A gulf of light opened to his left, and the horse shied wildly, hooves slipping in the wet loam, almost stumbling over the cliff at the top of the slide. It jerked back upright.
Inglis kept going, the saddle yanked from under him. The world whirled wildly around his head. For an instant, the bed of broken boulders far below him invited him like a bed in truth, an offer of rest at the end of an impossibly long day. A branch brushed his arm, and his hand closed convulsively, unwilled. Bark and skin grated each other off like bits from a blacksmith’s file. Wood snapped, he turned again in air, grasped, arm yanked straight, held, slid, lost it, turned, and smacked hard on his side. If he’d had any breath left, the last impact would have knocked it out. His lungs pulsed and red murk flooded his vision before he was at last able to inhale again.
It was a dozen breaths before he could lift his head and see where he’d landed. Raw stone blocked his vision a foot from his nose. He twisted the other way, and looked out over the gray valley. He’d come to rest on an irregular ledge about halfway up the sheer drop at the head of the rockslide. It was deeper than a kitchen chair, but only just, and several paces long, but they were paces that led only out into air at the ends.
No way to climb back up. No way… well, one way down. He eyed the broken rocks fifty feet below him, and wondered if the half-fall would be enough to kill him outright. Certain death still held attraction. Uncertain death, less so. He hurt enough already.
The skin of his hands was torn, his shoulder wrenched, his bad ankle… not improved. Spectacular bruises for sure. Amazingly, his neck and back and bones generally seemed intact.
Fifty feet above him, piteous whines sounded. A few barks, less labored or frantic than before—more puzzled yaps, really. Whatever are you doing down there? they seemed to say.
Truly, I have no idea. I have no idea about anything anymore.
He lay on his ledge and concentrated on breathing, achievement enough.
After a time, he became conscious of movement below him. He pushed himself a little up and looked over. The drop reminded him of crawling out on the roof of the kin Boarford’s Easthome city mansion, five floors above a cobbled street—Tollin had dared him, he recalled. The pale face of the sorcerer looked up at him, head back-tipped. Penric was breathing fast, but otherwise seemed unfairly unruffled.
He shook his head, and called up, “I swear, Inglis, you have a talent for disasters. …It’s not a good talent, mind you. On the other hand, I’d suspected you had help, and now I’m sure of it.”
Inglis could go neither up nor down, right nor left. He felt as exposed as a wolf pelt nailed to a stable door, and as empty. He could think of no reply, not that the sorcerer had invited one, exactly.
A hundred paces away across the scree, where the path had been cut off, Gallin cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Baar caught a horse! We’re going for ropes!”
Learned Penric waved a casual hand in acknowledgment of this news, a lot less excited than Inglis thought he should be. “That will be some time,” he said, half to himself—the over-keen hearing that had come so disconcertingly with his wolf-within had still not deserted Inglis. Penric skinned out of his heavy jacket, turned up the cuffs of his linen shirt, rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms and laced his fingers together, shook them out. “Well, then,” he muttered. “I decline to shout spiritual counsel from the bottom of a well, so I guess I’d better be about this.”
He flattened himself to the cliff wall and began to climb, barely visible handhold to barely visible foothold.
His mouth opened, and his voice emerged in a strained, sharp cadence Inglis had not yet heard from the man: “Penric! I have many powers, but I can’t make us fly!”
Penric grinned, fierce in his strain. “Then you’d best keep quiet and not interrupt for the next few minutes, eh?”
At a distance, at first, he seemed to scale the rock face like a spider. As he grew closer the illusion dropped away, and he was clearly a man, taller and heavier than he had quite seemed in his smiling affability; the tendons stood out in his hands and arms as he pulled himself up. As he gained each few feet he wheezed, “I admit… it’s been… a while…” When he at last reached the edge of the ledge, he very definitely heaved himself over, scrambling, not like the airy aplomb of vaulting on his horse. “Thank you, Drovo,” he gasped, incomprehensibly, rolling to his knees, shaking out his hands again. “I think.”
Slowly, gingerly, Inglis pushed himself upright and scooted back till his spine met the stone. His outstretched feet hung over the abyss. Breathing heavily, Penric plopped himself down beside him and stretched his legs out, too. They might have been two boys seated side-by-side on a log across a stream. Perhaps feeling the same, Penric picked up a loose stone and tossed it over the side, cocking his head as if listening for the splash. The faint crack of its landing was a long time coming.
Pinned crookedly to the left shoulder of his weskit, Inglis saw, where it had lain concealed beneath his coat, the divine sported the Temple braids of his full rank, three loops of interlaced white, cream, and silver, the hanging tails tipped with silver beads. They were stiff and clean, as though seldom worn since Penric had taken his oaths. That could not have been so many months before Inglis had been invested with his own powers. Penric’s ceremony had probably had less blood in it.
Although, considering the necessary origin of his demon, not less death, nor a lesser sacrifice. Hm.
Oswyl’s voice called from the rubble below: “Is he all right? Or were you prophetic about precipices?”
Penric swung around on his belly and hung his head over the edge, a move which made Inglis shudder. He did stretch and crane till he could just make out the locator, standing below looking up as Penric lately had.
Penric waved back. “Seems to be little the worse. Shaken up, though.”
“Fools and madmen,” Oswyl muttered, and sat down on a handy boulder, heaving an exhausted sigh. A bigger man, he did not seem inspired to hoist himself up what Inglis had taken for a sheer rock wall after the divine. Sorcerer. Whatever he was. He raised his face and voice and added, “Remember what I said about putting him on a horse?”
Penric grinned, and called back, “Remember what I said about the luck of such a ride?”
“Huh.” Oswyl grimaced like a man sucking vinegar. “Carry on, O Learned One.”
“I intend to. Is he not what every Temple divine desires, a captive audience?”
“I still want him back when you’re done with your lessons.”
“Pray for us, then.”
The gesture Oswyl made back at this was not in the least holy. Penric, still grinning, spun around and sat back up, and Inglis’s spine sought the reassuring rock again.
The grin faded to a thoughtful look, and Penric began to edge away, then stopped himself. “Scuolla has joined us,” he said quietly.
“Is that”—Inglis’s hands went to his temples—“why I feel this horrible pressure in my head?”
“Did you hit it, in your fall?” A look of medical concern flitted across Penric’s features, and he leaned across the space to lift his palm and press against Inglis’s forehead; Inglis flinched.