To Ride Hell’s Chasm

Another fingertip contact, this stroke moth-wing gentle at the back of Mykkael’s thigh; except the result woke a nerve end, screaming. The garrison captain sucked an involuntary breath, half strangling the impulse to whimper.

‘For pity.’ But this time, the voice held compassion. ‘You’re a great deal worse than a mess. Without help, you’re not going to walk out of here.’

The touch melted back. Mykkael pulled in a shuddering lungful of air, while glass jars chinked near his elbow. Then scented, hot oil splashed and flowed down his back, and the hands began work in earnest. Their gentleness almost wrung him to tears. He subsided, smoothed down by an expertise that made him wonder if he was back in a coma, and dreaming. His chest unseized. Shortly, he was able to speak. In the language Jussoud would likely know best, Mykkael murmured, ‘How can I ever repay you?’

Jussoud gasped, his strong fingers shocked to a stop. ‘How is this?’ he exclaimed, overcome. Oblivious to the drama contained in the broom closet, he swept a searching regard over the desert-bred captain before him. ‘How can you know the motherland’s tongue?’

‘Taught. As a child. My stepfather traded.’ Mykkael raised himself on one elbow, straining to see what Taskin’s soldiers had unearthed.

Jussoud’s arm swiped him flat. ‘Do not spoil my diligent efforts, you impertinent upstart.’

Working a bruised jaw, just banged on the cot strut, Mykkael grumbled a filthy phrase he had learned as a boy from a drover. Then he added, through bliss, as those hands worked their magic, ‘Just don’t ask me to write your distant relatives a letter. I speak, but I don’t know the ideographs.’

‘I do,’ Jussoud stated, his dignity in place. ‘They take half a lifetime of patience to learn.’ He caught Mykkael’s elbow, planted a fist, then pressed down on one shoulder until something tight popped free in his client’s upper back. ‘Do you have patience, Captain?’

‘Only as I choose. Thank you, for that. I’m much better.’ Mykkael let his head loll in the crook of his elbow, warned as an icy shadow encroached that someone else came to stand over him. The near soundless step most likely meant that inimitable presence was Taskin.

The commander addressed Jussoud. ‘Can you do aught with him?’

Sweet oil licked a channel down Mykkael’s buttocks. ‘Oh, I think so,’ said the easterner, detached as a butcher who sized up the heft and weight of a carcass. ‘If the muscles are eased, the pinched nerves will subside. The limp can be made much less noticeable.’ His tone changed. ‘Hold now.’

The hands grasped his leg, applied traction and torque. A reaming, white fire tore through his hip. Mykkael crushed his face to his forearm, and scarcely managed to muffle a scream.

Then something crunched and let go in his pelvis. Pain laced his bad leg, then subsided. On his face, slammed limp, Mykkael tasted blood on his teeth. For that, he said more words. Ones that had once made the incensed drover chase after a sprinting small boy, waving a lead-tipped ox goad.

‘I can’t make him civilized,’ Jussoud admitted. Then he chuckled. ‘No. Don’t ask. I won’t translate.’ His hands moved, pressed a scar, testing with ruthless accuracy until a sharp flinch recorded the damage past reach of his skill. ‘I can’t ease the half of this knot of stressed tissue, certainly not overnight.’

‘Who expected that miracle?’ Taskin bent aside, clipped off an answer to somebody’s question, then considered the prone body, stretched out at his mercy on the cot. ‘If I send Jussoud down to the Lowergate barracks, will you make time for his services?’

Mykkael tipped up his face, disgruntled to be caught strapped with oil, and flat helpless. ‘Yes. If Jussoud will agree to start teaching me ideographs.’

‘That’s Jussoud’s choice.’ Taskin tapped his chin with an immaculate thumb. ‘Now, my choice. The whipping I owe you will wait. Can you stand yet?’

Mykkael flexed his leg with tentative care, then flashed Jussoud a glance of astonished gratitude. He shoved erect like a cat about to be served with a dousing, snatched up his dropped cloak, and covered his grease-shiny shoulders. ‘I can stand,’ he responded, running fresh sweat, but no longer wretchedly shivering. ‘Exactly what did you wish me to see?’

‘This.’ Taskin moved.

Mykkael stalked after him, barefoot, and entered the crowded closet.

They showed him Anja’s clothes, every one, down to the delicate, lace-sewn camisole, the fine, scented silk that had only hours ago kissed the girlish curve of her hips.

‘What do you think, Mysh kael?’ Taskin demanded.

The garrison captain blotted his stinging, split lip. ‘She took those off without help. Most likely willingly. Nothing’s torn. The lace isn’t hooked, or unravelled.’

‘Is that all?’

As though the words goaded like searing hot wire, Mykkael knelt. He fingered a bangle bracelet, to a musical clash of gold bells. Then he picked up a silver-capped shoe, and arose with the dainty, scuffed sole cradled between his rough hands.

Princess Anja came alive to him in that moment.

Her presence combed over him, mind and spirit, and infused his rocked senses with the intimate essence of her exotic perfume. The aromatic blend of sandalwood and desert flowers framed a memory so vivid and distant, Mykkael knew of no tongue that had enough life in its spoken phrasing to capture it.

He sucked in a breath, overtaken by storm. The young woman, Anja, assumed tangible weight, a ghost presence spun from his living contact with the slipper cupped in his palms. Witch thoughts, Mykkael realized, then understood further: Taskin was deliberately testing him for wild talent.

Despite his fierce anger, he could not fight back. His fragmented awareness already dissolved, sucked down by a vortex of terror…

…clogging fear, filled with the sweat scent of horses, and fog, swirling dank off the river…Soaked clothes, dripping and clammy cold…A woman’s heart pounding, her breaths jerked in gasps as she runs through the dark in hazed flight. She is desperate. Her taut hands grip damp strap leather, while behind her, the horses bump and jostle, their eager hooves clipping her lightly shod heels, and crushing the early spring grasses…

Drowning in horror, Mykkael wrenched his mind clear. Wrung dizzy, then falling, he spiralled back into the dusty cellar, and recovered his spinning wits. Enclosed by stone walls, and the scouring smoke thrown off the oiled rag torches, he crumpled. The shoe dropped from his grasp. It tumbled, clattering. Curled in a tight and shivering crouch, Mykkael fought back nausea, his nostrils clouded by the oiled sweat reek rising off his own skin.

His eyes were dry. Not blurred by a young girl’s salt tears, shed in shattered panic as she fled headlong through the night.

Someone’s fist clamped his elbow, jerked him back upright. The bruising grip savaged Mykkael’s slipped senses with a wrench like the bite of cold iron.

‘What did you see?’ Taskin hissed in his ear.

Mykkael shut his eyes, still battling vertigo. ‘Dark. She’s outside. In flight for her life.’

‘Witch thoughts!’ someone gasped, close beside him. Light shifted as a torchbearer recoiled. Boots grated on gravel, as other men stirred and exchanged rounds of sullen whispers.

Then another torch, flaring, thrust into his face. ‘What did you see?’ the commander repeated.

‘Country clothes. Lightweight shoes. She’s wet. Swam the river.’ A shudder raked Mykkael. He thought about horses, then flinched as a sharp flood of warning coiled through him. Pierced by an icy stab of raw instinct, he closed his mind, hard, and shook off Taskin’s probing. ‘Witch thoughts,’ Mykkael dismissed. ‘Only fools trust them. I might be seeing a moment recaptured from the princess’s early childhood. Or nothing more than a fanciful shadow, pulled in from one of her nightmares.’

‘You claimed you weren’t a slinking shaman,’ the red-haired sergeant accused.

Mykkael shook his head. He swallowed back nausea. ‘No shaman at all,’ he insisted, his leaden tiredness pressing his scraped voice inflectionless. ‘Not trained. Not brought up in tradition.’

Taskin’s relentless gaze still bored into him. Mykkael sighed. He forced his scarred knee to bear weight, then reached out, very gently, and pried off the commander’s insistent grasp. ‘I never said, did I, that I had not inherited a pack of unruly, fresh instincts.’

Mykkael sensed sudden movement at the corner of his eye. He surged into a spin, hands raised, while the draped cloak gaped open at his waist. He caught a man’s gesture to avert evil spellcraft, full on, then the sight of another signed curse, not completed. ‘I am no sorcerer!’ he cracked in fired rage. ‘Don’t you dare, in your ignorance, mistake that!’

Stares ringed him, unwavering. From men fully armed, and impeccably turned out, while he stood weaponless, half unclad, slicked in stale sweat and the itching residue of beast liniment and medicinal oil.

Mykkael uttered a word Jussoud would have appreciated, had the huge man still lingered in the corridor. Then, disgusted, he shrugged the slipped cloak back in place. To Taskin, he suggested, ‘Find that drudge. Question her. She might have seen someone snooping here, earlier. If a witch thought bears weight, her Grace was not overpowered, nor was she smuggled out, naked. I’d guess your princess might have made her own way, masked in a servant’s plain dress. See if someone else noticed the clothing.’

The ruddy sergeant bristled with outrage. ‘Princess Anja would never indulge in foolish pranks! Nor would she be childishly stupid enough to leave Highgate without an armed escort.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Mykkael agreed. ‘No harm, though, in checking.’

Taskin’s searing regard on him lingered. ‘The drudge has already been sent for,’ he allowed. ‘She could arrive in my wardroom at any moment. You ought to get dressed, or lie down before you fall over.’

Still fighting queasiness, Mykkael shot back a racked quip. ‘No order, which?’

‘Your call, soldier,’ Taskin said, less generous than rigidly practical. ‘If you drop, I won’t waste a man, picking you up off the floor. Jussoud’s gone home. He’s sent back to bed. Can’t lose the edge off him to exhaustion. Respect that, since I want you upright and alert, and for that, you’ll need his attention tomorrow.’

‘You do keep the rust polished off your swords,’ Mykkael dug back without rancour. He rallied, gathered the trailing hem of the cloak, then ploughed ahead on unsteady feet until he won free of the closet. His scathing reply floated back from the corridor. ‘You would have made a first-rate field captain, if you weren’t cooped up guarding a citadel.’