Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  Tense, drawn by cold and exhaustion, the villagers tested buckles and harness straps, checked shackles and linchpins and chains. Some of them prayed, others cursed, and a few stayed grimly silent. At length the workers were joined by the men Korendir had excused from watch. The confusion redoubled until the newcomers had been assigned jobs, and all the while the rain beat down, blinding men's eyes and numbing their fingers until even the simplest task required curses to complete.

  A horse shied, and one of the chains fouled under the roots of a stump. Men struggled and swore and split the skin of their knuckles to work the wedged links free.

  "Where in hell is Emmon when his damned brute thews are needed?" someone carped.

  The work team answered in grunts, too involved to concern themselves with the man, mad as he was, and unpredictable. The root splintered and gave. Chain slithered free, and bodies overbalanced into mud to a chorus of blasphemies. By the time the company sorted itself out, two score teams of horses stood quietly in line, heads down, tails flattened against the driving damp. Nothing remained to do but send a quartet of men to retrieve the supplies from the cavern, and recall Korendir from fire guard.

  The men appointed this detail started for the caves with a fat child's pony and lightweight cart to load the gear.

  The chief councilman arrived. His cloak of dripping burgundy wool exactly matched his nose, which also dripped, and for that he carried a lace handkerchief in sore need of wringing out. "Where's Emmon?" he asked.

  "Where is he ever, but in the Master of Whitestorm's shadow?" the smith called sourly. "The others will have to bring him down. Neth curse this weather, did you think to bring up a wineskin?"

  The council chief sneezed, shook his head, and paused with his hanky half raised to his face. Something in the quality of his stillness caused the men clustered nearest to look up.

  In the gloom between two outer kingposts stood Emmon Hillgate's son, his hair plastered to his skull with rain, and a loaded crossbow in his hands.

  "What in the Eleven Kingdoms is that madman doing up there?" the leader by the ponycart snapped.

  "Go and find out," the chief councilman commanded through his handkercheif. "If Emmon makes trouble, ask the Lord of Whitestorm to handle him."

  "Right." The man clucked to the pony and tugged irritably on the reins. Wheels turned with a rattle of shale, and the party round the cart started in a knot up the slope.

  "Stop there!" shouted Emmon; his ragged pitch of hysteria could be heard even over the creak of the cart and the ceaseless batter of rain.

  The chief councilman hesitated. The man at the pony's head glanced back in uncertainty. When he received no further orders, he kept going.

  "No!" Emmon shouted. Carralin would have recognized his mood; there were times her brother would brook no reason from any man. Yet her poor departed spirit could not warn the living. Emmon flung back his head, dark hair flying in the wind. "Fools and sons of fools! My sister died on a wereleopard's fangs, and I say her killer will meet the same end."

  He raised the crossbow to his shoulder.

  The chief councilman shouted for the villagers to cease their advance. But the wind plucked his call away.

  Emmon pulled the trigger.

  The bolt struck flesh with a sickening, flat whap, and the pony jerked up its head and screamed. Scarlet bloomed at the juncture of its throat and chest. Crazed with agony, it reared. The reins tore the hands of its driver. Up the animal went, until it overbalanced and fell kicking amid a splinter of traces and a grate of steel-rimmed wheels.

  Blood smell saturated the air; every horse in the column tossed and shied in their traces. Drivers shouted, white-faced. Too late they reached for whip and rein; the teams surged away in blind panic, and the chains to the kingposts clamored taut.

  There followed a tortured creak of wood, then a run of maniacal laughter from Hillgate's son. Hooves skated and clattered on shale, and the blocks disgorged chain with a rattle like multiple ratchets.

  Emmon flung his hands up, as if exhorting Neth. Then the beams over his head shifted as the nearer of the central kingposts twisted from its setting and toppled.

  Cracks widened above the outcrop. The first boulders trembled and rolled and fell in what seemed like slow motion. Then more posts canted and the mountain itself gave way. Crushing tons of shale let go with a grinding, earth-shaking terror of sound and vibration.

  Emmon was lost under a booming rush of debris. The ground shook. Downslope, the figures of horses and men fled in panic for their lives.

  A rolling wave of shattered stone engorged the land, the river, the rows of five-foot palings topped with wereleopard skulls. The first ranks of trees became engulfed, chewed up like so many matchsticks. Several of the horse teams became snagged by their chains. Two men paused and tried to slash traces to free the animals. The slide caught them all without mercy, pulped their flesh and slivered their bones. The Ellgol moiled and ran dirty. To the men who survived to reach safety, the rending, shattering roar of moving earth seemed to last interminably before subsiding.

  Yet silence returned at last. The air held a drifting curtain of fine dust, rapidly cleansed by rain. Drenched, miserable, heartsick with awe, the men of Mel's Bye emerged from cover and gazed upon the changed face of nature.

  A great scar marked the place where the cliff face had fallen away. Where the honeycomb mouths of the caves had been, a jagged field of boulders lay heaped at the foot of the outcrop. The head of the gorge was choked off, and ribbons of water sluiced through a sieve of invisible gaps. Bark-stripped trees poked out of the devastation, and the shattered curve of a wheel rim; but nothing more. The passages that had let in the wereleopards had been milled under, utterly, by unshiftable tons of stone.

  That the man who had engineered this feat should be left, trapped inside in the darkness for death by mauling or starvation, was a tragedy no man cared to contemplate.

  "Go home," said the chief councilman, sodden and small before that vista of ravaged landscape. "He cannot be helped."

  Slowly, reluctantly, wearily, the folk of Mel's Bye turned their backs against the rain. No one suggested a monument. Emmon's act was compounded of insane grief and justice; not one farmer who made his way home in the rain gainsaid a man's right to exact vengeance for his sister.

  Only the issue of the gold remained; and where matters of finance prevailed, the townsfolk prided themselves on a tradition of scrupulous fairness.

  * * *

  Sleet rattled over the unfinished battlements at Whitestorm. Iced-over puddles gleamed like hammered metal in the compound that Korendir had dreamed would become his castle's inner bailey. Construction had ceased for the winter; in the absence of any craftsmen the site lay desolate, whipped by sea winds, and loud with the crash of the breakers that storms hurled endlessly against the cliffs. Though inhospitable, Whitestorm keep was not untenanted. A crook in the half-finished stonework stood roofed over with sod and enclosed by mud-chinked walls. There, his feet on a hot brick and his shoulders cloaked in blankets, Haldeth huddled before a blaze of thorn logs. Laziness, as always, got the better of him. He could see from where he sat that his fuel supply would not last until morning. Hating the cold and the long, lonely nights, he grumbled, shed his mantle of quilts, and arose.

  He unlaced a doorflap of oiled leather and stepped out into the dusk. A rutted footpath led from there to the smithy with its open-air forge and tool shed. A clutter of scrap iron lay piled untidily about the yard; in the gloom of another shelter rested the results of Haldeth's labors, a seemingly random assortment of tether-rings, hinges, latches, fastenings, gate-bars, winch pulleys, and other sundry hardware necessary to the raising of a fortress. Later, he would temper steel and hire in a master weaponsmith to begin on the armory; but at present his thoughts ranged no further than the tarp which protected the woodpile, which lay inconveniently flat.

  Haldeth cursed. Yesterday's indulgence had caught up with him; he should have fixed the axe haft and
gone foraging for brush while the weather was mild and sunny. That he must remedy his lapse in darkness and driving wind now could not be helped; he had only himself to blame. Vexed that Korendir's commission in Northengard should keep him from Whitestorm so long, Haldeth stumped out through the gap that would someday become the main gate.

  Freezing wind slapped his face the instant he cleared the walls. His eyes burned with cold and he blinked, at first too preoccupied to complete his habitual search of the sea. When the gusts subsided and his vision cleared to allow a squint beyond the cliffs, he stopped in his tracks and forgot everything to do with the insatiable requirements of woodfires. Against the indigo line of the horizon lay a glimmer of light.

  A ship rode the waves toward Whitestorm.

  At this season, with the spice fleets battened snugly in harbors and next year's wool trade mantling the backs of the grazing flocks, a vessel in these waters could mean but one thing. Korendir of Whitestorm had returned.

  X. Wizard's Tower

  The ship's lights steadily drew nearer, yellow against the sea by the time Haldeth replenished the wood stores. At dawn, the vessel backed sail and dropped anchor in the harbor beneath White Rock Head. The smith busied himself setting out kettles and stew, then washed his chipped mugs and fussed over his dwindled hoard of tea. Come the ebb tide at mid-morning, he descended to the beach to greet his returning companion.

  The bark at anchorage was a merchanter, squat and low waisted to ease the loading of goods. Her canvas was furled neatly, and her paintwork recent if scuffed from careless dockage. Haldeth waited, shifting from foot to foot while crewmen swayed out a longboat. He cursed himself for omission; a ship's glass would have served him well, for the tender did not immediately depart, but dallied to on load some chests that were heavy enough to commandeer several halyards and a commotion of shouted orders. The gold, of course; Korendir's fee. Haldeth swore again, for forgetting. Eyes narrowed against the flash of sunlight off the waves, he waited. Yet no dark-cloaked figure descended the battens to claim the stern seat in the longboat; instead several farmers in dusky cloth jackets completed the party bound for shore.

  Korendir, Master of Whitestorm, was not among them.

  Touched by foreboding, Haldeth saw the craft draw away from the merchanter's lee. Oar shafts rose and fell through a fine-blown scatter of spray, driving under the shadow of the cliffs until the boat put aground in the shallows.

  Looms flashed upright and were hauled inboard by the oarsmen, while the sailors nearest the bow leaped the thwarts. Haldeth stepped into the icy surf to help steady the craft. As the following comber raised the stern, he hauled with a vengeance for the beach.

  The chests made the craft keel-deep and awkward. More oarsmen had to wet their feet and heave before the longboat became manageable. In thick silence, Haldeth watched two farmers disembark; the third had a familiar face, behind an eyepatch and a green mottling of seasickness.

  "Yegods, lookit 'im, 'e's mebbe going ta puke," laughed a sailor.

  Certainly ill, but clinging to dignity as chief delegate from Mel's Bye, Lain rolled his eye to the cliff face, with its ragged crown of foundations pricking the sky overhead. The sailors lifted him ashore, where he sat as if felled on dry sand and muttered about an absence of roads for a wagon.

  From this Haldeth miraculously divined a meaning. He waved back the sailors who strained to raise the first chest from the longboat. "There's a loading winch up top, built for lifting granite. If you wait while I thread on some cable, no one will need to bust a gut."

  The farmers on their feet conferred, and agreed to oversee the loading at the beach head. Lain tottered upright and followed Haldeth toward a barnacle-crusted portal in the rocks. The opening was black as a pit and reeking of tidewrack. The departure of Whitestorm's elemental had dropped the sea to its former level; what had been the lower entry to Sharkash's caverns opened out on the narrow strand where the smith escorted the jelly-legged envoy from Mel's Bye.

  Much else had changed, since summer. Past the first crook in the walls, Haldeth retrieved the burned down stub of a torch. Flame from draft-fanned embers revealed a puddled, sandy floor, then stairs cut into rock all but buried under drifts of seaweed.

  Miserable with nausea, Lain began the ascent at Haldeth's heels. Early on they passed through a heavy steel trap that opened by winch from above. Although the sea had been at work on both, the chain was new, and the bolts yet bore marks from the forge. Haldeth did not close this defensework, to Lain's overpowering relief. He imagined besiegers pinned against such a gate by the rising well of the tide, and the sickness that still lingered from his voyage redoubled and left him gasping.

  Too preoccupied to notice much beyond his own distress, Haldeth led through two more grilles and passed the level of the high water mark. The upper access to Sharkash's lair had been fortified into an abutment, pierced with cruciform apertures for crossbowmen. Sea wind sang through those slits, and others cut through the walls where the stair continued the ascent. Lain shivered, not only from chill. He placed one foot mechanically after another, and wondered whether Faen Hallir's royal archers were numerous enough to man the defenses built into White Rock Head.

  The stair ended in an unfinished outer bailey. Haldeth paused to secure the final door, a steel plate that rolled on a track by means of a windlass and counterweight. Sweating in unexpected sunlight, Lain regarded the massive bulwarks, at present just eight feet high, but built of blue granite to uncompromising specifications. Everything about the incomplete keep bespoke the man left trapped in Northengard, behind tons of fallen shale; the wereleopards infesting the passages would not have shown him mercy. Unnerved afresh by the tidings he bore, Lain faltered in his tracks.

  Haldeth quenched his torch in a puddle, and noticed the farmer's white face. "You're ill," he said contritely. "Why not sit in the sun while I attend the winches? There are corners sheltered from the wind, and I'll heat water for tea."

  Still speechless, Lain shook his head. With forced determination he braved the cold on the heights, and lent his weight to the ropes while the chests shipped from Northengard were hauled from the beach to the summit.

  Exertion restored his equilibrium. Drained and tired, Lain accepted tea from Haldeth and sat down on the nearer of the iron-bound chests. The smith took a seat on the other. His tumbled hair needed a trim, and clothing much mended from briar snags smelled pungently of woodsmoke and forge coals. He gripped his mug with anxious hands and pointedly avoided questions.

  Lain had exhausted his reasons for withholding bad news any longer. "Mel's Bye sends the fee for Korendir of Whitestorm, who successfully completed his contract."

  Solemnly, the farmer drew a chain over his head; the iron keys at the end chimed sourly as he relinquished them to the smith.

  "He died, then," Haldeth stated flatly. He shivered at the touch of the metal against his palm.

  Lain nodded, and thereby crushed the final, outside hope, that the bronze-headed fool might have gone straight on from Northengard to fill another commission.

  The smith snatched a breath to steady himself. "Tell me how."

  Lain stared with his single eye into the dregs of his tea. Haltingly he began to speak.

  By the time he recounted the rock slide he was shaking. He perched rigidly on the bullion chest, his knuckles laced together, while his memory echoed yet with the grinding, thunderous crash of falling shale.

  Haldeth said something sharply. Lain took a moment to focus, then muster his thoughts and find answer. "Aye, there were supplies in the cave. Wood, canvas, a stockpile of food for the sentries."

  An interval passed, filled by the shrill calls of gulls.

  Then the smith hammered a fist against his palm in outraged disbelief. "Korendir certainly survived!" As if he addressed a lackwit, he qualified. "There must be other access to those caverns, higher in the mountains, where altitude would deter wereleopards. Why come here with this gold? Instead your people should have hired search parties
to scour the Doriads for caves. Neth's mercy, man, the Master of Whitestorm saved your town! Could you not at least endeavor a gesture in his behalf?"

  Lain shifted sadly, head down; his collar laces tapped in the breeze. "Because of Carralin, the council was opposed."

  Haldeth drew breath but found no inclination to curse. He arose instead and savagely kicked at a coin chest. Oaken boards bound with hobnails and iron absorbed the blow without budging; for his fury the smith gained only a sullen clink of gold and several painful stubbed toes. Limping, a frown on his face, he strode to the half-completed battlements and stared unseeing at ocean.

  He could not bear to look behind him, at the partially finished main hall. Here lay the foundations of a magnificent fortress; once the dream of a man obsessed by his need for security. The hope of a haven behind which to appreciate living, Haldeth profoundly understood. Mhurgai cruelties had driven many a man to madness; Korendir's had just been more logical than most. Haldeth tried embracing the scope of the memories left behind, and the home he inherited by default; lastly, achingly, he considered the circumstances which had brought this tragedy to pass.

  Something inside him rebelled. He exhorted Lain for details. "Did you keep records? Exactly how much wood and food did Korendir have at his disposal?"

  Lain stared open-mouthed, while Haldeth rounded from the wall in a fury. "Answer me, man, how long could he stay alive on those stores?"

  "But the wereleopards!" Lain shoved halfway to his feet, incredulous.

  Haldeth allowed the farmer no quarter, but towered over him and flexed his blacksmith's shoulders. "But the Lord of Whitestorm proved himself a match for shape-changers, yes? You sit on the gold that proves it."

  Lain sank miserably back. He fingered his tight-buttoned cuffs and would not look at Haldeth. "At the outside, the food left behind might sustain one man for two months. The firewood should have gone much sooner. Without light, the wereleopards would be free to slaughter. By this time, only an idiot could believe that Korendir of Whitestorm remains alive."