TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  Collared and dragged by the mailed fists of guardsmen back up the same tiresome tower staircases, then heaved with humourless force through the doorway, Dakar staggered into candlelight. The chamber where he had shown Rathain's emeralds was lit now by massive candelabra on stands at the four points of the compass. Grazed with patched blood and bruises, whooping in starved gulps of air, he sagged to his knees against the wall chest, left open since morning, when Keldmar had snatched his paired swords. The brothers were nothing if not thorough. Dakar's hands were trussed afresh in stout cord, beyond liberty to grope to see if other weapons remained swaddled in the oiled rags that lined the bottom.

  If the Mad Prophet held out hopes to ease his plight through fast talk, the speed of events soured his opening. When Guard-captain Tharrick had no ready explanation for a spy who had slipped through his posted watch, the brothers s'Brydionlost patience. They ordered him stripped and flogged with supreme unconcern for bloodstains on their rich carpets.

  Quaking and sick, Dakar shut his eyes against the poor wretch's screams as the lash fell. Tharrick was innocent of accepting any bribe, and zealous as any man might be in adherence to loyal duty; against the wily Master of Shadow, no sentry in Alestron had a chance.

  Unaware he had spoken his opinion out loud, Dakar started as a bandaged hand clamped his nape.

  'What was that you just said?' Mearn's unquiet pacing had carried him within earshot. Changed out of his dandy's velvets, he now wore scarlet riding leathers scaled across the shoulders with brass plates. His lovelock had singed to a frizzle. He had a marked cheek, a heel too tender to bear weight, and both hands poulticed for burns. The sting inflamed his already volatile temperament like the inexorable blaze of a slow match. Dakar tried a noncommittal mumble.

  'Say again!' shouted Bransian with a curt gesture to his left.

  The mottled, ugly henchman who wielded the whip stopped his stroke, and Dakar's reply rang incensed across silence. 'I warned you before. You dealt with a sorcerer. And I said, you punish the wrong man.'

  'Indeed?' The duke leaned out and snatched the dangling tail of the lash. Still in his scuffed and carbon-filmed armour, he twined the bloodied leather between skinned fingers, snapped hard, and jerked the stock from the grip of his lackey. 'If Captain Tharrick is guiltless, you are not.' A flourish of the swinging handle saw two hyperalert guardsmen jump to cut the luckless officer down. 'Get him out,' Bransian ordered. 'But don't set him free just yet.'

  With one eye puffed to a meaty, purple slit, the other half-lidded and speculative, he raked a sharp gaze over Dakar. 'Indeed, you haven't told us much of your connection in this. Who was this Shadow Master who has made such a wreck of our interests? How did he come to know you, and most of all, why did you betray him?'

  'You have some fancy explaining to do if you're going to leave here alive,' Mearn added.

  Fixated on Bransian's square, crimsoned knuckles, clenched and working through wet leather, Dakar licked his lips. 'Of course, I'll tell you everything. Where should I start?'

  But no display of obsequious eagerness could deflect four s'Brydion primed to exact painful vengeance. Keldmar and Parrien arrived back from their baths. Each had a gingerly hitch to their stride, suggestive of stiffening bruises. Other tender patches were soothed in silks and ribbon-laced velvets in place of leather brigandines and studs. Still enraged, scuffed with nicks still oozing from scabs, they were quick to point out that the oaken table was sturdy enough to use to strap a victim down. If the inquisition grew prolonged, and torture was needful, chairs were at hand, and servants could be called to supply drink and a tray of cold lamb.

  The guardsmen who had lately manhandled their luckless captain knew better than to risk their duke's displeasure by lounging in wait for direct orders. Before Dakar could draw breath to confess his first word, they hefted him upright, sliced his bonds, and stretched him flat on his back. This time, the men at arms shed their belts to restrain him. Dakar winced as buckles and studs bit through his thin hose to gouge at the bones of his wrists and ankles. Fear of greater pain set him talking.

  Belaboured by stark disadvantage, that knotting a clever screen of half-truths and lies was no laughing matter in distress, Dakar lapsed into long pauses. To augment his miseries, any brilliant fabrication he could spin out of words would scarcely save him from unpleasant handling. Quite the contrary: Duke Bransian had already made clear his intent to serve his prisoner's gizzard up raw, then toss his twitching carcass to the not-so-tender pleasures of Alestron's public executioner.

  Dakar licked dry lips and seized on the obvious inspiration. An explosion, a fire, then the vociferous, bloodletting trial of a guard captain should leave most men naturally thirsty. Any novice versed in granny simples knew the darker runes and seals that could compound the urge to drink into a driving obsession.

  Though the setting of any geas lay in breach of the Major Balance, Dakar held the infraction as insignificant beside the certainty of being drawn and quartered as the cohort of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  To engage even the most rudimentary spell of ill while crimped in an over-tight doublet posed a problem; after several botched tries, Dakar had to settle for tracing the symbols with his toe. As adverse to concentration were skinned knees, the blisters raised by cinder burns, and the horrid pull of leather straps that threatened to dislocate both his arms at the shoulders. The s'Brydion flung him questions in a rapid-fire barrage, often shouting each other down to be first to make their point. Parched enough by himself to be susceptible to his own arcane blandishments, Dakar scarcely managed the presence to maintain his string of lies, far less to mouth cantrips to activate his construct and fan the desires of four bellicose brothers to encompass a craving for spirits.

  Not least, his dire worry: that the s'Brydion style of viciousness might turn the more sullen when drunk. When the cold supper demanded by Keldmar arrived in the care of a servant, Dakar rolled his eyes until they threatened to twist from their sockets. At the cost of an unholy crick in his neck, he managed a cursory inventory: the tray held a carafe of wine, five brimming flasks of dark ale, and a tally that fell short at three mugs.

  In obstinate disdain of his older siblings' appetites, thin, nervous Mearn did not drink. While the candleflames sank in pooled craters of wax, and his brothers wolfed down strong cheese and meat pies, he regarded the fat prisoner in narrow-eyed, acid incredulity. 'You expect me to believe one such as yourself consorts with Fellowship sorcerers? That's not even plausible, it's foolish!'

  Since his connection with Asandir was the single incontrovertible truth in the unlikely course of his confession, Dakar showed justifiable injury. 'Fiends and Dharkaron's vengeance! If you'd met my master just once, you'd realize such a tie is the last thing a man would dare to lie about.'

  Bransian stretched to snatch the last ale flask from the tray before Parrien drained it dry himself. 'Wretch, I don't care if you sprang fully formed from the dungeon in Althain Tower.' Through a grand, steady pause, Alestron's dishevelled duke poured dark ale down his throat. In words not the least bit encouragingly slurred, he finished, 'Never mind your non-existent master. Just tell us where this Master of Shadow has taken himself to ground.'

  'I don't know that. I said so before.' Had Dakar's hands not been dragged white by cruel straps, he would have torn his beard in frustration.

  'You've said a great deal that adds up to nothing,' Keldmar grumbled. He shook the dregs of the wine carafe, then bellowed to a guardsman to collar the lazy steward and fetch up more food and drink. 'A man calls for a meal, and just on account of a pitiful few stairs, he gets a spread that's scarcely suited for a ladies' tea.'

  'You ought to leave off the wine,' Mearn snapped. He sprang up again and paced the carpet, sulky as a falcon mewed up for moult.

  Keldmar bared his teeth in a smile. 'The day I wish my little brother's advice on my pleasures, I'll certainly lie flat in my coffin.'

  'Fiends and death, stop your bickering!' Bransian crashed the drained fla
sk on the table with force enough to dent oak, and redouble the headache that slammed in reverberation through Dakar's skull and sinuses.

  'Such temper,' murmured Parrien. 'If you're minded to thump something, my Lord brother the Duke, why not use the prisoner for the purpose? If he's going to keep prattling nonsense, I'd much rather listen to him howl.'

  Alarmed lest his straits should deteriorate further, Dakar unlocked his tongue and embroidered on his woeful tale of subterfuge.

  Two hours passed. The guard on the wall walk outside had changed twice. At ground level, Alestron's streets lay wrapped in fog and night silence, but for the distant clank of sheep's bells and the intermittent tramp of the night sentries. In the tower, the candles flickered and dipped, their frayed flames half-drowned in hot wax. At least six wine bottles stood emptied to the lees. Dakar ached too much to maintain strict count on the ale. His extremities had gone numb where the straps pinched, no improvement: extended hours with his limbs stretched immobile had knitted his back in screaming knots. The wearing necessity of renewing the sordid energies inherent in his geas of compulsion left him sapped to gut-sick prostration.

  For all his expenditure of effort, the results were appallingly scant.

  Parrien alone had succumbed. He lay sprawled gently snoring on the tabletop, his slack wrists folded underneath his velvet collar, and his cheek pillowed on Dakar's ankle. To one side, Keldmar nodded, looking owlish. Except for combative glares between statements, Duke Bransian seemed little changed.

  Mearn was still upright despite his pronounced limp. Restless as a draught-teased spill of water, he quartered the chamber in unabated agitation. He fidgeted, impervious to every seal of suggestion, that nervous movement should strain body and spirit. Long since, Dakar felt, the man should have given way to a spell-turned, insatiable need for sleep.

  Awake and cold-nerved as a fish, Mearn stabbed a finger into his oldest brother's shoulder. 'The fat wretch is feeding us a hotchpotch of lies. It makes me ill, that you let him keep it up.'

  Bransian blinked like a tiger at the jostling, wiped beer foam from his whiskers and pontificated. 'Undoubtedly he lies. What I want to know is why he set himself up for the fall?' Another long swallow, a belch heaved up behind a massive, cupped hand; the duke gave his alesoaked conclusion. 'That slinking little spy never struck me as a fool. You did notice, he caused damage, but never once struck to kill.'

  'Well, seven of our garrison were lost in that explosion. I'm tired of games.' Mearn stalked toward the table. The scales on his shoulders sparked gold fire as his bandaged fingers clawed at the knife hilt in his belt. 'You and Parrien and Keldmar can drink 'til you're witless. I'm going to hear some truthful answers.'

  The blade sheared from its scabbard with a sour, cold ring, and the sweat already beaded on the prisoner's face trickled in copious runnels. Dakar's frantic squirm creaked a protest from the straps. He desperately wet ashen lips. 'I've told you. The man is the Master of Shadow! No locked and guarded door in all the five kingdoms could stand against his fell wiles.'

  As though tripped on cue, the latch clicked. The door spun open with decisive, oiled speed, and a dark-cloaked figure strode through. Tall, silver-haired, commanding in movement, the arrival flicked a cold gaze across the prostrate figure on the tabletop. 'Pray, don't let me interrupt,' he said.

  'Asandir!' Dakar forgot himself, gave a frantic heave, and yelped as his bonds all but dislocated every joint in his limbs.

  Knife in hand, Mearn started full circle, then fell back before the sorcerer's first glance. Keldmar more simply succumbed to the wine. He swayed, eyes squeezed shut, then crumpled beneath the table with an aristocratic ease cut off by a thud as his head came to rest against the carpet.

  Lord Bransian rubbed his black eye and said solemnly, 'Ath, it's another uninvited guest. If you're selling anything, I hope it isn't emeralds.'

  The sorcerer gave no reply. Beaten haggard, he stood cloakless in his travel-stained leathers, while draught from the door left ajar at his back flared and harried the stubs of the candles. He smelled of horse sweat and the crushed stalks of meadow grass, the last likely place he had snatched a nap. His demeanour showed every sign of having burned reckless power to keep a horse from flagging underneath him, through a journey of untold leagues.

  No Fellowship sorcerer ever spent such reserves, or drove a dumb beast without cause.

  Pressed by fatigue to a hardness like fired enamel; fixed in cold temper with no spark available for pity, he opened as though the duke and his brothers were not present. 'I came here at speed from Rockfell.'

  A dreadful, uncontrolled shudder raked Dakar from head to foot. If the threat of Mearn's knife no longer held impetus, the fate he would suffer for his plot to harm Arithon defied imagination.

  Asandir came straight to the point. 'Why should I trouble to punish you?' He took a step, the look he trained on his apprentice as depthless as glazed winter sleet. 'Arithon can handle his own slights.'

  He raised a hand still grimed from lathered horse, sketched a rune upon the air above the spellbinder's body, and murmured a lyric phrase in Paravian. As if plucked to life, the air shivered through a cry like struck crystal. Its peal of layered harmonics felt very like another set of notes, set off by Arithon's whistle on the scaffold in the feast hall in Jaelot. The straps that bound the Mad Prophet ripped asunder; no less a constraint, every last brass button on his doublet flew off and pinged off the ceiling. Showered in their backfalling numbers, Dakar grasped after the fast-fading edges of an unbinding spell he would trade his right leg to remember.

  But fear rinsed his will to stark blankness as Asandir resumed speech. 'Get up. Go. Luhaine's safe-conduct will see you past the guard and through Alestron's outer gates.'

  In slinking humility, Dakar forced hurting sinews to move, to rise. No s'Brydion voice protested his freedom; none dared. Asandir's forbidding presence charged the room like new frost. Dakar tripped and reeled in his haste. Aware of Duke Bransian's glare like a coal dropped on his bare flesh, harried on by Mearn's thwarted bloodlust, he stumbled through the open doorway in a running plunge for the stair.

  Behind him, the half-started Duke of Alestron ventured in an acid show of courage, 'Apparently the fat man didn't lie about his ties with Fellowship sorcerers. Is he your lackey or that of the Master of Shadow?'

  Then Asandir's reply, never loud, but emphatic enough to pierce through the iron-bound portal as it shut. 'As soon as you and your brothers sober up, we need to have a serious discussion.'

  * * *

  When midnight came, Arithon still waited in the hayrick alongside the oak grove. The neat linen shirt tailormade for him in Farsee hung torn at the elbows, grimed with oil and sooty dust. His left cuff was scorched, legacy of a fire arrow. The laces of the right were sliced and blood-soaked, courtesy of a s'Brydion knife throw; another shallow gash scored his ribs. A jagged, clotting scab marred one steep, s'Ffalenn cheekbone, and the soft, cloudy drizzle that had dampened him since sunset wicked up the sulphurous reek of smoke that hung about his person.

  Absorbed in the act of digging splinters from his palm, he looked up as something clumsy thrashed through the brush beneath the trees. A muffled curse followed, then the sound of cloth tearing, and a thud as a body collided with a low-slung branch.

  A sharper oath issued through the rustle of the bough, and a dewed fall of droplets pattered into deadening leaves; apparently Luhaine's escort to Alestron's city gates had included no pause for the purchase of a fourpenny lantern.

  Without moving, Arithon said, 'Prophet of Madness. Lost your mage-sight, I see, to fatigue?' He sheathed his stolen dagger and carolled a line of balladry in lyrical, lilting satire. '"And whither went thy trust, that thee abandoned?"'

  Dakar clawed his way into the open. Adorned like a springtide celebrant with sticks and sprigs of plucked oak leaves, he took a planted stance above his nemesis. 'Ath, what possessed you to start a fire?'

  Arithon looked up, stilled as old rock in the d
arkness. 'And what did you expect, since you sent me in unwarned? Those casks contained a firespell, or some other seal of unbinding destruction, and I'm mageblind! People died. I was made the instrument. If you chose me as your proxy to fulfil some promised duty to Sethvir, I'd say you got far less than you deserved.'

  A dangerous fury sparked within the green eyes. Chastened to fear, wary with the knowledge that affairs had gone beyond a simple baiting, Dakar shrugged off a raking chill. Then, struck by the leashed temper in Arithon's regard, his own hot rage rose and shattered into stunned recognition. 'Fiends! You guessed I would betray you!'

  'Guessed?' Arithon stood. Robbed by bruises of his usual easy grace, he caught up his lyranthe and belongings. 'More than that, my blind-sided seer. My strategy hinged upon that single fact. But don't be asking my gratitude.'

  The damning train of past events stitched together, of an endless narrow corridor; of locked and barred doors; and of guard captain Tharrick, weeping broken on his knees, pleading still as the whip fell and fell, that no sentry posted under his command had done any less than maintain Alestron's security. Now, through abrasions and dirt and a racking, sharp ache of stiffened muscles, Arithon regarded the agent whose predictable betrayal had unkeyed those inviolably guarded posterns. His face showed contempt, and a brittle impatience as he slung satchel and lyranthe across his shoulders.

  Dakar felt kicked breathless as a man just bludgeoned in the belly. 'May Daelion speed your spirit to the darkest pit in Sithaer. You've been using me all along! What have I been but a living tool to further your unsavoury wiles!'

  'By all means, place the blame where it's properly due,' said Arithon in ringing, hard warning. 'I don't require self-indulgence. I never asked you for loyalty. But step softly. This time innocents have suffered. Cross me again at your peril.'

  Dakar swung a fist to smash those fine-boned, impervious royal features. His blow deflected off a stinging parry. Then hated hands gripped and spun him, hurled him off-balance into the wet, wooded darkness.