Fugitive Prince (61 page)

The warning strictures remonstrated by Asandir posed a fearful array of hidden pitfalls. Their small party dared not disturb any aspect of symmetry in this unworldly place. To take even apparent life, or to strip so much as one green branch would cause a strand of continuity to shift resonance. A balance would change, demanding harsh forfeit, and no power of mercy might spare the offender from the fate of that unknown consequence. Whatever fell power enacted this sphere of illusion must not be aroused to the presence of trespassers.

“As you love life, walk softly,” Dakar entreated, aware the least act could distress the loomed pattern of integral consciousness surrounding them.

Their footsteps were now guided by a force of unknown magnitude, and retreat of any kind was impossible.

Felirin alone retained the brash whimsy to flirt with poetic phrasing. “Will we or nil we, we’re drawn toward the center. I wonder what we’re going to find?”

“Something Asandir never spoke of, even on his good days.” Fed up with the minstrel’s feckless temperament, Dakar let fly out of pique. “Take great care you don’t snap any twigs.”

For whatever unearthly pocket this grimward carved out, they had no choice but to grapple its uncanny mystery headlong.

The first time the apparent season changed, Felirin cried out in shock.

Dakar gawped and inhaled the frizzled ends of his mustache. His perception had not lied. The leafed autumn wood had transformed at one step to the cobalt gloaming of winter twilight. Low, rolling hills lapped away to a snow-clad horizon. Treeless, the crests wore mantling drifts like honed cleavers. The wind snarled and gusted. The breath Dakar drew to indulge in rank curses sieved cold like spilled mercury through his lungs.

The forest was gone as if expunged from existence, and the new vista offered no shelter. Too exhausted to bolt, the horses shivered and stamped, their labored exhalations trailing white plumes against the deepening purple of dusk. The stars blazed overhead like chips in

black ice. No moon arose to diminish their splendor, nor did the constellations form any pattern familiar to Athera.

Arithon volunteered his sparse comment through a pause to share the brandy the innkeeper’s wife had tucked into the provisions in the saddlebags. “I know this sky. The stars were never so bright, but on Dascen Elur, ships’ masters navigated by these same constellations.” He passed the flask on to Felirin, and added, “I wonder if our thoughts could be bending the dream?”

“Then you recognize this plain?” Dakar swiped off the ice crystals lodged in his brows, too dispirited to show disappointment as the Master of Shadow shook his head.

“This landscape doesn’t match my memory of Dascen Elur. At least, no landmass encountered by my father’s ships seemed this wretchedly desolate.” Arithon’s voice seemed leached of all feeling as he qualified. “Even on those barren archipelagoes where families mined salt from the silted lagoons, scrub thorn grew on the high ground.”

Worried afresh by the lifeless flatness to the Masterbard’s expression, Dakar attempted to hold his gaze and measure the depths of his internal despair. But Arithon refused even that slight contact, his mouth a taut line of strained nerves.

The small party pressed on when the brandy was finished. Felirin rode with his eyes shut, lips working, perhaps in a verse from some ancient ballad, or in prayer to Ath. Huddled in his singed cloak with both hands swathed and poulticed, and his pert scarlet tassels shredded to threads from unkindly fire and hard usage, he seemed a tatterdemalion beggar left witwandering in the night.

Dakar pondered their changed surroundings, not a bit reassured that the sky overhead seemed to match Arithon’s recollection. He had never thought to ask Althain’s Warden whether dragons had flown past the Worldsend Gates. That fine point might come to matter dearly in the future. If in fact the great drakes had not cached the memory of these far-off stars as a backdrop for their present-day dreams, then trouble would shadow the chances of their mortal survival.

The danger could not be discounted or ignored, that this disjointed frame of existence might prey upon human thoughts, then manifest their dark contents. If such linkage occurred, then Arithon’s shattered equilibrium could couple with Felirin’s penchant for foolhardy fancy and brew up an unconscionable risk. The chance was too frightening, that the impassioned knots of subconscious pain might weave themselves into the loom of the uncanny forces that clothed this alternate
reality. If so, the unimaginable guilt held in check by a blood oath could unleash, all unwitting, a murderous, tormented revenge as a subjective nightmare of horrors.

Shaken stark silent, Dakar sketched a sign to avert the ill thought, that the grimward’s effects might come to magnify Arithon’s despair. The best-willed intent to repress a death wish might twist free of constraint and remanifest in this place as a parallel act of self-punishment.

Through the pound of his heart, Dakar leaned across and spoke directly to Arithon. “Use your mage training. Wrap your mind into silence, and don’t for a second drop your guard.”

The Master of Shadow opened tortured green eyes. “Ath save us all, I’ve already done so.” He cast a weighted glance toward Felirin’s turned back.

For of course, the free minstrel owned no such schooled discipline to lock down the unrestrained play of the mind.

Dakar chewed his lip. He knew illicit lore, had knowledge of sigils to force the will and bend a man’s acts through the use of sheared lines of power. Such craft broke the Law of the Major Balance. Eddies of recoiling damage could backlash on both the victim and wielder. Yet here in this place, such a safeguard might mean the difference between life and death.

Left cold to the bone by the bent of his thoughts, even granted the impetus of a terrible expediency, Dakar startled to the sudden restraint of a hand on his wrist.

“Don’t, Dakar,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn. His shackling grasp did not loosen. “I thought the same once on the banks of Tal Quorin. Believe me, no stakes are worth such a cost. I’ve lost direct access to my mage talent as a penalty, and would give any price in my power to reverse that decision.”

Dakar swallowed, undone by the leveling force of an honesty he could not match. Nor could he restate the horrid, cold fact, that the harmonious continuity of Athera yet hung on the thread of Prince Arithon’s life. “If need warrants, even you cannot stop me,” he said finally.

The hold on him released in an unspeakable surrender. That act, and the numbing silence that followed ran against every tenet of fight in Arithon’s character. An ominous sign, with no joy in the victory, that Dakar held such sway over a friend whose innate strength had always outmatched him. “I’ll hold my decision,” he temporized, to no avail.

The Teir’s’Ffalenn had retreated past reach behind the stone mask of his training.

Very quickly after that, all concerns became moot before the raw cruelty of the elements. Gusts bit through every inadequate layer of clothing. Horses could not withstand such punishing cold without rations of grain and fodder. Half-shed into their sleek summer hair, they were already suffering. Nor did the queer, bending track through the gloaming permit a retreat by retracing their steps into autumn. Concerned that Arithon and Felirin were left in more fragile condition than he, Dakar insisted that the pair ride double on the gray and share the warmth of the drover’s cloak between them.

The small party plowed on, horses laboring chest high through sifted pockets of snow. Stuffed like a sausage in two of Felirin’s court-style tunics, Dakar blinked melted snow from his lashes and startled to the clang of shod hooves on rock. The frigid air left his lungs in a gasp as the stars and bleak snowfields all vanished.

The three riders moved now under a sky streaked with dawn, across sands grooved and black as raked basalt. The air held the forge-tang of desert and a flint-dry cloy of fine dust. No birds flew. The arid vista seemed lifeless as Kathtairr, except for the massive, clawed tracks of a predator which scored the ribbed flank of a dune.

“Seardluin,” Dakar whispered through a throat parched to paper by a devastating stab of fresh fear. In Athera, Fellowship intervention may have battled the monstrous killers to extinction; yet in the sheltered existence of drake-dream, the creatures would prowl still, their marauding thirst for blood raised to a scale of unimaginable viciousness. “If even one catches wind of our horses, we’re finished.”

Felirin pushed back the limp folds of the drover’s hood. “Arithon’s unconscious,” he said softly.

The Mad Prophet vented an explosion of oaths. No telling, now, whether the defenses ingrained in the Shadow Master’s mage training might contain the subconscious poison past memories and grief might engender.

Between blowing on numbed hands and fighting to slip the stiffened straps of the buckles on his saddlebags, the Mad Prophet flung back stopgap instructions. “Felirin, pack up that cloak. You may need your hands free. And we’ll have to shift Arithon back onto the mare.”

The spellbinder scrounged out two stout pairs of horse hobbles. Focused and made desperate by full awareness that he must safeguard the body that housed the self-haunted powers of s’Ffalenn conscience, despite the latent potential for disaster that same mind might seed to envelop them all, Dakar tossed the restraints to Felirin. “Tie your Masterbard astride. Don’t think of pity Strap him down tight, or he’s lost if we have to gallop.”

“The horses are spent. We ought to be leading them.” Felirin fumbled with poulticed hands to assist as Dakar directed. Together, they fastened the stiff leather cuffs around Arithon’s wrists and ankles, and bound his slack form to his horse’s girth and breast strap.

That grim preventative was scarcely completed when Dakar looked up. “Dharkaron wept!” A massive, dark shadow slunk sinuously into the hollow where they took shelter. He snatched the bard’s wrist. “Don’t move or breathe.”

Felirin glanced back, aghast. The next moment the three horses shied sidewards and tore at the reins trying to bolt.

Dakar held on, half-weeping, though both of his hands were skinned raw. Standing or running, they had no chance at all once the monsters that approached charged to hunt.

There were four of them, coats like rippling sable, and horned heads burnished to polished gold under the harsh desert sunlight. The powerful, maned shoulders stood high as an ox. The forefeet bore fearsome talons. The muzzles extended into jaws with scaled plates, and fangs that were cruelly poisonous. The eyes were pale as poured oil, and slitted like a snake’s. Dakar was aware through the hammer of his pulse that nothing alive looked more lethal. While at large on Athera, Seardluin had outrun the gazelles of Sanpashir, which took bounding flight like racing shadows over parched grass and flint sands.

Never had the spellbinder known such blank fright as that moment, when the creatures on the dune paused to snuffle the wind, ears pricked to strain out the footfalls of prey. Those wide-set, mean yellow eyes swung and fixed, and seemed to stare
right through him.

Then the lead creature howled in a key to bristle the hair and tear a hole through a man’s slackened bowels. Slumped on the mare’s crest, Arithon groaned.

Dakar reached out, pitiless, and muffled the cry with his palm.

Then, as if tuned to one thought, the Seardluin moved on, lithe, deadly, and uninterested. They passed not three yards from the horses, who quivered and dripped sweat in rank fear.

Felirin shrank, shaking, against the damp heat of his gelding. “Ath’s blessed mercy, I don’t think they knew us.”

Weak kneed with shock, Dakar resisted the urge to collapse where he stood. “We must not be visible to them in this spectrum of dream. If we were, I assure you, we’d be torn limb from limb.”

Felirin offered no argument. Once the horses had settled enough to walk calmly, he remounted and pressed on, trailing the mare which bore Arithon. From behind, the wind carried a drawn-out howl, then
the sounds of a snarling fight. Screams that sounded human sliced the baked air, then the drumroll report of hapless horses set to flight, sheared through by a chilling clang of steel.

“Hold fast!” Dakar tightened his grip on Arithon’s reins, and twisted to see over his shoulder.

Five horsemen burst over the ridge at his back, mounts stretched to a lathered gallop. Down a grade unsuited to headlong flight, they slid and skated. Sand caved and gave way beneath panicked hooves. Against the fierce, copper glare off the dunes, Dakar made out the Hanshire town blazon sewn on their saddlecloths and surcoats.

“Felirin!” he cried, tensed to stab heels to his own mount and run.
Even here, the Alliance pursuit had overtaken them.

Yet even before reflex could spur startled flight, the last guardsman cleared the crest, shouting like a madman and driving his horse with the unsheathed flat of his sword. A grue like the precursor to prophetic sight caused Dakar to hold back raw instinct. He reined in. While the guardsmen plunged closer, and the sand scarp ripped loose like unraveled knit beneath their destriers’ pounding sprint, he spun a fast cantrip to mask his horse’s copycat impulse to bolt.

The stayspell locked down barely in time. Arithon’s mount hit the rein in a spinning plunge, shredding new skin from Dakar’s fingers; then hot on the heels of the Hanshire guardsmen came the predators which hazed them.

Seardluin burst over the skyline, four streaks of muscle and bared talon that came on like shot oil to overtake. Plowed sand and ripped footing caused them no missed stride. Nor was time given for prey to react or defend.

The lead creature sprang with sinuous speed. It overtook the trailing rider, closed a stride and a half lead in one bound, its thick, plated tail streamed behind. One snap of armored jaws decapitated the horse. The animal pinwheeled, fountaining blood. Its rider catapulted ahead. He crashed in a rolling spray of sand, but never came to rest before the predator pinned him. One goring swipe of its horn left him a disemboweled carcass.

The survivors pounded on through another mired stride before the Seardluin charged among them. Their horses’ berserk panic scattered them right and left, chaff before the oncoming stroke of Sithaer’s scythe. The king male snatched a mare by one hind leg. Half her haunch tore away in one razor-clean swipe. His Seardluin mate cleared the steed’s scissoring struggle in a powerful leap. She landed ahead of the next horse, tucked and rolled, then extended a taloned forepaw as a hook. The horse was jerked out of its run like a gaffed
fish. It crashed, splayed and gutted. The downed guardsman died as fast, bludgeoned silent by a swipe of the Seardluin’s armored tail. Blood pattered a fine rain on parched earth, the spray masked by the whistling shriek of another gelding, collapsed with a severed windpipe. The final horse thrashed in a heap of maimed limbs, its rider crushed in the tangle.