Warhost of Vastmark
‘There were fourteen other inlets like this one,’ someone grumbled. ‘It’s a living oddity, why our prince should’ve left those alone. We had enough archers. Raids could have been launched on all of them, with three thousand murdering townsmen left lying as wyvern bait tonight.’
‘Good thing his Grace is beyond earshot,’ somebody else ventured from the sidelines. ‘Mood he’s in now, he’d be like to knife you on reflex for loose talk.’
Dakar edged off from the circle of scouts. He checked, unsurprised to find the fire where Arithon had knelt brewing remedies deserted and burned down to ash. The battered brown satchel remained, its canisters of herbs, its neat rolls of bandaging, and glass flasks of tinctures and elixirs undisturbed where they had been left. The straps that fastened the flap were tied shut, sure sign the prince was not making rounds to check the injured.
Dakar paused. He rubbed the itchy bristles of his beard, filmed in the bitter dust that at summer’s end seemed to coat everything. While the crickets scraped in their hanks of dry grass, he stood in troubled thought and pondered where to look for a man who would at this moment hold a virulent aversion for companionship.
His memory of Ath’s shrine at Ship’s Port came back, on the night of Halliron’s death.
After the first moment of fainthearted hesitation, Dakar turned away from the campfires, where the jokes rang a fraught pitch too shrill. He walked under starlight, the heads of seed-tipped grasses tapping his cross-gartered calves, and the lichens on their beds of exposed shale crumbling under his step. He wound through gorse and bracken and the crushed fragrance of wild thyme until he reached the scarp overlooking the sea.
A half-moon threw needled light across waters pooled deep indigo between the knees of the headlands. The winds combed the wild rocks, cleanly freighted with salt. Insects clicked their frenzied last mating song before the killing autumn frosts. A man who had access to mage-sight could pick out the blue-white dance of their life energies, like tiny constellations of stars strewn amid the tangled briar stems and the rustling, forked stands of bracken.
A man trained to vision could see also the hazed burn of life force undone and ripped into untimely death; the animal magnetism released with spilled blood, that fanned like a taint of ill-spawned fog on the airs overhanging the Havens. The shocked blur of light would fade slowly with the passage of days, until only the rock would retain any trace of the vibration. There, the faint resonance would stay preserved like a cry in deep darkness, to remind of a violence long past. Once, when Ilitharis Paravians had walked the land, their song had eased such haunted strains of burdened energies into peace. The silver fall of rain would perform the same office, but over time, through the thousands of years that framed an age.
A prince with his mage talent blinded would see no mark at all; but his masterbard’s ear might hear the wails of the spirits caught in shuddering confusion, who had yet to refind themselves as whole spirit in completed transition out of life. He might ache in despair for his lost powers, that in this time and this place could effect no ritual of release for his unforgiven toll of dead.
Touched to concern, Dakar hurried his step. He trampled through late-season asters, flecked like floating lace amid the broom. Before he was ready, he came upon a steep promontory, isolated from the land by the knife-edged slope of a trail. And on that battered height, a balled outline against sky, he made out a figure hunched into itself, arms wrapped over knees as if such a posture could bind an unwilling spirit into its vessel of bruised flesh.
Another moment only, Dakar balked on the ridge. Then, steeled against whatever rebuff might await him, he set foot on the scarp and edged forward.
Arithon s’Ffalenn remained still as the intruder he did not want stopped to a chink and scrape of boot leather over crumbled shale. He spoke through his fingers in stabbing, sudden venom. ‘I suppose you couldn’t resist the chance to come and meddle.’
Unpractised at minding the affairs of others, Dakar ventured the first words to cross his mind, just to fill in the silence. ‘You’ll gain nothing by brooding.’
The awkward moment came anyway, while wind patted fingers through his unkempt hair, and twisted and untwisted the cord lacings on the other man’s suede herder’s jacket. ‘You have no choice now and there’ll be none tomorrow. The blood’s been let. Accept what’s finished and have done.’
Fine drawn in malice, Arithon stirred. ‘You’ll not put the cloak of suffering martyr over me. I fight because I will it, remember? Else I’d be aboard Khetienn and far from these shores. The remorse tonight must be Lysaer’s.’ He uncoiled further to disclose a leather flask cradled in the crook of his elbow, then jerked out the tasselled cork to an unmistakable sweet scent of strong spirits. ‘Drink to my half-brother’s tears with me?’
Dakar ripped the proffered flask out of strong fingers and threw it, gurgling in protest, over the cliff face. Without heat, he said, ‘You damned fool. I know you too well not to guess the exact measure of your feelings.’
‘And curse you for that, while I think of it,’ Arithon said. The words clipped short in a cough. His hands moved in a blur to shutter his face and he twisted aside in the grass.
Aware of what was happening, Dakar dropped to his knees. He caught the prince’s racked shoulders in a grasp that clamped bone, and held on through a horrible interval. Arithon lost grip on every nerve all at once, bent helpless in a vicious, heaving nausea that seemed to go on far too long.
‘Have you eaten anything since morning?’ Dakar asked as dry retching let up enough to allow an attempt at speech.
Spent in a shivering huddle, Arithon assembled sound into speech with great effort. ‘Ask Caolle. He’s been the tireless nursemaid.’ He was too beaten even to set sting to his tone.
Familiar with overwrought nerves from the course of his prescient fits, Dakar knew such sickness. The shudders that wrung the other man were not going to subside until total exhaustion forced collapse.
Belated and thrown out of his depth, he came to understand worse: the prince beneath his hands had lost himself into a wilderness of grief. Arithon was weeping in harsh, unbridled bursts that had everything to do with a mind-set unsuited for cruelty.
Think of the forty thousand,’ the Mad Prophet murmured like a litany. ‘Take hope for the ones you may have saved.’
The words fell thin, whisked away by the sea wind, their impact reft of meaning by an unpardonable truth. Logic, morality, justice, or reason could not stay the cut of s’Ffalenn compassion. And it came to Dakar, through the channels of his rage and an unaccustomed stab of anguish, that in fact, he was not helpless after all.
He asked and received from Arithon a ragged assent, along with the unequivocal understanding that if anybody else had dared the intervention, they would have been harried off the clifftop.
His unpractised spell of deep sleep required time to take effect. But when those terrible, dry sobs of remorse finally stilled, the Mad Prophet crouched on his knees on sharp stone, a prince he had never believed he could pity cradled in his arms like a brother.
The fine hands that had drawn a terrible lesson upon the bodies of Lysaer’s troops lay undone in dreams, sealed into peace for a little while.
Alone under stars, Dakar bent his tangled head to Arithon’s shoulder and mourned. He could scarcely cry for the wasted lives, torn as he was by a tragic remorse geascursed to outlast them. Desh-thiere’s ills were not ended. He knew, as no other, that the day’s burden of horror could never in life be lifted from the spirit of the man who slept enspelled in his arms; even if, under the shadow of Dier Kenton Vale, forty thousand other misled troops abandoned the war to return alive to their families.
Field of Thorns
Day broke over the Havens to the screeling calls of feeding wyverns, dipping and gliding and snapping in sharp squabbles over ledges mercifully masked behind fog. The camp atop the cliffs was broken down in cracking efficiency by the clan scouts, the dazed survivors of Lysaer’s decimated companie
s given plain fare before they were banded together to be marched under guard into the hill country.
To the boy with the splint who still snivelled, a fellow hostage gave bracing reprimand. ‘Lad, if we’re to be knifed by barbarians inside the next hour, they’d scarcely waste their bread and jerky keeping us fed. Be still now and bear up.’
The more stoic veterans among the prisoners kept better grip on raw nerves, but few held much store by quick platitudes. Between snatched glances at the clansmen, who went about their duties with brisk indifference, they watched until the black-haired healer whose word had delivered them from the carnage on the strand reappeared in the company of an unkempt fat man.
His grass-stained jacket of the day before had been changed for a clean tunic of the same dusky dun that blended with the napped lichens underfoot. He spoke in words too quiet to overhear to the archers, distinguished amongst their burly frames by his slighter build. The cloak he wore was the same coarse wool. He carried no weapon, just his battered satchel of remedies slung across one shoulder.
Only when he stepped close to check bandages and poultice wraps could a man see the marks on him of a haunted, uneasy night. He looked harrowed. Beneath his every movement lay a hunted, flinching tension that startled at slight sounds, and turned listening for voices only he seemed to hear. As if he were dangerous, or chancy to cross, all but the fat man maintained their wary distance.
As different from the clanborn killers he walked with as a hawk’s quill cast among broadswords, still, no man among the captive wounded dared to break his aggrieved silence to inquire why he should be here so obviously against his given will.
The company started off slowly. The pace was set to accommodate the slowest and most infirm, winding inland between peaks snagged like spindles in white cloud, or silvered in dustings of thin snow, sublimated into air the moment the sun burned through. So began an arduous trek through the high passes that lasted for fifteen days.
Townbred men who were strange to the rugged Vastmark landscape grew to hate beyond measure the whine of the winds through broom and stone and escarpment. They cursed the treacherous, uncertain shale that crumbled underfoot without warning, to skitter fragments in shattering bounds downslope. The squall of the wyvern and the hawk filled the day, and the chorus of insects by dark. Peat for fuel was dug from the marshes and borne into the heights by hand, which made cook fires cheerlessly small and short-lived. The available heat through the bone-chilling nights was limited by necessity to those sapped by blood loss who needed it most. The clansmen made no complaint. Inured to outdoor hardship, practised at setting tents out of the wind’s prying fingers, they clustered together under blankets, or stood guard in the lee of lichened outcrops, scouring rust from their bone-handled weapons.
Awakened each pallid dawn to the cry of the wyvern and the accented consonants of the night watch reporting, some of the captives found their dread for the future fed and deepened. Others, seated still while the healer tended their hurts and changed their dressings, were deeply disturbed to find they were not. Their time amid clan company had shown them no evidence of the Shadow Master’s inhuman witcheries. Carefully as they watched for signs of evil or corruption, nothing arose beyond the competence of superior leadership and an unbroken teamwork, well versed to maintain its cutting edge.
No matter who asked, whether in the grey-haired veteran’s tactful phrasing, or in the young boy’s pleading fear, none of the survivors could pry a clue from their keepers concerning the destiny awaiting them. The fat man proved deaf to all questions.
The clan scouts said in blunt dismissal, ‘That’s for his Grace himself to say, when he wills,’ often with a fast glance over the shoulder, as if they feared someone watching.
From the healer who gave them no name, they had the soft promise, ‘You will live.’
But for what sorcerous usage, or what turn of fate, every man of them dreaded to imagine, and dreamed worse in racking bouts of nightmare. In time, they arrived at the mouth of a broad meadow, dropped like a green twist of silk between the mounded debris of two rockslides. A spring-fed stream cut the swale like a scar. Black-footed sheep grazed amid stems of goldenrod on the banks, guarded by bristling, brindle dogs. Tucked into shadow, unnoticed at first glance, three herders’ tents lay pitched against the ridge of the north slope, loomed in broad, tribal patterns of saffron and sienna, sum faded to the tints of weak tea.
The advance party of clansmen were challenged by a sentry, unseen among the scree until she spoke. Of Vastmark stock, she wore her loose trousers cross-gartered to the knee and a dusty tunic hooked ragged by thorns. Her pale hair was knotted in braids. A handsome, lacquer-worked recurve bow lay slung at her shoulder. The horn at her belt had a patterned, silver rim, and she carried a sheep crook beside the quiver with her broad-bladed arrows. Those seasoned men-at-arms among Lysaer’s captive wounded took her measure, and could not miss the trained squint as her eye measured distance, or the muscled, alert manner that showed the stamp of a skilled command.
After the slaughter just endured at the Havens, the appearance of a young shepherd girl indoctrinated to the arts of war chilled their blood. The hospitality they received in the larger of the tents failed to allay their unease, as they were served mutton stew and goat cheese by a tribal grandmother who muttered in dialect and made signs against the evil eye behind their backs. Over jugs of cold water and coarse biscuit, the survivors huddled, their whispered speculation cut to stark quiet as a scarred older clansman snapped the entry flap open. He announced that the Prince of Rathain would address them.
Silenced by dread, every captive faced the small man who entered, armed with a black lacquered bow and a sword of unnatural, dark steel. His neat frame glittered to the muted wash of light through the canvas, the sable and silver leopard of Rathain stitched rampant upon a green silk tabard. Under trimmed hair and the circlet of royal rank, the face was one grown familiar through the past fortnight.
Here stood the Prince of Rathain, called sorcerer and Master of Shadow. He was also none other than the healer whose hands had dressed their wounds and splinted their broken bones in a compassion whose memory became overturned into stunned disbelief at the moment his captives identified him. The irony dismembered reason, stopped thought, that this same man’s whim had sown broad-scale, indiscriminate death at the Havens.
‘Ath preserve,’ gasped the iron-haired veteran. On reflex, he thrust the boy with the splinted arm behind his bulk for protection.
Green eyes flashed a glance in aggrieved recognition for a fear that drove even the bravest to edge back, and the most openhearted to cringe from too close a contact. ‘I’m here to appoint you all as my sanctioned envoys,’ said the Master of Shadow into the hostile quiet.
Here was none of Lysaer s’Ilessid’s forthright appeal. This prince’s features stayed shuttered. His voice, crisp and light, made no bid for close loyalty. Without fire, stripped to its thread of bald conviction, the fate Rathain’s liege held in store for the chosen twenty-five he had selected was forthright to the point where no listener dared to believe him.
‘You’ll be given an escort to the central valley of Vastmark to rejoin the main body of your army.’ Through a murmur of astonished voices, Arithon cracked, ‘I want a spokesman. You.’ His gesture singled out the senior officer, a captain from the city of Perlorn, whose fealty by old kingdom charter should have been subject to Rathain. ‘Step forward.’
The appointed man stood forth, too straight in his ripped hauberk, the wrist healing clean through an enemy’s faultless care clenched to his breast as he suffered a scrutiny that seemed to strip him skin from bone.
‘I want the news of your ruin at the Havens to reach your master before the week’s end,’ Arithon said. ‘Find Lysaer s’Ilessid. Spare him no detail of your report. I wish no mistake, no attempt to dismiss your defeat at the inlet as unlucky.’ A pause, while the wounded captain sought some simple way to unravel the contradictions and discern what moved the slig
ht enemy confronting him.
‘Know this,’ Arithon cut him off before he found nerve enough to question. ‘If this allied warhost under Lord Commander Diegan takes arms in Vastmark, I stand prepared. You’ve tasted the mettle of my archers. What tactics you suffered at the Havens can be made the more deadly through sorcery or shadows. I warn. Numbers make no difference, nor morals, nor dedication. Any who march here to take me will suffer disaster on a grand scale. The men you lead back are my witnesses. Be sure they are heard. Make the officers of Lysaer’s warhost understand that if they seek bloodshed in Shand, I will not stay my hand.’
‘You want us to sap our men of courage,’ the gaunt captain accused.
Green eyes flicked up to match him, stung to a frost spark of irony. ‘Daelion as my witness,’ Arithon flared back in pure anger. ‘I want you to save their sorry lives.’
Lord Diegan had rediscovered in his service to Lysaer how much he detested open-air camps and chill rain. For three days, while the central body of the warhost laboured on its closing march into Vastmark, the peaks lay roofed over in cloud. Drizzle dulled the landscape to pewter, the broken slate slopes snagged into overcast like the layered slabs of scrap lead in a glassworker’s yard. The poor, stony soil glistened with runoff, or gave way to black bogs where a horse could mire to the brisket. Dry ground was non-existent. Tents pitched on gravel became wet and unpleasant as the ones staked into the peat-reeking mud.
The wool factor’s man recruited as a trail guide had no opinion for ill weather beyond a glance tipped through bushy eyebrows toward the silted grey sky. ‘Blighted Vastmark clouds could shed wet for a week. Thank Ath Creator. In this benighted country, that’s the only damned thing puts good wool on the sheep.’