‘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 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 sabre cut through updraughts 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, unable to gain vantage into the recess beneath the moss-rotten underhang. The Shadow Master’s exclamation of warning came muffled behind a sleeve as he rolled, unlimbered his strung bow from his shoulder, then positioned himself on one knee and nocked an arrow.
Moved by danger to scramble and close the last descent, Dakar also spotted the quarry which held the wyverns in circling patterns.
In the deep shade of a fissure, on a ledge lower down, a shepherd in a stained saffron jerkin crouched braced at bay against the cliff face. One arm was muffled in a dusty dun cloak. The streaked fingers of his other hand were glued to the haft of a bloodied dagger. Heaped to one side like a sun-shrivelled hide, the corpse of a wyvern lay draped on the scarp. The gouged socket of the eye that took the death wound tipped skyward, stranded in gore like a girl’s discarded ribbons between the needle teeth that rimmed the parted, horny scales of its jaw.
Another living wyvern perched just beyond weapon’s reach, wings half-furled and its snake-slender neck cocked to snap. Its golden, round eye shone lambent in the gloom, fixed on the steel which was all that deterred its killing strike.
Arithon drew his horn recurve. The arrow he fired hissed down in angled aim and took the predator just behind the foreleg.
The wyvern squalled in mortal pain. Its finned tail lashed against the rocks. Torn vegetation and a bashed fall of stones clattered down the ravine. The leathery crack as its pinions snapped taut buffeted a gusty snap of air. One taloned hind limb raised to claw the shaft, then spasmed, contorted into death throes. The creature overbalanced. It battered backward and plummeted off the vertical rock wall to a thrash of scraped scales and torn wings.
The man with the knife jerked his chin up, his face a pale blur against the gloom. He cried in hoarse fear as another wyvern plunged from its glide in a screaming, wrathful stoop, talons outstretched to slash and tear whatever moved in the open.
Arithon nocked and drew a second arrow. ‘I thought you said they never fought in packs!’
‘They don’t.’ Morbidly riveted, Dakar watched the weapon tip track its descending target, the twang of release left too late to forgive a missed shot. Arithon’s shaft sang out point-blank and smacked home. The wyvern wrenched out of its plunge. It cartwheeled, the arrow buried to the fletching beneath its wing socket.
His envy compounded with unabashed regret for such nerveless, exacting marksmanship, Dakar qualified. ‘That was the mate of the one you killed first. The creatures fly paired. They defend their own to the death.’
‘I believe you.’ The edged look of temper Arithon threw back bruised for its knowing, poisoned irony. ‘But if you happen to be wrong, you’d better do the same.’ He thrust his bow and his unhooked quiver into the Mad Prophet’s startled grasp.
Unable to mask his raised hackles, Dakar glared as Arithon hurled himself over the lip of the ledge. ‘You think I’d bother? I don’t care how often you’re reminded. It’s no secret I’ll rejoice to see you dead.’
Arithon’s reply slapped back in hollow echoes off the sheer walls of the ravine. ‘I’m not quite the fool I appear. With eighty leagues of mountains between here and Forthmark, if you don’t fancy climbing, you’re stuck. Unless you find the sea legs to single-hand my sloop.’
‘That’s not funny.’ Dakar cast down bow and arrows in disgust and sucked in his paunch to give chase. If his descent was ungraceful, he was scarcely less fast. He dropped to the lower ledge in a shower of dragged gravel, yanked down