TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  Over the noise, raised through the crack of flame by some fickle trick of the rock, sound winnowed upward from an argument in progress aboard the Khetienn. One of her crewmen was a sailor born in Merior, pleading exception to the order to blockade. 'For mercy, let them by. That's no soldier on that sloop, but a captain I've known since my birth!'

  Then the brigantine's commander, in diminished rebuttal. 'Our orders stand. Get back to your post! Our liege was plain. We dare not cease fire until the signal.'

  And Arithon gripped the black bow, a very statue of indifference. He did not ask back the white arrow while the sloop clawed bravely against the wind. His delay sealed her fate. On the Khetienn's deck, the tinny clang of an arbalest sang sharp in release. Its quarrel arced out, and fire raged through the fishing craft's sails like Sithaer unleashed. The screams as her burden of wounded burned alive racked the air, cut by a south shoreman's curses for a prince who had once claimed false refuge in his village.

  Caolle gripped the white shaft in locked fingers. 'The clansmen are mine. I could pull them off, despite you.'

  'Do that!' cracked the Prince of Rathain. 'Then stand and endure the taste of my sanctioned royal justice. I'd take the heads of the ones who obey you for treason.'

  No threat, but hard certainty; Caolle read as much. He spat in revolted disgust.

  'So many deaths,' Arithon mocked him, vicious. 'You say they're enough. Well, half measures won't serve. We're not fighting against a man, or a moral, or a principle.'

  'Desh-thiere's curse is your justification? Then I'm questioning that.' As much as Caolle knew of the reasonless hatred and inspired lust to kill from what Jieret had related after past events at Minderl Bay, this act at the Havens broke the mould.

  His hand on his sword grip, Caolle quivered to a chill that ran him through. He wondered how much of today's slaughter was based any more on clear sanity.

  Arithon saw Deshir's war captain waver and redoubled his savagery to compensate. 'Lysaer won't stop for my mercy. I dare not stop for his. Step back, Caolle! I'll not be gainsaid, nor buy a cheap failure for the sake of one bleeding heart. The cease-fire will not be given, do you hear? Not for as long as one man under Avenor's Ath-forsaken banner remains standing.'

  'If they're all dead, who takes Lysaer the warning?' Caolle cried.

  Arithon gave back a nasty smile. 'I'll pick the envoys I need from among the least-hacked survivors.'

  Caolle could not contain the rise of his gorge. He hurled the white signal arrow to Arithon's feet, eyes inimical as black steel boring into his prince as his sword sang clear of its sheath. 'You may not be sick,' he said in a low, taut rage he had never before felt toward any man. 'But by Ath, I am. For both of us.'

  Arithon's lip curled. 'Don't worry,' he taunted before that steady, levelled blade. 'If my foray here doesn't raise enough terror, you'll have your chance to shoulder the larger sacrifice. You'll stand front and centre, up against forty thousand. I'll watch you direct the bloodbath to stop the next wave when the warhost mounts the vale at Dier Kenton.'

  Which urgent bit of viciousness slapped Caolle short. He did not challenge a madman, but encroached instead on a naked and tortured vulnerability.

  The carnage at Tal Quorin had been done in heated battle, over the freshly gutted bodies of clan women and children. The Havens was a tactic wrought out in calculated cold blood to break nerves; to raise by brutal storm the very reasonless upset a seasoned man of war would never imagine he could fall victim to.

  Stung too late for the impulse that had made him question his liege lord's timing, Caolle recoiled against the uttermost cruel paradox: Athera's Masterbard was no spirit to be forced to command here. Yet the half of him that was Rathain's born prince was too much the man to relinquish the unendurable weight of sovereignty.

  'Ah, Ath, I can't fight you.' The war captain stood down, abashed. 'Not over this. Not when you're like to wish yourself dead over what you believe is stark necessity.'

  Spared the searing coil of guilt and conscience, touched to a pity he could not bear, the seasoned campaigner turned his back. He hunched over his blade in staid misery and endured through the cries, the soft whine of bowstrings, the drifts of stinging smoke, until the assault upon the ships played itself out into soaked carbon. In time, naught remained beyond timbers quenched into steam and the pale, drifting knots of the bodies entangled by the incoming tide.

  When at the last the white signal flew to end the bowfire, Caolle was unashamedly weeping.

  * * *

  The men who descended to walk the scene of slaughter were hand-picked, all clansmen, veterans of the past butchery in Strakewood Forest. Arithon chose ones still bitter from the loss of their families in the grottos of Tal Quorin, who would not balk at unrelenting vengeance. The young officer with them was one of Jieret's Companions, no stranger to dealing a mercy stroke to a man moaning helpless in fresh blood.

  Others went along to bear litters for the lucky few chosen to survive.

  Arithon led, still swordless. Under the merciless sunlight, he descended the gore-streaked stone, past men lying sprawled with eyes and mouths opened to sky; past others who were little more than boys, curled in agony over the slow pain of lacerations, the torment of an arrow in the gut. He did not hurry. The scouts selected to carry the wounded trailed at his heels, half-sickened by the stench of sudden death and hazed by the circling buzz of flies. They listened, struck mute, for their liege lord to speak; to point to the grey-haired captain panting in the half-shade of a niche, a broadhead pinned through a wrist. 'That one.'

  Two scouts peeled off, bent to the cringing victim, and lifted him, to bear him away in a drawn-out, jouncing passage up the cliff face to the ridgetop.

  Downward, the party passed, into the shadowed throat of the Havens inlet. Now the air reeked of char and the tide-bared weed on the rocks. Arithon pressed footprints into a shingle fouled in the stains of dying men; past corpses piled like drift wrack. He stepped over discarded swords and slackened fingers, and once, a face blistered to featureless meat where canvas had fallen, still burning, upon a swimmer. Amid the carnage and dead, a young boy who had been a banner bearer sat, crying over blistered hands. 'That one.'

  The lad screamed as the scouts caught hold of him.

  Arithon never turned his head. Straight as cold steel, he pressed onward, around the upset shell of a longboat, prickled with arrows. Two men underneath were alive and unmarked. 'Those also, if they surrender without fight.'

  One died on a clansman's knife. The other, dazed and sobbing and out of his wits, was herded back up the cliff trail, past the first, settling flap of black vultures, the croak of feeding crows; and the inevitable, sinuous, circling flight of the wyvern pairs, sailing the breezes to scavenge.

  'That one and that one,' to a couple of seamen adrift on a plank, one with an arm half-torn away, and the other supporting his companion.

  Not every face was a stranger's. Nearby a sailhand off the doomed fishing sloop from Merior lay on his side, scarcely alive, his laboured breaths in low venom reviling the name of the Master of Shadow whose merciless act had brought him, crippled and blistered, on a shingle heaped over with corpses. Arithon passed him, wordless, his gaze straight ahead. From another group lying arrow struck, one mortally, he pointed, 'Take the one with the slashed shoulder.'

  When the chosen man-at-arms was forced away from his fellow, he cried out, 'For pity, what's to become of my friend?'

  Arithon did not answer, but walked on. The litter bearers who manhandled the weeping townsman to separate him from his prone shipmate knew in cold surety, but said nothing. Ones their prince did not designate were to die where they lay, a swift mercy stroke to end their suffering. The scouts followed a scant pace behind with their bloodied knives. By strict royal orders, they did their grim work unabashed before the horrified eyes of the few winnowed out to survive.

  The strand at the Havens was emptied of living men inside of three hours, the unburied skeletons discarded fo
r the wyverns to pick. Khetienn ceased her blockading patrol, braced around, and slipped seaward, to draw clear of trammelled waters and air sifted dim with spent smoke.

  Shepherd archers and clan scouts who had never descended to witness the charnel ruin on the beachhead were broken into small groups, then sent under Caolle's direction to sites elsewhere. The men who had borne the litters, who had dispatched the fallen in stone-hearted, deafened efficiency, stood guard over an open-air camp. Their perimeter was centred by the sun-faded felt of a shepherd's tent set up for use as a hospital.

  The wounded brought away from the Havens were treated there by the same black-haired man who had designated who should be spared. He made his rounds, quiet, self-contained, and versed in the arts of healing. The remedies in his satchel had no witcheries in them. He spoke no unnecessary word.

  'What will the Shadow Master do with us?' gasped a boy with a broken arm, held flat by two scouts as the bones were splinted. 'Why were we saved, except for some fate more terrible?'

  His plea received no answer. The small, dark man in still patience just finished wrapping the splints, his sure hands astonishingly gentle. Through air pressed close with the scents of stirred dust and the herbal pastes brewed to make poultices, he went on to bind a compress on the next man in line, who lay moaning in pain on a pallet with a gaping shoulder wound.

  Behind, the instant the clan scouts released their constraint, the boy laid his forehead on his drawn-up knees to hide his face and weep in silenced fear. No one came to comfort him. The eyes of the clansmen who guarded the tent held no mercy, and the one who brought healing and succour for pain seemed deaf to any outcry of the spirit.

  When the last wound was treated, the last shattered bone strapped straight, and the final posset doled out to ease suffering agony into sleep, the imprisoned wounded from the Havens were left to themselves. Late day sun slanted down from the heights, adding the scent of rancid felt to the reek of astringent herbs. Breezes bowed the tent's door flap and billowed the saffron and rust patterns encircling the fire-blackened ridge post. In whispers thrummed to fear, those men still awake began to speak. They compared observations and quickly came to realize that, except for the fact no man in their present company bore a leg wound that would impair his ability to walk, neither rhyme nor reason attended their selection. Some had been taken in acts of rank cowardice, playing dead beneath the bodies of fallen victims. Others were singled out who had fought in cornered courage in some small grotto or tide-washed ledge.

  'Why were we spared?' they asked, haunted over and over by the five hundred and forty of their fellows who had at one stroke been most pitilessly dispatched beneath the Wheel.

  They numbered twenty-five, that had braved the landing at the Havens and lived.

  For his spree of unbridled killing, the Master of Shadow had lost one, taken by surprise when a head-hunter knifed him from under a splintered shelter of beached planks. Two other scouts had suffered slight wounds in the course of their murdering work among the fallen. Those had been left to wait, bleeding in stoic patience, until the dark-haired man finished his ministrations to the enemy.

  'What if we're to be sacrificed in some ugly rite of magecraft?' said a veteran with a crippled hand. In the dimness of the tent as the day failed, eyes flashed and looked away while the boy in the corner, in tearing, sad sobs, finally wept himself into exhausted dreams.

  * * *

  Night fell over the Vastmark coast before Dakar the Mad Prophet mustered the courage to emerge and walk the site where the fighting company camped at the Havens. Amid the banked, rocky corrie set back from the cliffs, he threaded amid the cookfires of the clan scouts mustered to serve their liege lord. He overheard the talk, the coarse jokes, the jagged intervals of quiet someone always jumped to break with a laugh, a story, or a boast. The day had been won. In the spectre of widespread death, men celebrated and affirmed their ties to life. Being clansmen well hardened to the hatreds of entrenched feud, the odd complaint arose amid the brosy glow of satisfaction.

  'There were fourteen other inlets like this one,' someone grumbled. 'It's a living oddity, why our prince should've left those alone. We had enough archers. Raids could have been launched on all of them, with three thousand murdering townsmen left lying as wyvern bait tonight.'

  'Good thing his Grace is beyond earshot,' somebody else ventured from the sidelines. 'Mood he's in now, he'd be like to knife you on reflex for loose talk.'

  Dakar edged off from the circle of scouts. He checked, unsurprised to find the fire where Arithon had knelt brewing remedies deserted and burned down to ash. The battered brown satchel remained, its canisters of herbs, its neat rolls of bandaging, and glass flasks of tinctures and elixirs undisturbed where they had been left. The straps that fastened the flap were tied shut, sure sign the prince was not making rounds to check the injured.

  Dakar paused. He rubbed the itchy bristles of his beard, filmed in the bitter dust that at summer's end seemed to coat everything. While the crickets scraped in their hanks of dry grass, he stood in troubled thought and pondered where to look for a man who would at this moment hold a virulent aversion for companionship.

  His memory of Ath's shrine at Ship's Port came back, on the night of Halliron's death.

  After the first moment of fainthearted hesitation, Dakar turned away from the campfires, where the jokes rang a fraught pitch too shrill. He walked under starlight, the heads of seed-tipped grasses tapping his cross-gartered calves, and the lichens on their beds of exposed shale crumbling under his step. He wound through gorse and bracken and the crushed fragrance of wild thyme until he reached the scarp overlooking the sea.

  A half-moon threw needled light across waters pooled deep indigo between the knees of the headlands. The winds combed the wild rocks, cleanly freighted with salt. Insects clicked their frenzied last mating song before the killing autumn frosts. A man who had access to mage-sight could pick out the blue-white dance of their life energies, like tiny constellations of stars strewn amid the tangled briar stems and the rustling, forked stands of bracken.

  A man trained to vision could see also the hazed burn of life force undone and ripped into untimely death; the animal magnetism released with spilled blood, that fanned like a taint of ill-spawned fog on the airs overhanging the Havens. The shocked blur of light would fade slowly with the passage of days, until only the rock would retain any trace of the vibration. There, the faint resonance would stay preserved like a cry in deep darkness, to remind of a violence long past. Once, when Ilitharis Paravians had walked the land, their song had eased such haunted strains of burdened energies into peace. The silver fall of rain would perform the same office, but over time, through the thousands of years that framed an age.

  A prince with his mage talent blinded would see no mark at all; but his masterbard's ear might hear the wails of the spirits caught in shuddering confusion, who had yet to refind themselves as whole spirit in completed transition out of life. He might ache in despair for his lost powers, that in this time and this place could effect no ritual of release for his unforgiven toll of dead.

  Touched to concern, Dakar hurried his step. He trampled through late-season asters, flecked like floating lace amid the broom. Before he was ready, he came upon a steep promontory, isolated from the land by the knife-edged slope of a trail. And on that battered height, a balled outline against sky, he made out a figure hunched into itself, arms wrapped over knees as if such a posture could bind an unwilling spirit into its vessel of bruised flesh.

  Another moment only, Dakar balked on the ridge. Then, steeled against whatever rebuff might await him, he set foot on the scarp and edged forward.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn remained still as the intruder he did not want stopped to a chink and scrape of boot leather over crumbled shale. He spoke through his fingers in stabbing, sudden venom. 'I suppose you couldn't resist the chance to come and meddle.'

  Unpractised at minding the affairs of others, Dakar ventured the first words to cros
s his mind, just to fill in the silence. 'You'll gain nothing by brooding.'

  The awkward moment came anyway, while wind patted fingers through his unkempt hair, and twisted and untwisted the cord lacings on the other man's suede herder's jacket. 'You have no choice now and there'll be none tomorrow. The blood's been let. Accept what's finished and have done.'

  Fine drawn in malice, Arithon stirred. 'You'll not put the cloak of suffering martyr over me. I fight because I will it, remember? Else I'd be aboard Khetienn and far from these shores. The remorse tonight must be Lysaer's.' He uncoiled further to disclose a leather flask cradled in the crook of his elbow, then jerked out the tasselled cork to an unmistakable sweet scent of strong spirits. 'Drink to my half-brother's tears with me?'

  Dakar ripped the proffered flask out of strong fingers and threw it, gurgling in protest, over the cliff face. Without heat, he said, 'You damned fool. I know you too well not to guess the exact measure of your feelings.'

  'And curse you for that, while I think of it,' Arithon said. The words clipped short in a cough. His hands moved in a blur to shutter his face and he twisted aside in the grass.

  Aware of what, was happening, Dakar dropped to his knees. He caught the prince's racked shoulders in a grasp that clamped bone, and held on through a horrible interval. Arithon lost grip on every nerve all at once, bent helpless in a vicious, heaving nausea that seemed to go on far too long.

  'Have you eaten anything since morning?' Dakar asked as dry retching let up enough to allow an attempt at speech.

  Spent in a shivering huddle, Arithon assembled sound into speech with great effort. 'Ask Caolle. He's been the tireless nursemaid.' He was too beaten even to set sting to his tone.

  Familiar with overwrought nerves from the course of his prescient fits, Dakar knew such sickness. The shudders that wrung the other man were not going to subside until total exhaustion forced collapse.

  Belated and thrown out of his depth, he came to understand worse: the prince beneath his hands had lost himself into a wilderness of grief. Arithon was weeping in harsh, unbridled bursts that had everything to do with a mind-set unsuited for cruelty.