Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [26]
None of the knights walked here with their lord unless they were specially invited. There was no greater honor than to be asked to climb Mt. Ambition with Lord Ariakan, sharing his stroll and his thoughts. Krell had come here often with his lord. It was the one place he most avoided during imprisonment. He would not have come here now, but that this peak afforded him the best view of the inlet and the dock, and the human speck that was attempting to climb what the knights called the Black Stairs.
Perched amid the rocks, Krell looked down over the edge of the cliff at Mina. He could see the life pulsing in her, see life’s warmth illuminating her, as a candle flame lights the lantern. The sight made him feel death’s chill all the more, and he glared down at her with loathing and bitter envy. He could kill her now. It would be easy.
Krell recalled a walk with his commander along this very part of the wall. They had been discussing the possibility of an assault on their keep by sea and arguing over whether or not they would use archers to pick off any of the enemy who were either bold enough or stupid enough to try to climb the Black Stairs.
“Why waste arrows?” Ariakan gestured to the boulders piled in heaps all around them. “We will simply toss rocks at them.”
The boulders were good-sized. The strongest men in the knighthood would have had to work hard to lift them up and heave them over the wall. Himself one of those strong men assigned to this post, Krell had always been disappointed that no one had ever mounted an assault against the fort. He had often pictured the carnage that those hurtling missiles would have created among an enemy—soldiers struck by the stones falling off the stairs, plunging, screaming, to bloody and broken death on the crags below.
Krell was sorely tempted to pick up one of those boulders and hurl it down on Mina, just to witness firsthand the destruction he had always fondly imagined. He controlled himself with an effort. Meeting this killer of death knights face-to-face was a rare opportunity, one not to be wasted. He was so looking forward to it that he actually cursed when he saw Mina slip and almost fall. If he’d had breath in his body, he would have sighed it out in relief when she managed to regain her footing and continue her slow and laborious climb.
The air was chill, for the sun was rarely allowed to break through the clouds that hung over Storm’s Keep. Exertion and the sudden flash of terror caused by her near fatal slip sent chill sweat rolling down Mina’s neck and breasts. The wind that keened endlessly among the rocks dried the sweat, set her to shivering. She had brought gloves, but she found she could not wear them. More than once, she was forced to dig her fingers into fissures and slits in order to drag herself from one stair up onto the next.
Every step she took was precarious. Some of the stairs had large cracks running through them, and she had to test each one before she put her weight on it. Her leg muscles soon cramped and ached. Her fingers bled, her hands were raw, her knees scraped. Pausing to try to ease the pain in her legs, she looked upward, hoping she was near the end.
Movement caught her eye. She caught a glimpse of a helmed head peering down at her from the top of the cliff. Mina blinked to clear her eyes of salt spray, and the head was gone.
She did not doubt what she had seen, however.
The stairs seemed to go on forever, climbing up to heaven, and at the top, Krell was waiting.
Below her, the sea surged over glistening, sharp pointed boulders. Foam swirled on top of turgid water. Mina closed her eyes and sagged against the cliff face. She was worn out and she was only about halfway up the stairs. She would be exhausted by the time she reached the top, where she would have to face the death knight who had somehow been warned of her coming.
“Zeboim,” Mina said with a curse. “She warned Krell. What a fool I am! So proud of myself to think that I had deceived a goddess, when all along it was the goddess who was deceiving me.