TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  'Think of the forty thousand,' the Mad Prophet murmured like a litany. 'Take hope for the ones you may have saved.'

  The words fell thin, whisked away by the sea wind, their impact reft of meaning by an unpardonable truth. Logic, morality, justice, or reason could not stay the cut of s'Ffalenn compassion. And it came to Dakar, through the channels of his rage and an unaccustomed stab of anguish, that in fact, he was not helpless after all.

  He asked and received from Arithon a ragged assent, along with the unequivocal understanding that if anybody else had dared the intervention, they would have been harried off the clifftop.

  His unpractised spell of deep sleep required time to take effect. But when those terrible, dry sobs of remorse finally stilled, the Mad Prophet crouched on his knees on sharp stone, a prince he had never believed he could pity cradled in his arms like a brother.

  The fine hands that had drawn a terrible lesson upon the bodies of Lysaer's troops lay undone in dreams, sealed into peace for a little while.

  Alone under stars, Dakar bent his tangled head to Arithon's shoulder and mourned. He could scarcely cry for the wasted lives, torn as he was by a tragic remorse geas-cursed to outlast them. Desh-thiere's ills were not ended. He knew, as no other, that the day's burden of horror could never in life be lifted from the spirit of the man who slept enspelled in his arms; even if, under the shadow of Dier Kenton Vale, forty thousand other misled troops abandoned the war to return alive to their families.

  Field of Thorns

  Day broke over the Havens to the screeling calls of feeding wyverns, dipping and gliding and snapping in sharp squabbles over ledges mercifully masked behind fog. The camp atop the cliffs was broken down in cracking efficiency by the clan scouts, the dazed survivors of Lysaer's decimated companies given plain fare before they were banded together to be marched under guard into the hill country.

  To the boy with the splint who still snivelled, a fellow hostage gave bracing reprimand. 'Lad, if we're to be knifed by barbarians inside the next hour, they'd scarcely waste their bread and jerky keeping us fed. Be still now and bear up.'

  The more stoic veterans among the prisoners kept better grip on raw nerves, but few held much store by quick platitudes. Between snatched glances at the clansmen, who went about their duties with brisk indifference, they watched until the black-haired healer whose word had delivered them from the carnage on the strand reappeared in the company of an unkempt fat man.

  His grass-stained jacket of the day before had been changed for a clean tunic of the same dusky dun that blended with the napped lichens underfoot. He spoke in words too quiet to overhear to the archers, distinguished amongst their burly frames by his slighter build. The cloak he wore was the same coarse wool. He carried no weapon, just his battered satchel of remedies slung across one shoulder.

  Only when he stepped close to check bandages and poultice wraps could a man see the marks on him of a haunted, uneasy night. He looked harrowed. Beneath his every movement lay a hunted, flinching tension that startled at slight sounds, and turned listening for voices only he seemed to hear. As if he were dangerous, or chancy to cross, all but the fat man maintained their wary distance.

  As different from the clanborn killers he walked with as a hawk's quill cast among broadswords, still, no man among the captive wounded dared to break his aggrieved silence to inquire why he should be here so obviously against his given will.

  The company started off slowly. The pace was set to accommodate the slowest and most infirm, winding inland between peaks snagged like spindles in white cloud, or silvered in dustings of thin snow, sublimated into air the moment the sun burned through. So began an arduous trek through the high passes that lasted for fifteen days.

  Townbred men who were strange to the rugged Vastmark landscape grew to hate beyond measure the whine of the winds through broom and stone and escarpment. They cursed the treacherous, uncertain shale that crumbled underfoot without warning, to skitter fragments in shattering bounds downslope. The squall of the wyvern and the hawk filled the day, and the chorus of insects by dark. Peat for fuel was dug from the marshes and borne into the heights by hand, which made cook-fires cheerlessly small and short-lived. The available heat through the bone-chilling nights was limited by necessity to those sapped by blood loss who needed it most. The clansmen made no complaint. Inured to outdoor hardship, practised at setting tents out of the wind's prying fingers, they clustered together under blankets, or stood guard in the lee of lichened outcrops, scouring rust from their bone-handled weapons.

  Awakened each pallid dawn to the cry of the wyvern and the accented consonants of the night watch reporting, some of the captives found their dread for the future fed and deepened. Others, seated still while the healer tended their hurts and changed their dressings, were deeply disturbed to find they were not. Their time amid clan company had shown them no evidence of the Shadow Master's inhuman witcheries. Carefully as they watched for signs of evil or corruption, nothing arose beyond the competence of superior leadership and an unbroken teamwork, well versed to maintain its cutting edge.

  No matter who asked, whether in the grey-haired veteran's tactful phrasing, or in the young boy's pleading fear, none of the survivors could pry a clue from their keepers concerning the destiny awaiting them. The fat man proved deaf to all questions.

  The clan scouts said in blunt dismissal, 'That's for his Grace himself to say, when he wills,' often with a fast glance over the shoulder, as if they feared someone watching.

  From the healer who gave them no name, they had the soft promise, 'You will live.'

  But for what sorcerous usage, or what turn of fate, every man of them dreaded to imagine, and dreamed worse in racking bouts of nightmare. In time, they arrived at the mouth of a broad meadow, dropped like a green twist of silk between the mounded debris of two rockslides. A spring-fed stream cut the swale like a scar.

  Black-footed sheep grazed amid stems of goldenrod on the banks, guarded by bristling, brindle dogs. Tucked into shadow, unnoticed at first glance, three herders' tents lay pitched against the ridge of the north slope, loomed in broad, tribal patterns of saffron and sienna, sun faded to the tints of weak tea.

  The advance party of clansmen were challenged by a sentry, unseen among the scree until she spoke. Of Vastmark stock, she wore her loose trousers cross-gartered to the knee and a dusty tunic hooked ragged by thorns. Her pale hair was knotted in braids. A handsome, lacquer-worked recurve bow lay slung at her shoulder. The horn at her belt had a patterned, silver rim, and she carried a sheep crook beside the quiver with her broad-bladed arrows. Those seasoned men-at-arms among Lysaer's captive wounded took her measure, and could not miss the trained squint as her eye measured distance, or the muscled, alert manner that showed the stamp of a skilled command.

  After the slaughter just endured at the Havens, the appearance of a young shepherd girl indoctrinated to the arts of war chilled their blood. The hospitality they received in the larger of the tents failed to allay their unease, as they were served mutton stew and goat cheese by a tribal grandmother who muttered in dialect and made signs against the evil eye behind their backs. Over jugs of cold water and coarse biscuit, the survivors huddled, their whispered speculation cut to stark quiet as a scarred older clansman snapped the entry flap open. He announced that the Prince of Rathain would address them.

  Silenced by dread, every captive faced the small man who entered, armed with a black lacquered bow and a sword of unnatural, dark steel. His neat frame glittered to the muted wash of light through the canvas, the sable and silver leopard of Rathain stitched rampant upon a green silk tabard. Under trimmed hair and the circlet of royal rank, the face was one grown familiar through the past fortnight.

  Here stood the Prince of Rathain, called sorcerer and Master of Shadow. He was also none other than the healer whose hands had dressed their wounds and splinted their broken bones in a compassion whose memory became overturned into stunned disbelief at the moment his captives identif
ied him. The irony dismembered reason, stopped thought, that this same man's whim had sown broad-scale, indiscriminate death at the Havens.

  'Ath preserve,' gasped the iron-haired veteran. On reflex, he thrust the boy with the splinted arm behind his bulk for protection.

  Green eyes flashed a glance in aggrieved recognition for a fear that drove even the bravest to edge back, and the most openhearted to cringe from too close a contact. 'I'm here to appoint you all as my sanctioned envoys,' said the Master of Shadow into the hostile quiet.

  Here was none of Lysaer s'Ilessid's forthright appeal. This prince's features stayed shuttered. His voice, crisp and light, made no bid for close loyalty. Without fire, stripped to its thread of bald conviction, the fate Rathain's liege held in store for the chosen twenty-five he had selected was forthright to the point where no listener dared to believe him.

  'You'll be given an escort to the central valley of Vastmark to rejoin the main body of your army.' Through a murmur of astonished voices, Arithon cracked, 'I want a spokesman. You.' His gesture singled out the senior officer, a captain from the city of Perlorn, whose fealty by old kingdom charter should have been subject to Rathain. 'Step forward.'

  The appointed man stood forth, too straight in his ripped hauberk, the wrist healing clean through an enemy's faultless care clenched to his breast as he suffered a scrutiny that seemed to strip him skin from bone.

  'I want the news of your ruin at the Havens to reach your master before the week's end,' Arithon said. 'Find Lysaer s'Ilessid. Spare him no detail of your report. I wish no mistake, no attempt to dismiss your defeat at the inlet as unlucky.' A pause, while the wounded captain sought some simple way to unravel the contradictions and discern what moved the slight enemy confronting him.

  'Know this,' Arithon cut him off before he found nerve enough to question. 'If this allied warhost under Lord Commander Diegan takes arms in Vastmark, I stand prepared. You've tasted the mettle of my archers. What tactics you suffered at the Havens can be made the more deadly through sorcery or shadows. I warn. Numbers make no difference, nor morals, nor dedication. Any who march here to take me will suffer disaster on a grand scale. The men you lead back are my witnesses. Be sure they are heard. Make the officers of Lysaer's warhost understand that if they seek bloodshed in Shand, I will not stay my hand.'

  'You want us to sap our men of courage,' the gaunt captain accused.

  Green eyes flicked up to match him, stung to a frost spark of irony. 'Daelion as my witness,' Arithon flared back in pure anger. 'I want you to save their sorry lives.'

  * * *

  Lord Diegan had rediscovered in his service to Lysaer how much he detested open-air camps and chill rain. For three days, while the central body of the warhost laboured on its closing march into Vastmark, the peaks lay roofed over in cloud. Drizzle dulled the landscape to pewter, the broken slate slopes snagged into overcast like the layered slabs of scrap lead in a glassworker's yard. The poor, stony soil glistened with runoff, or gave way to black bogs where a horse could mire to the brisket. Dry ground was non-existent. Tents pitched on gravel became wet and unpleasant as the ones staked into the peat-reeking mud.

  The wool factor's man recruited as a trail guide had no opinion for ill weather beyond a glance tipped through bushy eyebrows toward the silted grey sky. 'Blighted Vastmark clouds could shed wet for a week. Thank Ath Creator. In this benighted country, that's the only damned thing puts good wool on the sheep.'

  Dismounted to the spitting flare of torches, his boots gritted with gravel on the inside and mud caked to stretched leather without, Lord Diegan clenched perfect teeth and cursed everything connected with fleeces and sheep. Provisions were an ongoing devilment. With flour and oats wont to mould, any flock caught in the path of his troops would find itself slaughtered for mutton.

  Flagged down before he could surrender the reins of his destrier into the care of his groom, the Lord Commander of Lysaer s'Ilessid's warhost blessed fate that the s'Brydion brothers held the supply lines. Without their bull-stubborn efficiency, the campaign would have bogged in its tracks.

  'Lord, there's a man arrived from the fringe patrol with news,' interrupted his equerry, a scrappy little man who regarded inbound scouts and the intrusion of inept servants alike on his list of life's nuisances.

  Routine problems never disrupted the command tent; the scout, still mounted, had no word to say beyond, 'My lord, I think you should come.'

  'Bad news?' Diegan hitched his shoulders to relieve the rub of his mail shirt and soaked hauberk, caught back the reins of his horse, and set his foot into the stirrup. 'You can report just as well from the saddle.'

  As the pair rode past the picket lines, dodging grooms, and crossed the outer ring of sentries to press into the rainy darkness, the scout related the raw gist: an engagement with the Master of Shadow at the Havens had left five hundred men dead. The shock that threatened upset were the twenty-five survivors, held apart in a small glen beyond the camp perimeter by the patrol of four who had encountered them, stumbling down from the high passes toward the lights and the fires.

  'They claim they were brought from the coast by the enemy's feal clansmen,' related the scout as he rounded a last rock spur, flanked in dark skirts of dripping bracken. 'When you hear what they say, you'll see why we held them. Their story's going to rip morale to bloody ribbons.'

  This far outside the lines, there could be no torches. The hollow tucked beneath the jagged shoulder of the hill was cheerless, filled with the moan of the wind and trickle and drip of water. There, the wounded from the Havens pressed in a huddled mass beneath the partial shelter of an outcrop, a blurred jumble of pale hands and featureless, rain-blurred faces.

  Lord Diegan pulled up, dismounted, and said, 'Wait here.' On presumption the scout would catch his tired mount's bridle, he strode over loose stone into the shallow defile. The jingle of his spurs drew a heave of movement in the pathetic, wet knot of refugees. They surrounded him like schooling fish to crowd close, inquiring.

  An older veteran captain with a north country accent presented himself as their spokesman. Recognition of the Lord Commander's rank brought a respectful hush, cut by the cry of a night heron from some unseen marsh down the ridge.

  'I've been told you suffered an attack by the Master of Shadow,' Lord Diegan opened, then demanded to hear what had happened.

  From the first account, the surrounding night seemed to turn fearfully colder. His pulse quickened, the skin beneath his soggy gambeson shivered into chills, the commander of Lysaer's warhost listened as men rendered nameless and faceless by the night gave their bare description of a trapped cliff and a relentless toll of dead, fallen to arrows and fire. The voices held the ragged stress of reliving; all the stifled, helpless rage of men who had watched comrades die, and questioned their right to keep breathing. The clenched fists, the soft curses, the coarse tears of the boy with the splinted arm brought back hateful, ugly memories.

  Lord Diegan stared away into shadow hazed grey with rain, bedevilled by the raised spectre of another drenched field, and the mud-silted, tangled dead on the banks of Tal Quorin in Strakewood.

  'What took place was no battle, but a planned execution,' the veteran captain summed up. 'Lucky we are to have reached your ear swiftly, my Lord Commander. For we survived by design to carry last warning to Prince Lysaer. The Master of Shadow has sworn his oath on our blood that what happened at the Havens was no accident. He's promised if the warhost advances to engage him in Vastmark, we shall be snared in disaster.'

  'That's no news to be handled lightly,' Lord Diegan agreed, too urbane to reveal his blazing rage. 'Before we go the next step, I'll have your report set in writing. A scribe will come here to take statements under my seal before witnesses. I'll send guards, a tent, food and blankets, as soon as they can be arranged. The rest must wait until morning, since our prince has retired for the night.'

  Brisk in distess, the Lord Commander took his leave. He strode up the rise, waded through bracken feath
ered in droplets to the gulch where his scout remained with the horses. Careful to keep his voice low, he said, 'The rest of your patrol are Etarran?'

  A soft word confirmed from the dark. 'All trained under Pesquil, rest him. Why, you have need for discretion?'

  Diegan let go an imperceptible sigh of relief. 'Near enough.' His scouts were well seasoned. Already they grasped the sensitive problem posed by these survivors. If measures must be taken for expediency, he need not grind through tedious explanations to convince them to follow his orders. 'I'm going to send servants from my personal train. They'll set up two tents, one to serve a cold meal. When the refugees have eaten, you'll bring each in singly, but not to make the written statements they've been told to expect.'

  Bit rings jingled as Diegan's horse butted a damp nose against his chest. Knocked back a half-step by the antic, he slapped the animal off, clammy where the water ran off his black hair and soaked steady, cold runnels down his gambeson. 'Your men will bind and gag the refugees and hold them there,' he added to the scout. 'No noise, no fuss. Nobody speaks with them. Word of the slaughter at the Havens must never leave this hollow. In time, a team of headhunters will come to relieve you. Gather your party then and return to the main camp. I'll see the man dead who asks questions. This matter will be handled to my satisfaction, and your part is to keep your own counsel.'

  'You won't want an escort back?' the scout asked, Etarran born, and well accustomed to the clandestine intrigues men of power engaged for necessity.

  Lord Diegan set foot in his stirrup, swung himself astride to a grinding jingle of metal. 'I need time to think by myself.'

  He turned his weary mare and spurred her to a trot through the darkness, while the heron cried like a lost spirit over the marshes, and the rain tapped chill tears against his face. Until Arithon s'Ffalenn lay dead, the horrors enacted at Tal Quorin, at Minderl Bay, at the Havens, were bound to repeat and compound.