Warhost of Vastmark

Since such were wont to kick him as they passed, he wormed into the gap behind the log stores. If he feigned sleep and stayed out of sight, sometimes his presence was forgotten. Today, the mere hope made him pitiful. The sweeping chills that seized through his frame made him unable to keep still.

The footsteps outside came closer, overlaid by agitated talk. Then a stranger’s voice blistered across rising argument like tempered steel through threshed straw. ‘Enough! I’ll hear no excuses. Stay out here until you’re called.’ Keys chimed sour notes through a patter of hurried strides, and the new arrival spoke again. ‘No, Dakar. You will wait.’

The bar in the lock grated and gave; the door jerked open. A flood of rain-washed air swirled through the heat and a small, lithe man stepped inside. He stood a moment, eyes searching the darkness, while the fiery glare from the furnace lined his sharp profile and the lip he curled up at the stench.

Snapped to a scourge of clear anger, he said, ‘You claim he’s in here?’

The master joiner’s south shore drawl filtered back, uncertain through the silvered splash of water. ‘Master, he’s there. My heart’s blood as surety. We’d never let him escape.’

Without any fumbling, the man found the lamp and the striker kept ready on the shelf by the doorway. His hands shook as he lit the spill. The trembling flare of illumination as he touched flame to wick shed gold over finely made knuckles. He raised the lamp and hung its iron ring from a nail in the rafters.

Through vision impaired to slits by bruises and swelling, the prisoner saw him fully, centred beneath the yellow glow. Thin and well-knit, he looked like a wraith in dark breeches, his white shirt slathered to his shoulders by the rain. His hair was black. Wet strands stuck like ink to his temples and jaw. The features they framed were pale granite, all chipped angles and fury, the eyes now shadowed by lamplight.

Wind riffled through the portal at his back. The lantern flame wavered and failed to a spark, then leaped back in dazzling recovery. Swept by a chill that chattered his teeth, the prisoner shrank into his cranny.

The man spun toward the noise like a predator. He could not miss the lashed pair of ankles that protruded from the wood stores, livid and blackened with scabs.

‘Merciful Ath!’ He lilted a fast phrase in the old tongue that resounded with appalled shock. Then in a rage to freeze the falling rain itself, he changed language and commanded, ‘Strike his bonds.’

‘But, my lord,’ protested the master joiner through the sizzle as the leak let fall another droplet on the boiler. The wretch came intending to murder y—’

In fearful speed, the man in authority cut him off. ‘Do it now! Are you deaf or a fool, to defy me?’

While the joiner entered, chastened to cowering, the black-haired man sank to his knees and laid his own icy hands over the prisoner’s roped ankles. ‘Give me the knife. I’ll do this myself. Then send for a litter and some sort of tarp to cut the rain.’ In the same distilled tone of venom he added, ‘Dakar and I will serve as bearers.’

The prisoner flinched in agony as his leg was grasped and steadied and the knife touched against the crusted cord.

‘Easy,’ soothed the speaker in a murmured change of register. As the bonds fell away, the same fingers explored the swelling cuts and burns, gentle despite their marring tremor and the slowed reflex of deep chill. ‘We’ll have to ease him out before I can reach to free his wrists.’

Worked clear of his cranny with the aid of a fat man he recognized, the captive forced open the grazed, bloodied pulp that clogged his eyelids. The presence of the gem-dealing imposter last seen tied for questioning in the Duke of Alestron’s private study cleared his wits. At close quarters the identity of the other could be guessed.

Such sharp-angled features and green eyes must surely belong to the Master of Shadow, who had ruined his name in the duke’s guard and brought him to ignominy and exile.

‘You!’ he ground out, half-choked by bile and hatred. ‘You’re the dread sorcerer who enspelled my lord’s armoury the day it burned. I swore in cold blood to see you dead!’ He wrenched his strapped arms with such force that the stout, bearded henchman scrambled back in sceptical alarm.

‘You see who he is? You’re sure you want him freed?’ The Mad Prophet clasped his fat fists in trepidation. ‘He’s sure to fly at your throat.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn simply sat down. Already white, his face looked like paper soaked over bone from the impact of pity and shock. ‘I said I want his bonds struck. Have you eyes? Ath Creator, the man’s out of his mind with pain, and feverish to the point where a fair weather breeze could knock him down.’

‘At your service, with pleasure, your Grace, except for one thorny problem.’ Dakar’s round face furrowed in sly sarcasm as he accepted the knife to slice ropes. ‘When this brutish fellow gets up and cuts your heart out, I’ll be forced to explain. The Fellowship of Seven will hold me to blame when they hear how your line met its end.’

A small movement; the Master of Shadow turned his head.

Dakar sucked in a sharp breath. ‘You win, as always. Dharkaron show mercy, forget I ever spoke!’

Awash in dizziness and quick hatred, the captive gritted his teeth. Such reversal of fate lay beyond even dreams, that he might snatch back his chance to avenge his honour. He endured the frightful pain as his enemies raised his shoulder and turned him over. ‘I was never careless,’ he ground out in mulish acrimony. ‘Your black sorcery allowed you entrance to that keep. A vixen’s cunning got you out alive. Ath’s Avenger bear me witness, you shall get what you deserve.’

Behind and above him, Arithon s’Ffalenn regarded the older grid of scars that marked the captive’s naked back. ‘Your duke made you pay sorely for what was, at most, a lapse of attention. What brought you here? A need to strike back for injustice?’

Stubborn in pride, the exiled guardsman held silent, his cheek pressed to damp sand until his cuts stung. The grate of broken ribs stitched his side in red fire and spasmed his muscles at each breath. He squeezed his eyes closed, clinging to patience, but the close heat and the sweat that ran from him in his agony made him light-headed and sick. His senses upended into vertigo. Long before the ropes that tied his wrists were sawn through, his awareness had unreeled into dark.

He awakened raving, deep in the night. A vision tormented him, of clean sheets and the astringent scent of poultice herbs. He thrashed against the touch that restrained him and railed aloud at the woman’s voice that implored an unseen demon for assistance. Then he cursed as other hands reached down in diabolical force to restrain him.

‘Is there no end?’ someone cried in distress. ‘He’s started the bleeding again.’

Over his head loomed the face of the antagonist he had ached and endured horrors for the chance to kill. He shivered. His nerves an inferno of thwarted rage, he tried to strike out with his fist.

Bandages stopped him; then the sorcerer’s features, haggard with an incomprehensible pity.

‘Mountebank,’ gasped the guardsman, reduced to frustration and tears. His enemy’s dread shadows and his darkness were real enough. They spun him in their web once again and swallowed his struggles. Pinned helpless and moaning, he lost his thoughts into starless, lightless night.

Later he heard someone weeping his name. The harsh accents sounded like his own. Sunlight burned his eyes and branded hot bands at his naked wrists and ankles. He remembered the prison and the post. Again he tasted the fire of the whip, as Duke Bransian s’Brydion’s master-at-arms flayed open the skin of his back. ‘I’m no traitor, to beg like a dog to be forgiven,’ he said, and then retched, sickened by his weakness. ‘Why can’t you believe me? I opened no doors. I met no Master of Shadow!’

But the whip fell and fell. The accusatory voice of Dharkaron Avenger seemed to roll like thunder through his dreams. ‘If you suffered a flogging harsh enough to scar for failing to secure a locked passage, then what shall be your lot for setting fire to the ships of a sorcerer?’

The bed where he lay underwent a mad spin, like the turn of Daelion’s Wheel. The pain in his flesh swelled and drowned him. He heard water splash from a bowl and then music. Notes tapped and pried against his fevered senses like slivers flung off breaking crystal. Their sweetness conspired to weave a rolling pattern of freed beauty that scalded a breach through his hatred. Again he wept. The purity of song left him chilled like white rain, then threatened to break his laboured heart. He fell back, gasping against a soft pillow that swelled around his head until he died.

Or thought so, until he opened his eyes, limp and lucid, to a gloom gently lit by a candle. Rain chapped against the shutters of a cottage which smelled of oiled oak and dried lavender. He moved his head, aware by the softened prickle beneath his cheek that someone had washed and trimmed his hair. The strands were tarnished gold again, and shining on the linen, combed neat as in the days before his beggary.

‘He’s awakened,’ said a woman in a shy, cautious whisper.

Someone else in the shadows responded. ‘Leave us, Jinesse.’ Light steps creaked against the floorboards. A man’s outline swept across the candleflame, etched in brief light before he pulled up a wicker stool and sat down. ‘Your name is Tharrick?’

The guard captain condemned to an unkind exile opened bruised eyelids and discovered his enemy at his bedside.

He swallowed, whipped dry from the aftermath of fever and a pathetic, languid weakness that required all his will to turn his head. Echoes from delirium rang back out of memory to haunt him: What would be his lot for setting fire to the ships of a sorcerer?

Terrified by the kindness that had nursed his cruel injuries, he swept the stilled features of his benefactor with a scorching, searching gaze. ‘Why?’ he croaked at last.

Restored reason could no longer deny the compassion in the man, whose very hands had bandaged and poulticed, and whose masterful playing upon the lyranthe had spiralled tortured thoughts into sleep.

‘I came here to kill you,’ said Tharrick. ‘Why not make me suffer?’ He reddened at the memory of the curses he had uttered to speed this man’s spirit off to Sithaer.

Arithon stared down at his fingers, loosely cradled on his knees. His calm was all pretence. His masked spark of urgency lay so perfectly damped, his presence became a statement wound in patience. Whatever had unnerved him in the boiler shed, the emotion had washed clean and passed.

A faint frown tucked his upswept brows as the Master of Shadow weighed his answer. The lacings at his cuffs hung still as pen strokes, unmoved by the draught that teased the candleflame. ‘When a man has been handled like an animal, it should come as no surprise when, from mistreatment, he’s finally driven to desperation. What happened at Alestron was no fault of yours. The spell that brought the keep’s destruction was not mine, but your duke’s, that I was sent in by the Fellowship to help disarm. The plan went sadly wrong, for all of us. But I am not as Lord Bransian of Alestron, to hold you to blame out of temper.’

‘Temper! I wanted a sword in your heart!’ Tharrick gave a riled push at the blankets. Only sour luck had let him strike at a time when the victim he came to assassinate had been absent on business in the north.

‘Don’t.’ Arithon caught the guardsman’s shoulder, pressed him back. ‘Your broken rib could be jostled to nick a lung. The leg wound is serious. If you stir, you’ll restart the bleeding.’

‘I burned your brigantine!’ Tharrick gasped, anguished. ‘All your cut timber. Your ropewalk.’

Quiet on the stool, Arithon released his hold and looked at him. He said nothing. His face showed regret, but not anger.

Tharrick shut his eyes. His bruises throbbed. Under the ache of linen bindings, he felt as though his chest would tear and burst. Then remorse shredded even his last hold on pride. He wept, while the Master of Shadow stayed at his bedside and withheld comment like a brother.

‘Get well, with my blessing,’ said Arithon finally in that tone that could hurt for its sympathy. ‘Jinesse will give you shelter in her cottage while you heal. After that, by my word, you go free. Return to your loved ones and live out your days without fear. For if in truth I were the sorcerer you believed, your life in my hands would be sacrosanct.’

But Tharrick had no family, nor any place left to call home. His post in the duke’s guard had been his whole life until this man, who meant no malice, had ruined him. Desire for revenge had sustained him ever since. Denied that, he was an honourless exile, lost without purpose and cast adrift.

Duke and Prince

The hour after the brig Savrid dropped anchor behind the chain in Alestron’s inner harbour, Duke Bransian and two brothers s’Brydion prepared to fare out hunting. The formal messenger sent by Lysaer of Tysan to request an audience reached them in the stable yard, just then a commotion of running grooms and glossy horses plunging and snorting at their leads. Underfoot, through the puddles seized black in the frost, the stag hounds yapped and cavorted.

Even while coursing for pleasure on his lands, the duke preferred to wear mail. Planted spraddle-legged over an upset trestle that had spilled its overweighted load of horse trappings, Lord Bransian turned the snarled frown begun by his servant’s incompetence upon the harried royal dignitary. ‘The timing’s a cursed inconvenience!’ His shout boomed across the milling chaos in the bailey. ‘I shan’t hold a war council without the attendance of my family. That’s a problem, since Mearn hates to hunt.’

Lysaer’s greying seneschal clasped his cloak in his fists before a gust ripped it up around his throat. A slender, quiet man who disliked being dishevelled, he fought the odds to maintain diplomacy and dignity, and ignored the puppy which crouched to gnaw his ankle.

Lord Bransian overshadowed him, a tower of a man in cowl and surcoat, who fumed in impatience until his groom scuttled up in breathless deference to retrieve the scattered ducal horsecloths.

‘My lord, our news involves bloodshed,’ pressed the seneschal.

The huntsman by the kennels chose that moment to try his horn; Lysaer’s statesman pitched his plea above the bugle. ‘His Grace of Avenor bid me say that the Master of Shadow who laid waste to your armoury has burned the trade fleet in the harbour at Werpoint.’

Framed in steel links, the scowl on Bransian’s square features knitted to thunderous disgust. ‘Dharkaron’s avenging Spear and Chariot! His Grace petitioned us to withhold our assault against the meddling little criminal last summer. Just like kissing idiots, see what we get for our waiting! I suppose the royal army’s been landlocked?’

While the seneschal hunched like a turtle in his cloak and lace collars in mute affirmation of bad news, Bransian raised a mailed fist to flag down the pageboy who raced past with both arms looped in bridles. ‘Tell the master of horse to saddle Mearn’s gelding!’

The boy bobbed a bow, dragging reins. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘And kick my brother’s narrow arse out of bed!’ Bransian’s bellowed order sent a massive black stud in a clattering shy across the cobbles. Its bunched, dappled haunches set two carter’s lads to flight, while a lone, honking gander, escaped from its crate in the kitchen yard, flapped in distress through the fracas. ‘Say he’s to attend me, however late he’s stayed out to gamble, and bedamned to his disdain for blooding stags.’

The ducal displeasure fastened back on Avenor’s skinny seneschal. ‘Does your master ride a palfrey or a war-horse? Speak fair. Our destriers want for exercise, but I won’t spare your prince the rough side of my temper if his mount slips the bit and kicks a hound.’

Midday saw the four brothers s’Brydion reined up in the softened, grey slush on a hillside. They had taken no stag, but not for want of trying. Mud splashed and boisterous astride their foam flecked mounts, they groused in rough play, and derided Keldmar for his temerity. An exchange of dares had led him to jump over a wall in a shortcut through a crofter’s hog pen. The landing had mired his mount to his knees in a wallow overflowing with a shrieking sow and her farrow.

‘Ath, I’ll split,’ chuckled Parrien, his battle braid fallen undone and his hair whipped in crimped hanks across his shoulders. ‘That piglet that fell in your boot cuff -’

‘Shut up!’ Keldmar snapped, his eyes creased with malice. Reminder enough, the tassels on his horsecloths were crusted with dirt that reeked of faeces. ‘Your turn will come. Remember that stream with the sink pool, last season?’

Rain misted through the trees, nipping Bransian’s cheeks to clash pink against his beard, and chilling the thinner Mearn ghost white beneath the black velvet band of his cap. Still clad in the ribboned doublet he had chosen in expectation of a quiet morning minding the accounts, the youngest of the brothers tipped his head in cool courtesy toward the royal guest. The only one likely to commiserate with a foreigner dragged headlong through raw weather and winter fields, he apologized for the barren hunt.

‘We don’t use beaters. That’s a mayor’s habit, and shame on the man who kills a beast without due respect for its honour, its pride and wild strength.’ He combed nervous fingers through his mount’s burr-caught mane and flicked up one shoulder in a shrug. ‘I never liked coursing stag. Too much sweat and ploughing through briars. But the sorcerer you chase. He’s another matter. I should like to feed his heart to my falcon.’

Resplendent despite the soil on his blue-and-gold cloak, his hand in skilled quiet holding a mettlesome bay charger in check, Lysaer s’Ilessid at last gained the moment to address the subject which had brought him. ‘I’m here to join our efforts to that end.’

‘You mean you’re here to beg for ships,’ Parrien cut in, the humour erased from his face.

In the dark gash of the draw, cross-laced with winter trees, a hound bayed on a false scent. The huntsman shouted and winded his horn. Reduced to a toy figurine by the distance, he wheeled his horse and cantered, his pack fanned over the sere ground ahead like shadows streamered in a current.

Bransian grunted in disgust, backed his rawboned mount from the hillcrest, and reined around to rejoin his brothers. Faced to the wind, his beard whipped like a lion’s mane across his faded surcoat, he regarded the Prince of the West with eyes the gritted grey of filed iron. ‘This hunt’s a shambles. We may as well discuss the other.’ Never one to trouble over niceties, he plunged headlong to the point. ‘An entire fleet was scuttled. Excuses won’t restore your burned ships. I want to know if the loss was due to incompetence.’

Lysaer met the duke’s glare, his back straight, and his hands square and steady on his reins. ‘Let me tell you how a pirate who works sorcery and shadow goes about butchering the innocent.’

Keldmar snorted and scuffed a gob of dirt off the steel-studded knuckles of his gauntlet. ‘The trade fleet was anchored off Werpoint for the purpose of moving your war host. A fool might call that innocent. Your s’Ffalenn enemy’s proved he’s not stupid, that’s all.’

Parrien glared at the brother near enough in looks to be his birth twin. ‘You jabber like a woman at her laundry tub.’

Keldmar returned a smile rowed with teeth. ‘Say that again across my sword. Words are for ninnies. Let’s determine who’s a woman with bare steel.’

Duke Bransian shouldered his horse between the pair, effectively strangling their rivalry. To the prince interrupted by the family style of bickering, he said, ‘We have our ships snugged down and our mercenaries on leave for the season, as they should be. Winter’s no time to pursue war. Men sicken and die from disease. They desert from poor spirits. I hate this Master of Shadow full well and yet, on your counsel, we held our strike against him last summer. Now you’ve gone and made a bungle of things, bedamned if I’ll campaign in unfavourable weather to make amends for the lapse! Nor will I rise to arms in alliance for anything short of a cause to stir Dharkaron’s Chariot from Athlieria.’

‘We have that,’ Lysaer said, unsmiling. ‘Time’s gone against us since Werpoint. The Master of Shadow will pull out of Merior. He knows we’re aware of his intentions there. The best chance we have is to close on him now, before he dismantles his shipyard.’

Bransian regarded the blond prince before him, silent, unbending, and as powerful as the trained war-horse beneath him, who awaited his command in taut stillness.

Lysaer matched that dagger steel gaze. ‘You’re quick to ask of incompetence. Tell me straight, and mean what you say, that on the day your armoury went to ashes and smoke at the hand of Arithon s’Ffalenn, you never felt duped, or a fool.’

The duke’s grey destrier flung its head hard as the fist on its reins snapped the bit. State visitors who came to Alestron to importune on the heels of a grossly misspent favour were wont to cajole, or flatter, or bring some rich offering to ease relations. This unvarnished honesty was unprecedented, its impact as stunningly unpleasant as an unveiled insult or a threat. Mearn dragged a hissed breath between his teeth, while Parrien and Keldmar fixed the Prince of the West with expressions of matched admiration.

Straight against the icy, winter whine of the wind, Bransian flushed irate red. A hound in the distant stream bottom yipped. The huntsman’s whip cracked in swift reprimand. On the ridgetop, the more dangerous challenge brought stillness, until the duke’s war-horse sidled and slashed its thick tail in an ear-flattened response to its rider’s temper.

Then Bransian threw back his coiffed head and succumbed to a deep, belly laugh. ‘You have bollocks, prince. I’ll give you that. Yes. I felt like the world’s born fool. If you were incompetent at Werpoint, so was I that day our secret armoury was ruined. You’ve made your point. This Shadow Master’s far too wily to be permitted to live and run abroad. But if I’m going to muster Alestron’s troops to march against him, I’m not going to waste my hours of comfort. Our plans should be discussed underneath a dry roof, over wine and a table of hot food.’

Lane Imprints

In Whitehold, the Koriani Prime broods over two image spheres whose significance stymies all conjecture: in one, the flare of mighty wards conceals some momentous event in Althain Tower; the next shows the Master of Shadow on a windy beach, a knife at his wrist as he kneels to swear blood oath at the feet of a Fellowship Sorcerer; and resigned to frustration, the Prime Matriarch curses timing, that First Enchantress Lirenda’s trial to regain the order’s Great Waystone cannot take place any sooner than spring equinox …

In a windy pass in Vastmark, the discorporate Sorcerer Luhaine waylays a black-clad colleague in the company of a circling raven to relate ill news from Althain Tower: ‘The knowledge Kharadmon sought from the worlds beyond South Gate has eluded his grasp. The Mistwraith’s curse over the royal half-brothers cannot be tried at this time. Its latent evils are far worse than we feared, a danger too dire to provoke …’

Soon after Prince Lysaer and Duke Bransian shake hands to seal an armed alliance, and the mercenary camps at Alestron muster to cross Shand to stage an attack on Merior, the clansmen under Erlien, caithdein of the realm, engage his given order to strip every farmstead in the path of the army of horses and cattle, and to hamper their advance as they can …

II. SHIPS OF MERIOR