Warhost of Vastmark
The Prime Matriarch of the Koriathain traced an ivory nail over the cold arc of the stone’s surface, aware as a strained current of vibration awakened to even that slight touch. The Fellowship Sorcerers had not tampered with the jewel. Its freight of stored energies, every perilous, layered contortion ingrained by generations of past spells remained twined through its shadowy depths. Any unshielded handling of the great amethyst required rigorous discipline. To command its focus demanded far more than a mastery of mind and will. The stone was deadly dangerous. The wielder who failed to channel its bright focus could be enslaved, her self-awareness broken by gibbering nightmares until her mind became consumed in madness.
Morriel had cared for past victims during her girlhood as a novice. Left those disquieting memories, she abjured a course of unwise haste. Time and practice would be needed before the Koriani Order could remaster and wield the Waystone’s full might. Perhaps a decade of exacting instruction lay ahead, before First Senior Lir-enda dared the trial to engage the jewel’s deep focus without the Prime’s partnered guidance; years Morriel could ill afford to squander if her chosen successor proved unfit.
Against this added demand of power and responsibility, the Prime sought her own private sureties. If the Great Waystone’s properties had lent her some surcease from the crippling pain which hounded her overtaxed body, it could not extend the span of her life by even as much as one day. The burden of breathing had grown little less for the promise of the order’s restored influence. Closed alone in the airless stone room, her hair unbound in waves over shoulders clothed in a robe of bleached silk, Morriel cupped the melon-sized amethyst between her spidered fingers. Her decision was set. No anomaly would be left to risk. Against the gnawing host of her doubts, she would engage a deep scrying to map the last steps to secure Lirenda’s transition into prime power.
Unlike the properties of the Skyron focus, the great amethyst met the mind which sought dominance in vast and ominous quiet. Morriel closed lightless eyes to strain her thoughts clear of distraction, then linked her awareness to the crystal. Swallowed into smothering darkness, undermined by the old, familiar dread that the Waystone’s pooled malice might slip her control and unstring the coils of her sanity, she held her mind in balance. She was too old, too wise to be baited to insecurity. Neither did she ease her guard as the stone’s vast quiet gentled into seductive invitation.
The jewel she bid to master had been wielded by a thousand prime enchantresses, its latticed structure over time compounded into a vicious labyrinth of tricks.
Morriel bided in chill patience. Ancient, she was herself well tempered in the power of stillness. She out-waited what green youth would challenge, her strength kept hidden for the moment the crystal’s random currents would align themselves against dominance.
Always the change struck without warning. Morriel gasped under the first onslaught. Pinched by a rising, twisted mesh of resistance cruel as the rake of barbed wire, she grappled. Any tapped access into the heart of the stone’s focus forged a gateway into its centre; and like any portal kept guarded too long, the unquiet detritus imprinted by spent spells boiled up in charged effort to escape.
Its hot, resentful force sieved through her sealed consciousness like a raking barrage of slivered glass. The stone’s near-sentient presence probed for weakness, any flaw, any breach in her character, any bastion of self-awareness left untended. Should such opening exist, no matter how small, the pent malice of the Waystone would reach through and devour her alive. The wrong response, and she would be lost in a maelstrom of night mare, wrought from the latent shame and guilt sown by her own past mistakes.
Morriel stamped down the perilous instinct to flinch. She was mistress of her pain. Flesh, thought, and viscera, her body was thralled to her will. She cut through the stone’s clamour of resurrected hatred, firmed against the warped cry of crystal enslaved. Her consciousness darted and thrust deeper into the web’s meshes. To chain the flared spite of the Waystone’s dark aspect was like using bare flesh to quench magma. Against a revulsion that raised the hair at her nape, into the rage of the jewel’s matrix the Prime rammed the frigid counterspells of mastery. Hers was the sure knowledge of the primal seals to impose unconditional domination.
As she shaped the runes and sigils in ritual configuration, she suffered the fragmented echoes of past uses to which the great amethyst had been turned: scryings of fire and smoke and bloody battle. In fleeting imprint, she smelled the putrescent reek of corpses scythed down by plague. She felt again the clean flood of healing spells raised to stem the tides of human pestilence; knew the scream of faulted earth pressed down and called to heel; the howl of tempests reined back from assault upon merchant fleets and settled shorelines. Bone and nerve thrummed to the echoes of past conflict and sweeter surcease. Morriel exalted to the might of compassion and humanity, pitted broadside against the unquiet force of nature’s cruelties. For a heartbeat her inner sight was battered under the white lick of deluge and chaos.
Struck deaf and blind to the world beyond the tower, she fought and closed the last seal.
The scream as trained will collided with elemental bare force slammed a cry through every synapse in her mind. Momentary agony thrummed in recoil through the marrow of her bones, flicked each nerve down to her fingertips.
Then the threshold was past, the stone’s focus sub dued. The Prime was no longer tied to a weakened vessel of aged flesh, but freed to pluck the currents of the world’s winds and demand them to bend in submission. She was the thought to crack the heart of wild stone, the sand grain to drink the sea to dust. Sun and moon and stars were her servants, to yield their silvered secrets on demand.
In that moment of ascendancy, the crone’s form glowed in scintillant outline, framed in the same violet light which kindled the depths of the Great Waystone. Alone, Morriel spun the mighty axis of its focus to delve into the shadowy future.
She expected problems. The path to prime succession was fraught with snarls, each derived from flaws in a candidate’s development. No aspirant could succeed, nor survive the last test without submitting to an exhaustive, ever-narrowing course of study to cleanse her character of imperfections.
Lirenda’s training was far from complete. Scrying clearly mapped those weaknesses yet to be conquered. Morriel tracked them, methodical: the small ambitions that blinded in tomorrow’s imperfect handling of a dispute between two novices; then the annual placement of boy wards in craftshop apprenticeships evincing a stubborn prejudice still ingrained from an overly privileged childhood. Envy of the Fellowship’s sure grasp of grand conjury would give rise to a critical inattention. And like a chained snag in knit, that moment yielded in turn to a faulty understanding of a minor sigil which, another day, would fail to halt an affliction that caused stillbirths.
For each shortcoming, Morriel marked out the corresponding lesson to enforce the desired correction. She sounded the sureties to discern which seal spells to use to impose subtle influence to curb, then realign and hone the last rough edge from Lirenda’s self-awareness.
At the last the Prime reviewed the most glaring of all drawbacks, given into her attention as warning through a long past scrying at Forthmark. The pitfall most likely to spoil Lirenda’s bid for primacy was her persistent, drawing fascination for the compassion which ruled Athera’s last Prince of Rathain.
Aware of shimmering danger in that single thread, Morriel Prime traced the span of coming happenstance with the delicate care of a spider spinning webs above a waterfall. Her augury took hold, unreeling in fierce energy to yield a scene set in falling sleet against the shadowy postern of a coastal city’s back alley.
There, the vision of Lirenda, lost in Arithon’s embrace, a flush to her cheeks, and her hair a fall of spilled sable down the violet cloak of the order.
For this startling glimpse of lapsed vows, Morriel was caught in blank astonishment. Before she could ponder, the sequence reeled on, inexorable, a lightning strike partnered by thunderclap.
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A fired burst of passion, then heartbreak stanched in ice; this followed in sequence by a second, clearer vision: in a bleak tower dungeon, and the same prince, bound captive in iron and spread-eagled upon a stone slab. The s’Ffalenn features were stamped to mocking irony. In contempt for his helplessness, Arithon spoke a phrase whetted to a glib stab of satire.
Then an ugly revelation, a shattering break in continuity; the ongoing chain of future event overset to smash more than First Senior Lirenda’s overblown pride. For Morriel, presaged ending came in a deranged explosion that built to a keening, savage force. Her will was milled under. Self-control ripped away, snagged into sparks and white agony. She saw the Wheel’s turning; then the eth-eric veil; then the awful, sharp snap which would sever final connection to the withered husk of her flesh.
The matriarch’s outcry fell dampened by the muffling felt curtains as the stream of her prescient image impelled off its known course. Scalded in the mind, seared to blisters where her palms held contact with the great crystal, she gasped, crumpled over and shivering.
Cast headlong out of disciplined trance, she opened her eyes, disoriented. Blackness imprisoned her. A burst of raw terror lanced through her until she cried out a cantrip and grounded her awareness in the stale, cold stone of the tower.
The candle by her knee had knocked over or snuffed out. In darkness, she forced a steadying breath. The copper-tinged aftertaste of fear stayed with her, rank as the pound of her heartbeat. For branded in memory was the promise of her own sudden death.
What circumstance she could garner from the shreds of smashed augury stabbed like old rust through her inner mind: because of Arithon s’Ffalenn she would meet her passage uncelebrated, unprepared, long before Lirenda’s succession to prime power was transferred and sealed to completion.
The instrument of her successor’s downfall and her own annihilation was no mystery: beside Arithon’s role, the Waystone itself would play a part. Morriel hissed through locked teeth. Her blood rushed through thin veins to the pressure of her rage.
The chance was inconceivable that she should come to die through the meddling intervention of one mortal.
Perspiration sealed her grasp to the faceted sphere of the Waystone. Its matrix remained roused. Spiked to dangerous, slipped vectors since her lapse in control, stray spurts of faulted power spun sullen patterns through the elements. The air sang with peril. Dissonance chimed from dead dust and rock like the wasp-thin clash of dropped steel.
The Koriani matriarch forced control over terror. She steadied the crystal’s riled focus. Adamant before an overwhelming surge of fury, she struggled and failed to regain either equilibrium or objectivity.
In harsh fact, this one setback could hurt too much.
For the imbalance was no longer so small as Lirenda’s starved craving, or her female fascination with male attraction. If Arithon s’Ffalenn was left a free hand with fate, Morriel faced a permanent failing. She could become the single matriarch since the first to break the chain of inherited power. The deepest of mysteries, the keys to prime inheritance itself, would pass the veil with her, forever lost from the Koriani Order’s living store of knowledge.
A moist brush of her palm and a steel-hard seal of binding severed the Waystone’s roiled focus. While shivers of dread raked Morriel’s weary flesh, she stroked the sweat-printed surface of the amethyst.
Her choice was plain. Unless she risked an immeasurable disaster, she dared not suffer the Prince of Rathain to live.
Beloved of the Fellowship of Seven he might be as the last of a chosen royal line, nonetheless he was born a mortal man. His days would have a thousand artless moments of pregnability. Morriel’s forehead fretted into pleats as she pondered the thorns of her dilemma. The Koriani code forbade murder, an inconvenience she had ways to circumvent. Evading the Fellowship’s interest would be harder. Any trap to take Arithon must be spun in dire subtlety to escape prying notice from Althain’s Warden.
An outside hand must act as her catspaw to accomplish the killing in her stead.
Sealed in the icy chamber with the flat scent of dust and the taint of moth-rotten felt, Morriel Prime released a scratchy sigh. In her hands, the Great Waystone spiked a glimmer of cold violet against the masking darkness. Through its grand focus, she held the power to comb all Athera and align the precise junction of motive with its matching opportunity.
Somewhere there lurked an unguarded mind with the passion to wish Arithon dead.
Her task was to ferret out that individual, to assist just one bitter enemy to couple the means with the moment. If she spun her desire through subliminal suggestion, her bit of small meddling would never be traced to link her hand or her order to a plot of assassination.
Interventions
Hazed into deep-water swells by a scalding attack from a brigantine flying Arithon’s blazon, Alestron’s fleet of galleys is forced to jettison supplies of flour and hardtack to keep waves from crashing through the oarports; and as the last battered vessel limps into sheltered waters, their captains discover their proud flagship missing, with Mearn s’Brydion lost with her …
As the autumn rains resume their dismal fall on Vastmark, and mists seep white through the valleys, a supply train out of Forthmark is waylaid by northern clansmen feal to Rathain, who strike in a whirlwind attack, leaving upset wagons and hamstrung oxen, and only when the officer of the guard seeks the duke’s brother to deliver report of the incident does he hear that Parrien s’Brydion is nowhere to be found …
In a chilly tent drummed by hard rainfall, surrounded by a war camp churned into thick mud, Lysaer s’Ilessid paces past guttered candles, his calm line of dictation closing a letter to be sent under seal to Duke Bransian of Alestron, ‘You have my sincere grief, and my royal regret, that your brother Keldmar was not found among the living after your mercenaries became routed on the slopes behind Dier Kenton Vale …’
IX. COUNTERPLOYS
The rains returned colder, musked with the scent of dying bracken which presaged the dismal turn of season. Autumn came to Vastmark in shades of ochre and brown, then burst into a short-lived, false green as the hills sprang new shoots after summer’s dry winds and drought. Each year, life in the low country seized one last frantic chance to throw off seed heads before the first killing frost.
Like the doomed industry of the grasses, the remnants of Lysaer’s brave warhost regrouped. Reduced to one-quarter of their original strength, wedded to their cause in grim tenacity, they drove on with their effort to send the Master of Shadow beneath the Wheel.
The losses at Dier Kenton had convinced the last doubters of Arithon’s broad-scale ability to sow ruin. If the Prince of the West could endure the decimation of his recruits from Tysan and Rathain and stay unshaken, his allies from Jaelot and Alestron, and the supporters garnered from Shand, took fire from his example. They poured out their hearts to meet his demands and match his unbending dedication.
But now the shortening days turned the weather against them.
Soaked peat made poor fires. The brick ovens for baking bread stayed dismantled, the wrapped iron pots corroded in mouldering canvas. Flour stores spoiled and cheeses grew rinds of sticky mould. The days dawned the same, dim under spun webs of mist that wisped and coiled through the corries; only now the fogs lingered, shedding silver drizzle and a miserable, pervasive clinging damp.
Chain mail and weapons lost their shine despite polishing, and the tents grew streaks of black mildew. Men slept on wet ground and donned byrnies splotched with rust to ride out and scour the uplands for the fugitive enemy.
Arithon’s motley force of shepherds melted before their patrols, elusive as wind. Or they lurked concealed in ambush, to rain down their killing flights of arrows. No day passed without casualties. If Lysaer still commanded a force eleven thousand strong, they were not enough to cordon off Vastmark’s wild territory, with its seamed peaks and dim ravines and steep-sided, rock-scarred ranks of ridges. The best a scourging army coul
d effect was a headhunter’s aim, to pocket small groups of skirmishers, or scour the vales for flocks or unwary settlements, then close in and leave nothing alive.
Against their armed numbers, the nomad tribes were pitifully few. Each death brought the Master of Shadow a loss he could ill afford, a life that left the shepherds one foothold less on the land to preserve family ties and survival.
Lysaer laboured, tireless, to reforge the knit of troop morale. No matter what the hour, he arose to meet the sentries at every change of the watch. He heard each report from inbound scouts, unfailingly at hand to number their dead or credit their diligence, or acknowledge their smallest success. Thin and tired and regaled in soaked finery, he stood in chill darkness and engaged his gift of light to warm the garrison troops dispirited by the cheerless, dreary nights.
Each dawn, while camp followers called coarse encouragement from damp wagons, the patrols rode out to sweep the mist-cloaked crags and comb the ravines for the sign of the Shadow Master.
‘He’s out there,’ Lysaer insisted, his confidence a balm to fuel faith. Nights he awakened to the tug of antipathy that bloomed into sweating, harsh nightmare: the sense of a step on the earth, or a current in the air, raised to a distinctive stab of awareness that warned of his half-brother’s proximity.
The hours when the feeling burned strongest, he dispatched Skannt’s headhunters, backed by squads of Ales-tron’s leaderless mercenaries. No few of these rode refitted to arms at his personal expense. Since the gear cast off in the rout behind Dier Kenton had vanished to tribal looters, Keldmar’s divisions gave their loyalty in redoubled diligence to atone. No one berated them for giving way before a barrage wrought of sorcery. Prince Lysaer’s direct word silenced any loudmouths who jeered. Still Alestron’s men stung for shame that the enemy’s escape had been accomplished through the break in their lines.