TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  Never more wickedly serious, Arithon shrugged. 'I had to get up. Else Dakar would have his revenge on me for the times I've kicked him when he was down. We really must be off.'

  His circle of admirers parted, elbowing one another and chuckling. All showed regret at the leave-taking. One dog grown particularly fond of the Shadow Master whined on the fringes, morose. At the far edge of the circle, amid an isolate jink of bronze, Dalwyn awaited, her cloak hood pulled low over her face, and the anxious release of her half-held breath a feather of white in the cold.

  'Will you come back?' she asked. 'Ghedair wished to know.'

  Arithon regarded her through a careful pause, touched her cheek, then bent his gaze to encompass the high peaks, fired now like steel raised red from the forge in the first blush of sunrise. 'Lady, tell Ghedair to depend on it.'

  * * *

  The journey on foot to the coast took five days. Dakar grumbled to hide his relief that Arithon had lost his urge to dawdle. They wended a track through the valleys, slogging through peat bogs and crossing, rock to rock, over freshets risen with snowmelt. In the low country, the southland sun prevailed over the cold, which still mailed the peaks in ice. The hollows spread lush as new velvet, the scattered puddles skimmed into wind scallops that cupped turquoise glimmers of sky. The bracken on the hillsides lay stitched with new shoots. In the marshes, the springing tips of pale reeds were sliced by the cries of the curlews.

  Dakar had not realized they had strayed so far inland, sharing migration with the herdsmen.

  The sloop Talliarthe rode quiet in her anchorage, a bit mussed by storm wrack, her brightwork left gritted by roosting gulls and gannets, and her bilges in sore need of bailing. Still clad in his patched herder's smock, her master looked as neglected. Dakar made the painful discovery that slack grooming did nothing to blunt the edge from Arithon's tongue. If the Shadow Master had been scatheful company before, the affray over the dead child had peeled away even the pretence of manners in private.

  Rather than suffer the satiric barbs slung at him each time his comments bit too near to the bone, the Mad Prophet chose the more peaceable labour of swabbing Talliarthe's decks.

  For a day, the sloop's rigging flapped like a farmwife's clothesline with laundry. Arithon whipped new ends on chafed lines and let the sunlight which sliced in gold blades through the cliff walls bleach the mildew from her stored canvas. Then, reclothed in a fresh tunic and a shirt with silk laces, his fingernails trimmed and his overgrown hair nipped back in a thong, he raised sail. Talliarthe threaded her way west in a dicey course through the reef-ridden waters that unreeled between the headlands and the tight, mazed shoals of the Cascains.

  The channels between islets were too perilous to navigate by night. At anchorage each eventide, in the grim, shadowed mouths of a succession of remote coves, Arithon penned maps on new parchment. He sketched out the valleys and trails he had traversed through his winter excursion into Vastmark. He recalled those sites prone to slides, and which corries offered pasture, and how close the fodder could be grazed to support livestock at different seasons of the year. Trained to a masterbard's memory, he had amassed an impressive store of information from the course of the tribesfolk's idle talk.

  'We're going to try sheepherding next?' Dakar asked, squeezing past to reach the companionway to dip a bucket of seawater to wash.

  Arithon looked up as though he might answer, the flame in the gimballed lamp a ruddy glow over the upswept planes of s'Ffalenn features. Then his gaze brightened and his smile thinned to a scalpel's edge. 'You'll have to guess, if you can.'

  The next day at noon, to Dakar's amazement, the Khetienn arrived in rendezvous, rigged out and completed on borrowed coin to the last fitted detail of her brightwork.

  As her master saw her ghost between islands on the whispered breeze in her staysails, his expression lit to pure pleasure. Against the louring rocks of the shoreline, tanbark headsails crowned her in elegant curves like the flounces in a virgin's skirt. The brigantine was everything his design had intended, lean of frame, with the promise of a handy turn of speed in her grace, and the varnish on her spars glossy as polished citrine.

  New canvas flogged up an echoing thunder as she backed her sails and dropped anchor. Arithon leaped to uncleat the Talliarthe's tender, afire with joy and pride, as well he might be, Dakar allowed from his propped stance at the sloop's mainstay. Seafaring s'Ffalenn forebears in Karthan had time-tested that rapacious, long sheerline.

  Then the shout of a child pealed through the clank of the anchor chain; Fiark's, Dakar determined with a wince at the sting to his eardrums.

  Poised to thread oars in his rowlocks, Arithon looked around in dismay. His stunned glance locked on the pair of towheads butted over his brigantine's bowsprit. The boy's effusive peals of delight were predictably followed by Feylind's shrill hail to her dark-haired idol in the dory. 'Look sharp, all you lubbers! Your cap'n's coming aboard!'

  The Shadow Master's flushed elation drained away into pallor and for a second his heart seemed to stop.

  'Fiends plague!' Dakar crowed in righteous pleasure. 'If you hadn't meant to kidnap those twins, your fat's in the fire, regardless. Jinesse will tear you to ribbons.'

  Arithon came alive as if pricked. 'She'd be far better off to warm the hides of her children.' His dilemma was unpleasant, with his formal promise given to guarantee the children's safety.

  Their wayward presence here exposed them to risks he was powerless to avert. Merior was closed to him; the coasts were under search by s'Brydion galleys. He had no escort and no ship he could entrust to dispatch them home. The frustration in his anguish showed through his every movement as he slammed down his oars and squared his lean shoulders to row. The blades lapped deep and scalloped dark water to froth in the dory's agitated wake.

  Too late, indignant, the Mad Prophet realized he no longer had hold on the painter. 'Wait! You're not going to leave me here!'

  'In fact, I am.' The vinegar bite to the Shadow Master's smile chased a nasty chill down Dakar's back.

  Unless the spellbinder undertook the fool's errand of swimming, he was stranded aboard the sloop until a longboat and crew were sent from the brigantine to ferry him. The creeping suspicion ate him to rage, that Arithon might seize upon his absence to enact all his best covert planning.

  By the time Dakar managed to commandeer himself a tender, the twins had been expertly chastened to silence and sent to bed in the first mate's cabin. Twilight sketched the high cliff rocks and the jumble of outlying islets in tones of poured lead and deep azure. A wind that nipped with the memory of winter slapped frisky waves against the hull. Belowdecks, the aft cabin was snug. A gimballed lamp warmed the grain of a generous chart table. Around the spread layers of maps and mismatched documents, a council of sorts was in progress. Angled so the best light fell over his shoulder, Arithon sat propped beneath the paned window, one knee raised, his hands kept busy cracking the seals on several thick packets of correspondence.

  Dakar admitted himself without knocking, hungry, but too nosy to miss what might transpire through delay if he joined the crew in the galley for bean soup. Discussion trailed off in the stale sort of pause that marked a topic several hours old. The Khetienn's paid captain filled one of the chairs. An opened wine bottle rested on a tray alongside several long-stemmed Falgaire goblets, once the property of Prince Lysaer. Cut crystal strewed focused arrows of light across the damp-riffled leaves of those letters perused and discarded. The Shadow Master's hair lay in light disarray, as if more than once the absorbed rake of his fingers had hooked loosened strands from the thong tie.

  'So, a search has been launched to track my movements,' Arithon said, sparing no glance aside for Dakar's blundering entrance. 'Go on. Galleymen dislike these channels. The currents are treacherous and strong, as you saw. Every oarsman I drank with at Innish insisted the cliffs here were haunted by spirits.'

  The captain was a hulking, solid man with square eyes and ruddy cheeks and an affabl
e, hearty turn of speech.

  At the mention of ghosts, his lower lip twitched into petulance. 'There's a Second Age ruin on the mainland causes the haunts, which are no rumour, mind, but plain truth. You'd be canny to listen. Ships wreck here too fast to count. These waters breed whirlpools to suck a keel under, stirred by the shades of drowned crews.'

  Arithon leaned forward, caught up the carafe, and poured a goblet of wine, which he offered in friendliness. The grizzled man accepted, his hand faintly shaking, indication enough he found the shoals in the Cascains unsettling.

  Dakar declined the same service. Arithon retained the second filled goblet for himself and flipped the string off his last stack of letters. A pair of dice clicked across the decking overhead; two sailors exchanged bets in low murmurs.

  Eased by the wine, the captain resumed his measured review of the southcoast gossip. 'Word of your doings reached the taverns of Innish as we sailed. Best steer most softly if you dock there again.'

  'The merchant who holds my notes won't be hurt.' The Master of Shadow snapped a thumb through an official city seal, apparently indifferent as Dakar forwent the empty chair and jockeyed his girth behind the table to assume a comfortless perch on the windowsill. There, he craned his fat chin this way and that, until, by design, he gained a clear vantage over the correspondence being perused.

  'I intend to repay my loan and the interest to the last copper,' Arithon said.

  'Your benefactor never showed a worry over that.' The captain seemed intrigued by Dakar's prying as he added, 'You'd warned us well enough what was coming. There are friends still at Innish who won't be turned, whatever has happened at Southshire.'

  'What's happened at Southshire?' Dakar cut in, his eyes meanwhile tracking, upside down, the curlicued script of a feminine hand. The seal had been a false cover. A connoisseur of scents, he judged the perfume that wafted off the thin, pastel paper to be from a brothel up the coast. Its message matched his hunch: 'The restoration of Avenor is nearly complete and no sorcerer has arrived to bring retaliation for the standing stones torn down. Prince Lysaer is considered a hero. With everyone's dread of the ruin laid to rest, and the roads reopened to West End, his stature has grown. The arrogance of the trade guilds weakens against him as they see their fears dissolved by the very royalty they deplored. . .'

  'Well, Southshire's in Prince Lysaer's pocket,' the hired captain obliged. 'The merchants were already primed to welcome the increased business drummed up by a muster for war. Plain avarice saw to that. Then Lysaer gave a show fit to blind Ath Creator when he entered the main gates of the city. The whole populace turned out to throw flowers in the street to salute his royal cavalcade.'

  The tale emerged in full-blown colour as the vintage wine mellowed the captain's nerves; how Lysaer, Lord Commander Diegan, and the dandyish Mearn s'Brydion had swept into Southshire in grand state. The gems and bullion braid on the prince's horse trappings alone had impressed the merchant's wives to goggling awe. The live presence of old blood royalty, all chiselled, pale elegance and guileless good manners, had done much to enliven their winter parties.

  While the captain rambled on through his narrative, Arithon finished the scented letter and refolded it, the faintest clipped tension to his fingers the only sign that the news it contained was all grim. The present trend against him would not be reversed; given time, the rumours would reach even the backwater villages like Merior. The day would come when he was going to find his welcome proscribed wherever he chose to go on the continent.

  Never had his salvaged brigantine meant more to life and freedom than at this moment. Dakar read as much in the swift, searching glances directed at intervals around the white-painted cabin.

  'I don't suppose the military interests in the city gave much thought to the fripperies,' the Mad Prophet interjected, pressured to a new and dogged turn of mind that set impatience on the dalliance of light gossip.

  'Ah, that.' The captain helped himself to more wine and scraped an itch between his shoulders against the bulkhead. 'It was an easy enough conquest, so I heard. Lysaer paid for a festival match.' Details followed in humorous, wry satire. The city garrison had been reduced to blustering incompetence, first by the smoothly perfect drills of the royal officers, then by the hard-bitten mercenaries from Alestron. The shipwrights who had once dealt with Arithon, and received their pay in pale gold, had watched this latest byplay, reserved to nonpartisan silence. But as the coterie around the prince became outspokenly devoted, whispers over shadows and piracy began to circulate. The crisp efficiency that earmarked Arithon's transactions came to be regarded with suspicion in retrospect.

  'That mightn't have mattered,' the captain summed up. 'Except the spurning of your interests by Merior's fishermen became the stone that tipped the balance. The folk who ply the nets there are a dour enough lot, but even the galleymen respect them. When those villagers chose to forsake their trust, their opinion was taken as testimony.'

  Dakar shot a veiled glance to measure Arithon's response. But the elegant, bard's fingers had delved through the stack of papers and emerged with another penned in heavy, antique script. The front bore a cipher scribed in old Paravian; the seal in the splash of ruby wax was royal, slashed across by a diagonal bar, denoting correspondence initiated on kingdom business by Lord Erlien, Regent and caithdein of Shand.

  'Daelion avert!' Dakar murmured in surprise. 'What possessed an old blood clanlord to commit his news into writing? I haven't seen that happen since before there were the headhunters' leagues.' He trailed off, not so much in embarrassment for his filching interest in Arithon's affairs as for the glower from the captain, interrupted from his meandering recount.

  Since the caithdein's missive contained nothing of interest beyond an inventory list of blooded livestock, the verbal news recaptured its due share of interest.

  The captain related how the Prince of the West had waited until the city trade guilds and government were already moved to support him before offering a demonstration of the powers behind his gift of light. 'He stood himself up on a battlement in the dead of night and lit the damned sky afire. Whoever wavered after that was minded to take sides for sheer terror. No man alive ever saw such a show of raw might! Even ones who've claimed close acquaintance with sorcerers and Koriani witches.'

  Only half as absorbed as he seemed by the particulars of hoofed booty lifted by clansmen out of Atchaz, Arithon said, 'When are the troops from the north expected to reach the south coast?'

  'Post rider's report I heard last said by summer. That relies on support from the merchants, for galleys. Don't bet it won't happen. Damned fair-haired prince has a tongue like pure honey. He's charmed the harbourmaster at Southshire well enough. Gone and wheedled his vessels a free anchorage. That from an official who's married to a shrew who counts his shirt studs each morning in case the servants should steal one.'

  Arithon arose in cat quiet, tipped the livestock list into the lamp flame, and twisted it to and fro to speed its burning. Shadows wheeled across his peaked brows and fanned a demonic caste to his features as he rose and leaned sideward to unlatch the stern window and toss the smouldering spill into the sea.

  'Three months,' he mused. Only the Mad Prophet could detect his uneasy irritation as he stared out into the darkness, to the unschooled onlooker, his loose-fitted shirt well masked the tension in his stance.

  Left to his own devices, Dakar succumbed before temptation and thumbed prying fingers through the leftover correspondence. He plucked up a missive addressed in a laborious, childlike script, and fishing for opening to provoke, said, 'Dhirken's written you. That's rather strange since you assured me she'd left your service.'

  In sarcasm thin as ribboned steel, Arithon said, 'Are you going to play the secretary's part and enlighten us?'

  Dakar required no more incentive. He snapped the smeared wax of the seal, sniffed the paper, then wrinkled his nose in disappointment. 'No attar of roses. She hasn't refined her female habits.' Quick at deciphering scurri
lous facts, no matter how sprawling the handwriting, he skimmed over lines that wobbled as though they had been penned in the midst of a gale.

  'Here's a rich little snippet.' He sniggered behind plump knuckles. 'Her Grace, the most exalted Princess Talith has inveigled some foolish young captain-at-arms to sail her to Alland to join her royal husband.'

  'Lysaer doesn't know?' In a stunned turn of speed, Arithon snapped the smuggler's letter from the other man's avid grasp. He read in silence, his mask of pensive patience cracked to consuming attention. Then, in that inflection that infallibly raised Dakar to unease, he demanded point-blank of his captain, 'The hold is filled with scrap stock from the shipyard. I trust you also got the yew?'

  Dakar sat up fast enough to bash his knee against the brace of the chart table. 'Yew!'

  'The wood's to be unloaded on the mainland,' Arithon continued, unmoved. He dug into the locker beneath the chart desk, straightened with hands filled with paper, ink, and wax, then began to pen a hasty missive. 'The craftsmen will hear my instructions tonight. Until we have coin to refound the shipyard, they'll use the scrap planks for small joinery: tables, stools, and maybe small chests and dogcarts.'

  'Yew!' Dakar interjected again.

  'You'll take my sloop Talliarthe and sail her to this cove by the Ippash river delta.' Arithon slid a chart from beneath his correspondence, stabbed at a dimple in the coastline, then turned his long fingers to folding the letter. He impressed the hot wax with the nondescript seal he had used for bills of lading out of Merior. While the captain studied his assigned destination, the Master of Shadow concluded, 'An associate of Erlien's will meet you.' The new missive changed grasp. 'Please see this reaches his hand along with the maps of the Vastmark valleys you'll find rolled with the charts aboard my sloop.'

  'You cold-blooded bastard!' Dakar hurled at the dark head bent just beyond range of his fist. 'You planned to recruit here all along! The horrible misfortune that befell those two shepherd children just gave you the opening to exploit. How Dalwyn would weep if she knew of your endless, twisted conniving!'