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The wind poured in cold gusts off the heights, freighted with the keen snap of
frost. Chilled in his sweat-sodden woolens, raked over by gorse spines, and
sliced on both palms from grasping dried bracken to stay upright, Dakar hung
at Arithon's heels in an unprecedented, stalwart forbearance. The higher the
ascent, the more stoic he became, until exhaustion sapped even his penchant
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for cursing.
By then, the divide of the Kethom Mountains loomed in saw-toothed splendor
above; below and to the northwest, in valleys the sheenless brown of crumpled
burlap, the black and red-banded stone of a ruin snagged through the crowns of
the hills. Once a Paravian stronghold, the crumbled remains of a power focus
threw a soft, round ring through the weeds that overran the site. Had Arithon
not lost access to the talent that sourced his mage training, he would have
seen the faint flicker of captured power as the fourth lane's current played
through the half-buried patterns. Since the site of Second Age mysteries
posed the most likely reason for today's journey, Dakar's outside hope became
dashed as the valley was abandoned for a stonier byway which scored a tangled
track to the heights.
Once into the rough footing of the shale slopes, Arithon left the trail to dig
for rootstock. He offered no conversation.
The Mad Prophet spent the interval perched atop an inhospitable rock,
undignified and panting.
The afternoon dimmed into cloudy twilight. Arithon strung his bow and shot a
winter-thin hare, which Dakar cooked in inimical silence over a tiny fire
nursed out of sticks and dead brush. Vastmark slopes were too wind raked for
trees, the gravelly soil too meager to anchor even the stunted firs that
seized hold at hostile sites elsewhere. The only crannies not scoured bare by
harsh gales lay swathed in prickly furze. A
man without blankets must bed down on rock, wrapped in a cloak against the
cold, or else perish from lack of sleep, spiked at each turn by vegetation
that conspired to itch or prickle.
Dakar passed the night in miserable, long intervals of chilled wakefulness
broken by distressed bouts of nightmare.
He arose with the dawn, disgruntled and sore, but still entrenched in his
resolve to outlast the provocations set by his s'Ffalenn nemesis.
They broke fast on the charred, spitted carcass of a grouse and butterless
chunks of ship's biscuit, then moved on, Dakar in suffering silence despite
the grievance of being forced to climb while he still felt starved to the
bone. Arithon seemed none the worse for yesterday's energetic side trips.
His step on the narrow rims of the sheep
trails stayed light and sure, the bundles slung from his shoulder no
impediment to the steepest ascent.
"You know," Dakar gasped in vain attempt to finagle a rest stop, "if you slip
and fall, you'll see Eishian's last lyranthe in this world crunched into a
thousand sad splinters."
Poised at the crest of an abutment, Arithon chose not to answer.
Dakar sucked wind to revile him for rudeness, then stopped against his nature
to look closer. "What's wrong?"
Arithon shaded his eyes from the filtered glare off the cloud cover and
pointed. "Do you see them?"
Dakar huffed through his last steps to the ridgetop. His scowl puckered into
a squint as he surveyed the swale below their vantage, The landscape was not
empty. Sinister and black above the rim of a dry river gorge, creatures on
thin-stretched, membranous wings dipped and soared on the wind currents.
The high mountain silence rang to a shrill, stinging threnody of whistles.
"I thought the great Khadrim were confined to the preserve in Tornir
Peaks." Prompted by a past encounter that had ended in a narrow escape,
Arithon reached for his sword.
"You need draw no steel. Those aren't Khadrim," Dakar corrected.
"They're wyverns; smaller; less dangerous; non-fire breathing. If you're a
sheep, or a leg-broken horse, you've got trouble in plenty to worry about.
The Vas tmark territory's thick with their eyries, but they seldom trouble
anything of size." He studied the creatures'
wheeling, kite-tailed flight a considered moment longer. "Those are onto
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something, though. Wyverns don't pack up without reason."
"Shall we see what they're after?" When his footsore companion groaned in
response, Arithon grinned and leaped off the boulders to land running through
the gorse down the ridge.
"It's likely just the carcass of a mountain cat," Dakar carped.
"Mother of all bastards, will you slow down? You're going to see me trip and
break my tieck!"
Arithon called over his shoulder, cheerful. "Do that and you'll have to roll
your fat self off this Mountainside.
juNo trees grow within a hundred and fifty leagues to cut any poles to make a
litter."
Ripped by a bilious stab of hatred, Dakar spat an epithet on each tearing
breath until he slipped and bit his tongue between syllables.
Sullen and sickened by the rank taste of blood, he hauled up panting beside
the Master of Shadow and gazed over the brim of the cliff head.
The first minute, his eyes refused to focus. His head swam, and not from the
pain; sharp drops from great heights infallibly made him unwell. Where the
WYVERNS ducked and wove in fixed interest, the channel-worn rock delved out by
a glacial stream slashed downward into a ravine. The bottom lay dank as a
pit. More WYVERNS threaded through the depths. Their dark scales glinted
blue as new steel, and their spiked wingtips knifed a whine like a saber cut
through updrafts and invisibly roiled air.
Arithon paused a scant second, then stooped and slung off his lyranthe.
"You're not going down there," Dakar objected.
He received a look the very palest of chill greens that boded the worst sort
of obstinacy. "Would you stop me?"
Arithon said.
"Ath, no." Dakar gestured toward the defile. "Be my guest.
You're most welcome to crash headlong to your death. I'll stay here and
applaud while the WYVERNS gnaw the bones of your carcass.
Arithon stooped, caught a handhold, and dropped down onto a broken, narrow
ledge. There he must have found a goat track. His black head blended with
the shadow in the cleft.
Dakar resisted the suicidal, mad urge to drive him back by threatening to hurl
Halliron's instrument after him into the abyss.
In the cold-hearted hope he might witness his enemy's fall instead, the
Mad Prophet tightened his belt to brace the quiver in his gut, grabbed a furze
tuft for security, and skidded downslope on his fundament, The wyverns
cruising like nightmare shuttlecocks screamed in piercing outrage, then
flapped wings and arrowed UP from the cleft.
From what seemed a secure stance on an outcrop below, Arithon kicked a spray
of gravel into the ravine. The pebbles bounced, cracking, from stone to stone
in plunging arcs, and startled four other settled monsters into flight. The
chilling, stuttered whistles they shrilled in alarm raised a dissonance to
ache living bone marrow.
Dakar saw Arithon suddenly drop flat on his belly. He peered downward also,
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