Traitor''s Knot (epub)

The mate's boisterous guffaw shattered the tension. 'It's a straight game of knock-down with thirty-six ladies!'

  As chuckles broke out, Captain Feylind retorted, 'Dharkaron's black vengeance, that's scarcely a contest!'

  'Oh, aye.' The mate elbowed her ribs with good cheer. 'Hardly worth spit in the wind, for a wager. Not with a lot that's stone-cold in the twat from a lifetime as tight-lipped virgins!' He glanced at the men, stoked to brazen challenge. 'We're agreed? Let the Prince of Rathain serve the mim-faced old sticks their comeuppance!'

  Handclaps and cheering broke over the deck. Fionrt Areth did not share the coarse round of bravado. Far more than alarmed, he glared at the figure still braced, with his unruffled back to the rail. Arithon's expression showed inquiring diffidence, the deft handling of an appalling dilemma underplayed to the point where his steadfast concern appeared genuine. In fact, he had done little to win peerless loyalty from these rough-cut men, who were strangers.

  'They forget they would not be endangered at all if their captain wasn't enthralled by a felon's unsavoury company!' Mistakenly, Fionn Areth had grumbled aloud, raising slurred contradiction from the side-lines.

  'He leaves them the dignity and freedom to choose.' Flushed red, stout arms folded, the Mad Prophet still nursed his sour disapproval. Yet his planted stance - that the Master of Shadow outweighed the game-piece of this one brig, and all of the living aboard her - did not extend to supporting a herder caught up past his depth.

  'What makes you defend him?' Fionn Areth asked, desolate. 'His criminal record of killing inspires no standard of morals. He enacts no grand cause. Nor does he make any offer of betterment, or promise prosperity, or safety.'

  Dakar sighed, then winced for the daylight that mauled his insufferably sore head. 'Stay your tongue for one day, drop your infantile ideals, and you might understand why those exact qualities make an unimpeachable crown prince.'

  'So does frost kill the grass!' exclaimed Fionn Areth. 'I might have been cozened to wear a spelled face, but you people react to unnatural straits as though you've been bound in possession!'

  The assessment seemed accurate at surface appearance: the helpless brig bobbled like a cast-off cork, bombarded by whizzing fragments of wood, and the random buffet of infested waters. Yet her terrified deck-hands still acted in concert. The hatch stayed unsealed. Brave men went below to net the strayed gear and refasten burst lockers. Look-outs ran aloft to check damages. Each one knew he might face death, even drowning, if the hull sprung her planks or lost caulking. Yet Feylind's haranguing steadied them on, and the mate seemed at hand to lend help wherever activity faltered. Such team-work, deployed amid staring disaster, did indeed bear the stamp of the prince, self-contained where he knelt, hearing out the stammering distress of the ship's lad.

  Arithon's patience was more firm than complacent. His words to the boy were not honeyed with false reassurance.

  Yet where. Fionn Areth misperceived the exchange as a sorcerer's ploy to weave delusion, the Mad Prophet recognized instead the rejection of officious authority. From earliest childhood, Arithon had taught Feylind to know her own strengths, then apply them. He had backed the bold means for her to step forward, and abandoned support, if she shrank. Idolize him though she would, her life in his absence remained self-complete. From the crew she had chosen to man her brig, to the mate who had fathered her children, she had matched the example before her.

  'His Grace doesn't pander to weakness,' Dakar said. 'Until you stop reasoning with other men's thoughts, and start to stand on your own, you won't see. A hollow mind makes you too ready a dupe. You will dance on the puppet-strings of his enemies, dumb and blind, for as long as you choose not to think.'

  'You hated him, once,' Fionn Areth retorted.

  'I also took the Prime's bespelled arrow in my back to keep him this side of Fate's Wheel.' Dakar added, not flinching, 'My death at the time would have left no regrets. Had Arithon gone down, a true light would have been lost from the world, with the balance tipped toward disaster.'

  Unimpressed, Fionn Areth scoffed. 'Now who speaks like a hothead fanatic!'

  'No, numbskull,' Dakar snapped, done with futile argument, 'I speak with the ice-cold eyes of a seer!'

  Fionn Areth was left to himself. Unmoving amid the rush of activity, he stayed fastened on Arithon, now repositioned behind the wheel mount on the quarter-deck. Head tipped askance, the bard appeared to be gathering himself. The flitter of iyats tweaked at his hair, plucked his shirt, and lashed at his unstrung cuffs. He paid them no heed. Stark stillness reflected his focus. A moment passed; two. Then he uttered a line in Paravian, whether prayer, or spell, or outright malediction, Fionn Areth could not determine. Yet when the Master of Shadow clapped his palms on the stern-rail, the thump seemed to shudder, length and beam, through the brig.

  If the frequencies left from his first conjured song had dwindled into subsonics, there was change: the human ear sensed the silence. For an instant, the air hung like crystal. The hustling sailhands ceased movement. The spell-driven fiends also noted the shift. Amid splashing gyrations, they dropped all pursuits as one mind. Wood fragments pattered into the sea and showered the open deck. The ship's timbers creaked, and her tarred ratlines hummed as the swarm reconverged on their drifting target.

  Their passage flicked skin, rugged at clothing, and rushed the nerves to alarming sensations. Fionn Areth saw their descent as patchy riffles of distortion. The master initiate's self-aware presence was instantly recognized: Arithon stood erect, his form rippled and hazed as though viewed through a pane of blown glass.

  Frightened, but not enough to stand down, Fionn Areth held his post, while the fiends bore in and gadded. Forced to slap down his sleeves, then snatch at his billowing shirt-tails, the herder huffed curses. His irritation incited the harrying swarm. His hair was tousled, then pulled, and snarled to elf locks. More sprites descended. Reaction did nothing but spur on their mischief. Fionn Areth found himself pinched and prodded, tickled and stung, bedevilled as though plagued by hornets.

  If Arithon accomplished aught by the stern-rail, his conjury brought no relief. Iyats flitted at will through the ship, indulging their penchant for havoc. The cook's shouts arose as they accosted the galley in a swarm of manic fury. Possessed pots clattered and clanked, and whisked air-borne, until the jarring clash of repeated collisions made the men wish they had been born deaf. Elsewhere in the forecastle, a sea chest was breached. Loose playing cards kited and fluttered underfoot, and a stray set of dice chased them, rattling.

  The mate shouted to the Mad Prophet, 'Fiends are fouling the mainstay. Can you do aught to lay down the splice and keep it from coming unravelled?'

  'Hung-over and sick?' Dakar snarled through his teeth.

  Yet the mast could come down, if the troubled rope parted. The spellbinder ground the six of clubs underfoot, wiped his hands, and manfully hauled his fat carcass into the rigging. Battered and poked, then drubbed by hurled water, he clung in the main-top crow's nest. Ill though he was, with raw talents depleted, he did what he could, spinning small wards of binding to prevent the whips on the splices from coming unlaced in the maelstrom.

  The iyats kept coming. Their relentless invention kinked the lower yard lifts into knots, and rummaged and thumped through the lockers. The objects meticulously battened inside thrashed to burst free, breaking latches. With time, the assault would exhaust the charms of protection set into the nails. No harassed crew could long retain equilibrium amid the unravelling mayhem.

  Even a landsman could see that the Evenstar was outmatched. Against mounting despair that would shatter morale, Arithon started to sing.

  As before, his grasp of trued sound translated itself throughout the brig's timbers. The effect harrowed every-one, a harsh, hurtful dissonance that invoked a stinging range of harmonics. The buzzing frequencies stunned thought and nerve, then trammelled, aching, through bone. The bruising vibration deepened and built. It swelled, relentless, acquired jangling overtones, then drill
ed into reverberations like mallet-struck iron.

  Men winced at each movement. The most sensitive clapped tormented hands to their heads, as their skulls went to war with their ear-drums. Others lost balance and tempers. Frayed emotions in turn spurred the sprites to more mischief. Energy-gorged, they scrambled their mad acquisitions on tangents, or plunged them into the sea with vehement spouts of shot spray. Soaked where she knelt, striving to free a man's jammed boot from a scupper, Feylind gasped with breathless laughter.

  'Dharkaron's vengeance, if we feel this bad, imagine how wretched those witches must be, linked as they are to a forsaken sigil that's fastened against our ship's timbers.'

  'Remember, we only have to outlast them!' the mate cried to back her encouragement.

  More fiends descended. The assault gained force. Battered and wrung nauseous, Fionn Areth backed against the mizen-mast pin-rail. Whirled dizzy, he could scarcely stand up, far less command the concentration a bard must sustain to unreel his bane-song. The effort behind that seamless delivery defied every concept of reckoning. Yet Arithon's stance showed no drastic change. He remained poised with bent head, flattened hands braced on the wheel mount. Around him, the air was pock-marked with ripples. The iyats detected his adamant presence. They pestered and pried, testing the least tiny fissure of strain stitched like unseen thread through his aura.

  No man could maintain that immutable calm, or withstand the exhaustive drain of the sprites' provocations. One break would touch off a concerted attack. For Arithon, the danger compounded since his trained talent posed him as antagonist. His self-willed composure cried challenge as moment to moment, the pressure increased. The brig bore the brunt. One after the next, her protections unravelled. The chain that had fastened the scuttle-butt mug broke away, hooking fittings and tripping up feet. Shouts erupted up forward: a rolling batch of loose dead-eyes skittered over the forecastle, whacking ankles and shins, and knocking a man down, unconscious. Coughs belowdecks bespoke a breached flour barrel, while an unlucky victim, beet-faced and cursing, chased hither and yon to recapture the flapping rags of his trousers.

  If Evenstar's crewmen were sore beset, the Koriathain also struggled to hold the wiggling bait in their trap. As Arithon's virulent handling of sound disrupted the Prime circle's control, the odd tempest blasted the face of the ocean. The random explosions at first promised hope, as more iyats succumbed to distraction. Tens and dozens soon flaunted their excessive energy, dashing up sheets of wild spray. Other flocks tussled in contrary whirlwinds, or snatched up the played-out scraps of the constructs. Yet the marginal respite was not enough. The hard toll of damages mounted.

  No bard, no matter how gifted, could outlast his mortal endurance; limping and crippled, no beleaguered merchant ship could evade the armed might of an Alliance ambush.

  No man stepped down, or admitted defeat. But the on-going pain of their hard-fought resistance crushed morale as each mishap compounded. Inside the stern cabin, the breathless steward batted and pounced on loose bedding. Pillows careened helter-skelter, and ripped apart in mid-flight. Scattered down loosed a blizzard, while the grim-faced mate made the rounds, collecting reports from below. Arithon shivered, soaked to the skin, while several small fish flopped in stranded panic across the boards under his feet.

  On, the squall raged. Length and beam of the brig, the crew was rushed ragged in futile attempt to keep pace. The harder they strove, the more malice unleashed, every freed object made weapon and club, haranguing and slapping them bloody.

  Then the mainstay let go with a crack. The mate's timely shout sent a team up the rigging with block and tackle to jury-rig a replacement. Iyats coalesced and swooped to interfere. Harsh puffs of breeze and the buffet of torn clothing hampered all movement aloft. Topmen's feet slipped off the shuddering ratlines. Again and again, hard-won progress was reversed, undone by pummelling setbacks. Knots and stout splices came unravelled at cruel whim. Unsecured rope ends became garrotes. Possessed lines bound, squealing, inside unruly blocks, and coils kinked in the sheaves. The sailhands faced lethal frustrations, determined. Uncomplaining, they laboured, dependent upon Dakar, who wore himself white, stringing stayspells.

  As misfortune mounted, Fionn Areth still hung back, engrossed by his poisonous doubts. Yet as a mess of dropped tackle tried yet again to snag a young topman off balance, and a mate's desperate snatch saved his jostled stance on the foot-ropes, the rigid denial could not be sustained.

  Spell-craft and determination were all that forestalled the impact of tragic injury. Under siege by a fiend storm, the Alliance doctrine wore thin, that Athera's conclaves of initiate knowledge founded the root of all evil.

  Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn and a drunken spellbinder's conjury held the Evenstar's fate by a thread.

  Should either one lose his rapt concentration, the plague would breed havoc until the brig lost her fight to stay seaworthy. The Prime and her seniors would not stand down until the brute contest reached closure. Laid hard against the self-evident fact, that his face had been fashioned as a live gambit to trap the last Prince of Rathain, Fionn Areth rubbed his aching temples. His righteous dedication to Araethurian good sense began to cramp reason, in hindsight.

  That moment, Feylind yelled up from below. The iyats were broaching the water stores.

  Arithon broke off his resistance at once. 'Dakar! Mind the deck! I'll go below!'

  For of course, if the casks became wrecked, the brig's crew would be left stripped of options. They must turn for shore and succumb to the ambush, or else waste from thirst one by one.

  'Man, you can't!' Up the mainmast, with the jury-rigged stay half-secured, and the mizen-mast ratlines unravelling, Dakar shouted, frantic, 'We'll be at the mercy of that sigil, each minute. The Koriathain can't withstand your bane-song. Their tracking hold's loosened. Did you not feel the shift? The web they've cast over us is fraying! Show them one second's respite, they'll rally and slam us all over again.'

  'I know. Believe me, there's no better choice.' Erect, though the iyats shimmered and weaved in bilked riffles of wind all about him, Arithon was not calm, or dispassionate as he breasted the storm to the ladder and raced for the main-deck.

  'Use shadow!' urged Dakar. 'You've recovered the natural use of your talent. Damn all to these fiends. We'll stay unharmed if we give in and sail. Turn for shore. The Prime will slack off, once we're bearing the direction she wants to herd us. Surely before we reach landfall, we can raise some form of spell-craft to defang the threat of those galleys!'

  'No.' The rejection rang, unequivocal.

  Fionn Areth glimpsed Arithon's face as he passed, taut with decision that could come to cost him his freedom, and worse. His anguish was backed by restless awareness: that if sorcery were invoked, the toll of such reckoning must outweigh even the lives and the friendship of his loyal allies on Evenstar. 'That fleet is aligned with Lysaer's Alliance! They are innocents, Dakar, bearing arms from blind fear. How many more dedicates will waste their lives if I show their conflict a tangible cause? I will grant no fresh proof that their terrors are real! Not by my hand, and not for self-preservation under my conscious consent!'

  Which meant the assault would end here, in victory or hard-fought defeat. Evenstar would win free, or go down, with the choice of collateral damage ashore set aside by unflinching adherence to character.

  Prodded by impulse, Fionn Areth charged forward and joined the crazed sprint toward the hatch. 'I'm coming. You'll need help.'

  Arithon turned his head. He never broke stride. His rushed glance pierced, for its honesty. 'I don't have a solution,' he warned point-blank. 'If every-one on this ship could sing fiend banes, the Koriathain would still outlast us. But follow along. Grasp at straws, if you wish. For my part, there's naught left but hare-brained tricks and invention born out of necessity.'

  * * *

  Late Autumn 5670

  Fiend Swarm

  Belowdecks, enclosed by low beams overhead, the bangs and thumps of the fiend swarm seemed magni
fied. Fionn Areth trailed Arithon at reckless speed, his heart raced by trapped apprehension. He was grass-lands born, accustomed to open sky, with the sun and wind in his face. In this noisome, damp pit, airless dark became nightmare, made worse by the ravaging iyats. Possessed objects clattered, hell-bent to cause injury. Loose feathers clogged eyesight and breathing. Harried and tripped, he might fall and break bones, even drown, never again to glimpse daylight.

  Ahead, the pale glimmer of Arithon's shirt vanished into the gloom. Strewn flour foreclosed any use of a lamp. Never mind the fine dust became volatile tinder, iyats would find a live flame irresistible. Evenstar's timbers offered too ready a fuel for an explosive conflagration. Fire would doom her crew fastest of all, roasting them in a pitch-fed blaze, or casting them adrift beyond sight of land, crammed into an open boat.

  Arithon spared no thought for such matters. As well, a mage with initiate talent would not require a light. He pressed ahead with sped grace in necessity, where Fionn Areth must grope. Stumbling blind through the ship's pitching dark, the herder kept on out of obstinacy.

  At the bottom rung of the lower-deck companionway, someone's hands fumbled a grip on his clothing, then steadied his step in descent. 'His Grace went that way,' said the seaman on guard, breathlessly apprehensive. 'The hatch to the hold. He'll go down. You sure he's asked for your company?'

  'Somebody ought to stand at his back,' the Araethurian said in stout irony.

  His grass-lands inflection raised instant contempt. 'Yourself?' carped the sailhand. 'Watch his Grace's back? I'd sooner trust him to a circling shark!'

  'Let him go,' cracked Arithon. 'I've already said the goatherd could please himself without hindrance.'

  The sailhand's clasp reluctantly loosened. 'Off you go. That way. Harm comes to him, Feylind will scuttle you like a gaffed dogfish.'

  Fionn Areth stayed silent. If Arithon fell to mishap, far more likely no man would be left alive on the brig to brandish the punitive knife. The goatherd blundered ahead through the buffet, beset by grisly smells and random barrages of fish guts: the opportunistic fiends had seized on a carcass, then torn it apart in possession. Gagging as he dodged the sting of flung cartilage, the Araethurian held still as his eyesight adjusted to the pin-holes of light fallen through the cracks in the main-deck.