that seemed designed to whip Dakar to fury.
Given the intent to embark on a foray into the mountains of Vastmark, the Mad Prophet blinked, caught aback. ‘Ath, whatever for? There’s naught in these hills at this season but frost-killed bracken and starving hawks. The shale beds in the heights get soaked in the rains, and the rockslides can mill you to slivers. Those shepherds with sense will have driven their flocks to the lowest valleys until well after the first spring thaw.’
For answer, Arithon packed a small satchel with necessities. He heated his horn recurve bow over the galley stove to soften the laminate enough to string. Then he fetched his lyranthe, his hunting knife and sword, and piled them into the dory.
‘You’ll need warmer clothing,’ Dakar said in tart recognition that the shore excursion lay beyond argument. His dissent was ongoing as he squeezed his girth past the chart desk to delve in a locker and scrounge out a pair of hose without holes. ‘There’s ice on the peaks. How long are you planning to sulk in the hills if it’s snowing?’
‘If you wish warm clothes, fetch them.’ Arithon checked the sloop’s anchor lines one final time, then climbed the rail and dropped into his rocking tender. The yard workers I’ve retained won’t rejoin us here for at least another two fortnights. If you stay, the wait could be lonely. I didn’t provision to live aboard.’
Dakar almost lost his temper. No hunter by choice, he detested the stringy taste of winter game. Just how the Shadow Master proposed to maintain his team of experienced shipwrights lay beyond reason since the coffers from Maenalle were empty. Whatever else drew him to peruse the barren uplands that sliced like broken razors against the clouds, the principality of Vastmark was by lengths the loneliest sweep of landscape on the continent. The shepherds who wrested their livelihood from its wind-raked, boggy corries subsisted in wretched poverty.
In distrust and suspicion that Arithon’s excursion must be plotted as a feint to mask a more devious machination, the Mad Prophet snatched up his least-battered woollens, crammed them in a wad in his cloak, and in a clumsy boarding that rocked water over a gunwale, parked his bulk in the stern of the tender.
His compliance did not extend to shouldering the work of an oar. Nor when the craft beached on the nar row, pebbled strand did he lift a finger to help drag the dory into cover above the high tide mark. Ferret insight into Arithon’s affairs though he might through adventure into a wilderness, Dakar scowled to express his commensurate distaste. Open-air treks and clambering up scarps like a goat came second only to the mazes through sand grains once dealt him as punishment by Asandir.
The pace Arithon set in ascent from the strand was brutal enough to wring oaths from a seasoned mercenary. Breathless within minutes, aching tired inside an hour, Dakar toiled over rock that slipped loose beneath his boot soles, and wormed past chiselled escarpments which abraded the soft skin of his hands. The wind poured in cold gusts off the heights, freighted with the keen snap of frost. Chilled in his sweat-sodden woollens, 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 for cursing.
By then, the divide of the Kelhorn Mountains loomed in saw-toothed splendour 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 meagre 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 Elshian’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 tot 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 Vastmark 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 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 neck!’
Arithon called over his shoulder, cheerful. ‘Do that and you’ll just have to roll your fat self off this mountainside. No 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
