No man could maintain that immutable calm, or withstand the exhaustive drain of the sprites’ provocations. One break would touch off a concerted attack. For Arithon, the danger compounded since his trained talent posed him as antagonist. His self-willed composure cried challenge as moment to moment, the pressure increased. The brig bore the brunt. One after the next, her protections unravelled. The chain that had fastened the scuttle-butt mug broke away, hooking fittings and tripping up feet. Shouts erupted up forward: a rolling batch of loose dead-eyes skittered over the forecastle, whacking ankles and shins, and knocking a man down, unconscious. Coughs belowdecks bespoke a breached flour barrel, while an unlucky victim, beet-faced and cursing, chased hither and yon to recapture the flapping rags of his trousers.
If Evenstar’s crewmen were sore beset, the Koriathain also struggled to hold the wiggling bait in their trap. As Arithon’s virulent handling of sound disrupted the Prime circle’s control, the odd tempest blasted the face of the ocean. The random explosions at first promised hope, as more iyats succumbed to distraction. Tens and dozens soon flaunted their excessive energy, dashing up sheets of wild spray. Other flocks tussled in contrary whirlwinds, or snatched up the played-out scraps of the constructs. Yet the marginal respite was not enough. The hard toll of damages mounted.
No bard, no matter how gifted, could outlast his mortal endurance; limping and crippled, no beleaguered merchant ship could evade the armed might of an Alliance ambush.
No man stepped down, or admitted defeat. But the on-going pain of their hard-fought resistance crushed morale as each mishap compounded. Inside the stern cabin, the breathless steward batted and pounced on loose bedding. Pillows careened helter-skelter, and ripped apart in mid-flight. Scattered down loosed a blizzard, while the grim-faced mate made the rounds, collecting reports from below. Arithon shivered, soaked to the skin, while several small fish flopped in stranded panic across the boards under his feet.
On, the squall raged. Length and beam of the brig, the crew was rushed ragged in futile attempt to keep pace. The harder they strove, the more malice unleashed, every freed object made weapon and club, haranguing and slapping them bloody.
Then the mainstay let go with a crack. The mate’s timely shout sent a team up the rigging with block and tackle to jury-rig a replacement. Iyats coalesced and swooped to interfere. Harsh puffs of breeze and the buffet of torn clothing hampered all movement aloft. Topmen’s feet slipped off the shuddering ratlines. Again and again, hard-won progress was reversed, undone by pummelling setbacks. Knots and stout splices came unravelled at cruel whim. Unsecured rope ends became garrotes. Possessed lines bound, squealing, inside unruly blocks, and coils kinked in the sheaves. The sailhands faced lethal frustrations, determined. Uncomplaining, they laboured, dependent upon Dakar, who wore himself white, stringing stayspells.
As misfortune mounted, Fionn Areth still hung back, engrossed by his poisonous doubts. Yet as a mess of dropped tackle tried yet again to snag a young topman off balance, and a mate’s desperate snatch saved his jostled stance on the foot-ropes, the rigid denial could not be sustained.
Spell-craft and determination were all that forestalled the impact of tragic injury. Under siege by a fiend storm, the Alliance doctrine wore thin, that Athera’s conclaves of initiate knowledge founded the root of all evil.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn and a drunken spellbinder’s conjury held the Evenstar’s fate by a thread.
Should either one lose his rapt concentration, the plague would breed havoc until the brig lost her fight to stay seaworthy. The Prime and her seniors would not stand down until the brute contest reached closure. Laid hard against the self-evident fact, that his face had been fashioned as a live gambit to trap the last Prince of Rathain, Fionn Areth rubbed his aching temples. His righteous dedication to Araethurian good sense began to cramp reason, in hindsight.
That moment, Feylind yelled up from below. The iyats were broaching the water stores.
Arithon broke off his resistance at once. ‘Dakar! Mind the deck! I’ll go below!’
For of course, if the casks became wrecked, the brig’s crew would be left stripped of options. They must turn for shore and succumb to the ambush, or else waste from thirst one by one.
‘Man, you can’t!’ Up the mainmast, with the jury-rigged stay half-secured, and the mizenmast ratlines unravelling, Dakar shouted, frantic, ‘We’ll be at the mercy of that sigil, each minute. The Koriathain can’t withstand your bane-song. Their tracking hold’s loosened. Did you not feel the shift? The web they’ve cast over us is fraying! Show them one second’s respite, they’ll rally and slam us all over again.’
‘I know. Believe me, there’s no better choice.’ Erect, though the iyats shimmered and weaved in bilked riffles of wind all about him, Arithon was not calm, or dispassionate as he breasted the storm to the ladder and raced for the main-deck.
‘Use shadow!’ urged Dakar. ‘You’ve recovered the natural use of your talent. Damn all to these fiends. We’ll stay unharmed if we give in and sail. Turn for shore. The Prime will slack off, once we’re bearing the direction she wants to herd us. Surely before we reach landfall, we can raise some form of spell-craft to defang the threat of those galleys!’
‘No.’ The rejection rang, unequivocal.
Fionn Areth glimpsed Arithon’s face as he passed, taut with decision that could come to cost him his freedom, and worse. His anguish was backed by restless awareness: that if sorcery were invoked, the toll of such reckoning must outweigh even the lives and the friendship of his loyal allies on Evenstar. ‘That fleet is aligned with Lysaer’s Alliance! They are innocents, Dakar, bearing arms from blind fear. How many more dedicates will waste their lives if I show their conflict a tangible cause? I will grant no fresh proof that their terrors are real! Not by my hand, and not for self-preservation under my conscious consent!’
Which meant the assault would end here, in victory or hard-fought defeat. Evenstar would win free, or go down, with the choice of collateral damage ashore set aside by unflinching adherence to character.
Prodded by impulse, Fionn Areth charged forward and joined the crazed sprint toward the hatch. ‘I’m coming. You’ll need help.’
Arithon turned his head. He never broke stride. His rushed glance pierced, for its honesty. ‘I don’t have a solution,’ he warned point-blank. ‘If every-one on this ship could sing fiend banes, the Koriathain would still outlast us. But follow along. Grasp at straws, if you wish. For my part, there’s naught left but hare-brained tricks and invention born out of necessity’
Late Autumn 5670
Fiend Swarm
Belowdecks, enclosed by low beams overhead, the bangs and thumps of the fiend swarm seemed magnified. Fionn Areth trailed Arithon at reckless speed, his heart raced by trapped apprehension. He was grass-lands born, accustomed to open sky, with the sun and wind in his face. In this noisome, damp pit, airless dark became nightmare, made worse by the ravaging iyats. Possessed objects clattered, hell-bent to cause injury. Loose feathers clogged eyesight and breathing. Harried and tripped, he might fall and break bones, even drown, never again to glimpse daylight.
Ahead, the pale glimmer of Arithon’s shirt vanished into the gloom. Strewn flour foreclosed any use of a lamp. Never mind the fine dust became volatile tinder, iyats would find a live flame irresistible. Evenstar’s timbers offered too ready a fuel for an explosive conflagration. Fire would doom her crew fastest of all, roasting them in a pitch-fed blaze, or casting them adrift beyond sight of land, crammed into an open boat.
Arithon spared no thought for such matters. As well, a mage with initiate talent would not require a light. He pressed ahead with sped grace in necessity, where Fionn Areth must grope. Stumbling blind through the ship’s pitching dark, the herder kept on out of obstinacy.
At the bottom rung of the lower-deck companionway someone’s hands fumbled a grip on his clothing, then steadied his step in descent. ‘His Grace went that way,’ said the seaman on guard, breathlessly a
pprehensive. ‘The hatch to the hold. He’ll go down. You sure he’s asked for your company?’
‘Somebody ought to stand at his back,’ the Araethurian said in stout irony.
His grass-lands inflection raised instant contempt. ‘Yourself?’ carped the sailhand. ‘Watch his Grace’s back? I’d sooner trust him to a circling shark!’
‘Let him go,’ cracked Arithon. ‘I’ve already said the goatherd could please himself without hindrance.’
The sailhand’s clasp reluctantly loosened. ‘Off you go. That way. Harm comes to him, Feylind will scuttle you like a gaffed dogfish.’
Fionn Areth stayed silent. If Arithon fell to mishap, far more likely no man would be left alive on the brig to brandish the punitive knife. The goatherd blundered ahead through the buffet, beset by grisly smells and random barrages of fish guts: the opportunistic fiends had seized on a carcass, then torn it apart in possession. Gagging as he dodged the sting of flung cartilage, the Araethurian held still as his eyesight adjusted to the pin-holes of light fallen through the cracks in the main-deck.
Arithon knelt by the lower hatch, hazed by rope shreds and sundry whirled flotsam. ‘Shout topside,’ he called back to the watchful sailhand. ‘I’ll need a pry bar to draw the last nails.’
The man climbed for the main-deck, chased by whirled puffs of down and a sleeting glitter of fish-scales. He coughed to clear his airway, cracked the overhead hatch, dodged a hurtling shoe, and nipped through in dogged pursuit of his errand.
The brief flare of daylight unveiled the Prince of Rathain, intent gaze locked upon his made double. His stripping search lingered, unswerved by the ear-splitting clamour, or the yells of the cook, separately damning his pots. Against such hell-bent noise, a masterbard’s diction bit through with razor-sharp clarity. ‘Why are you down here? I want the truth.’
Fionn Areth could scarcely declare that he searched for a reason to hate. The excuse he presented hung, utterly lame. ‘I don’t understand you.’
Arithon slapped down the ace of spades that nicked in to gouge at his face. ‘You can’t explain why I have friends, with my history?’
Sweating beneath that unflinching perception, Fionn Areth let fly. ‘You would let us sink, here. Dishonour the vow you once made to a mother. See every-one you care about lost at sea, all for those others who’d trap you, ashore. Enemies who would just as soon see you burn. Folk with families you never saw. You dare the effrontery to act like they matter? I will not be deceived by such pretence!’
Their locked stare lasted. Even when the crewman returned and slammed the hatch to, dropping dark like a wall to separate them.
Out of that fiend-festered maelstrom, and through the tread of the sailhand, approaching, Arithon gave his answer. ‘We’re not done. Nowhere near close to losing those casks. This hull hasn’t yet sprung a critical leak.’ Dauntless, he accepted the offered pry bar, then began to draw nails, his exigent haste guided by mage-sight. ‘Koriathain know but one way to raise power, and I am not out of options.’
A squeak of tight wood saw the hatch cover loosened, and time had run out for discussion. ‘I’m going down,’ Prince Arithon said. ‘If you follow, beware. You’ll step into danger. At this point, I have to use fiend banes. The effects cause the iyats to disgorge their energies. They’ll fight, even turn in attack as they’re drained. My banishment cannot act on them cleanly. Not with three diligent circles of Seniors and the Great Waystone actively feeding them.’
His rapid statement in fact mapped a war against entities enspelled by coercion. The sailhand took back the pry bar, unasked. ‘You’ll sing interference throughout our ship, the same as you did before?’
‘No,’ Arithon said, then explained. ‘This pass, I’ll have to run the tonal vibrations through air. The Prime’s sigil is set into the sheathing and laid against Evenstar’s timbers. Opposed in headlong contact through wood, her forces and mine could spark off a conflagration.’ To the herder he added, ‘If you come, I can’t assure you protection. The swarm is going to center around me. Mishaps in that hold are going to increase. Since a quartz-driven binding won’t let the sprites leave, they’ve no choice but turn viciously violent.’ To the sailhand, he finished. ‘Seal the hatch. Keep it closed at all costs. If Evenstar burns, or starts taking on water, tell Feylind to abandon the ship. Launch the two boats with all hands and row for your very lives!’
The sailhand’s nerve wavered. ‘Leave you below?’
‘And any-one with me,’ Arithon cracked. ‘No questions. No argument. Batten the hatch. Post a diligent guard.’ As a wet crash from below signalled another cask hurled and demolished, he exhorted, ‘If I need aught else, I’ll shout. My voice, do you hear? You’ll not answer another.’
The seaman nodded, unhappy.
‘Good man. Hold the line.’ Beyond option, out of time, the Master of Shadow yanked open the grate. Air-borne water sprayed out, mixed into a gyre of splintered staves. He ducked the macerating onslaught, evaded the scything spin of a barrel hoop, and slipped through.
His agile descent down the ladder was hard followed by Fionn Areth.
The hold was a jet well, alive with the whining, vexed breezes of iyats seeking invention. Off to one side, a cask creaked and sloshed. The air smelled of bilge, hot steel, and soaked tarps, stitched by the manic splashing of waterspouts looped up in defiance of gravity. While Fionn Areth stood blind, groping clumsily to re-orient, a hardened hand caught his collar and yanked.
He staggered aside, while something bulky whipped past his head and just missed clubbing him unconscious.
‘Ballast rock!’ Arithon snapped in his ear. ‘Without mage-sight, you’re a helpless target.’
Again without asking, the grip steered him on. Fionn Areth was shoved the next stumbling step, then roughly repositioned, close enough to his enemy’s back that he felt the man’s light, rapid breathing.
‘Stay close! The iyats must demand all my attention, and no way else can you hope to survive this.’ Athera’s Masterbard gathered himself then, and launched into the threnodies for fiend bane.
The notes were arrhythmic, and difficult. Their tonal balance ached the teeth. Pressed against the singer’s vibrating form, Fionn Areth shared a sense of the coiling tension required to create the exacting pitch. Tuned sound pierced his mind like razor-taut wire. Each fluid, transformational run sieved deranging harmonics through the echoing hold of the ship. The flow pierced pandemonium. Its unsubtle, nerve-cringing tempo disrupted the iyats and sapped the flux of their energies.
Unable to cross-link their matrix of being into material possession, their hold upon captured objects faltered, then failed. A clatter of noise ripped the dark, as sprung wood staves, whirling barrel hoops and ballast stones, and scooped water sliced out of suspension and crashed. The din was horrific. The brig’s timbers rebounded to the bludgeoning impact of who knew what load of dropped wreckage. Without light, the damage could not be assessed. Pelted by spray and oddments of wood, while glued, sweat-soaked, to Arithon’s back, Fionn Areth fought blanketing panic as he faced the gravity of his predicament. He knew nothing of ships. The fierce slap of liquid over his feet might have been bilge, or a sprung seam that let in the sea. The blanketing dark left him no choice but to suffer the peril of joined battle, tied up by his helpless ignorance.
Beyond such uncertainty, Arithon sang, now pressing for increased volume. Though such harsh triplets must strain the voice, and unhinge the most rapt concentration, he struck each piercing pitch without cracking. Throughout the dimmed hold, the iyats responded. The freakish swarm shifted, impelled to escape the harmonies that gouged them to entropic destruction.
And there, true to Arithon’s horrific forecast, the Prime Matriarch’s sigil recontained them.
The hold’s contents and casks were no longer an arena for sport, but the field of contention for the energy sprites’ basic hold on survival.
Evenstar’s stakes were not one whit less. As the trapped fiends recoiled in back-lash, their locked c
ontest with Arithon redoubled. Gathered like wraiths, the unseen creatures closed in, lashing up vicious, hot breezes. Small objects and slivers of wood whistled in, stinging flesh and stabbing through clothing. Arithon changed key, raised his frequency, then sounded a drilling overtone through his teeth. The whistle ran chills over Fionn Areth’s skin and ripped like sharp pain through his viscera.
Rocked to vertigo, he snatched and caught Arithon’s shirt to keep balance.
The soaked flesh beneath was quivering with strain. Shocked by the force of the bard’s raw exertion, Fionn Areth almost tripped as a barrel hoop reeled into his feet. As Arithon’s fist snatched him short of a fall, then forcibly tugged him a tangential step sidewards, the herder realized: the urgent cue pressed him to move with his protector across the beleaguered hold. The Araethurian was forced to keep pace by touch. Smothered in darkness, he could not guess what bent drove the sorcerer’s intentions.
But the Master of Shadow engaged no dark powers. Through the bruising collisions, the barked shins, and the stumbling recovery of each misplaced step, Fionn Areth at last discerned the purpose: Arithon laboured to shift the imperilled casks farther aft. There, he padded them under a wadding of tarps and ripped netting, scavenged off the baled silk and sundry crates of stacked cargo.
Though clumsy, a talentless partner could help. Fionn Areth hefted barrels and lugged armloads of burlap in shuffled steps through the darkness. If the slippery bilge grating was littered with splinters, broken staves, and flung rocks; if he blundered into the sodden wads of dumped grain-bags and snarls of unspun silk, he regrouped, steadied upright by Arithon’s shoulder.
Throughout, the bard whistled his tooth-grating threnodies. Marked as their deadly adversary, the fiends whickered and dived, harrying at his person. They hampered his footsteps and snatched at his flesh, and snapped gusts to hinder his vision.
He sang them down. Unremitting, his voice drove their railing jabs back, pealing cascades of triplets that stayed achingly pure. As the casks were restacked and swaddled over in cloth, Arithon spared the astonishing grace to bestow the odd back-slap of encouragement.