Someone exclaimed, ‘Fiends plague! There’s my wife.’ If her smiling, buxom beauty was brighter than reality, and if she appeared, beckoning, to swim through green air, the spiralling pull of magic caused the man to pay details no mind. He slammed to a stop and threw down his weapon to kiss his beloved on the lips.
The first gap in the ranks was joined by another, as a second man dropped smiling to his knees, stuffed his mouth full of dirt and chewed with groaning relish. The horrified shieldmate who grabbed his shoulder was cuffed away and chastened. ‘After hardtack for a month, my bowels are jammed. Bedamned if I’ll leave a basket of pears here to rot!’
One man hugged his helmet and murmured endearments. Another raised the butt of his dagger to his lips as if he swilled wine from a bottle. One quarter of the middle company simply plonked their arms down for pillows and snored. The bloodthirsty few who wanted to gut enemies screamed bull-throated war cries, whipped swords from their scabbards, and determinedly began hacking rocks.
Buffeted amidst the unravelling chaos of Alestron’s best troop of mercenaries, Keldmar stared about, red to the ears with flummoxed rage. ‘Have you all gone crazy!’
The scant few who heeded were mystified as he, as discipline came wholly undone. All but the most strong-minded veterans abandoned their march and fell victim to the allure of Dakar’s spell. Like a jerked tear in a knit, neat drill undid into knots of rollicking celebration. Pikes clattered from emptied hands. Men whooped in abandon and threw themselves into ribald frenzy, stripping off armour and moaning prone on bare rock as if they lay coupled with their lovers. The banner bearer became engrossed in a weepy, long dialogue with his belt buckle. Around his curled form, the troop’s most trustworthy captain leaped in tight circles, stabbing at gravel and shrieking about snakes in the grass.
Keldmar lost his temper, kicked his staff officer in the flank, and received back a murmured endearment. He jabbed another man-at-arms with his boot toe, was ignored, then progressed through obscenities to blistering threats.
‘It’s no use,’ said a scarred old campaigner who had fought with the troops for twenty years. ‘They’ve been spell-turned. If we take out the sorcerer, they’d recover.’
Too irate to credit even sensible suggestion, Keldmar peered through the virid gloom. Perhaps a hundred men remained unaffected, ones who lacked imagination, or whose heartfelt desires were too weak or uninspired to spring the snare of ensorcelment. Some cursed and exhorted their afflicted companions. Another dedicated sergeant swiped at laggards with the flat of his sword, then got himself flattened by a burly pikeman, who howled a shocking profusion of epithets, then accused, ‘Bedamned to you, man! Keep on clodding about and you’ll upset the ale barrel for certain!’
The next instant, a swirl in the soupy fog disgorged the commander of the second division, his flushed face running with sweat that dripped off the knurled ends of his moustache. ‘Ath preserve! This madness gripes your troop, as well? We’re fair paralysed. Every ninny in our ranks who pines for a wench seems bollocksed witless on some spell of illusion.’
Keldmar cast a jaundiced eye after a battle-scarred campaigner who danced mother-naked over the engrossed forms of his fellows. ‘Damn me, we’ll get even. March any man you have who will listen. We’ve got to press on and skewer the sorcerer who’s doing this.’
‘With pleasure!’ The commander lent his shout to Keldmar’s bellows to muster any standing soldier who could be hazed back to coherent action.
A cobbled-together company of seventy-five regrouped and resumed the advance. Outrage drove them, and fierce thirst for revenge to punish the indignities visited upon their companions. They unlimbered swords and pole weapons, swore dire oaths at the mists, and resolved on their course to hack the first mage they found into whimpering meat.
The advance scout they passed in amorous attempt to couple with his discarded byrnie gave their industry no second glance.
‘Useless,’ groused a soldier who knew him. ‘Spends all his silver in the bawdy house, does Gundrig, then sleeps ‘ while the whores rob him blind. Ten years, I’ve watched. Some things never change.’
Someone else loosed a raw gust of laughter. ‘Keep on like that, he’ll hang his fool bollocks in his mail and bend the rest of himself beyond using. Habits are bound to change quick enough then. Most ladies don’t like their fun kinked.’
‘Quiet!’ snapped Keldmar.
Something whined through the mist. A man four paces off crumpled at the knees and sprawled with a shattering, coarse cry. Blood spread across the breast of his surcoat, and his fingers raked the ground in grasping agony. Then the air came alive with a hail of shafts fired in terrible accuracy.
‘How can they see to take aim?’ The troop commander ducked as men dropped from his ranks. ‘Dharkaron himself couldn’t cast his ebon spear and hit any sinners in this murk.’
‘It’s got to be sorcery. Scatter!’ Keldmar shouted. ‘Fan out in skirmish lines and move!’ He plunged up a low rise, felt bright sun splash his face. Through a dazzle of glare, he blinked, astonished to see the lance streamers of his strike force casting thin, smoky shadows over the top of the fogbank. No fool, he dropped flat. The marksman’s shot dispatched to take him whizzed over his helm and smacked into stone downslope. He rolled out of reflex and escaped a second shaft, launched in an arc from above. Impact splintered into the lichens where he had lain a scant second before.
‘Jam your pole weapons upright as decoys and run!’ he screamed. ‘The tips are piercing through the mist and every man with a pike’s a walking target!’
The troops who had the presence to obey shed their pole arms and charged up the mountain, swords drawn and lips peeled from their teeth as they sucked burning breaths to ease exhaustion. The ground pitched and dipped, then rose again, steeper, and green mists gave way to clear air.
A grey-clad line of clan archers threw down bows and quivers and drew swords to check them in a screaming clash of steel.
These were Erlien’s clansmen, tenacious and skilled. They had done battle with mercenaries before, and arrows had levelled the odds. Up and down the scarp, small knots of combat raged to curses and threats, snatched between clangs as blade bit blade in a lethal exchange of parry and feint and riposte. Men fell. Their blood slicked the shale in treacherous, slick patches. The clansmen pressed in, relentless.
Keldmar found himself engaged, surrounded, then deliberately worried separate from his men. The enemies who pressed him took consummate care to drive him off-balance and corner him. Their swordplay was fresh, skilled, and agile enough to sting the grip of his hand through his heavy, leather gauntlets. Sliding on gravel, outnumbered beyond recourse, Keldmar fought and blinked through the sweat that burned into his eyes. His throat was rasped raw, his chest laboured. He knew no sound but the whistle of his own breath, and the sour, metallic shock of punished steel. Hazed backward until he could scarcely swing to parry, he found himself at bay against the side of a weed-tangled gully.
‘You can fight until you drop,’ one antagonist baited in the butter-soft vowels of Shand. ‘Or by our high earl’s invitation and Prince Arithon’s preference, we’ll take your weapons and your word in surrender.’
‘You have my word,’ Keldmar said through gritted teeth. As son of an old blood duke, he could rely on the code of ethics his ancestors shared with these descendants of the displaced clans. He tossed his sticky broadsword with a ringing, flat clash at the feet of the swordsmen who pinned him. Stubborn he might be, but never the fool to die for pointless bravado. ‘I’ll have my satisfaction. Your earl’s fiend-plagued ally, the Master of Shadow, will curse the hour he left me alive.’
A clansman carried word of Keldmar’s capture to Dakar in his cranny seconds later. ‘We have him, blazing mad, but unharmed. We’ll need time to get him clear before you raise the mist and let his troop find out he’s gone missing.’
Tucked between rocks like an uncombed hedgehog, Dakar swore with disgruntled lack of heat. He had a snarling
headache, result of stressed concentration and too much sim without any beer to ease his paralysing thirst. The diversion he had spun over the s’Brydion garrison had decidedly grown out of hand. The spell-laced green mist had lured the more imaginative men-at-arms over the threshold of delirium. The air down the rise had spawned schools of pale mermaids with alluring long tresses and shell bracelets. They drifted above the incline like displaced succubi, to strains of wild music that sounded sawed from an instrument an excruciating half-pitch too flat. The occasional yelling brawl erupted through the murk as men crazed by visions of unbridled lust vied for the favours of Ath knew what sort of female. Pikes poked up at odd angles through the turbulence. The lance tip of one was festively streamered with what looked like some strumpet’s scarlet petticoat.
Dakar might have thought the sight uproarious if his skull felt less like an anvil pounded silly by a blacksmith.
The scout who reported raised a sceptical eyebrow and burst into whooping amusement. ‘You do have a touch,’ he commiserated, then jumped back as Dakar swung chubby knuckles at his middle.
‘You’d better clear out,’ the Mad Prophet warned. ‘Those revellers down below won’t stay so friendly when their women change back into rocks.’
‘You say,’ gasped the scout. He slithered back to leave, all but knocked aside by an inbound runner streaming sweat from a sprint across the ridge.
‘Word from the Shadow Master,’ the newcomer forced between breaths.
‘Trouble?’ Dakar pushed fallen hair from his eyes, and squirmed to face the tired messenger.
‘Jaelot’s divisions are stubborn as rock.’ The scout braced his hands against the buttress of shale and panted through the rest of his message. ‘Our archers are gutting their ranks like damned sheep. Still, they won’t turn. Even stark blind in shadows, they plough up the crests and attack. We could let the whole murdering mass of them slaughter themselves on our weapons, but the tribesfolk are running out of arrows. Arithon’s asked, can you clear out an opening so our people can turn in retreat?’
Dakar stubbed a finger into his cheek and rolled spaniel eyes in forbearance. ‘He’s that desperate?’
The scout straightened up, affronted. ‘Need you ask? That garrison commander from Jaelot became laughingstock over something our prince exposed in a satire. Whatever the scandal, the man’s mad for revenge. He’d kill his whole company out of spite just to even the score.’
‘The general of Jaelot’s garrison?’ Dakar smirked in sly malice. ‘His prick wilts in bed. The wife scratched her itch with every footman and stableboy she could lure to try out her favours. She’s had six sons and four daughters, no two of them by the same father. And it was Halliron Masterbard’s ballad, not Arithon’s.’
‘Well, for our part, that’s a fine point scarcely worth standing ground to die for.’ The clan scout peered at Dakar in sharp concern. ‘Can you help? You look washed as a bucket of old curds.’
‘I can pray for an almighty miracle.’ The Mad Prophet appended his graphic opinion of the garrison general’s tartish wife.
‘Well the old wheezer could have saved himself a skinful of trouble,’ the clan scout agreed in scornful earnest. ‘Should’ve just had done and tossed the bitch off the nearest battlement.’
‘It’s nobody’s secret the citizens of Jaelot invented the tradition of bloody grudges.’ Dakar drew in his undone shirt laces to ease the chill, since the low sunlight lost warmth to his memory of the garrison commander’s treatment of the city convicts condemned to labour on the seawall.
A harrowing yell from a victim downslope recalled his diverted attention. His spell-turned spread of mist was wearing away, torn in wide patches and thinning. That first boggled shout was followed by cried curses as several of Alestron’s crack mercenaries recovered mazed senses, clinched in loving poses with buttressed chunks of knife-edged Vastmark shale. A mermaid with blue hair puddled into a haze of spent light. Then the pike flying the lacy furbelows cracked with a bang into a blackened explosion of fragments. Dakar knuckled the hair at his temples in dismay. The gnat swarm of sigils set loose to wreak havoc had gone unstable, most likely because of a seal of protection laid infinitesimally awry, or some tiny, incompatible property of nature neglected in the heat of inspiration.
The spellbinder cringed to imagine how his Fellowship master would reprove his shoddy turn of conjury. Worse, his spreading green fogbank scarcely established a sound base for permission to ensorcel the enemy, since the duke’s paid soldiers could not refuse to enter without rejecting orders from their officers. The lapse in proprieties left the spellbinder unrepentant. The only way he knew to divert the troops now was to twist the dregs of his dream binding into a mass hallucination. That Asandir might come to punish him later for chaotic intervention was a point he shrank from examining. The offered stake was the Shadow Master’s life.
Then the choice became moot. A shepherd woman scrambled in, soaked and breathless and bearing desperate news. ‘The enemy’s broken through from the south. We’re routed and running. Arithon’s thrown up shadow to screen our rear guard from bowfire. But that’s not protection. We’re going to need space, and quickly, to open the way to escape.’
A breeze sharpened to a flaying, unseasonable cold snapped down off the heights, pressing damp braids to her neck and streaming the thong ties of the emptied quiver at her hip. She glanced over her shoulder, worried, and Dakar shivered. More aware than she, he knew that Arithon was driven to binding his gift of shadow with unsubtle malice. Those enemies holding a steel-handled sword, or touching bare skin to their armour were probably finding their flesh flash-frozen to chilled metal.
The woman spun back to him, urgent. ‘If you’re planning to help, we haven’t much time.’
‘There are some six thousand mercenaries down there!’ Dakar cried in protest.
His quandary raised not a murmur of sympathy. At the crest of the rise, frantic shouts rode the wind, twined through the belling play of steel. Shepherd archers were fleeing the ridgetop, their grey-and-dun clothing scarcely visible amid falling twilight. The Mad Prophet uttered a scatological curse upon every mother’s son born in Jaelot, balled up his fists, and screwed his eyes shut.
He ripped out three summonings, scribbled runes in cold air, then threw his vivid, disordered imagination into a vision to raise terror.
His unpremeditated jumble of forced power cast a baleful snap of fire across the zenith.
Dakar embellished this with his most evil remembrance of nightmares brought on by cheap gin. In garish, deafening splendour, an apparition burst from the glare, made manifest through an irresponsible explosion of spells.
His finest rendition of Dharkaron’s Chariot roared into the arc of the sky.
The visitation was drawn in sable splendour by the Five Horses of Sithaer, harnessed in lightnings, their coats polished ebony and their nostrils flared to expose dark red linings. White-stockinged hooves struck sparks off the very roof of heaven. After them rocked the dread chariot of black lacquer and bone inlay, its narrow, spoked wheels a whirl of steel rims which sliced clouds in their path like spent smoke.
Ath’s avenging angel grasped the lines in his gaunt-leted fist. Not by accident did the face beneath its raven hair bear resemblance to Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince.
Dharkaron opened tapered lips and laughed against the winds that streamed his silvery cloak. The blazoned Wheel of Fate spread blood scarlet on his breast as he straightened to full height and checked his steeds’ wild rush. They reared in trumpeting splendour. The silhouette of their bellies darkened the afterglow of sunset. Then the Avenger brandished his ebon spear. He howled a curse of damnation upon the dream-fuddled mercenaries strewn across the shale slopes below. His team flung down, snorting. On a whipcrack shout from their master, they launched into a pounding charge straight for Alestron’s disordered battle lines.
Torn in rude fear from lascivious dreams, roused up naked and weaponless, some shaken out of sleep or raised staggeri
ng from improbable, drunken fits of gluttony, Keldmar’s companies of mercenaries wailed in abject terror. They leaped up to flee, tripped and fell flat, then scrambled off hands and knees in blind panic to escape. Barefoot and shod, they trampled over shucked mail and snagged heaps of clothing, discarded boots and dropped shields. Swords and pikes were abandoned where they lay. Seized by mass fear, every war-hardened man-at-arms scattered before Dakar’s unholy illusion and bolted flat out for low ground.
None looked back, even when the chariot and horses dissolved in a flat slam of thunder over the vacated slope.
Arithon’s bands of shepherds and clan scouts were freed to slip away and disperse into the seamed hills and corries where nightfall and spun shadow could hide them.
Severance
Behind a locked iron door, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani Order sat amid a bare stone chamber in the battered shell of a signal tower within the coastal city of Thirdmark. The lancet windows which commanded a strategic view of the headwaters of Rockbay harbour were masked off in stiff felt. Old dust stirred in the mouse feet of draughts. The stone smelled of mildewed mortar and sea salt, and the curtains like fusty woollens rinsed in old sweat and bog water.
In that place, the time could have been midday or the deepest hour of night. No chink of outside sky showed through. Sound was muffled to resentful, dull silence, feathered in the subliminal resonance of old wars when the tower had withstood the battering assault of nameless, forgotten sieges.
Morriel preferred the ambivalence. Her skin the yellow of aged, crumpled linen in the light of a single candle, she rejoiced for the freedom restored by the Great Waystone cradled in her lap. Never again need she leach borrowed energy from the diurnal rhythms of the earth. The passage of days and seasons no longer ruled her arcane might.