And still, even still, Arithon remained unsatisfied.
Dakar sensed the drawn interval, the gathered moment of preparation. Through the harrowing unpleasantness he sustained to impound conscience and hold open the Shadow Master’s mage-sight, he felt the stripped-down, silverpoint discipline Arithon called into play to engage yet another course of augury. The tienelle’s influence by then was nearly spent. Through the friable webs of inner consciousness, Dakar sensed the poisons eroding his tissues to dissolution. Arithon would suffer the same awareness, and yet, his grip was as granite, and his assurance new steel as he raised his will to carve out his planned line of prescience.
‘What are you doing!’ Dakar wailed through the pause. He had no strength to spare to expound on the dangers.
‘I’m seeking a way to turn them,’ came Arithon’s reply. ‘If the warhost never marches, there won’t be any bloodshed. Lysaer may have a weakness in his resolve to seek my death. If he does, I’m going to find it.’
The task was impossible. Dakar tried to protest. He knew the Prince of the West, had watched him at Cheivalt and been forced through sorrow to an unwanted evaluation. Best of any he understood how the prince’s morality had been wrenched awry and used by Desh-thiere’s curse. The royal gift of s’Ilessid justice would never let Lysaer back down.
Arithon saw the same, but was undaunted. ‘There’s one way we haven’t tried yet. Make the stakes too punishing for even Lysaer’s staunch morals to endure.’
By then, Dakar had seen all there was to know of the mind of the Prince of Rathain. In a burst fired out by the tienelle, he guessed the horrific intent. ‘You can’t do this!’ he cried. ‘Don’t try, for your heart’s sake.’
But his warning was hammered aside.
Written in blood and in razed human lives, the desperate deterrent unreeled. Arranged for maximum impact and effect, Dakar was given a raw vista of twisted corpses and fired ships as fruits of a merciless slaughter. Alongside the handful of witnesses chosen by intent to survive, he beheld the utter death of hope.
The horrible, harrowing reverberation of their pain snapped his hold on concentration.
He had no second’s warning, no moment to prepare, as his senses overturned into an untimely, drug-fired augury. His birth-gifted talent sundered his control and ripped through, and like a cascading fall of dominoes, chaos stormed the breach.
Dakar cried out, racked over by truesight: of Lysaer s’Ilessid, brought weeping to his knees in a field tent, while a shaken, white-faced captain received orders: that the warhost was to turn in retreat.
‘There’s no foray worth the cost of forty thousand lives!’ Lysaer said. ‘I’ll not see my men lured in and toyed with just to be needlessly broken. The conclusion is plain: the Master of Shadow has made Vastmark a trap. He cannot be run to earth over ground he has chosen. We must pull back now and rethink our strategy until other ways can be found to destroy him.’
‘It’s going to work, what you plan,’ Dakar gasped. ‘When Lysaer receives word of the carnage, his warhost will be turned and disbanded.’
The next moment, his whole edifice of wards crumbled down. Protections cobbled together at need dissolved into scouring static. His grip on Arithon’s store of conscience slipped free to slam up the old barriers and lock off all access to his mage-sense.
Aware of disaster, hurled into pain as his inner sight crashed into darkness, Arithon grasped the fast-fading edge of knowledge. He wrung from the dregs of his failing talent a last twist of craft to effect a swift cut of unbinding.
Dakar had no moment to measure the effect. Darkness howled down like battening felt and drowned his last spark of awareness.
While dawn threw light like old ice through the stern window, the Mad Prophet reawakened to the gut misery of withdrawal, made worse by the slamming toss as the brigantine bucked over storm swells. The weather had gone foul with a vengeance as dire as the descent of Dharkaron’s Chariot. Rain flung in spatters on the mullioned casement. The reefed gear aloft crashed and shrilled to the shrieking swoop of rank gusts.
Arithon lay on the berth, limp to the jostle of the ship’s roll and scarcely conscious. The shivering spasms had left him wrung weak; his body had ceased its attempt to expel the raw poisons his lost powers could not transmute.
Dakar said the first rude word to rise to mind. Stripped by the ache of overextension, in no grand fettle himself, he understood by the hollow ring of sound in his ears that he was going to require a terrible effort to move, far less to begin a dangerous course of healing to ease Arithon back to recovery.
‘Are you all right?’ came a ragged whisper from the berth.
The Mad Prophet paused in his effort to swear. He peered across the creaking gloom of the cabin to where Arithon lay, eyes slitted in pain, but watching him closely all the same.
‘I have a headache that could kill,’ Dakar answered. ‘And balance so wrecked, I doubt I could manage to make a puddle in a chamber pot without missing.’ He refused to address the rest, or confront the meat of the question’s intent. For of course, he would never be quite right, nor be able to resume his past carefree ways. Stitched into memory beyond his power to dissolve, he held the pure recall of everything in life that Arithon s’Ffalenn had ever suffered.
The sting of conscience was unrelenting, and twofold for the parts where his personal lapses had added impetus to the burden: the scouring devastation of pride at Minderl Bay, the betrayal at Alestron’s dungeon, the loss of Halliron at Jaelot. Remorse was too paltry a concept to encompass the wretchedness he shared with Rathain’s prince. Pretence was ripped away. The conclusion he had to bear forward was forthright in simplicity: that Arithon s’Ffalenn was no criminal at all, but a creature of undying compassion whose natural bent was to celebrate an irrepressible joy for life.
Music could free that hidden aspect, had the burdens of royal bloodline and the Mistwraith’s curse between them not forced his nature away from his birth-born inclinations.
Dakar looked up, touched to sorrow, to find Arithon’s weighted gaze still fixed in stilled patience on his face. ‘You’re going to go through with this,’ he said in choked reference to that unspeakably lethal last augury outlined for a small, coastal cove called the Havens. ‘Ath show you pity.’
‘No choice.’ Arithon looked sick white for the knowledge that his chance was now lost, to recheck and sound for a full set of sureties. For his trouble he held only one frail thread of hope behind a proposed action that courted the edge of cold murder. ‘I have your scried proof. The tactic of terror alone will turn Lysaer. What are five hundred deaths in exchange for the lives of forty thousand?’
‘You take a great risk. The whole plan could go wrong.’ Dakar pressed pudgy palms to his thundering temples, magnified and made worse by the pound of the ship’s timbers, hurled working against contrary waves. He was too reamed with weariness to define nuance, that his auguries manifested two ways. The ones he saw as visions were always mutable, subject to change or reverses if subsequent circumstances intervened. Others came in blind fits of spoken prophecy, beyond his recall when he awoke. These alone held pinpoint accuracy, and if the content of their riddles held opening for change, only the Fellowship had seen proof.
The vision of Lysaer recalling his troops had borne no such terrible certainty. ‘Arithon, what if the purpose of your killing field fails?’
Curled into a reaming fit of dry heaves, the Master of Shadow closed tormented eyes. He answered with no change of position as soon as he was able to command speech. ‘I’d be forced to follow through, as you saw. Ath’s pity has no part. By blood oath to Asandir, I’m charged to survive. If the ploy fails and I draw the wrath of that warhost into Vastmark, I can’t let my allies come to die for it.’
The Mad Prophet hung mute, unable to refute that tortured course of logic.
As if the dread in that moment were shared and transparent, Arithon ended, ‘I’ve made the issue no longer your concern. You haven’t felt the change? You’
re no longer bound to me by duty.’
And Dakar understood in wild exhilaration just what that desperate, last unbinding had achieved.
Arithon had made a gift in return for his sacrifice: had broken his Fellowship master’s geas and ceded back his unimpaired freedom.
Except for Asandir’s verbal charge of service, Dakar’s free will was once again his own. He drew breath to speak, then coughed through his beard, crestfallen. For the issue was no longer simple. The changes to his person had been driven too deep; and an arrow’s fatal role in the Shadow Master’s affairs remained yet to happen in the winter.
Dakar took stubborn hold, pushed himself to his knees, then shot a poisoned glare at his nemesis. ‘You won’t be rid of me so easily, and anyway, you’re going to need a nurse who knows how to draw you clear of a tienelle poisoning.’
He was Arithon’s man, that much could not be changed, at least until after the campaign was turned in Vastmark. Only then could he measure the impact of what he had become. He had until equinox to weigh the warning impact of his augury and decide whether he should abandon Lysaer to fate and stay involved with the Master of Shadow.
Strike at the Havens
Summer’s end saw Lysaer’s proud warhost in their closing march upon Vastmark. They came from the north, through the passes beyond Thirdmark, under snapping pennons and sunlit lances and scudding clouds. From the walled city of Ganish, they came on by road, then by river, to march in dusty columns over the parched stems of the late summer grasses into the wilderness beyond. They skirted the lower foothills of the Kelhorns from Forthmark, the brilliant banners, polished armour, and glittering, gilt harness of pedigree commanders flung like hoarded jewels against the dusty landscape, bleached to the duns of sun-faded velvet by the pitiless southern latitude.
Their orders were simple: to cordon the territory in a living noose, then to engage and clean out any ally of the Master of Shadow.
Like the closing fingers of a gauntleted fist wrought of forty thousand dedicated lives, they came also by galley and fishing boat to crush out an enemy they well knew for an author of dangerous sorceries. Into the stiff, shifty winds that presaged the first change in season, uncounted small fleets nosed up the shadowy narrows of South Sea and through the twisted straits into Rockbay Harbour. Each had decks packed to the gunwales with armed men. On shores north and south, headhunters and town garrisons converged on the peninsula of Vastmark, to land on stepped shingle and ledges of moss-rotten rock, and to invade the high ramparts of its twin walls of mountains, arrayed like jutted battlements toward the sea.
Among a hundred such landings, one was singled out.
Flattened amid a fractured clutch of shale on the brim of a cliff, his black hair stirred to a clammy breeze off the inlet known as the Havens, the Master of Shadow lay cat still. He wore no armour, but only a grass-stained shepherd’s jacket and tunic; on his person he carried no weapon beyond a knife. His intent study encompassed the cross-weave of rigging and yardarms of a fleet of merchant brigs and fishing sloops, recently anchored.
‘They’re lazy as well as careless,’ he murmured, for the haphazard way the sails on the vessels had been left brailed up to the yards.
‘Well,’ said Caolle in sour censure behind his shoulder, ‘you wanted a place where they’d play straight into your design.’
‘Killing is killing,’ Arithon said, flat bland. ‘Are you faint? I’m surprised. After all those murdered couriers out of Jaelot, I didn’t think you had any tender spots left to offend.’
The barb shamed Caolle to stiff silence; a contrary and difficult service he had of this prince, but one he was forced to respect. Bloodshed had never balked him for the sake of his clans in Deshir. If Arithon’s proposed tactics lay outside his approval, there were headhunters’ devices amid the town pennons which streamed from the mastheads below. Except for the odd fishing sloop out of Merior, these men marked as prey were not innocent or harmless, but professionals as dedicated as he.
Reduced to black specks by height and distance, four companies of troops seethed up from the feet of the cliffs. They seemed insignificant as wingless insects against that vast landscape, but for the chance-caught glitter of sunlight on mail or the coloured threads of yarn that were banners. The occasional shouted order spiralled up, half-masked by the clicks of summer crickets in the broom.
Minutes became an hour, with only the formless shadows of clouds fanned in movement across the upper scarps. To the invaders who toiled upslope, the scabbed old ridges their advance scouts searched seemed bare, tenantless; raked over by winds, and too steep to harbour any trees or small scrub, far less an outpost for ambush.
What their maps did not show, and their legends had forgotten, were the caves stitched between the seamed ledges, for which the Havens had been originally named.
A clan scout emerged from such a crack to pause at Caolle’s shoulder. Words passed between them, low and hurried; then the scout slipped back into the brush.
To Arithon, the clan war captain said, The headhunters’ advance foray has given their officers safe signal. The garrison divisions have started up the rocks. If you’re bent on going through with this, you won’t be getting better timing.’ Then, to shrug off the leftover sting of rebuke, he added, ‘My liege, let me have the honour. I ask to fire the first signal.’
‘No.’ Just that one word; royal claim to a responsibility no other would be suffered to share.
Arithon s’Ffalenn slid back from the precipice. He took up the strung bow of black-lacquered horn set waiting against a rock, then chose the first of three marked arrows arrayed in a row in the dirt. The red streamers affixed to its head flicked over his shoulder as he knelt and nocked the first. Slight, thin-tempered, dwarfed by the bowl of the Vastmark sky, he made a drab figure against its surfeit of colour as he drew and took aim.
The hammered look of anguish his features showed then gave even his war captain pause.
Then the bowstring sang into release. The arrow arced up, poised, tipped into irrevocable descent. Ribbons unfurled behind in a snapping tail of bloody scarlet.
Men tucked in concealment in the crevices of the cliffs saw the flagged shaft’s passage. It plunged seaward like the fall of an evil portent, harbinger of an unnatural steel rain, and sure death for the troops below.
The stakes were unrelenting: clan archers with longbows and years of skill hunting game in the lean northern winters to feed their families; tribe marksmen with their powerful, horn recurves, unerring at bringing down wyvern, a prey they could spit through with pinpoint accuracy as it spiralled on the high thermal currents. The hundred and twelve bowmen chosen for this foray had been ruthlessly selected for steady nerves and unfailing obedience. As the red-tagged signal snapped earthward, all drew their weapons. They took aim, and shot from the sun-scoured cliffs into ranks who toiled in strewn formation over uncertain footing on the mountain’s flanks.
The wasp hiss of air over fletching became all the warning human targets received.
Then the hail of barbed shafts struck. The first casualties wrenched and went down, sprawling, rattling, writhing uncontrolled in their death throes down the baked, stony slopes. Living companions flattened back against the rim walls, only to become transfixed as they stood, blades drawn in hand. They were helpless to strike back. The enemy who slaughtered was beyond reach, beyond view. In vain, townbred archers squinted upward against sun-glare to seek retaliation against invisible targets. Trapped helpless, they died, while flight after enemy flight sleeted in and pared their ranks, remorseless.
The dust-dry stone became ribboned in blood. Broadheads took men seasoned at war and raw recruits with no discrimination. Men scrabbled to seek cover in terrain that showed them no mercy. They crumpled, buckled at the knees, or jerked over backward with arms outflung at the shock of impact, crying in pain and cruel rage.
Ones not broken outright on the rocks thudded onto the shingle, where their blood ran and mingled and sullied the salt breakers which
ruffled the shoreline, uncaring.
On the clifftop, Caolle knuckled his fist to closed teeth, raked over by a sudden wash of cold sweats. He had seen war; had fought and inflicted ugly carnage in his time. This was not battle, but a living, tearing nightmare that made him want to cringe and block his ears.
Below raged a chaos tripped off and arranged, coil within coil like a clockspring. Hazed beyond grief, officers cried orders over the screams of mounting casualties. The fallen were beyond hope to rally; the terrified had lost wits to heed. Retreat became a melee of panic, a desperate, zigzagging rush from cleft to outcrop that invited the slip, the missed footing, the rocking, final plunge into air. As many men succumbed to falls as to bowfire; smashed onto rocks and buttresses of shale like knives, no less agonized, no less dead for the fact the Wheel took them in accident.
‘Turn them back! Ath’s pity, get them down to the boats!’ cried a garrison commander from the beachhead. Erect in dedication, he wore the black-and-gilt surcoat emblazoned with Jaelot’s gold lions. As a man who had once matched companionable bets over bows with the conniving imposter, Medlir, he knew beyond fear what he faced.
Help came to his cry. In the narrows between the cliff heads, captains screamed for longboats to be launched; for crewmen to unbrail canvas and man capstans to weigh anchor. Headhunters and town troops alike were in flight, and still, the marksmen in the heights main tained their incessant barrage. This was not war, but unconscionable slaughter. Men shook their fists, or scattered and ran, or huddled in clusters under targes that failed to protect. Arrows raked the clear air and pinned their scrabbling, yelling figures like flies, whether they struggled in mad flight, or stood ground in a vain effort to cover their comrades’ retreat.
Jaelot’s guard captain dropped in the shallows, clawing at an arrow in his thigh. Two sword-bearing headhunters leaped to assist, cut down on the next flight to share the watery cradle of his agony. The next crest dashed their dying convulsions against the pebbled shale ledges. Amid the heaving, shouting knot of survivors pinned under fire on the strand, boats were relaunched into surf. Men rammed the keels against the unravelling foam in frenzied haste, trampling over wounded and bumping over bodies to escape a rain of shafts no defending troop could hope to cut back with cross fire. Cries of terror and mortal pain rang thin over the screams and the echoes shot back by walling rock.