Dismounted to the spitting flare of torches, his boots gritted with gravel on the inside and mud caked to stretched leather without, Lord Diegan clenched perfect teeth and cursed everything connected with fleeces and sheep. Provisions were an ongoing devilment. With flour and oats wont to mould, any flock caught in the path of his troops would find itself slaughtered for mutton.
Flagged down before he could surrender the reins of his destrier into the care of his groom, the Lord Commander of Lysaer s’Ilessid’s warhost blessed fate that the s’Brydion brothers held the supply lines. Without their bull-stubborn efficiency, the campaign would have bogged in its tracks.
‘Lord, there’s a man arrived from the fringe patrol with news,’ interrupted his equerry, a scrappy little man who regarded inbound scouts and the intrusion of inept servants alike on his list of life’s nuisances.
Routine problems never disrupted the command tent; the scout, still mounted, had no word to say beyond, ‘My lord, I think you should come.’
‘Bad news?’ Diegan hitched his shoulders to relieve the rub of his mail shirt and soaked hauberk, caught back the reins of his horse, and set his foot into the stirrup. ‘You can report just as well from the saddle.’
As the pair rode past the picket lines, dodging grooms, and crossed the outer ring of sentries to press into the rainy darkness, the scout related the raw gist: an engagement with the Master of Shadow at the Havens had left five hundred men dead. The shock that threatened upset were the twenty-five survivors, held apart in a small glen beyond the camp perimeter by the patrol of four who had encountered them, stumbling down from the high passes toward the lights and the fires.
‘They claim they were brought from the coast by the enemy’s feal clansmen,’ related the scout as he rounded a last rock spur, flanked in dark skirts of dripping bracken. ‘When you hear what they say, you’ll see why we held them. Their story’s going to rip morale to bloody ribbons.’
This far outside the lines, there could be no torches. The hollow tucked beneath the jagged shoulder of the hill was cheerless, filled with the moan of the wind and trickle and drip of water. There, the wounded from the Havens pressed in a huddled mass beneath the partial shelter of an outcrop, a blurred jumble of pale hands and featureless, rain-blurred faces.
Lord Diegan pulled up, dismounted, and said, ‘Wait here.’ On presumption the scout would catch his tired mount’s bridle, he strode over loose stone into the shallow defile. The jingle of his spurs drew a heave of movement in the pathetic, wet knot of refugees. They surrounded him like schooling fish to crowd close, inquiring.
An older veteran captain with a north country accent presented himself as their spokesman. Recognition of the Lord Commander’s rank brought a respectful hush, cut by the cry of a night heron from some unseen marsh down the ridge.
‘I’ve been told you suffered an attack by the Master of Shadow,’ Lord Diegan opened, then demanded to hear what had happened.
From the first account, the surrounding night seemed to turn fearfully colder. His pulse quickened, the skin beneath his soggy gambeson shivered into chills, the commander of Lysaer’s warhost listened as men rendered nameless and faceless by the night gave their bare description of a trapped cliff and a relentless toll of dead, fallen to arrows and fire. The voices held the ragged stress of reliving; all the stifled, helpless rage of men who had watched comrades die, and questioned their right to keep breathing. The clenched fists, the soft curses, the coarse tears of the boy with the splinted arm brought back hateful, ugly memories.
Lord Diegan stared away into shadow hazed grey with rain, bedevilled by the raised spectre of another drenched field, and the mud-silted, tangled dead on the banks of Tal Quorin in Strakewood.
‘What took place was no battle, but a planned execution,’ the veteran captain summed up. ‘Lucky we are to have reached your ear swiftly, my Lord Commander. For we survived by design to carry last warning to Prince Lysaer. The Master of Shadow has sworn his oath on our blood that what happened at the Havens was no accident. He’s promised if the warhost advances to engage him in Vastmark, we shall be snared in disaster.’
‘That’s no news to be handled lightly,’ Lord Diegan agreed, too urbane to reveal his blazing rage. ‘Before we go the next step, I’ll have your report set in writing. A scribe will come here to take statements under my seal before witnesses. I’ll send guards, a tent, food and blankets, as soon as they can be arranged. The rest must wait until morning, since our prince has retired for the night.’
Brisk in distess, the Lord Commander took his leave. He strode up the rise, waded through bracken feathered in droplets to the gulch where his scout remained with the horses. Careful to keep his voice low, he said, ‘The rest of your patrol are Etarran?’
A soft word confirmed from the dark. ‘All trained under Pesquil, rest him. Why, you have need for discretion?’
Diegan let go an imperceptible sigh of relief. ‘Near enough.’ His scouts were well seasoned. Already they grasped the sensitive problem posed by these survivors. If measures must be taken for expediency, he need not grind through tedious explanations to convince them to follow his orders. ‘I’m going to send servants from my personal train. They’ll set up two tents, one to serve a cold meal. When the refugees have eaten, you’ll bring each in singly, but not to make the written statements they’ve been told to expect.’
Bit rings jingled as Diegan’s horse butted a damp nose against his chest. Knocked back a half-step by the antic, he slapped the animal off, clammy where the water ran off his black hair and soaked steady, cold runnels down his gambeson. ‘Your men will bind and gag the refugees and hold them there,’ he added to the scout. ‘No noise, no fuss. Nobody speaks with them. Word of the slaughter at the Havens must never leave this hollow. In time, a team of headhunters will come to relieve you. Gather your party then and return to the main camp. I’ll see the man dead who asks questions. This matter will be handled to my satisfaction, and your part is to keep your own counsel.’
‘You won’t want an escort back?’ the scout asked, Etarran born, and well accustomed to the clandestine intrigues men of power engaged for necessity.
Lord Diegan set foot in his stirrup, swung himself astride to a grinding jingle of metal. ‘I need time to think by myself.’
He turned his weary mare and spurred her to a trot through the darkness, while the heron cried like a lost spirit over the marshes, and the rain tapped chill tears against his face. Until Arithon s’Ffalenn lay dead, the horrors enacted at Tal Quorin, at Minderl Bay, at the Havens, were bound to repeat and compound.
Burdened now by the need to avert the vicious stress which had nearly unstrung Prince Lysaer at Werpoint, Lord Diegan weighed his options, alone in the Vastmark night. Bluff and cleverness were entrenched s’Ffalenn tactics. No doubt the bloodshed at the Havens had been wrought as a weapon to tear the heart from the warhost. Worse, the strain incited by the horrific rout was expressly designed to chafe at Lysaer’s moral conscience. Well warned that the nightmares and the driving remorse still suffered by his Grace since the fleet burned at Minderl Bay would make the affray at the Havens loom large. Lord Diegan measured his alternatives.
By the time he threaded his horse through the mucky lanes between the bonfires of the war camp, he had determined tonight’s news of an unspeakable carnage was a provocation his prince must be spared. Lysaer had been living on nerves and determination since his break with Talith at Ostermere. His mood had run sharp and brittle as eggshells, and through the nights he scarcely slept. The risk must not be taken, that the calculated slaughter of five hundred men might become the excuse to turn the army from its purpose in Shand.
To avenge the cruel usage his sister had suffered, perhaps to mend her sadly scarred marriage, Diegan resolved to take fate in hand. By himself, he would make certain the campaign proceeded to corner and claim its due quarry. For the Havens was a bluff, a last brazen effort on the part of Arithon to buy escape. No man with a motley force of shepherd
archers, even given the strengths of wielded shadow, could rout a warhost forty thousand strong.
Settled by hard logic that the odds lay in his favour, Diegan dismounted before his tent, tossed his reins to his groom, and meted out swift strings of orders to the equerry on duty. His body servant arrived, wide-eyed and nervous, to strip off his surcoat and mail. Hard at heel came his secretary, rousted from bed by his summons.
‘I’ll want privacy and the loan of your lap desk,’ Lord Diegan said. Without another word, he stepped out of the rain, into the dense, clammy gloom of his command tent.
The lanterns engaged in pallid war against the dark creaked and tossed on their hooks as the wind slapped over laced canvas. Water ran, dripping in broken arpeggios, from seams long since soaked through. A particularly virulent leak had sprouted over the blankets on his cot. Resigned to sleeping in puddles, Diegan rubbed a wrist stained in oil and rust across his brow, then threw himself down on a camp chair. He took the lap desk from the thin-shanked scribe, who trailed at his elbow like a hound. ‘Come back for your things in the morning.’
‘Yes, lord.’ The little man departed, tripping over his large feet in his haste.
‘Later,’ Diegan barked in dismissal to the servant who hovered by his clothes chest, a towel in hand to clean his boots. He yanked open the lap desk, rummaged out pens and ink and two pristine squares of parchment.
By the time Skannt’s headhunters reported for their assignment, he had the necessary documents signed and sealed with his personal cipher.
To the sinewy, weathered captain who entered the tent for instructions, he said, ‘Outside of camp, due northwest, you’ll find a pair of tents guarded by four Etarran scouts. There are twenty-five men with them, all deserters from a minor skirmish with the enemy that took place on the upper coast. They’ve been duly judged and sentenced. I ordered them bound. Your knife work should go quick and quiet.’
Diegan arose. His hand did not shake as he proffered the ribboned, official documents, though even he was unsettled by the man he had engaged. The captain’s presence carried a miasma like the reek of old blood; whether real or imagined, few would draw near enough to determine.
‘Here’s proper writ for arraignment, and here, the order of execution.’ The warhost’s Lord Commander finished off, ‘See the shirking dogs beneath the Wheel, then burn the bodies. We need no reminders lying about to undermine the morale of our other steadfast troops.’
‘Ath!’ The steel studs on the captain’s jerkin caught baleful light as he stuffed the rolled parchments through his belt, then peeled off a gauntlet to test the edge on his dagger. ‘Should’ve guessed, at this hour, the duty’d be a messy one. We getting scalp pay to clean up your bothersome details?’
‘Ten silvers a head,’ Diegan affirmed. ‘Two of my servants will ride with you to inform me when the deed’s been done.’
The headhunter gave a silent, wheezed laugh as he snicked his steel in its sheath. ‘Assassins’ guildsmen?’ He squinted askance at his Lord Commander, a sneer on his full upper lip. ‘You know we don’t need any pandering witnesses to make sure of our kills.’
Diegan gestured his dismissal without comment. When the tent flap cracked closed after the headhunter’s stalking stride, he bellowed for his servants to return and attend to his interrupted comforts.
He was too hardened, too practical, too much the survivor of ambitious years of city politics. His dreams would be troubled by no screams at all, as Arithon’s fell tactic was foiled, and the twenty-five died in cold blood.
Endings
As the sun rises over the pastel drum towers of Innish, and the light falls gold and pink through the sandstone arches of a portico facing the harbour, Jinesse and Tharrick stand with linked hands before the robed figure of an adept of Ath’s Brotherhood; and as each swears the vow of marriage, their thoughts dwell with ambivalence and regret upon the enigmatic, black-haired prince whose fate brought their two lives together …
In a purple-carpeted chamber in the Koriani orphanage at the coastal town of Firstmark, Lirenda lays the amethyst Great Waystone into the hands of Morriel Prime with the words, ‘Matriarch, rejoice, for my mission to Althain Tower has brought the success you required …’
In a high, guarded tower in the city of Avenor, Princess Talith sits on velvet cushions in a south-facing window seat to stare out over the sea; and through a weight of unbearable sorrow, she aches for the absence of her beloved, pledged to lead a warhost to kill a single enemy whose cursed destiny has come to poison everything in life she held dear …
VIII. STRIKE AT DIER KENTON
The dawn over Vastmark came in smothering white mist, threaded by intermittent rainfall. Against air textured thick as unpressed felt, and the eerie shrills of flying wyverns, the cluster of shepherds’ tents set on the lip of the scree came and went from view, their primal, dyed patterns like an herb witch’s talismans scribed in old blood and rust. Before them, furled in damp clothing where he crouched stirring peat embers with a gorse twig, Dakar the Mad Prophet brooded in silence, his hair and beard screwed into rings.
Behind him, standing, the hood over his mail dull grey as the landscape, Caolle tested the edge of his newly oiled sword, a squint to his eye that boded trouble. Since the Havens, he had lost flesh. The skin pressed like cured leather over the craggy jut of his face bones, and his hands, never wont to pause between tasks, turned the blade in forced deliberation. ‘The tactic last fortnight has failed,’ he said, flat. ‘Lysaer’s warhost is coming despite us. Please Ath, don’t make me be the one to break the news.’
‘His Grace already knows.’ Dakar gave a particularly fierce jab at the embers and the sparks flurried, red-gold on the colourless air. ‘Arithon said last night he could feel the stir of the Mistwraith’s curse.’ For Lysaer pressed his march forward, not back. His army had closed, and harried, and set cordons, until the vale of Dier Kenton lay bottled in, each goat track and pass leading over the peaks sealed off by hostile troops. ‘Arithon said we have until noon before the pull of the geas builds to unmanageable proportions.’
Caolle sheathed his blade without sound by wary habit, then flicked a swift glance at the tent. ‘He’s sleeping?’
‘No.’ Dakar looked up, his pudding-round features all misery. ‘But he’s reasonable, and trying to rest.’
‘Let him bide, then,’ Caolle said. ‘We won’t need his final orders before the mist starts to lift.’ He strode off from the fire, disgruntled for the first time in his life by a bellyache before the onset of battle.
The mists that presaged autumn in Vastmark could hug the land like raw silk, impenetrable, then part without warning to some unseen caprice of changed air. The vale at Dier Kenton emerged out of stainless, cloaking white like an uneven bowl draped in furrows of burlap left out and beaten by weather, then salted with dirty flecks of shale. Mountains arose around the rim. The mild range of hills which invited easy access from the west built ever higher as the pitch of the valley steepened. The east wall swept up, a sheer face of grim scarps that speared blue-green shadow across the knoll where Caolle stood. Around him, pitched as a decoy to draw Lysaer’s main force, an array of steel helms set on stakes presented empty eyeholes toward the lowlands. Planted on a pole in their midst, the lazy slap of standards flicked a buffet of silk on leather against the war captain’s shoulder. Clan custom dictated their arrangement: the purple-and-gold chevrons of Shand uppermost; then the black-on grey wyvern, sigil of the principality of Vastmark; and lowest, the green, sable and silver of Rathain’s royal leopard, symbolically set in deference to the sovereign rule of the southland.
The irksome rains had ceased. Today’s clear morning held a fresh crispness and tension like an indrawn breath. Across the saddle at the vale’s far rim seethed the frontal body of the allied host to bring down the Master of Shadow, particoloured as sweepings from a tailor’s shop, spiked like stray pins where early sun flicked the metal of a helm or a sword blade. The landscape was vast, and the men, an un
natural, living carpet a league and a half in width.
‘Such bother for one life,’ Caolle murmured. ‘It’s not canny.’ The nerve-fraught awareness he was surrounded by foes ranked many thousands strong made his skin feel harried by itches. He cleared his throat, then finished his instructions to the runner scout waiting at his elbow.
The clansman slipped off. The knoll remained pressed in grim silence, while the mists ebbed and came in white-footed waves like ranked ghosts. The swirl of moisture and the presence of the peaks funnelled disjointed sounds in queer patterns. A rider’s horn call might ring in deceptive, close clarity, or make some distant officer’s snapped word to correct a laggard man in formation seem close enough to touch. Other times the breeze blew muffled in drifts, as if broken stone and desolation were all that had ruled since Paravian times.
Then the fog would clear again to reveal the army’s advance a disquieting furlong closer. The front lines were near enough now to mark divisions, each city’s garrison ranked out in squares. Rowed pikemen trickled like ants around the boulders left strewn by old slides. The stream of ribboned banners, the snorts of fresh horses, the snatched strains of voices raised in song to hold the tempo of the march as helms bobbed, disappeared and crested the banks of gullies, formed an inexorable flow of greyed steel over uneven terrain.
Easier to regard them as a leaden wave, Caolle thought, a mindless, cutting tide of sharpened weapons. Details only served to tear at the heart, that defined the ragged edge of the advance as single men who had lives and human fears.
Caolle shut his eyes, aching inside for what must come. For the stakes were no longer malleable. Each side would kill in defence of its prince; the living would mourn and the slain would stay dead. As Arithon had most cruelly foreseen, the recent blood spilled at the Havens in the weight of this moment seemed a pittance. A man could stand atop the knoll at Dier Kenton where the trap would be sprung and wonder if five hundred planned casualties had been enough; whether more than one raid and a thousand more corpses could have stemmed the flood of tens of thousands. Then if not a thousand, how many more, until the goading question of if and if again caused the mind to shudder off its wretched track and embrace the plunge into despair.