TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  Dakar grabbed the bulkhead, gasping in deep, aching breaths. His feet felt rooted straight down through the ship's hull. Beyond the abyss, icy fathoms beneath, he could have counted each grain of sand on the sea's floor. His head floated, wrapped in the singing bands of energies that were stars. The startling clarity of his insight went beyond prior experience, even through scryings under Fellowship auspices at solstice convocations. Whether his heightened powers had been induced by stress, or by the clean state of living he had embraced since Vastmark, he had no chance to determine.

  Necessity required every nuance of art he could manage to cobble together.

  The Mad Prophet sank to his knees, one hand on the Shadow Master's forehead, the other placed over his chest. Outside of fear, threshed beyond doubt, he forced a grip on his drug-widened consciousness. He sealed himself inside an inviolate stillness, then dropped like an arrow shot off a high arc into the heartcore of Arithon's mind.

  Maelstrom sucked him under, white-hot and merciless, the effects of the tienelle redoubled as the physical torment to Arithon's body rocked him off-balance into cramps. Then vision sliced him through like silver-bladed knives.

  Dakar mustered flayed resources. This time when mage-trained reflex sought to fling him wholesale into the dark, he cried Arithon's Name, tuned into a key of compassion.

  Careful as he was, his personal feelings leaked through and coloured the weave. What secrets he hoarded allowed no false pretence; he was anything but impartial where the Prince of Rathain was concerned. As the fires of reaction roused to hound him once again, he sensed the futility of further effort. He could batter himself silly in attempt to weave an access, and only buy repeated failure. He was not as Asandir, powerful enough in wisdom and strength to intervene without force, and call spirit to respond from within. The final conclusion was unpleasant in the extreme. The herb had entangled Arithon in the same guilt which blocked off his mage-sight. Only one means existed that Dakar was aware of, to reverse the process and storm through.

  He groped back to the table, too ragged to weep. Nothing, nothing at all, had prepared him for what he must endure. Whether he despaired or he howled, whether he emerged irrevocably changed, he had no other means to stem the remorseless tides of the tienelle's dissolution than to hurl Arithon's own guilt back against him.

  Dakar scraped up the spilled remains of the herb, then gathered pipe and striker and flint. He bore the items back to the floor by the berth, heartsick for what must follow.

  'You difficult, cross-grained, shadow-binding bastard,' he murmured to the heedless prince as he repacked the stubby little pipe. 'If I do this, I'll never be quit of your memory.'

  Dakar glared at the stilled form on the berth in a malevolence of sick misery as he fumbled the striker and managed at last to light the bowl. Bitter fumes bit the back of his throat as he inhaled. The far more likely truth was that Arithon s'Ffalenn would kill him stone dead for interference.

  The Mad Prophet drew on the smoke, deeper and deeper until his awareness whirled like motes of dust through a starfield. He was going to have to overdose just to stay ahead of the other man's blinding fast reflex. The tienelle's narcotic was unforgiving. If he misjudged by a fraction, he would lose himself with the prince, with no man aboard the Khetienn trained to the mysteries to lend either one of them succour.

  Settled into drug-heightened mage trance, tight-laced in control like a spear tipped in adamant, Dakar readied his assault. Then he arrowed a stinging cry of awareness across the mind of Rathain's prince.

  Defences lashed back, a peal of meshed force that Dakar had no skill to match except by a shield of stark vision: in the graphic detail impelled through heightened prescience, he shaped Arithon's own pernicious memory of the townsmen his act of grand conjury had cut down on the field by the River Tal Quorin.

  Sight collided with s'Ffalenn remorse. Dakar saw the silver-bright flare of imposed power as royal compassion stung the prince into flash point recoil. Arithon's defence? shuddered into disarray. Through that momentary gap, Dakar rammed force tempered like a killing blade. He struck without mercy, armed in ruthless, unsheathed power.

  Arithon's mage-sight had been poisoned by guilt; therefore, in judgement more pitiless than Ath's angel of vengeance, those deeds that stung conscience would be turned, reft beyond reach and veiled from recall. Dakar was relentless. He ransacked what memories he knew in ruthless succession: the grand failures at Tal Quorin; Steiven s'Valerient and his lady, now mouldered bones beneath a stone cairn in Deshir Forest; for one boychild spared, a generation lost in bloodshed; then Dhirken; Lady Maenalle; and nine other hapless innocents in an armoury; Talith's lost marriage; all these griefs, Dakar swept into the fiery ring of his ward.

  At each turn, Arithon's awareness protested his presumptuous meddling. The fight in him would not be quenched. This violation of his innermost privacy roused a vehement storm of prideful temper. Dakar ploughed on, beleaguered. His instinct to show mercy for need must be utterly stamped out. He held all the weapons. He was inside the Shadow Master's deepest defences. Any of a thousand thorny fragments of happenstance were his to seize and turn, to cut off resistance, no matter how brave, and to break down spirit and courage into reeling pain.

  And even stung and stung again to inward howls of agony, Arithon's nature would not give way in submission. The man who intervened in the effort to spare his sanity could do nothing else but meet each tortured obstruction, then use grief and sorrow to unbalance.

  Dakar plumbed layer upon layer of guarded record, through events he had not shared through experience -memories that extended back to Arithon's time as Karthan's heir beyond the West Gate, where moral ideals and the fresh hopes of youth had culminated in an unspeakable interval as a prince in captivity under another s'Ilessid king. Laid out like tapestry, the Mad Prophet beheld the foundations for all that Arithon had become. Through each turn of event which had shaped a master of shadow rose the silver-gilt blaze of Fellowship intervention, the instilled gift of Torbrand's compassion. Its influence laid an unmistakable trail to follow: a father's death of an arrow upon the flame-racked decks of another brigantine, a kingdom lost to blood feud; a beloved grandfather whose every warning and principle had been disregarded and finally betrayed.

  Dakar dug in and occupied, and cut like a scalpel until at long last he recoiled against the black, entwined web that entrenched the poisoned work of Desh-thiere's curse. There he turned at bay. That tangle, not even the Fellowship Sorcerers dared disturb.

  And waiting for him there, still armed with enough power to stun, was Arithon's trained awareness, enraged to stabbing malice for an unconscionable violation of self.

  Dakar knew despair. He had achieved no master's training at magecraft: in born talent, in training, in knowledge, the other man outmatched him. He was in beyond his depth and pinned with no avenue of retreat. The straits were not forgiving. Through the mage's reflex that disbarred his try at rescue, he could sense the ongoing pressure as the effects of the tienelle coursed through Arithon's body. Should his hold slip, should the diversion of his presence become unseated, the guilt in the visions he defended would resume their inflamed sequence and spur on the unwinding descent into madness.

  A course of sheer folly remained. The personal bindings of selfhood, which Dakar for expedience had broken, but that a master's exacting reflex in defence must be instilled to respect; aware of only that one barrier that Arithon's counterthrust would hesitate to cross, Dakar reacted. He claimed the burden of remorse he had stolen and assumed the full coil as his own.

  As he conjoined borrowed memories with the signature pattern of his Name, the bleeding roots of the other man's compassion became his personal inheritance. Along with the guilt came every wounding twist of fate that had arisen to separate a masterbard from his born calling to shape music.

  A heartbeat, and the victim was freed from his crippling guilt. Reason returned, and full cognizance. In a rush fired to bounding expansion by the tienelle, Aritho
n's mind unreeled through sharp, unfolding vision into the lost power of his mage talent.

  For him, a wondering, peaceful miracle of insight, for Dakar, a stab of dark agony the likes of which ground and shattered his being through a paroxysm of change.

  'Do what you must,' he charged the prince he sought to salvage. 'Transmute the drug's poisons and pull yourself out of this!' He need not remonstrate that his spellbinder's resource was finite. Nor could he sustain the weight of Arithon's conscience for one second longer than shocked nerves could withstand the strain. He was not royal, nor tempered to mastery, nor disciplined to a masterbard's empathy, but only a fat man born to a spurious gift of prophecy whose burdens had driven him to drink.

  'You are more than that, truly,' Arithon's reply sang back through the terrible, twinned link. 'Else I would be mad, and you would be drunk, and the Mistwraith would have its fell triumph.'

  But a darker deception lurked hidden behind the spellbinder's barriers. The threat that awaited when winter browned the bracken in Vastmark, the prescient secret held guarded, stayed sealed away, along with the paralysing ties to memory Dakar had locked beyond reach. Then, as though the blast of s'Ffalenn conscience was not enough to flatten him, he saw the intent of his sacrifice repudiated.

  'Ah, you scheming, clever bastard!' the Mad Prophet cried.

  For Arithon did not use the reprieve he had been given to restore his taxed faculties to safe limits. Instead, he shouldered the restored scope of his self-command, grasped the reins of the tienelle's powers of expanded vision, and launched through a nerve-stripping sequence of augury. As he had done before the battle at Tal Quorin to buy the survival of his clansmen, he tried now for the forthcoming debacle at Vastmark.

  Dakar was drawn in as hapless witness. Meshed still in the wards that had stood down mage-trained defences, he had no resource to exert his own control as Arithon imposed his chosen test of cause and effect to trace a sequential array of probability. The spellbinder was forced to follow to its bloody finish each traced-through combination of strategy. In an agony paired with Arithon's, he counted, in sorrow and blood, the bodies fallen on the field. The battering ordeal imposed a cruel order. Through a horrific train of posited futures, Dakar came to realize that the Master of Shadow did not replay each ugly nuance with the sole intent to save his own.

  At each turn, through every crafty twist of projected circumstance, the deployment of shepherd archers and clan scouts was replayed to sound for alternate tactics. Arithon broke rules. He trampled morality. He stretched every resource to unconscionable limit, and spared nothing of himself. At every turn, his exhaustive effort sought openings to disarm conflict. Dakar sensed the driving will to create ways to demoralize, and frighten, and haze back the enemy; to allow men misled for false cause the free option to retreat, and live, and return to their hearthstones and families.

  Through the terrible course of the auguries made to steer the war in Vastmark, the Mad Prophet came to know that nothing concerning the massacre at Tal Quorin confirmed his past set of assumptions. Arithon had acted in perfect consistency, start to finish, each predetermined move done for mercy. He had not, after all, struck out in wanton fury, but used destruction as his most calculated tool, the sole means he had at his disposal to turn the scope of much wider disaster.

  And so he would do again at Vastmark, over terrain most ruthlessly chosen to disadvantage a warhost. If Lysaer's troops closed to fight, they would march into ruin. Arithon's scryings were unequivocal. His light force of archers and clansmen would give way and strike from ambush. They could beat swift retreat into the mountains and lose themselves, or turn and cut down pursuit from the high cover of cliff walls while their enemies blundered, unable to find the hidden tracks to scale the cruel rocks and retaliate.

  In spilled blood and in resource, for Lysaer, the campaign against the Shadow Master would be a terrible, drawn-out waste of life.

  And still, even still, Arithon remained unsatisfied.

  Dakar sensed the drawn interval, the gathered moment of preparation. Through the harrowing unpleasantness he sustained to impound conscience and hold open the Shadow Master's mage-sight, he felt the stripped-down, silverpoint discipline Arithon called into play to engage yet another course of augury. The tienelle's influence by then was nearly spent. Through the friable webs of inner consciousness, Dakar sensed the poisons eroding his tissues to dissolution. Arithon would suffer the same awareness, and yet, his grip was as granite, and his assurance new steel as he raised his will to carve out his planned line of prescience.

  'What are you doing!' Dakar wailed through the pause. He had no strength to spare to expound on the dangers.

  'I'm seeking a way to turn them,' came Arithon's reply. 'If the warhost never marches, there won't be any bloodshed. Lysaer may have a weakness in his resolve to seek my death. If he does, I'm going to find it.'

  The task was impossible. Dakar tried to protest. He knew the Prince of the West, had watched him at Cheivalt and been forced through sorrow to an unwanted evaluation. Best of any he understood how the prince's morality had been wrenched awry and used by Desh-thiere's curse. The royal gift of s'Ilessid justice would never let Lysaer back down.

  Arithon saw the same, but was undaunted. 'There's one way we haven't tried yet. Make the stakes too punishing for even Lysaer's staunch morals to endure.'

  By then, Dakar had seen all there was to know of the mind of the Prince of Rathain. In a burst fired out by the tienelle, he guessed the horrific intent. 'You can't do this!' he cried. 'Don't try, for your heart's sake.'

  But his warning was hammered aside.

  Written in blood and in razed human lives, the desperate deterrent unreeled. Arranged for maximum impact and effect, Dakar was given a raw vista of twisted corpses and fired ships as fruits of a merciless slaughter. Alongside the handful of witnesses chosen by intent to survive, he beheld the utter death of hope.

  The horrible, harrowing reverberation of their pain snapped his hold on concentration.

  He had no second's warning, no moment to prepare, as his senses overturned into an untimely, drug-fired augury. His birth-gifted talent sundered his control and ripped through, and like a cascading fall of dominoes, chaos stormed the breach.

  Dakar cried out, racked over by truesight: of Lysaer s'Ilessid, brought weeping to his knees in a field tent, while a shaken, white-faced captain received orders: that the warhost was to turn in retreat.

  'There's no foray worth the cost of forty thousand lives!' Lysaer said. 'I'll not see my men lured in and toyed with just to be needlessly broken. The conclusion is plain: the Master of Shadow has made Vastmark a trap. He cannot be run to earth over ground he has chosen. We must pull back now and rethink our strategy until other ways can be found to destroy him.'

  'It's going to work, what you plan,' Dakar gasped. 'When Lysaer receives word of the carnage, his warhost will be turned and disbanded.'

  The next moment, his whole edifice of wards crumbled down. Protections cobbled together at need dissolved into scouring static. His grip on Arithon's store of conscience slipped free to slam up the old barriers and lock off all access to his mage-sense.

  Aware of disaster, hurled into pain as his inner sight crashed into darkness, Arithon grasped the fast-fading edge of knowledge. He wrung from the dregs of his failing talent a last twist of craft to effect a swift cut of unbinding.

  Dakar had no moment to measure the effect. Darkness howled down like battening felt and drowned his last spark of awareness.

  * * *

  While dawn threw light like old ice through the stern window, the Mad Prophet reawakened to the gut misery of withdrawal, made worse by the slamming toss as the brigantine bucked over storm swells. The weather had gone foul with a vengeance as dire as the descent of Dharkaron's Chariot. Rain flung in spatters on the mullioned casement. The reefed gear aloft crashed and shrilled to the shrieking swoop of rank gusts.

  Arithon lay on the berth, limp to the jostle of the ship's roll
and scarcely conscious. The shivering spasms had left him wrung weak, his body had ceased its attempt to expel the raw poisons his lost powers could not transmute.

  Dakar said the first rude word to rise to mind. Stripped by the ache of overextension, in no grand fettle himself, he understood by the hollow ring of sound in his ears that he was going to require a terrible effort to move, far less to begin a dangerous course of healing to ease Arithon back to recovery.

  'Are you all right?' came a ragged whisper from the berth.

  The Mad Prophet paused in his effort to swear. He peered across the creaking gloom of the cabin to where Arithon lay, eyes slitted in pain, but watching him closely all the same.

  'I have a headache that could kill,' Dakar answered. 'And balance so wrecked, I doubt I could manage to make a puddle in a chamber pot without missing.' He refused to address the rest, or confront the meat of the question's intent. For of course, he would never be quite right, nor be able to resume his past carefree ways. Stitched into memory beyond his power to dissolve, he held the pure recall of everything in life that Arithon s'Ffalenn had ever suffered.

  The sting of conscience was unrelenting, and twofold for the parts where his personal lapses had added impetus to the burden: the scouring devastation of pride at Minderl Bay, the betrayal at Alestron's dungeon, the loss of Halliron at Jaelot. Remorse was too paltry a concept to encompass the wretchedness he shared with Rathain's prince. Pretence was ripped away. The conclusion he had to bear forward was forthright in simplicity: that Arithon s'Ffalenn was no criminal at all, but a creature of undying compassion whose natural bent was to celebrate an irrepressible joy for life.

  Music could free that hidden aspect, had the burdens of royal bloodline and the Mistwraith's curse between them not forced his nature away from his birth-born inclinations.

  Dakar looked up, touched to sorrow, to find Arithon's weighted gaze still fixed in stilled patience on his face. 'You're going to go through with this,' he said in choked reference to that unspeakably lethal last augury outlined for a small, coastal cove called the Havens. 'Ath show you pity.'