To Ride Hell’s Chasm

Taskin lifted his head, his regard no less ruthlessly focused as he abandoned the seeing glass. ‘Mysh kael’s true to his oath to the crown, you believe.’

‘If I had to set trust in surface appearances,’ Jussoud admitted, reluctant, ‘the debate could be carried both ways.’

‘I sent down a lancer to bring the man in. He is also delayed, by now well beyond the grace of a plausible excuse.’ Taskin straightened, all business. ‘Do you know what became of him?’

Jussoud stared back, his grey eyes unblinking. ‘He waylaid Mykkael in a darkened stairwell.’

‘Fool.’ The commander’s long fingers tightened on the seeing glass, sole sign of his inward distress. ‘He’s alive to regret?’

The healer nodded. ‘Unharmed, and unmarked, in fact. Mykkael stopped him cold with a blow that stunned the nerves that govern involuntary reflex. Then he used direct pressure and cut off the blood flow through the arteries to the brain only long enough to drop your guardsman unconscious. I find that sort of efficiency chilling, a precision far beyond any nightmare I could imagine.’

‘Barqui’ino drill alters the synapses of the mind.’ Taskin stepped back, leaned against the stone wall, while the pigeons cooed in liquid murmurs from their roosts in the eaves overhead. ‘Then you’ve seen this desertman use skills that can kill, and leave no telltale bruise on the corpse.’

Jussoud said nothing. His sallow skin shone with sweat in the spilled glare of sun off the sills of the casements.

‘Where is my guardsman?’ Taskin said, his probe delicate.

‘On his feet, under orders, as far as I know still searching the town for the captain.’ Reliant on trust earned through years of intelligent service, Jussoud dared a tacit rebuke. ‘Shaken as your guard was, and exhausted after a night of rigorous duty, he was more afraid to return empty-handed. His search at this point will scarcely bear fruit. Mykkael left the garrison, masked under your officer’s purloined cloak. The garment was found later, draped over the drawbridge railing. Even the keep gate watch could not say where the captain went, or what he pursued on his errands.’

Taskin grimaced. ‘I’ll have that guard recalled. How many more men should I send to accomplish the charge of fetching Mysh kael uptown for review?’

‘None.’ Jussoud absorbed the commander’s surprise, unsmiling. ‘You won’t have to collect Mykkael, even if his stiff-necked pride would allow it. The captain asked me to deliver his report from the garrison, and to add, he will meet you himself at the Highgate. You can expect him in person by mid-afternoon.’

The older campaigner’s silvered brows rose. ‘How arrogant of the upstart, to dictate to me. What facts has he chosen to deliver, meanwhile?’

Jussoud recited, choosing Mykkael’s own words, and clipped sentences that did not elaborate. The close details he had overheard from the garrison’s watch officer shed no more useful light on the knotted problems at hand.

‘Nothing and nothing,’ Taskin snapped, eyes shut through the pause as he gathered himself. His ascetic face looked suddenly drawn against its lean framework of bone. Then his eggshell lids opened. Direct as forged steel, he said. ‘So much for bare facts. Now say what you think.’

Prepared for that command, Jussoud nonetheless chose his honest words with reluctance. ‘I think Mykkael knows, or is hardset in pursuit of firm evidence that will reveal the fate that’s befallen her Grace. He said she’s endangered. Not why or how. I’d hazard two guesses. That he’s loyal, but has a strong reason not to trust where he shares his information. Or else he’s involved with an ugly conspiracy, and doing a magnificent job for the party that wants to obstruct us.’

Taskin nodded, relieved, his respect for the healer grown to the stature he would have accorded a peer. ‘We aren’t wont to warm to a man of his breeding. The court gossip condemns him. His background checks clean, but he was a hired sword and a mercenary. He might have been commissioned a long time in advance, and sent here to win his key position through the opening of our summer tourney’

‘He is a weapon, well sharpened to spearhead whatever cause buys his service,’ Jussoud agreed in blunt summary. ‘He could be the best chance we have to find Princess Anja, or he might be the cipher to cast Sessalie to the wolves that would tear her succession asunder.’ A fraught moment later, he braved the soft inquiry, ‘Will you leave the man free, or restrain him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Taskin answered, his trim shoulders set to withstand an unprecedented burden of uncertainty. ‘You’re an astute judge of character, Jussoud. What do you feel this case merits?’

The commander watched, primed and sharp as a predator, and captured the nomad’s split-second hesitation. ‘Ah, Jussoud, you have doubts.’

The easterner sighed. ‘Just one. Not substantial.’ Mykkael had not said his own hand had killed a child; but the flicker of fear that had crossed his dark face well suggested the chance that he might have.

‘No need to elaborate,’ Taskin excused. ‘As always, your thoughts and mine seem to move in lock step. I value that, even if, with this desert-bred, the waters are dangerously clouded.’

‘Then what will you do?’ Jussoud asked, well aware he might not receive a straight answer.

Yet Taskin chose to share his rare confidence. ‘Let’s first see if Captain Mysh kael keeps his promised appointment at Highgate. If he comes in by free will, I plan to hear him. Should he have sound reasons for today’s behaviour, I’ll wait to see whether he chooses to disclose information I can use. The facts he delivers to my discretion had better hold value and substance. Once those hurdles are crossed, last of all, I must weigh the manner in which he answers to justly earned punishment.’

At Jussoud’s wary glance, Taskin said, starkly grim, ‘Oh yes, I will have to take that risk, won’t I? The brazen creature has made sure he’ll be tested. I have no choice but to handle him now that three counts lie against him, with only one of them mine, for an act of direct insubordination. He’s incurred a diplomatic insult, formally registered, that for the realm’s honour, I cannot ignore. You’ve just witnessed the third, a far more serious charge of striking a crown guard in obstruction of a royal duty.’

‘Bright powers avert!’ Jussoud warned. ‘I respect your prowess, my lord, and your sound grasp of command, but I’ve also seen Mykkael in action. Do you actually know he can kill you, that fast, on the strength of an ingrained reflex?’

Taskin drew in a shuddering breath. ‘I doubt my imagination falls short on that score. But Princess Anja’s survival may come to rely on this southern barbarian’s raw instincts. Either he’s our best hope to recover her, alive, or he’s a loose bolt of lightning, too deadly for any man’s hand to restrain. If he’s too volatile to bide under a crown soldier’s discipline, loyal or not, we can’t risk such a weapon among us.’

As the sun’s rays slanted through the early afternoon, she huddled in the dank gloom of a rock cave. The tied horses rested with closed eyes and cocked hips. Chilled and exhausted, she snatched sleep in catnaps. Yet each time she drifted, fear stabbed her awake, sweating from the recurrent nightmare: of familiar faces tirelessly hunting her, their changed eyes ice-hard with cruelty…

VIII. Afternoon (#ulink_a681643e-8b11-505a-9cb0-05e61ee8baeb)

THE GARRISON SENTRY ON WATCH BY THE FALLS GATE SCARCELY SENSED THE WHISPER-LIGHT STEP AT HIS BACK. BEFORE HE COULD TURN, OR set hand to his weapon, a small, furry bundle arrived on his shoulder, its sharp claws digging for balance.

The startled man-at-arms closed one hand on the scruff of what proved to be a young cat. Then he realized just who had crept up behind him. ‘Captain!’

Mykkael flashed a smile from under the penitent’s mantle that covered him from head to foot. He had been to the butcher’s, to judge by the fly-swarming contents of the osier basket slung from one casual hand. ‘Have that kitten sent up to the Middlegate watch officer, along with my updated orders, could you please?’

By now accustomed to the odd ways in which the captain saw fit to assert his command, the sentry secured the unsettled creature thrust into his grasp: a nondescript tabby with white paws and pink nose, sadly bedraggled, but bearing a braided cloth collar. ‘Someone’s lost darling?’

Mykkael nodded. ‘Belongs to the little girl who lives on Spring Street, the house with blue shutters and stone walls smothered in grapevine.’ He kept himself masked in the shadow of the keep, out of sight of the carters who jockeyed their drays past the foot traffic on the planked drawbridge. Through the cries of the vendors peddling grilled sausage, and the hoots of two sotted roisterers, he added, ‘Tell the child not to let her pet wander again. I found him in the hands of the rat killer’s boys.’

‘Powers!’ swore the guardsman, correctly faced straight ahead. ‘I thought you’d ordered a stop to their cruelty?’ Before Mykkael’s tenure, such boys had trapped stray cats in the alleys, and lamed the poor wretches for rodent bait.

‘As of today, those boys have received their last warning.’ The captain’s face hardened beneath the coarse hood. ‘If they persist with their mishandling of animals, here’s my updated word: the next offenders will be culled with a warrant. See that the change gets through to my sergeants.’

The guardsman on duty returned a clipped nod.

‘Now,’ Mykkael resumed, brought around to the business assigned to the watch by the Falls Gate. ‘You have the information I wanted?’

The man’s answer was prompt. ‘The recent list of the seeress’s clients, or at least the ones that her family recalls? The descriptions are scant. No one could agree on the numbers.’

‘I don’t care if the details were mixed up.’ Mykkael measured the sun angle, his cloaked stance touched to scalding impatience. ‘Report.’

The guard understood what his pay share was worth. He delivered the paltry summation. ‘The old besom hosted a wide range of visitors, most of them commons who came to buy charms for luck in love, or talismans for prosperity and safeguard. Yesterday’s list included five to eight merchant women from the Middlegate, all of whom came to her heavily veiled. Beyjall the apothecary visited once, perhaps to ask for a scrying. He often sought readings to locate rare herbs, but since the granddame kept her sessions private, the family can’t swear the presumption in this case was accurate. They all remembered the page from the palace. He came, they said, in a craftsman’s rough smock. But his shoes were a rich boy’s castoffs.’

Mykkael’s question slapped back, fast as ricochet. ‘When?’

Taken aback by a stare of driving intensity, the guard breathed an inward sigh of relief that he was prepared with an answer. ‘Two days ago. The night of the High Prince of Devall’s arrival.’

‘Well done. That will do.’ Mykkael adjusted the hang of his sword blade beneath his voluminous mantle, a sure sign he had concluded the interview and now made ready to depart.

‘Anything else, Captain?’ Given a negative gesture from beneath the enveloping hood, the guardsman cast a distasteful glance over the clotted offal heaped in the basket. ‘You’re off on some errand outside the gates? Surely you aren’t taking that as a gift to feed the blind storyteller who begs by the crossroad market?’

Mykkael tapped his chest, where he had a second wrapped packet stowed, beyond easy reach of the lower town’s scourge of street thieves. ‘The scraps are intended for somebody else. I’ll be back in an hour, two at the latest. Tell your duty officer to have a saddled horse waiting, I expect to be in a hurry.’

Asleep in the sun after quartering the hills through most of the night with a hangover, old Benj the poacher stirred to the jab of a toe in his ribs. The sawing snore that rattled his throat transformed to a grunt of displeasure.

‘Benj!’ screeched a female voice that wrought havoc with his sore head. ‘Benj, you damned layabout, wake up.’

The carping as usual belonged to the wife, shrill as a rusted gate hinge. The toe, which dug in with nailing persuasion and unleashed the fireburst of a pressed nerve, was no woman’s. Benj shut his slack mouth on a curse. Aware enough to interpret the delirious yap of his dogs, he answered without opening his eyes. ‘The only trail that matched your description runs into the western ranges. Six horses, led by a slight person who wore lightweight shoes, with soles stitched by a quality cobbler.’

‘Benj, you rude wastrel, get up!’ The wife caught his limp wrist with a grip like steel pincers and hauled. Her brute effort toppled him sideways off the kennel barrel currently used as his backrest. ‘Benj, at the least, you can hold conversation within doors, like a civilized man of the house.’