless gelding.

      ‘What?’ snapped the company commander, caught dismounted to examine the withers of a horse chafed raw where the saddle had shifted. ‘I thought one of your scouts said he’d sighted someone astride?’

      Shamefaced, the headhunter qualified. ‘What he saw was a decoy, a manikin fashioned from old clothing tied and stuffed up with pine needles.’

      To the owner of the galled horse, the commander said, ‘Strip the mare’s bridle and pack that sore with salve.’ His frustration set a lash to his already sharpened speech. ‘Nobody rides anywhere until we recover sound wits and a sense of direction!’ Then, to the headhunter who shifted from foot to foot in the dark, ‘You’re here to tell me we’ve spent the whole night running blind circles for nothing?’

      ‘We’ve caught a lame horse,’ the man stated, shamefaced. ‘The single count we’ve got going in our favor, our enemy has just one mount left.’

      ‘Which does us small good. Now the fiend could be anywhere!’ The commander did not need the trapper’s gloomy confirmation that the fugitive’s trail would now be obliterated, perhaps lost beyond all recovery. No option remained but to camp until dawn on the hope the storm would relent. Only the glimpse of the rising sun could reestablish their obscured bearings.

      The men hunkered down, soaked and miserable without fires. The low brush was too thin to sustain a good blaze, and the demon gusts extinguished the sparks the field cook coaxed from dry tinder. The horses were too spent to paw for the grasses that poked spiny clumps through the weather sides of the snowdrifts. Men huddled in blankets amid punishing cold, uncomforted by the knowledge that their enemy endured and suffered the selfsame privations.

      The night roared and howled, possessed in the grip of what seemed an interminable punishment. Dawn did not come. The men in their misery ached and wept pleas for the return of comfort and light. No voice answered. In vain, they held steadfast. No dark hour in memory had reigned with such force, that the advent of day should stay banished.

      Early dread became whispers, spun to volatile fear. Surely this was the end. The Spinner of Darkness had worked his fell shadows and consigned his pursuit to oblivion.

      As the mutters swelled toward an outbreak of panic, the officers fought to stem ebbing morale and keep a sane semblance of order.

      ‘Are you ninnies and girls, to wail fear of the dark? No one’s hurt. No one’s dying. Have faith in the Light, for the dawn came again, even at Dier Kenton Vale and the maelstrom that beset the war fleet at Werepoint. We are numbers against one. This wall of shadow is doubtless no more than the work of a driven and desperate criminal.’

      Men huddled together. Some sang. Others prayed. In due time, the vortex of darkness thinned and lifted to unveil a late day ripped by storm winds and blizzard. The adverse conditions would not permit tracking, nor could spent horses be forced to bear laden packsaddles and riders. The company chose the sensible alternative, and made camp in a dale where a thicket of thorn formed a windbreak. They lit fires, ate a cheerless meal of stewed horse, while their officers conferred, and decided at length to proceed for Ithamon. They would join Jaelot’s guard captain there with all speed as soon as the weather relented.

      ‘Better hope the Master of Shadow is ahead of us, bound headlong into our trap.’ The sergeant slapped chips of ice from his mail and voiced his bitter conclusion. ‘Else we’ll be ordered to regroup and give chase when the storm clears enough to take bearings.’

      Yet the snow fell at sunset, and all through the next night, a horizontal barrage that layered the landscape like draped gauze, and battened the sky in fleece scud. The brushfires burned to coals, then steamed and went out, puddled to slush and dank embers. The next cheerless day, the wild tempest blew out to thin cirrus. A platinum-pale disk spat hazed sun dogs. East, against an enamel horizon, the looming peaks of the Skyshiels notched the view in ice-clad splendor, skirted in foothills of spruce.

      ‘Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance!’ the gaunt tracker fumed. ‘We’ve drifted back eastward! Sithaer’s deepest pits, we’re so far astray we ought to weep as the butt of our enemy’s laughter.’

      ‘Well, he won’t laugh for long.’ The chief headhunter pulled out his whetstone and dragged it, screeling, along the kept edge of his dagger. ‘He’ll find our sweet ambush at Ithamon soon enough. May the sword of the Light and Sithaer’s righteous fires drive his accursed spirit past the Wheel.’

      Arithon s’Ffalenn believed himself braced for return to the haunted ruin of Ithamon. Across the sparkling, snowy vales of Daon Ramon, under sunlight like shards of white glass, he had seen spirit and sinew put to the test. Surely the three decades elapsed since the Mistwraith’s capture should have allowed ample time to address the scarred wounds that remained. Yet the passage of years had done nothing to soften the old pain, scalpel-cut to the heart. No mind trained to mastery could reconcile the loss, when misuse of grand conjury in defense of his feal clans had severed his access to mage-sight. If the agonized sufferance of such a blinding could not be resolved, the cold burden of guilt could be borne. The stab of roused memory lay familiar and worn, like the ghost throb of a severed limb.

      Yet when Arithon crested the knife ridge of drifts that edged the dry bank of the Severnir, he found himself grateful for the misfortune of his shuttered talent. This pass, he would be spared the visioning dream of the ghosts that shimmered and coiled through the ruin. He would see no past kings pleading for the hope of a crowned heir bringing long-sought restoration. Their gut-wrenching sorrows and their cry for reborn grandeur now lay beyond reach, safely screened from mage-gifted senses by the barriers of unhealed affliction.

      Arithon would not be wrung by the tears of his bygone s’Ffalenn ancestors. Nor would he behold the searing grace of the Paravian spirit forms that sheared like bright flame through the mists.

      Yet if he escaped the echoed reflections of lost glory, he could not be spared the terrible desolation of the ruins themselves. The shattered stone walls, with their smashed carvings, still bespoke the bitter violence of the uprising. The memory of dead high kings still walked moss-grown battlements. The wild winds keened through the shells of breached keeps, stones laddered in stripped ivy and an aura of tumbledown majesty.

      Arithon pressed his exhausted horse northward, troubled in thought and memory. He had known these hills in the mantle of winter; had ridden, then as now, across crusted snow, with the parallel ridges carved out by gales turned the shot gold of damascened silk. A sky as lucent as aquamarine crystal reduced him to a toiling speck upon a spread tapestry of landscape. So many years since he had left this savage country in the trickle of spring thaws, savoring his last days of freedom after the arduous conquest of the Mistwraith, and before the inevitable, fated coronation that laid him under geas at Etarra. His half brother had gone mounted, pensive, beside him, while the chickadees in their solemn slate plumage had scolded over the sere fruits of last year’s briars.

      As if no shed blood and no curse lay between, the birds sang still in the branches. The springs burbled through their paned ice in the dells, as if only seasons had changed, and no wars strained the cloth of world destiny. Arithon paused only to water his horse. Pushed to the bone-weary limit of endurance, he wished he had less time on his hands for the morass of solitary reflection.

      Too real, the chance he might fail in the mission

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