Warhost of Vastmark
The clan scout sharing his guard post expressed the same sour view. ‘Stubborn as a beggar’s biting lice.’ Below them, spread out like a stream of plugging ants, a line of troops scoured the gulches. Although worn and hungry on shortened rations, they ground on with their task in obdurate zeal, and unshaken belief in Lysaer’s cause.
Yet faith could not reduce their real suffering, or the rain, and each day with its grinding weight of losses. Four bands of scouts had been diverted from the insignificant, rugged seam that led to the glen Dakar guarded. He watched amazed as a fifth party laboured up the rise, a spatter of pebbled silver against the gloom.
The leader’s voice carried in surly complaint through the cleft. ‘Damned rocks. Fit for nothing but turning a man’s ankle.’
‘Pleased to oblige and the more fool you,’ Dakar breathed on a whisper. For the nature of stone was to absorb and reflect the influence of its environment. The wards the spellbinder had left strung like latticed light across the hillside now compounded the boulders’ propensity to align to their surrounding energies. They were keyed to awareness, letting malediction and injury become turned back in kind.
Throughout the day, the switched-back little sheep track had become adept at shrugging off scouts who expressed their weary hatred of patrols.
A second later, to a grate of slipped shale, the man-at-arms who maligned the ground where he trod lost his footing and sat. A high-pitched curse left his lips. ‘Fiends plague! My leg’s wrenched. This place is Sithaer itself!’
‘Better and better.’ Dakar coughed back bursting laughter and wormed from his niche, neglecting to wince as the wet funnelled trickles down his hood. ‘Best to leave,’ he urged Caolle’s scout. ‘We don’t want to witness what that harebrain’s unleashed. Trust me, gravel never forgets an insult, and if iyats are near, they’ll delight to play along for the malice. Nobody’s going to use the path through this notch for a ten-day without risking a broken neck.’
The Mad Prophet scrambled upright behind the ridge, soaked and dishevelled, and marvelling still for the newfound acuity to his mage-sight. With each passing day, he realized afresh how much earth and air had forgiven his clumsiness through the years he had studied with Asandir. The old platitude was no fable, that the world’s luck walked in a Fellowship Sorcerer’s shadow.
More cautious with his oaths of displeasure, Dakar shivered under soggy clothing. ‘How are we holding?’
‘There’s fighting, northside of the fissure,’ the scout admitted, his braid fallen loose and fanned in plastered ends to his leathers. ‘Duke Bransian’s guard,’ which meant a show of muscle by men who were fresh and well fed. ‘They shouldn’t break through now. Arithon’s there.’
‘To draw them, or maze them in shadow?’ Dakar asked in concern.
The scout shrugged. ‘Whatever’s needed. He promised the tribe.’
‘Take me.’ Dakar skidded downslope over grass choked in gravel and loose scree. The day had become an exercise in frustration, repeated sweeps by foray teams blundering to penetrate a glen where a tribeswoman laboured in childbirth. Made helpless by her time, she was attended by two midwives in a herder’s shelter. Until the babe was born and her condition could withstand a litter, archers and clan scouts had dedicated themselves to divert enemies and seal off the passes.
That the affray had come to open fighting offered the worst of ill news. Bransian’s company would press hard to gain ground defended by Arithon’s allies. The duke’s lancers had been scavenging the countryside like dog packs, shooting the wyverns off corpses and lying in ambush around springs in search of his captive brothers, to no avail.
More archers could die in one hour, here, than on the slopes behind Dier Kenton Vale. That Arithon s’Ffalenn should spend lives for a promise to the young mother’s kinsmen was a folly no one dared argue. The shepherd tribes of Vastmark might lie under Lord Erlien’s sovereignty, as vested caithdein of Shand, but for their help against Lysaer’s warhost, and the use of their pastures for his battleground, the Prince of Rathain had made them his personal trust.
Dakar laboured through a gully, then started up the flank of the hill on the glen’s farther side. ‘If word reaches Skannt’s patrols, his Grace could die for the sake of that mother and babe.’
‘I said so.’ The scout hunched, face turned against a dismal slash of rain. ‘Ath Creator can’t make our liege listen when his mind’s fixed.’
‘Then hurry.’ Head down, Dakar ploughed through a hollow choked with stunted evergreen. Through branches crippled into tangles by the abuses of weather and poor soil, he heard arrows whine from the ridgetop, then the low, clipped accents as a clansman maligned a snapped bowstring. Past a crest of lichened boulders, the Mad Prophet collided with a herdsman whose dim frieze blended with the landscape.
‘We’re friends!’ he yelped, before a dagger thrust on reflex could skewer him. ‘How can we help?’
The offending blade tipped expressively up the slope, and its wielder said in dialect, ‘Wish Alestron’s stamina to Sithaer.’
‘That’s his sister, in labour,’ Caolle’s scout informed Dakar. ‘How much longer do we need to keep them off?’ He began to extricate his bow from his cloak, kept wrapped against his body to spare the string from the wet.
‘She’s delivered an hour ago. A fine son. They’re moving her now.’ A clash of steel past the rise caused the shepherd to wince. ‘Arithon’s said he’ll hold the lancers off himself so our people aren’t pinned in the gulch.’
‘No.’ Dakar shoved ahead. His hood blew back to free hair screwed in rings against the plump flesh of his neck. When an arrow creased the wind and just missed him, he flung himself flat and crawled. In a cleft of puddled shale the defenders grouped, beleaguered, the rain in their eyes, and the gloom falling fast, to rob their slim advantage of height.
Arithon was with them, wrapped in someone’s borrowed cloak. Where his own had gone was anybody’s guess; Dakar had seen him strip his shirt to cover a man struck by a mace, that his kinswoman not be haunted in her grief by the memory of his shattered face.
‘You have to pull back.’ Dakar shoved through the press and spoiled the aim of a bowman to make his point. Through curses in tribal vernacular he insisted, ‘Skannt’s got patrols out. Use shadow, and they’ll pin your location.’
‘Darkness is closing.’ Arithon straightened, a strip of hide he had sliced off his boot cuff in hand. He tossed the leather to an archer who had welted his wrist on his bowstring, the result of a bracer clawed off in a climb. ‘I can make the defence look like nightfall.’
‘That’s a fool’s risk and you know it!’ Dakar need not belabour the frightening facts: Lysaer’s encampment was scarcely a league down the valley, and any use of shadow would provoke the lawless forces of Desh-thiere’s curse into play.
The shepherd he had jostled knelt, drew, and loosed. Downslope, a man screamed to a sliding clash of metal while the Mad Prophet threatened, ‘If you stay, I fight beside you.’
‘Dakar, you can’t.’ Arithon looked up, his dismay blurred in streamers of mist. ‘Your talents are needed to clear the way to the pass. Caolle’s sent word. There are headhunters entrenched to cut off our retreat to the high country.’
‘My duty to Asandir was to defend your royal life, and for no light reason.’ The Mad Prophet met and strove to hold that fierce stare, then flushed and gave way before the obvious. Any sally by headhunters could create a vicious standoff, see their small force trapped between the blundering aggression of two disunited sets of enemies.
‘You do see.’ Arithon dashed rain off his stubbled chin, then sheathed his dagger. ‘For that, I owe you everything.’
Dakar broke away, unwilling to speak. The storm was driving harder, and downpour raked the mountainside in sheets. Morning could see the summits sheathed in grey sleet, with the north face of the passes glazed in shining, glass ice. His mage-sight could sound the elements for what the most vigilant scout would miss. He would know if the trail lay safe
to cross, or sense early warning of an ambush.
Bad enough to suffer the cruelties of nature, far less the driven fury of thwarted men-at-arms whose commanders were too righteous to let them quit.
Bone-weary, stinging and bloodied where he had raked himself in the scrub, the Mad Prophet huddled in the lee of an outcrop while the band he was to guide gathered at the head of the glen. Five brindled sheep dogs padded anxious circles through the legs of tribal archers, who gnawed on smoked jerky and tested wet weapons in worried regularity. The beautiful horn and lacquer recurves they preferred were packed away in dry leather. Heavy wet would ruin them. During squalls, they favoured the same indestructible yew longbows as the woodland clansmen.
Over the common woe of bowstrings that stretched, Rathain’s scouts exchanged phrases in stilted tribal dialect.
No one made jokes. Hungry, half-frozen, they waited for twilight, then set out in gloom under silver-bellied cloud. Ahead lay the Kelhorn’s worst cliff walls and precipices, where soldiers unfamiliar with the territory could only follow at severe disadvantage.
Needled half-blind in cold rainfall, cloaked in smoking drifts of mist, the men in Dakar’s party picked their slow way, with the sheep dogs flanking to scent out the presence of enemies. The endless hiss of runoff over rock could not always hide the chink of slipped shale, or the sliding rattle of a misstep. Inside the first furlong, a pack of tracking hounds picked up their backtrail. The deep-voiced bay of man-hunting mastiffs was answered by the cry of a horn, then by shouts as their handlers fanned out in search.
‘Skannt’s band,’ said the rearguard scout who raced up to deliver breathless warning. ‘Watch the ground ahead. He’ll have an ambush waiting. On my mother’s grave, that’s his style.’
A whicker of attacking bowfire stuttered off the boulders where the shepherds had flattened into cover. Someone cursed in dialect. All shared the sharp frustration: they could see no target to aim at.
Plagued by the crowding sensation of raw fear, Dakar peered into the night. ‘They hope to pin us in place.’ Mage-sight yielded intermittent pulses of life aura through the stippled fall of precipitation. The staid form of stone was always more elusive to pick out when he had little stomach for patience. He persisted, though the interference thrown off by running water harried his nerves and made him queasy. Their party held position on a windswept rim of shale. He could sense the scarlet-tinged bloodlust of enemies entrenched where the scarp met the mountain.
‘We could loose our dogs to stall the trackers,’ a herdsman offered.
Dakar shut his eyes to steady himself through a moment of clawing dizziness. ‘Do that.’ If he could stand off the chill enough to concentrate, he could set a spell to magnify sound, create enough echoes to make the animals seem more fearsome than they truly were. The hounds might not stay fooled. But men in the dark in strange country would be vulnerable to unsettled nerves. For the ambush entrenched ahead, he had no recourse. Clan scouts with their knowledge of infighting must battle every step of the way.
Caolle’s men sorted themselves into a skirmish line and slipped up the ridge through the dark. The herdsman stroked muzzles, his soft-vowelled dialect sharpened by regret. He fingered the luck talismans twined to the dogs’ ruffs, then released his beloved animals with the trained commands to drive off wyverns or wolves.
Eager whines, a bound of motion, a gale-flung scent of wet fur, and the sheep dogs hurtled down their backtrail. While their growling charge diminished in the storm, Dakar mustered tattered skills, fumbled his first wardspell, then lost the thread of the second to a shimmering, redoubled fall of rain. Cloudbursts played havoc with conjury, could mute wards and cancel out his most reliable constructs of spells. The Mad Prophet fought through lethargy, shook off numbing cold, and finally succumbed to bright anger. He wove the elemental chaos of the deluge into his next effort and the bindings grabbed, then like fell vengeance.
In the darkness, the snarls became magnified as the herd dogs launched into attack. Yowling hounds and the fall of kicked shale pocked the night as the two packs collided in conflict. Men’s shouts clamoured through the uproar, faint and scared against what sounded like the very wolves of Sithaer, set reiving by the hand of the Fatemaster.
‘Go,’ urged the herdsman, torn to tears by his pride. ‘As long as my dogs live, they’ll keep fighting.’
But immersed in a webwork of glass-edged spells, Dakar shook his head. ‘Arithon’s people need this trail after us. The headhunters will have to be routed.’
Bloody swords were going to get bloodier, and on the black spine of the mountain, strafed by howling winds, weather would hamper both ally and enemy. Pouring sweat off cold skin, Dakar clamped down on a vicious twist of nerves. How simple if he could pit the pack of Skannt’s headhunters against Bransian’s lancers, and as a herb witch did with vermin, let them hack at each other, bemused under spells, until the way to the passes lay open.
The front rank skirmishers returned, wiping sticky knives, their numbers pared down by half. In typical fashion for clanborn, they showed no sentiment for losses. ‘Trail’s cleared ahead.’
Behind, the guttural snarling of dogs echoed back, cut by the yelps of one wounded. Steel clashed on rock, and men exchanged shouts in townbred accents. Through a gap in the drizzle, Dakar saw Caolle’s clansmen lock glances.
‘Headhunters aren’t fools enough to give way. They’d just track us from behind. Daren’t leave them,’ said one, bearded and very young. No doubt one of Jieret’s Companions, he spat on his blade in salute. ‘That, for the blood of my sister.’ A grin and one step saw him vanished amid the storm, older clansmen in formation close behind.
‘Come on.’ Dakar rallied the huddled band of shepherds. ‘If we don’t make the high country, Caolle will get worried and send another party down.’ He hoped against chance that Arithon would be quick; rough conditions were not going to slacken.
Two dogs rejoined them as they pressed up the ridge, both torn at the ears and one limping. The rank taint of blood stained the rainswept air, leaving Dakar gut sick and gasping. The trail up the scarp cut back on itself, draped with the throat-slit corpses of ambushers, dangling head down from wet rocks.
By midnight, the winds drove a barbed slash of sleet. Dakar flexed numbed toes in his waterlogged boots and shouldered head down against the blast. A cold yet more bitter rode the back of the storm, and a chill raked him through his wet clothing. The shepherds seemed inured to the discomforts of the climate. They made no sound in complaint. Dakar was aware of them only as movement, the tap of a bow against a silver-chased horn, or a soft, slipped step in total darkness. They relied on his mage-sight to feel out the path. His senses were overstrung and tired.
Enough that he misread his own vision.
When a flare of thin light glanced at the edge of his perception, and his nostrils picked up what could have been a faint, sheared trailer of ozone, he stopped. He unreeled his awareness into howling dark until he could taste the rank density of the night. He found nothing. The flare had not been lightning. Flat clouds spread over the mountains in a fabric of random motion.
Nowhere did he encounter the latticed energies of charged spellcraft. Hazed to uneasiness, he could pinpoint no reason why the blank elements should feed his spurt of alarm.
A shepherd blundered into him and spoke soft apology. Poised on the trail, his straining skills immersed in the web of natural forces, Dakar bludgeoned tired wits for some clue to prompt whether he had imagined that trace flicker of strayed energy. Nothing remained but the ugly recognition that this cold snap would turn the grass and bracken. Winter had crept in, all unnoticed, while one fragment of prophecy had unforgivably slipped his attention. As his pause grew prolonged, and the shepherds voiced uncertainty, for need, he reassured them and pressed on.
Once his party was safe, at the soonest opportunity, he must turn back and tell Arithon of his prescient vision concerning an assassin’s posited attempt to claim his life.
Dakar tr
ipped on the scarp, slammed his knee on an outcrop, and bit back his urge to cry curses. Ath knew, if Rathain’s prince was to die of a strike from covert ambush, these hills held the gamut of his enemies to choose from.
The arrow foreseen on that sere, rain-bled slope would be frightfully simple to arrange.
In an agony of doubt, the Mad Prophet struggled on to the upper vale settlement. The archers by then were staggering on their feet from the punishing climb against the tempestuous gusts. A biting drop in temperature made the last league a terror of slick rocks, glazed over in snap-frozen ice. As desperate as the men for the chance to get warm, the Mad Prophet crawled into the first shelter he was offered, hurting to his bones from too many hours with his mage-sight cranked to heightened focus. In a dank tent on a gale-whipped hillside, he accepted hot soup from a shepherd child with huge eyes, wrapped in some grandmother’s tasselled shawl.
Wet, weary, the archers shed quivers and unstrung yew bows. Given loaned blankets, or hunkered down in fleeces, they slept where they sat. By the light of a swinging lantern, two herd girls treated the dogs with a salve made from herbs and mutton fat. The air smelled of meat and fresh blood and wet sheep. Dakar strained reddened eyes through the smoke-thickened air, unsurprised to find a ewe who had lambed out of season, legs folded and dozing in the corner. A younger child lay curled between her kids, tucked asleep amid their grey-fleeced warmth.
Outdoors, the gale shrilled and rain fell, and sheep milled in plaintive, wet knots. A sentry reported. Caught nodding over his meal, the Mad Prophet snapped straight and snatched his bowl as it tilted. He need not have troubled. The broth had cooled off and congealed. Too tired to swear, he asked the grandfather who tended the peat fire. ‘Arithon. Has he come in?’
‘No.’ The answer was given by a clanborn scout, just arrived in from the passes. ‘Caolle’s gone out. There’s been some delay down the trail.’
‘Not more headhunters?’ Dakar raked back his bangs, winced to the sting of a scabbed wrist, and fought against the ache of abused muscles. His boots had stiffened like cold iron around his ankles and he was sitting in a puddle.