TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  'That's not funny.' Dakar cast down bow and arrows in disgust and sucked in his paunch to give chase. If his descent was ungraceful, he was scarcely less fast. He dropped to the lower ledge in a shower of dragged gravel, yanked down the tunic left hiked up to his armpits, then spat out the inhaled ends of his beard to deliver a scathing retort.

  His words died unspoken. A shudder of horror swept through him as he saw: the shepherd with the knife proved no man at all, but a boy not a year more than twelve.

  The child stared at his rescuers in uncomprehending shock, eyes dark and round in a face of vivid angles, drained to wax pallor beneath its scuffed dirt. Straw tails of hair stuck in matted hanks to a bloodied shoulder. The stained, cloak-wrapped wrist used to fend off teeth and talons was rust with the same stiffened stains. His shirt was more red than saffron. The one bare foot visible beneath the ripped cuff of his trouser lay swollen beyond recognition.

  'Daelion forfend, you're a very lucky boy to be alive,' Dakar said. Overhead, the wyvern pack whistled and dived in balked circles, too wary to close now their prey was defended.

  While Dakar battled to contain squeamish nerves, Arithon bent, caught the child's knife wrist, and pried his sticky fingers off the grip. 'It's all right. Help has come. You aren't going to need that any more.'

  The boy broke with a shuddering whimper. Arithon bundled his head against his chest and cradled him tightly, then used his left hand to probe the hot, swollen flesh above the ankle. The child flung back against his hold as he touched. 'Easy. Easy. We'll have you up out of here in just a minute.' But the jagged grate of bone underneath his light fingers belied his banal reassurance.

  As if crazed by pain, the boy struggled desperately harder.

  'Jilieth,' he gasped, the first clear word he had spoken. 'Look to Jilie.' He fought an arm free to tug at something shielded in the crevice behind his back: a second, more heartrending bundle splashed in scarlet.

  'Merciful Ath!' Dakar dropped to his knees, his antipathy eclipsed. Closer inspection showed a face and a small hand inside the mass of shredded clothing. Behind the boy lay a second child, a girl no more than six.

  'Your sister?' asked Arithon.

  The boy gave a stricken nod.

  'All right then, be brave.' While the Shadow Master shifted the injured boy aside, Dakar squeezed past with tender care and lifted the younger girl's pitiful, torn body into the open. She stirred awake at his touch. The one eye she had left fixed, brown and beseeching, on his bearded, stranger's face. 'Papa. Where's my papa?'

  The Mad Prophet clenched his jaw in helpless grief. 'If I could command even half of what Asandir taught me, I could help.'

  'Never mind that.' Arithon loosed the boy with a murmur of encouragement, turned aside, and cupped the girl's tear-streaked face.

  'Papa,' she repeated as his shadow crossed over her.

  'Your father is with you, believe it,' he assured in the schooled, steady timbre earned in study for his masterbard's title.

  'Ghedair said he would come.' The girl gasped. Blood welled and trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her chest heaved against drowning congestion as she forced in another pained breath. 'It hurts. Tell my papa, it hurts.'

  Arithon soothed back crusted hair to bare the mauled ruin a wyvern had left when its front talons had raked and grasped her face. The rear claw had sunk through her shoulder and chest; deep gashes had torn when it flew. Ends of separated bone and ripped cartilage showed blue through the shreds of her blouse.

  'It wasn't Ghedair's fault,' the girl blurted. 'He was watching. But I ran off. Then wyverns came.'

  'Hush.' Arithon added a phrase in lilted Paravian, too low for Dakar to translate. But the powerful ring of compassion in his tone could have drawn out the frost from ice itself. 'I know that, Jilieth. Stop fretting.'

  In merciful relief, the child's one eye slid closed.

  'Your bard's gift let her sleep?' the Mad Prophet asked.

  Arithon soothed her cheek against Dakar's rough clad shoulder. 'That's the best I could do.' In the moment he glanced up, the deep empathy of his feelings stripped his face beyond hope of concealment. 'Keep her quiet if you can.'

  Stupid with shock, Dakar clung to the girlchild while the Shadow Master bent to tend the boy. The blood on the torn saffron jerkin proved more the dead wyvern's or his sister's than his own. The arm, bundled out of its swathe of shredded cloak, bore deep punctures and gashes swollen to angry red. The break above the ankle was clean beneath the swelling. Arithon patted the boy's crown, arose, and in a fit of balked grace, kicked the rank, knife-hacked corpse of the other fallen wyvern over the edge of the outcrop. The implication was enough to stop thought, that somewhere lay another slain mate.

  The resourceful boy owned courage enough to shame a full-grown man.

  While the rest of the drake pack, in a squalling, stabbing squabble, glided down the gorge to scavenge the remains of their dead, Arithon disrupted Dakar's appalled stupor in brisk and fluent Paravian. 'We'll have to splint the leg first. Arrow shafts should do for the purpose. I'll tie them with my cuff lacings. The girl, we'll have to bind up as we may. I hate the delay, yet we've got no choice. They'll have to be moved. The herbs in my satchel and some of the roots can be pounded up to make poultices. But I can't brew the remedies without water and sheltered ground to make a fire.'

  'There ought to be springs at the base of the cliffs,' Dakar said.

  'Then we'll find a path down.' A leap and an athletic slither saw Arithon up to the ridgetop. He returned with his quiver and spare shirt. Before need that disallowed the indulgence of his hatreds, Dakar lent his hands to the grim work of splinting and binding.

  The boy gave one full-throated, agonized cry as his shinbone was pulled into line and set straight. Arithon spoke to him, soothingly gentle, a constant barrage of reassurance. Whether his voice spun fine magic, or cruel pain claimed its due, when the ankle and knee were strapped immobile, the child lay quiet, unconscious.

  'Pity them both,' Dakar whispered as he ripped linen to strap Jilieth's gaping lacerations. 'She must be half-empty of blood.' He need not belabour his certainty that the wounds beneath his hands were surely mortal. The grief in the Shadow Master's expression matched him in stricken understanding.

  'There's hope. We might save her,' Arithon insisted as he tucked the shepherd boy into the folds of his cloak.

  Dakar pushed back upright and trailed through the climb up the cliff path, the girl cradled limp in his arms. 'Are you mad? Five bones in her rib cage are separated from the cartilage, and one lung is filled up with blood!'

  'I know.' Arithon draped the boy over his shoulders, clasped the small, unmarked wrist and one ankle, then set his weight to scale the last rise of rock. 'Just keep her alive until we find a spring. If she's still breathing then, try and find the forbearance to trust me.'

  Dakar clamped his teeth. The Prince of Rathain had never asked his help; never before now bent his stiff royal pride to admit that other company was better than a burden to be managed in blistering tolerance. If Asandir's geas hounded Dakar to sheer misery, for Arithon, the bonding was a nuisance.

  Tempted into a sympathy that felt like self-betrayal, Dakar ground out the first rude word to cross his mind. Then, stubborn in prosaic disbelief, he passed the doomed girl into Arithon's waiting grip and dragged his plump carcass back up the rim wall to the slope.

  * * *

  Two hours later, on a sandy bank beside a rock pool, Arithon prepared a heated poultice to treat the punctures and slashes on Ghedair's mauled forearm. His concentration seemed unaffected by the oppressive gloom of the site. Damp and streamered in green shags of moss, the gorge reared up sheer on two sides, the sky a hemmed ribbon between. Light seeped through the clouds, dim as the gleam off a miser's silver, while the breeze fluted mournfully through the defiles. Far off, the braided whistles of a wyvem pair screeled in bone-chilling dissonance.

  Tired of feeling useless, set on edge by the spring's erratic plink of seeped dropl
ets, Dakar gave rein to spite and prodded Arithon to elaborate on his earlier, misguided cause for hope.

  'Jilieth's already failing.' The clogged drag of her chest seemed to worsen with each tortured breath that she drew. To distance the unaccustomed sting of pity, the Mad Prophet lashed out. 'You kndw full well there's nothing left to do but keep her warm and sheltered until she dies.'

  Her face by then had been cleansed and swathed in the torn strips from Arithon's spare shirt. Outside the bandaging, the lashes of her undamaged eye remained, fanned like cut ends of silk against a cheek so colourless the freckles shone dull grey. To look at her at all, to see her child's hands so far removed from life they never twitched, was to suffer a sorrow past endurance.

  Small comfort could be gained, watching Arithon's fine fingers wind and tuck smooth the ends of the dressing over the boy's poultice. That task completed, he settled Ghedair back in his cloak and plied him with herb possets until he slept.

  Dakar could no longer hold out. The child in his arms gasped on the edge of suffocation; she was going to pass the Wheel within the hour. Her plight most ruthlessly tore away pride until no grudge was enough to maintain his sceptical rancour.

  To Arithon, he ground out, 'If you think we can save her, say how.'

  'Easily spoken, in theory. Not so simply carried out.' A wind-tousled figure stripped down to hose and shirtsleeves, Arithon rinsed his hands. Water spattered off his reddened fingertips, shattered the pool into ring ripples that burst his reflection into a maze of jagged lines.

  Dakar found himself pinned by a measuring stare that assessed him wholly without judgment.

  'You've had longevity training,' Arithon said at blunt length. 'I've got a masterbard's ear for true sound. If you build the spell seals to initiate healing, I can link them through music to the signature vibration that defines Jilieth's life Name.'

  If not for the hurt creature that burdened his arms, Dakar would have shot to his feet. 'Dharkaron's fell Chariot and Spear! You have no idea what you're asking.'

  'You're most wrong.' Arithon looked away. 'I've a fair enough indication.' In unadorned phrasing, he described the time he had joined talents with the enchantress Elaira to reconstruct the mangled arm of a fisher lad. The result of that experience, coupled with the mage's schooling he had received from his grandfather, lent him full awareness of the implications. The aftermath had hurled his heart beyond peace; the woman had been driven to leave Merior.

  Dakar shrank from revulsion that pealed like an ache through his bones. 'I might know your whole mindl' The unspoken corollary freighted his tension, that the shared course of such bindings could expose every facet of Arithon's warped character to the intermeshed weave of the link. No secret would stand between them; no subterfuge. If Dakar once lost his grip, he would find his awareness submersed in the quagmire of the other man's criminal nature, to the everlasting upset of his conscience.

  'I don't want to be privy to your unsavoury intentions,' the Mad Prophet declaimed, afraid for what he might suffer.

  The concept was abhorrent. His enemy's deadly aberrance; all the doomed, fell bindings of Desh-thiere's geas could backlash and imprint his private memory. Though he would not share Arithon's subjugation to the curse, the Master of Shadow asked him to risk first-hand knowledge of the hates that drove the war against Lysaer, the same amoral passions which had brought the bloody slaughter of eight thousand lives on the banks of the River Tal Quorin, then the burning of the trade fleet at Minderl Bay.

  Those horrific burdens were none of his making, to assume for the sake of a child.

  Rathain's prince at least had the decency not to stare while the Mad Prophet pondered the unkindly reach of later consequence. The faltering life held sheltered in his arms became tormented testimony to the list of his personal shortfalls. Dakar stood as a man on the edge of an abyss. One word in consent, one misstep in weakness, and his self-awareness might become forever skewed.

  Worse, success could not be guaranteed. He could agree, and shoulder his whimpering fear, and still fail. The girl was far gone already. She could end a cold corpse beneath a shepherd's stone cairn, surrounded by her circle of weeping kinsfolk.

  Dakar closed his eyes against a thorny barrage of selfish thought. He could equally well master the sacrifice and see Jilieth walk whole in the sunlight.

  At his back, in drawn quiet marked off by the splash of the rock spring, Arithon awaited his decision. The understanding implicit in his stillness itself became a goad, until Dakar burst out in acrimony, 'There's no risk to you! All I have on my conscience is debauchery and vice. Every decadent trait you despise. You fear no remorse. Your self-restraint should scarcely be shaken.'

  Arithon's reply was all steel. 'I stake a certain independence of mind. Nor am I Sethvir, to pick out every nuance of future impact.'

  The child in Dakar's care shuddered through another racked breath; a wider patch of scarlet flowered through the layers of her bandaging. The spellbinder set his teeth and glared at rain-chiselled stone, that would endure through long ages, indifferent to the trials of mortal suffering. He measured himself in unprecedented cold logic, and understood, should he shy from the choice, the courage of a boy and a little girl's brown eye, beseeching, were going to haunt him forever. He bitterly dreaded to face their contempt in the dregs of every beer keg, to the ruin of his irresponsible pleasures.

  There remained only malice toward the man who laid that irreversible crossroads before him. 'Damn you,' Dakar answered to Arithon s'Ffalenn in a tone very like the one Tharrick had used before swearing his oath in Jinesse's cottage. 'I cannot refuse, as you're fully aware. Ath's pity on us both when we come to regret this hour afterward.'

  'There's always the chance that we won't,' Arithon said; but his pained snap of sarcasm showed his dearth of faith.

  The fact such doubt was justified hurled Dakar over the edge. His consent was flung down like a duellist's challenge, as much to spite the scorn of an antagonist as to save a failing child from certain death.

  'Make me the butt of your hatred all you like,' Arithon baited in maddening, nerveless composure. He fetched his lyranthe and in fierce, hard jerks began to unlace its fleece wrappings. 'But unless you wish to tempt disaster, let your feud with me bide until later.'

  Dakar chose not to acknowledge the insult. Longevity alignment was no novice's lesson; five centuries of study made him far from incompetent. Any spellbinder apprenticed to Asandir would be well trained to put by his surface passions for the clear self-control demanded for acts of grand conjury. The practice had never been an exercise the Mad Prophet welcomed; the deep, still quiet required for fine spellcraft often fired his spurious fits of prophecy. If the Fellowship Sorcerers had insisted the gift could be tamed to control, the gut-tearing sickness that followed each episode had been Dakar's trial to bear. He preferred to escape in debauchery.

  The fact hurt now with surprising venom, that he yet lacked the knowledge to initiate Jilieth's healing. Arithon might be damaged beyond conscious access to his talents; still, he owned the intuitive experience to explain how the trial should be approached. Dakar flicked up gravel in irritation. He had no option except to follow the plan, though trust gouged like sand against his grain. He had no wish to assume the reasoned risks of a man whose penchant for devious artifice held no limit.

  Through the sweet, plucked run of his tuning notes, Arithon said, 'Merciful maker, Dakar. If we're going to be foolish and corrupt ourselves, let's not waste time browbeating the issue. Lay the child across your lap. Get comfortable. You may not be moving before nightfall.' The splashed descent of an arpeggio cut through his measured instructions. 'The theory should not be unduly complex. I can use music to build a bridge-link to Jilieth, then turn the discipline I learned at Rauven to open myself as a conduit. If you can conjoin into sympathy and thread your power through me, I can transmute the seals into sound and heighten their pull on the girl.'

  As Dakar settled in capitulation, the Shadow Master cautione
d him further. 'I can build upon your foundation. But I will be blind to the spell construct as it forms. You must be my eyes as well as the source of raw energy. I can only weave sound on what I hear and sense through my empathic gift as a bard. The result will be measured and limited by the depths to which you can release yourself into sympathy.'

  Dakar chewed his beard in unalloyed apprehension as notes sprang and sparked like sprays of dropped crystal through the mournful moan of the wind. The browned tufts of sedges on the stream banks flattened and hissed and shivered. From the musician bent cross-legged with his instrument there came no hint of recrimination for the need to bare himself to an enemy.

  Dakar swallowed back awe, unable to match such resignation. 'Why ever should you do this? You know how I hate you. Anything I capture in the backlash from your mind will later be turned hard against you.'

  Arithon glanced up, his eyes deep and terrible with distance. 'You don't gloat for justice? I thought for certain you'd say I've a reckoning due for the young ones who died by Tal Quorin.'

  Since no more vicious a subject existed to rip back in rejoinder, Dakar was caught short. Before he was ready, the last remaining bass string was fussed and brought to true pitch. Arithon feathered through an acid progression of major chords, then launched into dancing, sprightly melody.

  For the tragedy of the setting, such vengeful, clean joy sounded blasphemous. Dakar felt his gorge rise.

  Then the music's fierce honesty slapped him speechless.

  For what Arithon described in the stunning command of his art was the signature pattern of a whole and healthy little girl. His melody captured Jilieth in her fabric of fresh innocence, extracted from one minute's fleeting, splintered view through the window of her sole remaining eye.

  The bard's perception was an untamed awareness, unrestrained as the lofty flight of falcons; it did not judge, but accepted. It made no demand, but set free.

  Dakar felt the small, contorted body in his grasp settle and ease across his knees. A tiny, stray smile bowed up the corners of colourless lips. Even through the fogs of unconsciousness, Jilieth met the song that was her living self and responded to the promise that lilted in light harmonics through each measure. In tripping runs, in fiery-sweet tangles of ascending and descending arpeggios, even Dakar could sense a glimpse of the woman she might become in the unfolded promise of later life.