TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  He had time to taste irony along with the blood. The spell-turned arrow intended for Arithon hurt a thousand times worse than the knife thrust taken from an irate husband for his stolen kiss from a kitchen wench, the signal bit of folly which had bought his unwanted term of service.

  Then darkness blanked his sight. Tears of remorse wet Dakar's cheeks, striped by the cold fall of rain. He understood he was not going to pull himself together, was not going to staunch the ebb of his life force in time. He would pass the Wheel and suffer Daelion's judgment without seeing whether Arithon survived.

  Of all disappointments, that sparked his anger. He could not even snatch the awareness for the handful of minutes he needed to know the outcome of his train of mistakes.

  The last thing he felt were hurried hands on his shoulder. Then a voice, perhaps Caolle's, in gruff and distant protest. 'Name of Ath, there's no justice in the world if he dies .. .'

  But therein lay the unkind twist of fate. Had Dakar any breath, he would have railed against paradox, that for all his inept living, his one selfless act should seal his end. He wondered if Sethvir's histories would name him hero, or if his Fellowship master would appreciate the contradiction; and then he had no thought but silence.

  * * *

  For a very long time, there was nothing. Darkness, stillness, utter cold; then a point of blue light, etching a fretted course to close patterns a trained mage should recognize. Meaning that tantalized reason grazed the edge of labouring consciousness. The mind knew nothing, felt less. Just an invidious lassitude and a quiet more profound than winter's grip of black ice.

  Then a powerful voice pierced the chill and cracked the shackles of freezing blankness. Dakar heard his Name twined in power that could have raised the earth's molten core in fiery summons.

  A question followed, demanding a permission. Dakar felt tears prick the insides of his eyelids and a ghostly sense of flesh he had forgotten he still possessed. His thoughts imprinted an awareness of Asandir's presence, then gave free consent to what was asked.

  Someone he could not see cried out in relief.

  Then a burst of white light scoured through him and pain rushed back like a shriek torn through perfect vacuum.

  Weeping for the return of bodily sensation, gasping breaths that seemed drawn in pure flame, the Mad Prophet opened his eyes. Rain and clouds; a bitter wind snapped his cheek. He saw Asandir's face, drawn in weathered lines and a fearful, patient concentration.

  Then Caolle's voice, surly with concern. 'Shouldn't we get him to shelter?'

  No one answered. Dakar felt the Sorcerer's hands in tender strength turn his body. He rolled prone on sharp gravel, rinsed over in running water. Blood trailed from his mouth. The taste made him gag. Too depleted to shiver, he felt the chill spear clear through him as fingers gently cut the tunic from the broken off arrow shaft struck on an angle through his back.

  'Steady,' said Asandir.

  Then, as Dakar struggled to ask what crisis should bring a Fellowship Sorcerer to his side, and to warn of the Koriani plot against Arithon, his master said, inarguable, 'Don't speak.'

  Dakar felt the burn of a sigil drawn in warm fire against his skin. The pain bled away, stilled from a thundering scream to a murmur.

  'Sleep, Dakar,' said the Sorcerer in that tone no mortal man could summon the wits to disobey.

  * * *

  The time was much later. Night, Dakar sensed as he clawed through mazed wits to reclaim his smothered awareness. He opened his eyes to the ruddy glare of a tallow lamp. Spidery legs of shadow stalked across the woven patterns of a shepherd's tent. He smelled rancid fleece and the hot reek of fat. Scapegrace that he was, he longed for cheap gin to obliterate the upwelling emotion that threatened to rip up his guts.

  Against every blundering mistake in creation, his master had seen fit to assist his survival. The result promised punishment and joy.

  A swathe of firm bandaging constricted his chest.

  Every breath jerked an ache through his back. He still did not know; he feared above all to ask if his foolhardy act had won reprieve.

  Then the voice he most wanted to hear this side of the Wheel spoke in gentle censure at his bedside. 'For the armoury at Alestron, I'd say we were quits.' Lean hands closed over his palms and pressed something sharp and metallic into his strengthless grasp.

  The Mad Prophet rolled his eyes to find the Prince of Rathain propped on crossed arms against his bedside.

  Too hurt to move, Dakar traced the razor-edged metal between his fingers. 'A clan vengeance arrow?'

  Arithon recited the inscription on the flange, unblinking, his grave features lent an unwarranted sense of majesty by the uneven play of the light. ' "From the hand of Bransian s'Brydion, for the seven who died in the armoury." You know you saved my life.'

  Against more than the Duke of Alestron, Dakar struggled to say. A banespell from Morriel Prime had sped the s'Brydion vow of enmity; and now, most dangerously, her guile had ensured that no trace of evidence would remain. Had he not taken the arrow in the Shadow Master's stead, not even Althain's Warden could have known of a plot in progress. Except for his testimony as living witness, the magic had left no aura.

  Arithon answered his urgent concern. 'Asandir found out about the Koriathain as he healed you. No one knows why their order should wish me dead.'

  Dakar expelled a scratchy sigh. 'If the Fellowship saw, why didn't my master do something earlier? Where has he gone now?'

  Above him, etched in motionless tension, Arithon weighed his reply. A masterbard's exacting intuition let him say, 'Sethvir picked up your distress on the ridgetop and passed on the warning. But Asandir made no intervention until you had accomplished the errand he set you on course to complete.'

  'Ath!' Dakar whispered, too weak for heat and vehemence. He coughed out the rancid reek of mutton fat. 'Don't ever run afoul of a Fellowship Sorcerer. Their ways are devious and tangled in a manner even Daelion couldn't fathom.' But hindsight showed his assigned service to Arithon was no penance, after all; just a difficult lesson brought to full circle.

  'You can rest,' the Master of Shadow said in rueful sympathy. 'Asandir has ridden on as my envoy to inform Lysaer s'Ilessid of another ransom. Thanks to your timely call to action, Caolle's scouts took Duke Bransian prisoner in my name.'

  'You've got all four brothers s'Brydion?' Dakar's beard twitched to his lopsided grin. 'A bloody plague of fiends would be simpler to banish. You'll let them go for Lysaer's gold?'

  Green eyes flashed to a gem-cut glint of bright humour. 'Stay and find out. Asandir left his wish that you choose your own road from this place.'

  The Mad Prophet grabbed the blankets to shove up on one elbow, then groaned. Felled by a stab of wretched agony, he surrendered to prostration while spinning senses settled. 'I can go with him or make my own way?'

  In dreamy disbelief, Dakar pondered this, a frown furrowed under the hair left screwed into a cockscomb nest of wild tangles. Beyond doubt he felt unready to resume the disciplines demanded of a Fellowship spellbinder. The willing burden of responsibility was too fresh, too unwieldy a yoke upon shoulders still far from self-reliant.

  The prince he had spilled his blood to preserve had opened his mind to new venues. Their relationship intrigued him like some razor-edged puzzle he could not resist the urge to challenge.

  'I'd stay in your service, if you'll have me.' Reddened in diffidence, Dakar tucked his bearded chin beneath the coverlet. 'If after Jaelot and Merior and yesterday's blunder, you can imagine me becoming something more than a damned liability.'

  Across from him, Arithon raised eyebrows in surprise. 'My service of itself is a damned liability. Has an arrow in the back taught you nothing?' Then his lips flexed and dismissed his rare smile. Unmasked by deep warmth few others came to witness, he added, 'In truth, Dakar, I'd be honoured. Three times you've proven your worth and your caring. I'd be the world's greatest idiot to turn your offer of friendship aside.'

  Overset by embarrassment
, Dakar stared up at the worn weave of the tent, pricked with holes at the roofpole. 'I'll still get drunk,' he warned. The light swam around him, bright beyond bearing, and the air felt too thick to draw past the lump in his throat. Against a maddening, sleepy urge to drift beyond thought, the Mad Prophet mumbled into the fleeces. 'I'll not give up whoring, no matter how horribly you plague me.'

  Somewhere far off, the s'Ffalenn prince was laughing without satire. 'If five centuries of apprenticeship with a Fellowship Sorcerer failed to break your decadent habits, who am I to dare try?'

  Last Defeat

  Rain fell over Vastmark in cold, autumn torrents, and the valleys lay pooled in pewter puddles. In a war camp half-dismantled, undone into chaos, and up to its ankles in churned mud, Lysaer s'Ilessid stood in the open, bareheaded, while the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, took his leave after bringing word of Duke Bransian's captivity.

  The moment was not private or friendly. Around the site where prince confronted Sorcerer, wet ox teams drew the great drays. Spoked wheels sucked over the moiled ground to a creak of stressed timbers, laden beds heaped with war gear and furled canvas. The drovers goaded their beasts and stared in furtive fear as they passed. No few marvelled over the proud courage of their liege lord, who dared the attempt to stand down a mage of the Fellowship.

  'You are not welcome here,' Lysaer said in stiff anger, while the Sorcerer regarded his stilted reserve in a stillness that marked them both as figures set apart. 'Not only for the fact you speak for the Shadow Master, and not just for the misfortune that Arithon demands another ransom from me for a hostage.'

  Asandir regarded the s'Ilessid prince unabashed, while the water channelled off his silver hair and through the grooves scored from the corners of his eyes over cheekbones like weathering on old granite. His answer, when it came, held restrained sorrow. 'That's a very large statement, made from a very closed heart.'

  He offered no advice, no wisdom, no platitude, but smiled to the trembling royal page who brought his black horse to hand him the reins. He patted the boy's shoulder before he mounted. 'Did the soldiers say something to frighten you? You're a bigger man than that. You have my promise, there's no truth behind whatever tale of horror you've been told.'

  The boy looked uncertain. 'You take no babes from their mothers for sacrifice?'

  'Never.' Asandir flicked his silver-bordered mantle off his horse's steaming hindquarters, draped it back over his shoulders, then set his foot in the stirrup and settled into his saddle. The stud snorted under him. Its ghost eye rolled white in eagerness to be off. Asandir held his restive mount and looked down at the fair-haired royal scion his Fellowship could not sanction for inheritance. 'Neither do my kind intervene with mortal lives unasked. You do your followers no service to foster that misapprehension.'

  'Should I lie?' Lysaer rebutted, his attention already strayed ahead to the needs of the people beneath his banner. 'Men have every right to fear the forces of sorcery for as long as the Master of Shadow is free to terrorize their towns, and slaughter their comrades by the thousands on the field.'

  In aggrieved awareness that no words of reason could pry through the implacable beliefs engendered by Desh-thiere's curse, Asandir lent the statement no endorsement. Would you sentence a criminal without hearing both sides of a grievance? I leave you with a challenge, that you make the chance to ask your half-brother's allies for their view.'

  'I shall, if you deliver him to my court for judgment in chains,' Lysaer countered.

  But the Sorcerer had already set heels to his mount. The stallion shouldered ahead, an apparition of night and shadow against the drab heave of men's industry and the leaden, unending fall of rain. The servants and squires collapsing tents or loading the bone-skinny backs of the pack mules scattered uneasily before that dark rider's passage. A few gave way with extreme respect. A camp follower in trailing, muddied skirts curtsied to the ground, more deferent than she would have been toward royalty.

  Asandir checked his mount. His gentle request to spare him her adulation left her smiling like new morning as he resumed on departure.

  No one watching could fail to acknowledge the power in the Sorcerer's capacity to care for detail. The fact that his Fellowship had twice stood as Arithon's envoy fed a steady and latent uneasiness.

  Lysaer damped back a sullen flare of resentment.

  Alone, unsupported amid the dismembered wreckage of his hopes, he fought back despair as the seep of grey weather and the measure of his losses sank their grip on his heart and squeezed. The shame of his defeat at Dier Kenton Vale would weigh on him all of his days. Nearest to the heart, on the heels of his wrenching estrangement from Talith, he must bear home the news of her brother, killed on the field by barbarians.

  Beyond life, the mark of ignominy would endure, indelibly set in Third Age history.

  A thousand lesser sorrows surrounded him. Soldiers who had set faith in his march to claim due justice slogged through chill puddles to dismantle the field tents. They moved with bent heads, and cheeks grown hollowed with hunger. Their voices as they attended their duties rang dispirited, except in reference to their longing to return home. Under the leaning, bare poles of a cook shack, the wounded and the sick waited to be carried to wagons on litters. In a field pavilion nearby, in sombre, lowered voices, Lord Commander Harradene conferred with other captains on how they should handle the inevitable illness that must sweep through the ranks as the weather worsened.

  Pain became anger, that all the brave efforts of three kingdoms' muster had come to naught.

  Ravaged by the effects of his enemy's unrelenting cleverness, Lysaer had no choice but accept his bitter defeat at the hand of the Master of Shadow. Yet he was too much the prince to leave the matter here in Vastmark, or to let the ruins of another campaign become an uncontested victory.

  Chilled through his rich surcoat, the prince called his page to send for Avenor's captain-at-arms. Then he instructed his steward to tell his officers to wait an hour before striking his command tent.

  'Your Grace,' the servant murmured, troubled as he arose from his bow for the sharp expression still stamped on the features of his prince.

  The captain of the royal guard arrived, his surcoat brushed clean of mud, and the gold braid against all odds still kept shining. His sallow, axe features were a fixed mask to hide disappointment as he presented himself to hear what he expected would become his liege's last order to retreat. 'My prince, your cause is just. Never would we have betrayed you, though the last of us died in these hills.'

  Lysaer turned away from his study of the mists that masked the cut rims of the mountains. 'This war is not finished. No defeat is ever final. My mistake, always, was to fight the Master of Shadow on his own chosen ground.'

  No warhost could close every bolt-hole in a continent. Nor could a galley fleet scour every cove in the shoreline.

  'We lost,' Lysaer admitted in full surety, 'because indeed, I demanded the impossible.'

  'No prince could have done more,' protested Avenor's captain. He had tears in his eyes for a pride beyond reach of mortal heartbreak.

  Inspired by recognition that he had cast his net too small, Lysaer gave a smile of encouragement to rival a Fellowship Sorcerer's. 'We return to Avenor, not to accept what has happened, but to become the supreme example for all other cities on the continent. If every man comes to hear of this campaign, if every village learns of our enemy's threat and guards itself against corruption, there will be no roof anywhere under which the Master of Shadow can find shelter. We can make certain, the next time he strikes, that no one alive gives him haven.'

  And there lay the answer, Lysaer determined as he watched his captain straighten tired shoulders and stride off to attend his men in revived spirits.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn could never succeed again if he was stripped of his welcome to delude backward settlements and win allies.

  Lysaer stepped into his command tent, sent his page to find his secretary, then pondered the formidable obst
acles confronting the seeds to restore his grand plan. Avenues of support still existed for Arithon, whose powers could never be vanquished: Fellowship Sorcerers and adepts of Ath's Brotherhood were unmoved in corrupted belief that his shadow-bending deeds were tied to innocence. To make way against such uncanny force and mystery, the influence of initiates and mages must become undermined or supplanted.

  To crush an enemy who commanded the fell powers of the dark, an armed host must be raised that was willing to die for the cause. One bound to unity through beliefs too strong to be routed by old superstitions or illusions of Dharkaron's legendary chariot.

  Lysaer settled into the damp velvet of his camp chair. Knuckles pressed to his temples, he frowned as logic vaulted him through avenues of fresh thought. To bring down a criminal who manipulated men's fears as a weapon would require soldiers who would march on command to outface the very essence of evil.

  To lead such a force, Lysaer perceived he would have to be more than a Prince of the West, more than Lord of Avenor, greater than the ancient royal bloodline of Tysan.

  He must stand before people of all kingdoms as a presence beyond mere flesh and blood. Only then could he raise the inspiration to fire men to offer themselves in sacrifice.

  His talent with light gave him birth claim to power. Davien's fountain lent longevity. Should he not stand as the servant of innocence to rid the land of Arithon's malevolence?

  A light cough at his shoulder returned the prince to awareness that his secretary awaited his instructions. 'I'll need a letter written,' he said, brisk in restored habit of command, 'a requisition to my council in formal language to raise the gold to redeem the four brothers s'Brydion.'

  A mousy, worn man, the scribe made a sound in surprise.

  Lysaer regarded him, sobered to attentive sympathy. 'What were you thinking? Did men dare to presume I'd forsake my sworn allies over a conflict between blood family and loyalty?'