No one dwelled on discussion of the carnage that must surely follow such forays to tweak the tail of the tiger. The Caithwood campaign had left none in doubt of the Alliance intent to eradicate ancient clan bloodlines. Each back-and-forth volley of debate thrashed over which way to divide the inadequate strength of their war band.
‘We sleep on it,’ Earl Jieret determined at length. ‘At moonrise in three hours, we’ll cast final votes and decide. Dharkaron avenge, if we’re wrong, we lose ground just as surely as if we waste time chasing more pointless arguments.’
‘We can drink to good hunting.’ Sidir loosed a brittle, snarling laugh. ‘Who among us thought we would ever die abed? I never did fancy being shut inside walls through a siege.’
In a camaraderie sharpened by pending crisis, Earl Jieret unstoppered his flask and shared his last brandy amid the brotherhood of his Companions. ‘May the blood on my blade be Lysaer s’Ilessid’s,’ he vowed as he sent them to rest.
Wrapped in the faintly rancid taint of his heaviest bear-pelt mantle, Earl Jieret crawled under a windbreak of bushes, stretched out, and closed his eyes. Like the swift, savage gusts that battered the stripped branches, his burden of worry refused to retreat. Too vividly real, the bleak possibility his prince could lie dead before sunrise. His absolute helplessness to stem that disaster crushed him to grief and despair. He felt paralyzed, numb, less alive than the lichened stone markers that gouged through the snow-silvered vales of Daon Ramon.
Jieret sucked in a bracing, cold breath and doused the ill bent of his thoughts. He must quiet his mind. Against the incessant anxiety that gnawed him, he strove to establish the stillness that opened the gateway to dreams. Like his father before him, he was gifted with Sight. Let him snatch one scant hour of peace, and he might tap into the elusive talent that gave rise to spontaneous augury. If his decision to divide the clan war band could save his imperiled sovereign, his tactics must dovetail with accurate foresight. The stakes ran too high for his limited resources; the far-flung desolation of the barrens was too vast to quarter for even large numbers of enemies. Jieret snugged down in his bearskin cloak, while the men in his company allowed him wide berth and strict silence. As well as he, they had measured bad odds. What slim chance existed for Arithon’s reprieve must transcend blind luck and ride upon prescient vision.
The landscape of Daon Ramon spoke to a man beyond the veiled dark of closed eyelids. Earl Jieret lay slack, while the sough of the winds described hill and stone, and whined through their whipped stands of thorn brush. The distant call of a wolf pack howling glissandos in chorus interspersed with the call of the winter white owl. The deer who raked tines in the thickets walked abroad, to the forest-bred ear attuned and alert for the mincing, soft step of cloven hooves in the snow. Mice emerged from deep burrows to gnaw seeds and bark, tiny feet printing hieroglyph tracks.
Beyond the limits of sensory perception, the master who owned mage-sight might key into the finer pitched chant of rooted grass and the textured whisper of the black earth. Deep toned, beneath these, the vast well of existence unveiled the grand chords of harmonic resonance that bound the solidity of creation. Here in Daon Ramon, far removed from trade roads and commerce, the mysteries moved near to the surface, unchained. Where once the herds of Riathan Paravians ran in pearlescent, ethereal splendor, the terrain spoke to the listening ear and thinned the veil that bound time and dimension.
Earl Jieret never marked the second of transition between wakeful awareness and the half world of Sighted dreaming. The wind, the wolves, the nervous snorts of tethered horses seemed unchanged, until somebody swore insults in a gruff, townborn accent, and a booted foot jabbed at his shoulder.
He groaned, pulled apart by a shattering headache that he realized was not his own. His seer’s gift had borne him to the hills near Ithamon, and folded him into the nightmare experience of Arithon’s state of captivity…
‘Bastard! You want to eat? Then wake up!’ The boot came again, a spike of impatience whose agony wrenched him to breathless and dizzying nausea.
‘Leave the wretch to himself,’ a superior voice ventured advice from the sidelines. ‘Give him gruel, he’s just going to heave up his guts. And anyway, he’s a lot less of a bother if he stays weak as a lamb, unconscious.’
Hostile footsteps retreated to the squeak of dry snow. The rolling, harsh spasms took longer to subside. Released to dull misery and cramping discomfort, Arithon lay in supine exhaustion. The return of full consciousness came as no boon, when hands and wrists were lashed tight with cord, and the cold gnawed with wretched persistence. The hair at his nape clung, sticky with blood, the scalp underneath tight with swelling. Pain came and went in angry, sharp throbs, and scattered his thoughts to delirium. Silted, thick mists obscured sight and blurred time as well, until he drifted, unmoored, and the phantom wings of a soaring eagle drew him back into past memory.
In another place, as unstrung by confusion and pain, he had raised his voice in denial as wounding as the bite of a vital sword thrust. ‘Ah, Ath,’ he had cried to Halliron Masterbard, ‘what have you given me if not another weapon for this feud?’
Then the old man’s admonition, resharpened by the unflinching veracity of the dying: ‘Yes. And you will make me no promises, not to use to the fullest what you’ve earned. You forget. I have lived to see the sun’s reemergence, and your part in the Mistwraith’s defeat. If a masterbard’s music can one day spare your life, or that of your loyal defenders, you will use it so, and without any binding ties to conscience.’
The dream that linked Jieret to Prince Arithon’s state of mind tore asunder, gone like rags of blown silk before the onset of prescient vision. The clan chieftain’s gift tapped him into an event yet to come in the near to immediate future. The scene showed the same hills below the ruin of Ithamon, imprinted by moonlight to a landscape of sable velvet and mercury. Tucked into the snow-clad fold of a draw, Jieret saw armed guards and horse pickets, and amid these, the prone form of Rathain’s prince, still bound as their prized captive. Though sprawled in the motionless appearance of unconsciousness, Arithon s’Ffalenn was awake; Jieret had observed enough wounded men to recognize the slight, subtle tension that marked a focused awareness.
The gift of his prescience granted him more: the soft, all-but-inaudible whisper of song called forth from the throat of a man trained as Masterbard.
That subliminal thread of sound swelled and grew, fashioned into a low, sustained note, richly textured with layers of harmonics. Its tonal complexities ranged beyond hearing, a living current that keyed into the true chord which accessed the world’s primal mysteries. If the townsmen who paraded as sentries heard nothing, the land underneath their staid tread was not either deaf or oblivious. Answering vibrations awoke out of stone. First the pebbles and round boulders in the Severnir’s bed, then the rocky crown of the hills joined with the bard’s keening refrain. These in turn woke the bedrock foundations of the hills near Ithamon, until the staid granite underlying the cold earth rang to the same pitch, keyed downward to subsonic octaves.
Even removed in the solitude of dreams, Jieret sensed the hair at his nape prickle erect with foreboding. Whatever fell crafting the Masterbard spun, the effect would not leave any men inside earshot untouched by the weave of its summoning.
Soon enough, the first sentry crumpled at the knees. Heedless of duty, he curled in the snow and yawned, his half-lidded eyes grown compulsively heavy until he slipped into fast sleep. One by one his companions succumbed also. Within minutes, the whole company sprawled in deep slumber, entrapped in the subtlety of the Masterbard’s skill that wound a cocoon of dark sound. The slow rise and fall of their breathing became the sole sign of life left within them.
Unafflicted amid their motionless forms, Arithon rolled and wormed, belly down, toward the nearest of the fallen sentries. He paused often, nursing the pain in his head. The tender care as he extended his body became a heartbreaking testament to the intensity of his bruises. Still whisperin
g fragmented song through locked teeth, he purloined the man’s dagger, and in painstaking steps, freed his wrists. He sat up, swayed through a braced moment of dizziness, then sawed the cord binding his ankles. Still sick and unsteady as he rose to his feet, he disarmed his enemies with careful and chilling efficiency.
From the patrol’s acting captain, he recovered his sword, Alithiel, his main gauche, and his confiscated hunting bow. Once only, he bent, racked through with cramps. His battered head pained him. His trained instincts as healer would warn him he should not be upright or walking. Nor could he afford to cosset his injuries, with who knew how many Alliance reinforcements inbound to take charge of a dangerous prisoner. Arithon wrapped snow into a rag as a compress. The deliberate pace of his movements bespoke a will that could dismantle mountains. Jieret’s heart ached for the dream that would not allow him to offer his liege any word of encouraging comfort.
He could but watch as Arithon s’Ffalenn made his way to the picketed horses. He saddled one, then loaded the rest until his captors stood stripped of provisions. Dawnlight flooded the east primrose yellow by the hour he rode out, driving the small herd before him.
The chord raised to resonance through his Masterbard’s art stayed sustained by the stone, as though the untamed fiber of the land spoke for the blood prince granted rule by the Fellowship’s charter. Asleep in the snow, stripped of swords and provender, Jaelot’s proud company slept oblivious, perhaps to awaken and discover their plight, or else to lie comatose until their hearts slowed, and the winter chill froze them to marble. Earl Jieret felt no shred of pity. Whether they died, or awoke to face a slower end by starvation, he prayed that Dharkaron let none of them stir before his liege was away and safely tucked into hiding.
Hunched in the saddle, grasping mane to keep balance against waves of sucking vertigo, the Master of Shadow turned northward. He did not look back. Ithamon was suspect, entrenched with camped enemies. Weak with shock as he was, he dared not reconnoiter and risk any chance of flushing more troops out to hound him.
‘I’m sorry, Caithdein, my brother,’ he pleaded, either raving, or else intuitively aware that in dream the absent earl who was his oathbound liegeman might hear his ragged apology. ‘Tell Luhaine I can’t keep our rendezvous.’
Whether Rathain’s prince sensed the presence that rode with him, Jieret s’Valerient lost his chance to attempt a reply. The fickle thread of his prescient contact snapped under a surge of blank darkness. Through the void came the hissed sound of feathers in flight, then an ink-upon-blackness impression of form that resolved to reveal a jet raven.
The bird lit before him in a burst of white light, the whetted edge of its primaries obsidian knives that carved a haze of diffracted rainbows. The crisp rush of swept air as it folded its wings framed a Word far beyond spoken language. Jieret sensed the intelligence in its fathomless eye. Nor was the fine point of protocol left in doubt, that he must be the one to speak first.
‘Do you bring me an augury?’ he demanded, afraid, all too aware he lacked a schooled mage’s discernment to tell if the presence before him was dangerous.
The raven shuffled its feathers as though to shake off the buffeting winds that blew far outside mortal awareness. Its clawed feet spanned a parchment scribed with a map of Daon Ramon. There, Jieret realized, its message could unveil the most critical course of the future; or the array might be the lure of a life-sucking demon, offered to tempt him to folly.
‘Ath preserve, ten enemies with swords would be easier,’ he snapped to himself in distaste. Yet a caithdein was born to spend life in royal service. Haunted by Arithon’s plight at Ithamon, Jieret shook off quaking nerves and dared the risk of the next step.
‘I accept you as harbinger, cruel though the news be,’ he invited in ritual courtesy.
The raven that was Prophecy tipped its head to the map, then tapped its bill three times to the parchment. Vision bloomed at its touch, a daytime view of Ithamon’s east-facing battlement. Beneath broken walls laced with canes of wild briar, Jieret beheld a muster of men. Their filthy, snagged surcoats bore the badge of Jaelot’s snake and gold lion. Two officers argued inside their tight circle. Hot words and snapped gestures harangued against the mad prospect of tracking a captive who had escaped their patrol of outriders during the night.
Their woes were well justified. The criminal sorcerer had purloined critical supplies, and eight of their better horses. The haunts in the old ruin demoralized nerves, and the barrens offered inadequate shelter for those victims just found, and aroused out of spellbound sleep with their hands and feet crippled with frostbite. The bitter conditions that lamed them were not going to relent anytime before spring. In the deeps of midwinter, westbound storms would keep coming. Under such onslaught, even the wild deer sometimes sickened and froze on the downlands.
‘What are you men, a bunch of fat farmers?’ The captain at arms strode onto the scene and quashed the resolve to retreat. ‘Just squat by the damned fire at the killing frost and count the acorns that fall on the roof? There’s a sorcerer at large gaining ground while you whimper! I want every hale man in the saddle, and riding. The wounded and those without mounts are no use. They can limp in disgrace back to Jaelot!’
The small troop formed ranks, with the gruff, zealot captain still busy reviling the laggards. Lent the uncanny, keen eye of the raven, Jieret noticed an unnatural shimmer about the man’s burly form. His imposing, mailed figure seemed spun about with filaments of violet light. Intuition unveiled the terrifying truth: that Prince Arithon’s pursuit had been driven all along by a Koriani geas of obsession. The spirit forms that guarded the old Baiyen road, and the ghost cry of Ithamon did not daunt them. Even on short supplies, they would hound the Shadow Master’s flight northward. Entrapped by the pull of strong spell seals, they were pressured to ride beyond the limit of sanity.
Jieret was granted no time to measure their plight in considered assessment. Once more he beheld the spread parchment map, with the raven’s lordly, deliberate tread marking the path of Arithon’s beleaguered flight northward. His Grace’s evasion followed the dry gulch of the Severnir, the swale of the floodplain offering the best footing for a mounted man to make fast passage. At the broad, horseshoe loop, where the river bent east, the bird paused, its clawed feet planted between strides. It regarded Earl Jieret with mournful, sharp focus.
Then it croaked the Paravian word for the rune of beginning, and blinked…
A white moon rode the sky, three nights past full. Winter stars framed the hour, precisely.
A gaunt man dipped a glittering bronze pendulum in fresh blood and uttered unclean incantations through the drug-scented smoke of a brazier. One hot, scarlet droplet spattered the map, and ignited a scene of pandemonium.
‘Rise!’ screamed a priest in a sunwheel robe, standing guard at the site where the bloodstain had marred the inscribed terrain of Daon Ramon. His fanatic’s glazed eyes beheld auguries in fire, and his shouts awoke horn calls that shattered the night calm.
‘Rise and ride!’ he exhorted. The banner he flourished in frenzied excitement showed the tower and mountain blazon of Darkling. ‘In the name of the Divine Prince, the faithful are called to raise swords for the cause of the Light!’
Rousted by his cries, men stumbled from sleep. They cursed, and groped through cold darkness for weapons and harness, and untied nervous horses from the picket lines. Trained hands yoked the six-in-hand teams to the supply sledges while the visionary priest bellowed his urgent tidings.
‘Our allies from Jaelot drive the Spinner of Darkness in flight across Daon Ramon Barrens! For the mercy of the world, we are charged to take arms. Blessed is the steel that cuts down the enemy without quarter, and blessed the man who sends his black spirit to Dharkaron!’
On edge and watchful, Darkling’s task force of three hundred advanced, westbound and primed for engagement. Through the eye of the raven, they appeared nondescript, a tinker’s scrap of pins and steel filings, cast across moonlit dales.
The defiles swallowed the shrill gleam of their steel. Gusting wind masked the snorts of their horses. Ahead, alone under the vast bowl of night sky, the Master of Shadow turned before them. He lashed his band of stolen geldings to flight, a tactic of graceless necessity.
Darkling’s three hundred had caught him, exposed. They spurred their fresh mounts and gave chase. Vision showed their charge into the dry gulch of the Severnir. Relentlessly trapped, Arithon responded. The white moon showed his face, wrenched to wild-eyed grief, as he engaged his born gift and wrought shadow.
The bursting wave of the enemy advance plunged headlong into a well of spun blackness. The dark showed them no mercy, nor the ancient, water-smoothed boulders scabbed over with rills of green ice. The horses floundered. Rank upon rank, they tripped, and snapped legs, catapulted head over heels while their riders sprawled, dashed and broken among them. The rear guard reined back from the treacherous ravine. Valiant officers regrouped them. A brave few pressed ahead and picked out a safe crossing, only to find the unnatural darkness sucked the life and warmth from their bodies.
The terrain proved no ally, but winnowed them separate. First scattered, then cut down to groping, small groups, men blundered and circled and cursed the blanketing blindness until their wretched mounts shivered beneath them. The balking arrivals were driven on, whip and spur, until the iron bit rings froze fast to the flesh of their muzzles, and tore them to headshaking agony. Frightened riders drew rein and halted. The prudent who paused to seek wood and strike fire met their doom before moonset. The stones in the riverbed sang them to sleep, and the shadowing chill stopped their hearts.