* * *
The guardsman who brought word of the tragedy had to be half-carried into the king's audience chamber, so weakened was he from loss of blood. His surcoat had been rent by a scimitar, and dust-caked stains all but obliterated the device.
"Your Royal Grace," he managed, swaying on his feet despite the support of two sturdy squires. "The princess's caravan has been overtaken by Datha raiders. All in her service were slain in her defense. Myself, Neth's Accursed left for dead. Sire, I searched, but no trace could I find of Her Grace, Iloreth, nor any of her tiring women and maids."
The queen's anguished wail fell upon a court stunned to stillness. Shocked courtiers were soon disturbed by the hurry of the royal healer, who shoved past the gaping chamber steward with his smock in disarray. An old man skilled in his trade, he sketched obeisance before the throne, looked once at the guardsman's gray features, then rounded without ceremony on the king..
"Your Grace, this man is dying. Have I your leave?"
The king ignored the healer's impertinence and somehow managed a nod. He watched in stony-eyed shock as the guardsman was led away, stumbling over a gold and purple carpet now marred with bloodstains and dust. The first seneschal of the realm spoke urgently to the queen's ladies. They moved like ghosts in response, and veiled her weeping face behind silk. On the highest level of the dais, the king roused himself. He gripped his throne with shaking hands and spoke.
"My daughter Iloreth is dead." The pronouncement was met without a rustle from the courtiers seated in the galleries on either side. "If there is life in her body, pray Neth extinguishes it, for the Dathei are an honorless race. Let South Englas mourn for the princess's soul. When the candles burned in her memory are spent, let no man speak her name in my presence."
Bells tolled in South Englas by royal decree, shivering the air over the desert sands. The king's loyal donned the black of mourning, and every priest in the land burned offerings for the merciful deliverance of Iloreth. Yet the sole and beloved offspring of the sovereign of South Englas was not dead.
* * *
The princess had twice tried to take her own life. As the victory screams of the Datha horseman had quavered over her fallen escort, the dagger she turned on her wrists cut well and deeply; but death had not come swiftly enough. Her captors had staunched her bleeding, their cruel, peaked brows shadowing their eyes as they worked. Words in their guttural tongue flew thick and fast between them. They pulled her from the scented dimness of her litter into merciless sunlight. Harsh hands pinioned her limbs, held her helpless before laughter and jeers while other, uglier hands prodded at her young flesh.
Scarlet with shame, Iloreth tore one hand free and seized the curved knife from the belt of her nearest captor. This time she tried for her heart.
The weapon was snatched from her grasp. A ringed fist slammed across her face and opened her cheek to the bone. One of her maids screamed as she sagged upon the sand. Yet the blow in the end proved merciful.
The princess who had never in life known mistreatment swooned into deep unconsciousness. She did not suffer when the thumbs were severed from her hands; she felt nothing of the callused fingers that pried her jaws open, or the knife that hacked the tongue from her mouth. The shock of such mutilation claimed the lives of two of her women. They were the fortunate ones.
Iloreth woke to the tickle of flies around her lips. Pain ran in waves up her arms and over her face; her subsequent attempt to move revealed an agony of cramped muscles. She opened caked eyes and received a whirling, blurred impression of sweat-sheened hide and jewelled leather. She had been lashed like baggage to the saddle of a Datha horseman. The rider was currently dismounted. He and his beast drank from a desert spring in great, sucking gulps; the sounds drew the princess's notice to the dried and swollen state of her own mouth. That moment Iloreth encountered the horror that remained of her tongue. The discovery made her retch.
The rider heard. He spat water into the sand and turned to find his captive restored to consciousness.
"Yhai," he exclaimed. Thin, mustachioed lips parted over white teeth. Sunlight gleamed on his muscled back as he bent and dipped his leather cup in the spring. He jingled as he moved. Brass ornaments sewn to his riding leathers scattered reflections of desert sky; slung from his studded belt, he carried six knives, a scimitar, and a sharpened set of quoits.
Iloreth retched again as his smell filled her nostrils, rancid and sour from the fat smeared on his skin as protection from the desert's drying wind. The Datha closed his knuckles like a vise in her hair. He yanked back her head, then poured a warm stream of water into her mouth.
Iloreth choked, forced to swallow or drown. Nausea racked her and emptied her stomach the instant her captor released her. His laughter stung her ears. Weak, dizzy, and barely aware, she lay limp, head down over the horse's sweated side. Her captor hooked the cup to his belt, then spun on his heel and remounted. He spurred his horse to a canter, and tormented once more beyond consciousness by the jolting lurch of the ride, Iloreth missed the raiders' entry through the gateways of Telssina.
Datha metal workers held no equals in their craft, and the city that housed their sultan possessed enchanting beauty. The wrought grilles of window and balcony gleamed like gold lace in sunlight, and colonnaded porticos stood patterned with delicate enamelwork. Telssina was the image of paradise of earth, but to the thousands of thumbless slaves who labored to keep its opulence unspoiled by tarnish and the erosive depradations of desert sand, this splendor was accursed by Neth.
Iloreth learned early to hate what lay beneath Telssina's graceful trappings. Delivered into the hands of the Master of Tribute, she and her surviving maids were pushed, prodded, or dragged into a pastel room with fountains. There they were stripped and examined like beef, the pretty ones selected for the sultan, and those too plain for his taste culled off for return to the raiders for personal pleasure or sale, at their whim.
The Master of Tribute turned Iloreth's chin one way and then the other in his fat and sweating hands. He smelled of citrine; the eyes deep-set into creased flesh missed nothing. Such lustrous hair and brown eyes betrayed promise, even through the dust and stains of capture. A nasal order set Iloreth aside with those retained. She was given care by a perfumed healer who packed her face and wrists with poultices and forced possets down her throat to make her sleep. Her cheek healed badly despite his efforts. The failure cost him a whipping. Cursed with a long, puckered scar that twisted her lip and pulled her left eyelid downward at a grotesque angle, the princess was reduced in rank yet again. Her deformities were too offensive to ornament the sultan's couch, but her body was deemed pleasing enough for a palace maid. Veiled in a servant's gauze, the once-cosseted princess learned to scrub floors and empty chamber pots; only then did she fully appreciate the inventive cruelty of her masters.
Thumbless hands could not manipulate door latches. They could not effectively handle a weapon or resist a beating. Slaves lived at the mercy of the titled lords or royal favorites who resided within the palace, for labor or for pleasure. Though Iloreth's scarred features spared her the attentions of most men, others whose tastes ran to vice were attracted to her. Life became an endless torment. Aching for the solace of death, Iloreth grew to detest the clever scrollwork that decorated the chamber pots, rendering it possible for the eight-fingered to dispose of their contents without mishap.
* * *
Two years from the date inscribed in the memorial chapel, the King of South Englas received word of his daughter. It came in the form of a ragged square of silk carried by a camel trader who sometimes did business at the oases. The fabric bore tortuously written lines that spoke of mutilation and mistreatment, some of which went beyond even the worst rumor out of Datha. Familiar names appeared, heartbreakingly set about with circumstances: Neshiane, assigned to the Sultan's heir as a breeding woman. She had delivered a stillborn child, and for a week she had screamed under torture in a sacrificial ritual intended to restore the princ
e to favor with the fertility deity she had offended. The words described Daide, who had birthed a healthy son, but one with blue eyes; an ancient Datha prophecy warned that a light-eyed man would bring about the fall of the current dynasty. Daide's baby had been hung from a pole in the square until vultures fed on its entrails.
Iloreth ended with a plea to her father that an army be raised against Datha. She signed with her name, and included a description of her childhood nurse to prove her missive was no forgery.
The camel trader shifted his weight on slippered feet. Ill at ease with the formality of the audience chamber, and unprepared for the royal tears, he masked impatience behind obsequious courtesy. He had risked much to deliver the princess's message. All he desired was compensation and leave to depart.
When the king twisted a ruby from his finger and pressed its massive weight into the camel trader's palm, the man flushed scarlet. He had been bestowed the wealth of a lord. He cared not a whit for the princess he had served, but conscience momentarily lent him principle.
"Your Royal Grace," he said, and bent his ample middle into a bow. "I have heard of a man, a mercenary, who might assist you against the Dathei. His name is Korendir of Whitestorm. He holds a reputation for undertaking the impossible. Word goes that he charges dearly for his sword, but he has never failed to deliver his contracts. The sailors out of Fairhaven speak his praises. If you ask, I'm sure they'd tell you more."
The king did not answer. His eyes seemed locked by invisible force upon the appeal penned by his daughter. The camel trader was ushered out by a courtier, the ruby clenched in his fist. His part was done. What followed concerned him not at all.
The King of South Englas neither ate nor slept for three days. He did not laugh at the revels, but sat like a painted icon in his hall of state, uncaring whether judgment was passed over the subjects who appeared with grievances. The queen hovered anxiously at his elbow, ignorant of the white square of silk that had lately been smuggled from Telssina. On the fourth morning, the king summoned his scribe. In the privacy of a locked chamber, he dictated a document which offered gold and command of the royal guard of South Englas for the purpose of war against Datha. Affixed to the parchment with wire was the scarf sent by Iloreth; set in a flourish above the seals, the inscription begged the attention of Korendir, Master of Whitestorm.
"Send this with the next captain bound for Fairhaven," the king instructed. Then he waited, galled by the knowledge that his cherished only daughter washed chamber pots in Telssina, pleasuring by night any barbarian who might fancy her.
* * *
In springtime, three years after the stone was laid for the foundations, the fortress on the cliffs of White Rock Head reached completion. High on the topmost battlement, Haldeth leaned on a flagstaff that flew no standard. Beneath him, the slate roof of the keep which housed the library reflected back the heat of morning sunlight; farther down breakers flashed in unending rows against the headland, and beyond the line of the horizon lay the mast of a trader most likely northbound for Heddenton.
But the ship was all that moved in the circle of Haldeth's view. Fortifications designed for warfare and siege, and the bustling strife of life, instead wore an incongruous mantle of tranquillity. Not a single man at arms sparred in the armory yard; no sentries patrolled the gatehouse. Sunlight fell untrammeled through the lancet windows of a hall unsoftened by tapestries or furnishings, and empty of servants and hunting dogs. Dust ruled in place of a chatelaine, and guests did not visit to feast. The master of the hold was in Heddenton bargaining for honey and broadcloth. Since his stint against wereleopards, Korendir had stayed on at Whitestorm and overseen completion of his holdfast.
Haldeth basked in the comfort of spring, and prayed to Neth the peace would last.
Twice messengers had come to offer contracts for Korendir's services. Both had been sent packing without so much as a meal offered in hospitality.
"Wars," Korendir had reiterated to an inquiring Haldeth, after the second of the two couriers was launched aboard the longboat which had delivered him. "The King of Faen Hallir is haggling over his borders. Again. Just men fighting their neighbors with repeated and senseless ferocity. The Mhurgai raid the coastlines upon principles very little different."
"Hardly that," Haldeth corrected. "Faen Hallir's enemies are invariably the aggressors."
To which Korendir had shrugged, closing a subject Haldeth was content to let die. If the Master of Whitestorm accepted no other contract, if the keep on White Rock Head never hired a single man at arms, the smith would pick no quarrel; women, maybe, and a servant or two for the hall, that was a subject altogether different.
But instinct warned Haldeth against broaching that matter. Korendir's temperamental nature had not mellowed at all.
The steady blaze of sunlight in time made Haldeth drowsy. He turned his shoulder comfortably against heated stone, settled into a cranny, and closed his eyes to nap.
The shrilling of a signal arrow split the sky above the wall. Haldeth started from sleep as the missile wailed overhead and plunged with a crack into the bailey. He bounded erect and looked out. The trader ship noticed earlier proved not to be destined for Heddenton; instead, she lay anchored beneath Whitestorm, the flag of a courier streaming at her masthead.
Recovered enough to swear, Haldeth rubbed sleep from his eyes. A longboat cleaved toward the headland, an emissary bearing a parley flag lodged like a vulture in her stern. Glad of his master's absence, the smith kicked open the postern to the stair. After sunlight, the sudden plunge into shadow raised chills on his cloakless back.
Yet by the time Haldeth passed the gamut of Whitestorm's defenses and arrived upon the strand, the boat with its blackrobed emissary was already being rowed back to the ship. Haldeth expelled a deep breath. The shore party was already beyond hailing distance; if the message had been urgent, the emissary would surely have lingered on the beach head. Grateful for his solitude, and panting from his run down tiresome flights of stairs, Haldeth set his back against the sea-damp cliffs and muttered a prayer devoid of blasphemies. Not until he turned to go did he notice the item left wedged in a cleft beside the entry to Whitestorm keep.
The emissary had delivered his message after all. It took the form of a folded square of parchment, crusted with ribbons and seals. Fastened to one edge with a twist of wire was a length of silk, jagged across with script in a hand that sprawled like a child's.
Haldeth lifted the missive from its niche, his heart touched numb with foreboding. The seals proved to be royal, the desert hare blazon of his Grace, the King of South Englas incised into rare purple wax. Border disputes would not be the issue this time. Pinching the missive like carrion between thumb and forefinger, Haldeth ascended to the upper keep. He could not bring himself to examine the silk, or read its piteous message. Whatever plea it harbored was no affair of his; he left both envelope and cloth on the desk in Korendir's library, then bolted the brass panelled door as if securing an enemy inside.
The message remained undisturbed for a fortnight, until Korendir returned from Heddenton and chanced to require a book. When he found the door to his library inexplicably barred and fastened, he stopped cold still in his tracks.
His shout raised echoes all they way down to the bailey. "Haldeth!"
No voice answered.
Quite without warning the smith had departed to go hunting; Korendir discovered as much in the course of a swift investigation. The horn bow reserved for game was gone from the hook in the armory. The fact that the smith's boots remained on the hearth rug, and his cloak still hung on its peg, spoke less of scant stock in the larder than of desperate, stop-gap escape. Korendir raked back bronze hair. His eyes were chips of ice as he retraced his way to the library and irritably unfastened latches.
The door swung soundlessly open. Fading daylight from the window cast a sheen on ribbons and royal seals; not the scarlet of Faen Hallir this time, but the purple and gold of South Englas. The ruler of that land was a kin
g famed for timidness, a fact resoundingly exploited by the rapacious Datha Sultan adjacent to his eastern border. Korendir crossed swiftly to the desk. With none of Haldeth's hesitation, he ripped open the seals and read lines which promised riches in exchange for mercenary service. The lure of the gold alone invited consideration and might have bought acceptance on its own merit; but the piteous tale scratched in blood upon silk was the reason the Master of Whitestorm departed at a run for his sword.
* * *
He all but collided with Haldeth beneath the arch by the seaward postern. Though the quiver at the smith's back was empty, the gamebag at his hip dangled suspiciously flat.
"Kindle a signal fire on the east tower," Korendir said briskly. "I'm going to require a ship."
The smith regarded Whitestorm's master, clad as always in black, from plain cloak and tunic, to the soles of boots well worn from nights spent walking the cliff tops. The only concession to color was the band of wereleopard hide stitched to the cuffs, unchanged since Korendir's service in Northengard. The scabbard and baldric were the same he had carried into the caves of Ellgol, and the sword, sharpened over old chips, had not been replaced. Haldeth had always found an excuse rather than re-forge that blade; now, his stubborn adherence to a former oath made him sorry. Fool he had been to think Korendir might settle for a quiet life at Whitestorm. The man's reasons for refusing the two contracts from Faen Hallir had never arisen from any reluctance to face risk.
"Let me at least repair your weapon before you go," the smith pleaded. "One day more cannot matter when that letter sat for two weeks."
"Two weeks!" Korendir curbed a wild blaze of anger. "Did you read that square of silk?"
Haldeth shrank miserably against the arch. "No. I told you once. The adventures you undertake are your own affair. No more help will you get from me."