I’d often pondered a scheme to bring some of the impressive coal black impiters over from the Stratemsk in Turismond. They were hardy flyers and would do well in any new environment of Vallia or Havilfar. And you don’t need barbs in an aerial polearm...
I cursed. I realized what I was doing. My thoughts were maundering on like this because I could not face the truth.
My daughter Jaezila had gone flying off to find Tyfar, alone, hurtling into danger. And I was flailing along after her and this pestiferous mist shut down and prevented me from finding the way.
By Zair! If the mist clamped in... That I might be dashed to death on the rocks seemed to me then a mere trifle, a passing side effect of the greater tragedy. I had to get to the Pass of Lacachun!
Tyfar was trapped. Nedfar had mumbled something about a message being a trick. So Tyfar had gone to the rendezvous with a couple of regiments or so and had been trapped. If Jaezila flew into that scene... I used the loose strap on the tyryvol and he responded, beating strongly and churning the air. It was cold and dank and miserable; I scarcely noticed. The furs lay back in our voller. I barely missed them. All the chill deadliness of the Ice Floes of Sicce would not have worried me then. I flew after my daughter, and I refused to think of the time in the Eye of the World when I had flown after Velia, my daughter...
Zair would not allow that to happen again. He could not...
To left and right the craggy mountainsides lifted up to vanish into the clouds. Ahead the mist hung like congealed cobwebs. Below lay a boulder-choked stream, a mere ligament of silver wire. As we flew on and the jaws of the mountains closed, the river spouted closer and closer. Ahead of us now the pass lifted with the stream tumbling down in fronds of spouting silver and the mist crushing down from above. Most birds and flying animals will balk at flying through clouds, although some — the flutduin par excellence — can manage that tricky evolution. The wise men say the flutduins have an extra sense in their souls. Whatever the truth of that, the tyryvol flew lower and lower above the stream spouting amid boulders in the pass and would not fly higher into the mist.
Eventually the mist and cloud touched the ground ahead.
The way was barred.
No use hitting the flying animal. He craned his neck around, hissing. Each scale carried a drop of moisture. The leather was dark with water. I jumped off and, gripping the reins in a fist like a knobbly tree bole, I started walking, leading the flying beast along. He strutted, lashing his tail, most unhappy.
Boulders sprang away under my feet. Sharp edges of rock snapped at my ankles. I almost fell and dragged on the leading rein to support my weight.
The animal balked, rearing, flailing his wings.
“Come on, tyry! You can do it!”
A ferocious haul on the lead pulled him on. He saw there was nothing else for it. Wings folded, tail tucked, head outstretched, he followed me into the mist.
Dampness clung everywhere. The chill bit to the quick. At least, the stink of the wildmen eased from the saddle and accoutrements. It was necessary to keep on hauling on the lead, pulling the beast along. His clawed feet clicked and clacked among the stones. He maintained a nasty hissing sound, which indicated not vicious anger but rather a sort of misery. No time to feel sorry for him. Somewhere ahead in the Pass of the Jaws of Laca Jaezila might be facing dangers that would appall a paktun...
The whole world of Kregen consisted merely of a silvery gray whirl. Nothing existed except the stones under my feet and the leather leading rein in my fist. Sounds thinned. The clatter of the tyryvol at my back sounded as if it came from the other end of Kregen. The mist got into my body. I felt as though I floated. Yet upward lay the way. Upward over rounded boulders which rolled treacherously, and sharp-fanged slabs of rock that gashed at ankles and legs.
My state may be imagined when I say it took me a long time to realize what this mixture of rock and boulders meant...
A rushing sibilant sound gradually intruded on my dulled senses. In these dolorous conditions I half expected the Star Lords to appear with their blue radiance and their Giant Scorpion and snatch me up and away. But the roaring welter of sound growing louder as I stumbled on came from the stream. Here it must be leaping off some higher crag to the side and splashing onto the rocks. In a few moments drops of solid water flew out of the mist, stinging like hail.
I stopped, turning my head. The tyryvol, a mere shapeless blot of shadow at my back, hunkered down. The waterfall was wearing away the cliff, and every now and again a cascade of sharp rocks would fall. Hauling on the rein I started off, edging a little to my left, away from the fall.
The mist looked to be in agitated movement over to the right; the boulders slicked with wet. I stumbled and half fell, gripping the rein. The tyryvol let out a tremendous squawk and dived over me, wings out and flapping, and giving me a welt with his tail. I sprawled forward under the flying beast. He went on, and I could still see him, and he dragged me after him, bursting out of the mist and soaring out over nothingness.
Spinning like a spider at the end of a thread, I dangled beneath the flyer; all below me, thousands of feet down, spread out a vast rock-enclosed valley. Helplessly, I swung along under the flyer, who thrashed his wings in an ecstasy of flight after the prison of the mist.
The leather rein cut into my hand.
Gyrating like a bobbin, I saw the mountains circling me, spinning around and around. The stream spouted off the cliff and hissed down to hit at the side of the path where the tyryvol had dived into space. Mist pressed down above, shading everything into tones of gray and slate and purple. Across the valley the opposite cleft shot into view and out again as I spun. Up there lay the Pass of the Jaws of Laca.
My weight at the end of the rein dragged the animal’s head down. He kept trying to lift himself and wagged his head from side to side. I swung. Freed from the goading manthing who rode his back, the tyryvol wanted to free himself from the weight dragging his head down.
He began to claw and bite at the rein, twisting his head to seize the leather between his fangs, grasping it with his talons to steady it and wrench at it. The leather was good and strong and would last; but not for very long. Below me lay a drop into the Ice Floes of Sicce, for sure.
Hand over hand, I started to climb up the leading rein.
It was a race and the dratted flying beast knew it.
Sweat poured off my face. My muscles knotted. I hauled up disdaining to use my feet, for there was no time. It was a case of heave up, grab, heave up. The wind whistled about my ears. The tyryvol’s wings beat remorselessly, up and down, and his tail flicked about nastily.
The opposite side of the valley swam nearer.
His teeth were yellow and wicked. He tore at the rein. His head was dragged down with each upward lunge I managed. I jerked the leather, and then gasped; that might snap the stuff clean through. Up I went, and click click went his teeth. Oh, yes, a fine old to-do, sweaty and alarming and windy.
It was a damned long way down, by Krun!
He nearly had my hand off when I reached up for the last purchase. Snatching my hand away, I glared up at the beast. His eye glared back, malefic and wrought up. Clearly, he was saying, “If you can’t fly me properly then drop off!”
Gripping the leather with both hands I swung back. On the return swing, face uppermost, I forced the swing on. Like a phantom bursting from the pits of horror and disappearing, a flyer whipped past. The impression was all of flailing wings and rippling feathers, of a sharp beak and bright eye, and of a wildman skirling and screeching and prodding with his polearm.
The leather cut into my hand as I spun. The newcomer volplaned up, turning, revealing himself to be a small fluttlann, all white and pale blue. His rider shook his pole-mounted blade at me. His teeth showed. He was laughing at my predicament! He kicked in and the fluttlann pirouetted and dived on extended wings. Not fast, fluttlanns, not one of the more prized saddle birds of Havilfar; but they are pressed into service when nothing better can be had. It was perfectly clear this wildman saw himself gaining a powerful tyryvol. All he had to do was fly in and slash the leather leading rein away, the idiot who had fallen off his saddle would drop into the gulf, and the tyryvol would change ownership.
My tyryvol lifted his head. I swung about underneath. The fluttlann straightened, turned into a horizontal bar with a double blob at the center. The sharp steel blade of the ukra did not glitter in that mist-shrouded light, but it looked highly lethal and unpleasant.
No time now to go through the contortions of fighting a way past the tyryvol’s fangs up onto the saddle. By the time all that had been done the wildman would have finished it with a single blow.
Gripping onto the rein with my feet, catching a loop and drawing that over and down one foot to stand on it with the other, gave me a crazy kind of anchorage. My left hand held the leading rein. My right hauled out the Krozair brand. I nearly went head over heels into nothingness; but the blade whipped free. The fluttlann swerved at the last moment and the ukra slashed, wide and horizontal and deadly.
The Krozair brand met that sweep. Steel chingled against steel. The shock made the tyryvol’s head bob up and down like a water duck. Gyrating like an insect caught in a spider’s web, I got a breath, took a fresh grip on the handle of the sword, glared about the sky for the wildman.
He spun up, circled, turned and then hurtled down again.
This time, set, I angled the blow. The Krozair steel simply sliced clean through the stout wooden shaft of his ukra. The steel head spun away below.
He screeched — wild, incoherent mouthings. I shook the sword at him.
“If you want to finish it, come in! Otherwise — clear off.”
He circled. No doubt he was waiting for me to put the sword away so as to climb up. It occurred to me to consider the way Seg would handle this situation.
Seg could have done it easily, I know.
It was more difficult for me.
The wildman circled, around and around. The little fluttlann was willing. The tyryvol ploughed on, heading for the opposite side of the valley. That was my direction, also. There lay the Pass of Lacachun.
The wildman wouldn’t be going away. He’d wait. He had me. If I didn’t tire and fall off, he could sweep in any time he liked. His patience would be rewarded.
Savage and barbaric tribesmen are noted for impetuous anger and headlong attacks; also they do not take kindly to fools. Often they are less noted for patience, although patience is one of the basic necessities of survival in barbaric communities. Yet this very readiness to wait blinded the wildman to a simple answer to the problem. It was simple only if he trusted his own skill, and I judged him a young man, an unfledged would-be warrior who sought to gain a great coup by the capture of this tyryvol. So as I put the longsword away and reached around on my back, the wildman drew his leather-wrapped bowcase.
His gorytus was decorated in only the most rudimentary fashion: a line of beads and a handful of feathers. As he gained in stature the gorytus would become smothered in applied marks of his prowess. But if I got my shot in first his gorytus would remain undecorated forever.
Now here was where Seg would have come into his own.
I held the leather leading rein in my left hand and into that hand, parallel with the rein, I transferred the bow. An arrow drew from the quiver with that initial little resistance to show it was firmly affixed and would not fall out when I stood on my head — an occurrence of routine nature, I assure you, in aerial combat.
The wildman had drawn his bow from his gorytus by this time. He eyed me, quite aware what I was up to. I saw his teeth again. We fitted shafts within the space of the same heartbeat. He nudged his fluttlann and I felt the choke of bile in my throat as he flew a little way to the side. I was dangling uselessly and swinging in the opposite direction.
I contorted my body like a chiff-shush dancer out of Balintol, all liquid wrigglings and writhings. The tyryvol poked his head down and I sagged in the air. I looked up.
“Hold still, tyry, you ungrateful beast! That wildman will beat you, for sure.”
The leather coiled the other way...
The wildman shot a tiniest fraction of time before I did.
His arrow buzzed off somewhere. My shaft took him in the thigh. That was not my point of aim. Seg would not have missed.
The moorkrim let out a shriek of rage and reached for another shaft. He had not faced a Lohvian longbow before. His own flat bow, while a fine weapon for aerial combat, did not draw with the same long power as a Lohvian longbow. He had no idea that the steel-headed arrow, piercing through his thigh, pierced on into the body of his fluttlann.
The saddlebird faltered in the air.
His pale blue and white wings flurried, beat with a panicky stroke, another, slowed the rhythm, drew out to a wide-planing glide angle. The wildman shook his bow at me. His mouth was an oblong blot of shrieked anger.
I felt for the fluttlann. Like the freymul which is called the poor man’s zorca because it lacks much of the superbness of the zorca, the fluttlann is regarded as a second-class saddle flyer. The strange and, if you care to delve, pathetic item to note about the freymul on land and the fluttlann in the sky is that, both being regarded a little slightingly, both are better than reports say, and both are willing and courageous and will serve to the utmost of their strength. This fluttlann tried to keep up; but his wound was sore and deep. Slowly, he gave up the unequal struggle and planed away, spiraling, looking for a good place to alight. With him he carried one moorkrim who was wilder than most wildmen in those dying moments of conflict.
My tyryvol tried to bite off my left hand.
I stuck the bowstave up, in a reflexive gesture, and knocked his head away.
My problems were not over yet, by Krun!
A quick grab saved me from falling. The bow went back over my shoulder. The tyryvol turned his head sideways and surveyed me with an eye that was not so much beady as downright voraciously calculating.