IX
Ammen Sharp hated the mountains. He hated the unruly horse he rode, and the bitter rain that fell upon him. He hated his rumbling hunger. It had been so long since he had slept that his head felt as though it was stuffed with feathers. The place where the dog had bitten his leg throbbed. But still he rode on, wrestling with his recalcitrant mount, hoping that soon, somehow, this would all be over.
Word that the Shadowhand had left Kolkyre spread so quickly around the city, riding a wave of relief, that Ammen Sharp had known of it within hours. He soon learned that Mordyn Jerain had gone east, accompanied by only a few warriors. Ammen did not care where the Chancellor was going, or why. He knew precious little of what roads led where, or which towns lay in which direction. The sum of his understanding resided in the names that Kolkyre’s three gates bore: the road from the Skeil Gate went to Skeil Anchor, that from the Donnish Gate to Donnish and that from the Kyre Gate, by which the Shadowhand had departed… well, that went up the Kyre River. Where it ended did not matter to Ammen. His sole concern was whether he could follow the Chancellor.
At first, when he heard that the Shadowhand was gone, he had been seized by panic. It seemed that he had lost whatever slender chance there had been of avenging his father’s death. To his shame, he had cried briefly, huddled inside the crumbling kiln he had taken as his hiding place, clutching his knees to his chest. He cursed himself for a fool, a child, and a weakling. Anger dried up his tears.
Once he thought about it with a cooler head, he knew what he needed: a horse. He was a bad rider but he could probably stay in a saddle for a trot, perhaps even a canter. Ochan had thought a son of his should know at least that much. He had said more than once that a man never knew when a horse might be just the thing he needed to put his troubles behind him. Ammen saw the sense in that, as he did in everything his father had said, though he had never seen Ochan in a saddle himself.
He considered stealing a mount inside the city but quickly discounted the idea. From the moment the recent flood of strangers – warriors from every Blood, pedlars, thieves, dispossessed farmers and woodsmen from the Glas valley – had started lapping around Kolkyre’s walls anyone with anything worth protecting had been buying themselves guards. Every stable he could think of was almost certain to be protected. The city’s gates were, in any case, choked with attentive sentries these days, and Ammen knew he did not have the look of the rightful owner of a riding horse. He must, he reasoned, leave on foot, and find the mount he needed beyond the walls.
Hours later, trudging down a muddy track in the near-dark of a cold evening, he had doubted his choice. He was already tired, even then, and those open spaces had made him feel vulnerable and exposed. He missed the sheltering presence of buildings, alleys and crowds. There were too many noises that he did not recognise, out here amongst the fields and ditches and copses: animal sounds, the creaking of branches or rustling of leaves. And smells: the stink of manure, the wet, green scent of weed-choked field drains.
But fortune had smiled upon Ammen in the night, and he found a solitary horse shut up in a big shed. A dog had come at him, and torn his leggings and gashed his leg. He had killed it with his knife. There had been shouts behind him as he rode away into the darkness, but no pursuit. He almost killed himself without the aid of any irate farmer, since the saddle he had hurriedly flung across the horse’s back was not properly fastened and the stirrups were far too long for him. When he finally found the courage to stop and dismount so that he could try to rearrange everything, he almost lost the horse. It took all his strength to hold it. Since that terrifying moment he had stayed astride the animal, ignoring the agonised protest of his muscles.
So now he rode on, beyond exhaustion, up and up into higher, bleaker territories. The rain had soaked him so thoroughly that he expected at any moment to start shivering. The pack on his back felt so heavy it could have been filled with lead, even though there was little in there now save his water skin and little crossbow. The hard stone surface of the road seemed a huge distance below him, and he began to worry about falling off and breaking some bone. Ammen did not know how much further he could go. The only thing that kept him moving onwards was the knowledge that he was on the right track. He had spoken to an old man, thick-accented and suspicious in the doorway of his stone hut, and learned that a party of Haig men had ridden this way.
The rain stopped and the sky cleared as night began to fall. For a multitude of reasons, he did not dare to stop: he would fall still further behind the Shadowhand, his horse would run away as soon as he was off its back, he would fall asleep by the roadside and freeze or be killed by some cutpurse. Held erect only by stubbornness, he remained in the saddle and hoped for a moonlit night. He got it.
Some indeterminate time after the last wink of the sun had been snuffed out on the western horizon, and cold moonlight had turned all the world to shades of grey, he saw the light of windows and torches ahead. So fearful was he now of any encounter with another living thing that he kicked his reluctant mount into a trot so that he might pass by quickly. As he did so, clattering up the road, he saw a clutch of houses on the bare slope above the road, and amongst them an inn. There was a stable block, with guards outside it, and another pair of warriors loitering at the door of the inn. Staring back over his shoulder as he rode away from the hamlet, Ammen discovered his mind to be briefly alive once more. It could only be the Chancellor and his escort, he thought.
Dawn found him slumped over the neck of his horse. The animal stood at the edge of the road, tearing at some spiky grass. Ammen Sharp jerked into wakefulness, almost crying out at the stiff agonies that beset his back and legs. The horse barely stirred beneath him. It was at least as drained as he was. Horrified at his lapse, Ammen looked this way and that. Dawn had only just broken. The light was insipid, and he was deep in the shadow of the mountains to the east. He could remember little of his ride through the night, other than the single bright moment of his discovery of the Shadowhand’s party. He could not even be sure how far ahead of them he was.
He did not get much further. The pain in his bone and muscle was too great, the fog in his head too obscuring. He lacked the strength to keep fighting against the horse’s desire to stop. Each time it came to a listless halt, it took still more savage work with his heels to force it into motion again. At the point when he was on the verge of surrender, undone by both the animal’s weakness and his own, Ammen looked up and saw the ruin of some hut or storehouse a short way up the slope above the road. It was like no building he had ever seen, with huge slabs of flat stone that bore some kind of writing, but it was close, and it was a hiding place.
Groaning at the effort, Ammen swung one leg up and across the horse’s haunches and stumbled to the ground. He almost fell. His legs had forgotten how to bear him. As soon as his foot touched the ground, the place where the dog had bitten him flared into protest. The horse turned its head to stare at him and he was afraid that it would kick him. He slapped its rump as hard as he could and it trotted on up the road, the stirrups flapping at its side.
Even the short climb up to the little ruin cost Ammen every sliver of his remaining strength. He slumped down amidst the pile of rocks and wept, out of desolate, despairing fatigue.
Mordyn Jerain rode the stone track to Highfast in silence. He ignored – often did not even see – the fields and farms and villages, the hills and scree slopes, that passed by. He felt, now and again, the edge of the wind or the chill spray of a shower, but would only tug the hood of his cape a little lower, hunch his shoulders, and then forget the weather once more. His mind was busy. He thought of his precious Tara and his Palace of Red Stone; he wondered what strange sights and people might await him in the castle of the na’kyrim to which he travelled; he gnawed away at the question of how best to bring Orisian oc Lannis-Haig to heel; he sketched out, somewhat despondently, a number of ways in which Aewult might mishandle the recovery of the Glas valley.