For the first time since childhood, Caolle felt haunted by his ghosts: from a few dozen caravan drovers and couriers in Jaelot livery with slit throats, to the wyvern-picked corpses on the shoreside ledges, to the current warhost still living, still marching in deafened belief of a just role in a grand destiny.
A stranger to himself, to feel harried by a young man’s uncertainties, Caolle found the prospect of drawing steel abhorrent. Nor did any cause under sky seem reason enough to claim another life. In the wrong place, years too late, he realized his pride and his skills as a killer led nowhere.
‘I have no one else I trust to see this through,’ husked a quiet voice near his elbow.
Caolle started, spun, and met a face as haunted as his own. His liege lord had arrived without sound at his side, change in him since the Havens the very epitome of heartbreak.
Too thin, too pale, too worn, Arithon met the mirrored anguish in his war captain’s glance. Again he answered the unspoken shock for the changes to his appearance. ‘It’s as much Desh-thiere’s curse and the draw upon my will as Lysaer approaches our position as any single burden from the past.’
Caolle bunched helpless fists at his sword belt. ‘Lysaer’s a murderer beyond compare, to mislead so many for the effort of buying your life.’ A sweep of his arm embraced the advancing lines, now darkening the vale’s western end like an infestation of blight. ‘Your tactic at the Havens was a mere pittance before this.’
‘No.’ Arithon studied the overwhelming, massive deployment, unable to mask his expression. Or perhaps the strength in him was too self-absorbed to spare any token thought for privacy. While the wind flicked his loose sable hair, the compassion that in this moment lacerated him from within showed in scraped pain through his words. ‘Lysaer’s not yet blinded to mercy. I have to believe that. Our twenty-five survivors never got through, nor had their chance to deliver fair warning.’
No argument remained; the weeks since the Havens had seen their shepherd archers surrounded. Nothing else could be done except embrace grim reality and follow the final step through.
After one bitter lesson at Merior, Arithon’s decision was fixed. He would abandon no ally to suffer the curse-twisted influence of his half-brother.
Caolle regarded his prince with an uneasy mix of pity and wary apprehension. ‘You have a will Dharkaron himself should fear to cross,’ he said, then spun on vexed reflex to meet a scrambling disturbance at his back.
Dakar crested the rise, wheezing like a holed bellows. Beneath his tousled hair and the wiry bristle of his beard, his complexion showed the blued pallor of half congealed candle wax. ‘Nothing alive should be standing here,’ he gasped. An expressive roll of his eyes encompassed the surrounding peaks, this moment clogged under clouds. As if chased by a thought, his brows furrowed underneath his woolly bangs. ‘Fiends plague, Arithon. So that’s what you were doing mooning about, walking this place over and over again at night throughout the spring.’ He turned an impossible shade paler.
‘Listening to the pitch of the stone,’ Rathain’s prince admitted, steady enough for all that he looked as if the touch of a finger might shatter him.
‘Dharkaron’s tears!’ Dakar cried. For since the seep of the autumn rains had rinsed the heights, even his limited mage-sight could detect how the shale was faulted. ‘Don’t anybody sneeze. I want for nothing except to be finished my work and hunkered down on high ground.’
‘Well, his Grace said the scarp would slide and close the passes,’ Caolle said, never impressed with histrionics.
‘A bard’s prize understatement,’ Dakar groused beneath his breath. Then louder, ‘Both of you, move. You’re standing on the site I need to enhance my spell pattern.’
Caolle edged aside as though faced by coiled snakes. Magecraft and mystery lay a rung below cheap trickery in his opinion, but he knew better than to waste breath arguing points of honour with a madman.
‘Dakar adheres to Fellowship teaching,’ Arithon reassured. ‘Any spell he works upon life or substance must be founded upon free permission.’
‘You say!’ The war captain snorted his disbelief, dark eyes squinted down the valley out of habit to mark tactics as the warhost began its last stage of deployment. ‘So, they’re smart enough after all not to charge their light horse over stone. You’ll face pikemen in squares with archers at the centre. Slow but sure. The gullies will hamper their advance, but not much.’ The war captain paused to slice a glower up the rise, where Dakar paced off a slow circle around the banners and helmets, his head tucked in frowning concentration. ‘And I don’t believe yon soldiers all chucked you a grin and bent their stupid necks to be witched.’
The Mad Prophet paused between steps, his offence expressed in a crafty glint of teeth that might have been a smile behind his beard. ‘Not in so many words. But Lysaer’s soldiers, to a man, allowed themselves to be deluded. The mesh I weave here will only cause them to see exactly what they believe they should find.’
‘A sorcerer, a vile killer, a corrupter of innocent children,’ Arithon finished in shaded, soft sorrow. ‘They will behold what my half-brother has led them to expect and react as they have been trained.’
‘Which means, prince, you’d better have distance between and a blindfold on when it happens,’ Dakar retorted.
Arithon did not respond, but held his regard on the warhost below in cat-eyed concentration. The Mad Prophet glanced at him, sharp, then spun to the war captain in a high-strung concern that was strikingly out of character. ‘Caolle, for the love you bear Rathain, get your liege lord out of here, now!’
The sun climbed another two hours higher and the mists fled before warmth, leaving a sky matted in haze the colour of bleached bone. Ruled by perversity, the wind died until the banners of the royal warhost draped limp on their poles. The hemmed ranges at the head of Dier Kenton Vale reflected every sound back, until the snort of a horse, the dull plink of mail, the jangle of harness held a hemmed-in, unsettling intimacy.
Puddles had dried, but the stubborn mud lingered, turning each step to sucking misery. The horses slid and sweated and cast shoes off damp-softened hooves. Grateful for the one coarse mount in his string too tough to pull up lame, Lord Diegan leaned over its unstylish, thick crest to tighten the strap on his helm. He lowered a sweaty wrist tinged in rust and swore. Armour polished inside of three days already showed attrition from the damp. No longer the dandy to fuss over appearances, the soldier he had become reviled the neglect to his gear.
At his side, a figure bright as a gilt-trimmed icon in a steel cuirass edged with gold chasing, Lysaer s’Ilessid turned blue eyes spiked to a baleful charge of humour. ‘Why mind the rust? Your gear’s sure to need scouring tonight just to clean off the bloodstains.’
‘I don’t care how many shepherds’ tents our patrols counted out on the heights. Those tribesfolk can move like wind itself and today’s shown no movement to report.’ Diegan lifted his chin to scan the peaks which ringed the vale like the glistening, crusted teeth of a wolf’s jaws. ‘Either nothing’s up there, or they’re holed up like stoats, just watching us work up a lather.’
Lysaer smiled. ‘Did you truly expect this would be easy?’
‘Never.’ But through the past weeks, riding in exhausting zigzag patterns up and down rocky corries as strike teams were dispatched to drive Arithon’s lighter forces before them like scrap sweepings chased by a broom, Diegan found his temper worn to breaking. Too many of the unseasoned garrison men boasted on their successes, that the archers always broke and ran under attack. If today the prince’s troops held the Shadow Master’s encampments surrounded, the creeping suspicion lingered that they were for a surety being led.
Lord Diegan held no illusions. When his warhost was finally permitted to close, when the shepherds and clansmen stood their ground, courage and armed might were not guaranteed to bring victory. Arithon s’Ffalenn would not be cornered without an ugly fight. His blood would be bought in fallen bodies, his sorceries crushed at last u
nder the weight of sheer numbers.
‘Well, we haven’t long to wait,’ Lysaer finished in frigid certainty. ‘Our enemy is near. I can sense his presence.’
A staccato rattle of hooves on shale marked an inbound scout, who crested the rise ahead of the advance army. Pressed flat to the neck of his mount, he thundered straight for the cluster of command standards and reined his hill pony to a head-shaking halt. ‘Your Grace, my Lord Commander, we’ve made contact.’ He unfisted a hand from his reins and pointed up the vale toward the stony rim of the knoll which divided the swale of the valley. ‘We’ve seen royal banners there. A band of armoured enemies lie entrenched in ambush behind.’
‘Halt the columns,’ Lysaer said to Lord Diegan. As the ranks around him shuddered still to a magnified creak of harness, and horn calls repeated the command down the vast length of the line, he snapped his fingers to the page boy who trailed on foot by his stirrup. ‘Hand me my glass.’
His eyes, cold sapphire, stayed fixed on the crest of the knoll as he accepted the brass casing and snapped its segments open. Trained upon the summit, the eyepiece yielded a grainy view of silver-pebbled helms, a ranked thicket of pole weapons, then the standards of Shand and Vastmark, accompanied in presumptuous arrogance by the leopard device of Rathain.
Lysaer felt a sharp sweep of heat cross his skin. His eyesight seemed to blur momentarily out of focus. A half-sensed brush of cold that might have been magecraft prickled the hair at his nape. For an instant, he almost saw a black-haired figure lift a mocking, triangular chin to taunt him over the blade of a black sword.
The animal snarl that arose in his throat was nearly too savage to repress. Fired to white fury, Lysaer clenched his fingers on brass and fought a blistering, sharp battle to retain his grip on self-command. Wise in restraint since the disaster provoked at Minderl Bay, he jerked down the glass and snapped it shut. ‘He’s there. There’s a fighting force behind him.’
Which statement required no name to qualify; his steely majesty hammered over in tight anticipation, the Prince of the West met his Lord Commander face on. ‘In my name, for the deliverance of all people, lead the advance. Let right prevail over darkness.’
Diegan’s salute held matching eagerness. ‘Mine the honour, highness. In your name and for the memory of Etarra’s city garrison sacrificed on the banks of Tal Quorin.’ And, he added inwardly, for the dishonour of my lady sister.
Then he filled his lungs, raised his shout. The trumpet notes of his staff officer relayed the signal to attack down the lines.
The Prince of the West and his personal bodyguard relinquished their place in the advance guard. While one chosen company peeled away to stand with them on a vantage lent by high ground, the main body of the royal warhost juddered into motion, to sweep up the throat of Dier Kenton Vale and close upon the knoll, and lay waste to the Shadow Master’s allies. At their backs, a figure of inspiring magnificence on his gold-maned war-horse, Lysaer raised his fist. He threw back his head and shouted in glad satisfaction as his gift swelled and answered. Then he opened mailed fingers. Raw light slapped forth, a blinding hot fireball hurled skyward to carve a scalding arc across the heavens.
The elemental burst exploded in blinding force at the zenith to a blast of distant thunder. Visible for leagues, the signal would alert the supporting forces from Jaelot and Alestron in position beyond the mountains of the rim wall. These would enact a simultaneous advance up the far slopes of the cliffs. The steel ring that hedged Dier Kenton began its closing march to crush the trapped quarry, over ground too stony for pit traps, too bare for ambush or cover. This time, the ragtag dregs who defended the Master of Shadow would be left no direction to run.
While the central deployment of the warhost rolled in dust and noise up the broad spread of the valley, Lysaer unclenched locked fingers and passed the glass to the most keen-eyed of his scouts. ‘Keep watch,’ he commanded. ‘If you spot any sign of the enemy, tell me.’
Not for nothing had the prince practised with his gift through the years of preparation at Avenor. Bowfire and shadows had been Arithon’s key defences at Tal Quorin. Lysaer bared even teeth. Praise be to justice, now, he had the finesse to forge his gift into a countershield for both. A silky, sure smile curved his lips. If need be, he would fire the very spine of the mountain, burn out the entrenched bands of tribesmen and archers, and light the way for his troops to advance and claim victory.
Tucked into a rocky declivity in the rimrocks above Dier Kenton Vale, the Mad Prophet stood at Arithon’s back, his plump hands pressed white against the royal shoulders that had not stopped trembling since Lysaer’s signal bolt had roared aloft.
‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘Hold steady.’ Then, as the distant glitter of the s’Ilessid bodyguard settled on station behind the rear ranks amid the low hills to the west, ‘For the love of Ath, don’t look now.’
Arithon gave a choked-off smile. Balled in a crouch with his hands locked around his knees, his eyes swathed under a black binding tied off with spell-turned knots, he was most effectively blinded to the movements of his enemy. Dakar and his war captain must serve as his eyes. Since the botched tienelle scrying aboard the Khetienn, the spellbinder had earned the clear right to ask permissions of him even a Fellowship Sorcerer might hesitate to impose.
The time was past for uncertainties, beyond all reach of regrets. Meshed into the pattern traced out through cold auguries, Rathain’s prince could only hope his unreserved consent would lend Dakar the leverage to help him if the mad onslaught of the curse became too great to endure.
In the event such constraint let him down, in final threat, his black sword Alithiel lay unsheathed and waiting.
The chance shrank his heart, made his nerves flinch in dread, that the terrible, edged beauty of the Paravian starspell might be turned against him again. He dared not frame the possibility that one day even this measure might fail him. The sweat which ran down the slant of his jaw arose as much from that fear as from grief for the trap set in the path of Lysaer’s warhost.
The spread of thin sun on his shoulders, the smell of wild thyme and wind-caught evergreen held the untrustworthy peace of a drug dream. Needled by circling thoughts, Arithon shifted.
A firm, bearing pressure thrust him down as Dakar said, ‘Damn you, prince, not yet.’
Yet a masterbard’s ear could pick out the spellbinder’s cranked tension, and know: the platitude masked the surety that the advance ranks drew within bowshot of the cluster of banners on knoll. The circle of illusionary spellcraft that had lured twenty-eight thousand to advance would not hold together in close proximity.
An outraged shout of discovery floated up, sliced by the peal of a horn call.
‘Lord Diegan’s troop?’ Arithon asked, a thin tug of humour tilting one corner of his mouth.
‘The very same. Their scouts just brought word of the helmets.’ Dakar snorted back a laugh at the snarled disarray as the proud centre companies from Avenor con verged, yelling outrage. The banners, the staked ranks of armour and pikestaffs seemed a pitiful ruse to have made grand fools of them all.
‘I tell you,’ cried the foray’s captain, his humiliated anger shaved brittle by distance. That knoll is bare of any enemies! There is no ambush, no hidden strike force at all.’
Yet Lord Diegan had learned deadly caution under Pes-quil. Tenacious as a lashed mastiff, he deployed a half-company to quarter the ground to be sure. The knoll swarmed with movement. A foot soldier rendered toy-sized against the span of the vale raised a sword and in a fit of silent fury hacked down the royal leopard standard.
That flash of bare steel and the wind-caught shreds of green silk for some unnamed reason ignited Dakar to slow rage.
‘Now,’ he ground out in a whisper.
Arithon stilled underneath his grip, locked for a second against the horrific inevitability of the moment. Then, as he had once loosed a bowstring to launch an arrow streamered in red ribbons, he deployed his gift in unreserved signature of his presence
.
Shadow ripped out and battened Dier Kenton under implacable darkness.
Cries of terror ripped up from the valley, followed in fated sequence by Lysaer’s defending counterplay of light. The burst of illumination sheeted through to create a flickering, sulphurous twilight. No longer the green fool, the Prince of the West would not fire blind strikes at an enemy which offered no target. His response came tempered, sufficient in force to provide his troops with the illumination they required to close and fight.
‘More,’ Dakar whispered.
Arithon spun his darkness thicker, deeper, smothering his half-brother’s effort in what seemed an effortless parry.
In direct touch with the tension which knotted the muscles beneath his hands, Dakar was not deceived. ‘Lysaer’s gotten stronger with his gift, has he not?’
A nod snapped back in response. Arithon braced through a hard shudder, and the dark coiled out like steel bands, laced warp through weft in anchored struggle.
The impact of Lysaer’s bolt was less seen than felt, a fan of hot wind burdened in a cracking scent of ozone. The report followed, a smothered whump of compressed air that shivered the stone underfoot.
A sound escaped Arithon’s lips. His hands locked into sweaty fists as he deepened his shadows yet again. Lysaer’s next counterburst bowled a crescendo of thunder across the heavens. The thrust came straightforward in control, directed skyward, its aim to sear off the unnatural night and reclaim an untrammelled field for battle. Yet even expended without solid target, the princes’ paired gifts clashed in violence.