TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  An interval passed, filled by the distant whistle of a wyvern pair. Then the grandmother worked free of his grasp. She arranged her layered shawls to close out the prying wind, but did not speak.

  'Support me, or not,' Arithon finished before a censure that held him in contempt. 'I won't force you. If this warhost can be broken, the best I can hope is to win back a year's respite to seek the haven I'd hoped to find offshore.'

  He gave no false assurance, Dakar took sour note, that the conflict would end here in Vastmark.

  Eight weeks before summer solstice, Arithon consulted with Caolle to measure the state of their progress. Never empty-handed, the war captain hunched by an outdoor fire, burnishing rust from his byrnie. 'These are good people. They'll be ready to fight when you need them.'

  The veteran campaigner was wont to hoard dissatisfaction as a weapon to ambush complacence; too clever to be victimized, Arithon waited.

  'You'll need experienced men to bolster the ranks.' The mail chimed a querulous, jingled refrain as Caolle turned its bulk in broad hands. 'These troops are untried and wars are damned messy business. Shooting down wyverns is all well enough. Quite another matter when your target's a man who screams in bloody pain and pleads mercy.'

  'You want to bring in clansmen,' Arithon surmised, his reluctance like flint struck to steel.

  Caolle flicked out his polishing rag, methodical, then dipped up a clean dollop of river sand. 'Well, without them, I won't bet my second-best bootlace we can hold off the least of Skannt's headhunters. He's not Pesquil's equal for cunning, but the pair ran cheek by jowl for sheer, bone-headed persistence.'

  'I'll hire in mercenaries, first,' Arithon said.

  Caolle laughed. 'Erlien's clans will take issue with that, liege.'

  To which Arithon had no choice but bend to plain truth; the Vastmark territory was a principality under Shandian sovereignty. If the caithdein of the realm elected to nose into his affairs, no scion of Rathain could deny the High Earl his given right.

  Through the rasp of wet grit against worn links of metal, the familiar stillness stretched between Rathain's grizzled war captain and his liege lord, stiff with cutthroat pride and dissent. 'Caolle,' Arithon broke in at firm length, 'you'll send no appeal to Lord Erlien.'

  'Don't need to,' came the bitten retort. 'The caithdein's own scouts are scarcely blind. They've seen what I have. Lysaer's been recruiting in Shand. Headhunters' leagues from Forthmark and Ganish have added themselves to his ranks.'

  The quality to Arithon's silence changed character, a subtlety Caolle at long last had learned not to miss.

  'Liege,' he said in odd gentleness, 'this won't be the same sort of fight as Tal Quorin. This time, you're going to win.'

  'To what use?' Arithon burst out in bitterness, and stopped. Too much thought would engender despair. For no matter what happened at Vastmark, regardless whose men were left standing, unless he or Lysaer fell as a casualty, the Mistwraith's curse would remain.

  * * *

  The Master of Shadow departed for the low country the next morning, Dakar puffing at his heels like a fat brown badger, a wilful bent to his stride. Under sunlight that blinded, while the gliding dart of wyverns flickered dappled shade over the rock-snagged folds of the fells, the pair left behind the raw design to break a warhost.

  Ahead, in the roisterous care of a delegation of clan scouts, the fruits of the past year's livestock raids milled like a muddied river beneath the flanks of the crags. Driven in bunches from Orvandir and Alland, the four-legged booty reflected its forced trek across the steppe-lands of Shand. Angular hipbones and the sprung curves of ribs pressed through staring, bleached hides. Clouds of ochre dust churned up by sharp hooves silted unkempt coats in bleak monochrome.

  Sun-browned, clear-eyed, as seethingly disgruntled as their charges, the force of young scouts from Selkwood had spent their spring in thirsty watches, turning wild-eyed stampedes, and swearing fell oaths over foaling mares and balked cattle. They had survived the full gamut of scrapes and escapes from harem conscious bulls. Bound to their task by clan loyalty to a chieftain two hundred leagues distant, their continued adherence to the herder's role was fever pitched to last until that celebrated but unfamiliar stranger, the Prince of Rathain, should arrive to relieve them of duty.

  As well for Arithon s'Ffalenn that he made his rendezvous three days early. A cry from the mounted sentries posted at the rims of the valley drew the riders from the herds at a gallop. In a flurry of noise and commotion, they drew rein and ringed the arrivals. Dakar had the instinctive good sense to step clear as the young clansmen eyed the prince like quarry closed on by wolves.

  On foot, clad in a wide sash, knee breeches and a shepherd's shirt with tailored cuffs that Dalwyn had woven from wild flax, Arithon lent a disarming appearance of frailty. Beneath wind-flicked tangles of dark hair, his expression reflected the careless ennui of high breeding, the features, sharp-faceted marble. Disadvantaged by the glare, his gaze on the circle of herdsmen looked half-lidded and lazy.

  Wide-eyed, peeling, and rafflshly unshaven beside his immaculate detachment, the riders gave him their voracious study in return.

  'Daelion's Wheel,' swore one in soft reverence. Black-eyed and lounging, muscled as an alley cat, astride a hammer-headed dun, he gave a low whistle. 'I've a small brother could span that pretty wrist with naught but one finger and a thumb.'

  Alight with pure mischief, Arithon inclined his head. The glance he awarded rider and horse was brief to the point of insult. From his vantage on the sidelines, the Mad Prophet winced, his teeth set unpleasantly on edge.

  'Your brother's not present?' Arithon asked, his politeness dipped to acid clarity.

  The man who had challenged gave back a slow grin. 'He's not.'

  'Well then,' invited Arithon, 'since you're no small fellow, why not show me in his stead?' He extended his forearm.

  The clansman bent with a whoop of delight. Knuckles grey rimed with horse reached to snatch the limb in its immaculate, fitted ivory sleeve.

  The moment of contact dissolved in a blur of fast movement and a wrench. Square, dirty fingers convulsed upon air. While Arithon stepped clear with apologetic grace, his victim yelped in surprise and toppled headlong from his saddle.

  Arithon loosed his hold. The scout struck earth still extended, randy oaths bitten off to a grunt. There he coughed up dust and struggled to rise, until a kick buckled his arm at the elbow. Dropped prone in the dirt, this time he stayed down. The prince who had felled him set foot between his shoulder blades and vaulted into his vacated saddle.

  The sidling dun flung its nose once and settled to its new master. Then green eyes raked over the waiting ring of scouts in that scathing, distasteful directness which men learned fast not to question. 'I want the beef herds and the horses culled and sorted by sunset,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  His following strings of instructions reordered milling chaos to an oiled, brisk efficiency Dakar found detestably familiar. Companionable in sympathy, he crossed to the felled rider and helped him back to his feet.

  Hawking up grit between curses, the man blotted a scraped chin. 'Fiends plague!' He grimaced in wry admiration. 'How was I to know I was set to shake hands with a snake?' He worked his jaw, discovered his lip split, and spat out the metallic taste of blood. 'Dharkaron's pity on me if that one treasures his grudges.'

  'He doesn't,' Dakar volunteered.

  The clansman stared, pity in his dark eyes. 'The claim of hard experience? Poor man! What binds you to his service?'

  But the root of that question had grown tangled and deep beyond the pull of a sorcerer's geas. Caught without ready answer, Dakar retreated into silence.

  * * *

  By eventide, the horses grazed in three divisions, and the cattle in two, the herds held separate by hills and minded by those few unfortunates Arithon had caught slacking. The other clansmen gathered around Dakar's campfire, laughing, bone weary, and noisy with exuberant pride. They had all laboured like anim
als. The prince who had driven them sat in their midst, his elegant linen silted with dust and his voice burred hoarse from shouting. If he had broken their rebellion through merciless work, he had spared himself least of all.

  Exhausted as they were, the clansmen were reluctant to retire. They sat picking shreds of hare stew from their teeth, and swapped stories of four-legged mishaps. More than one jaundiced glance was rolled toward the cooking pot, filled now with a bubbling concoction of urine, bark, and dried berries. Squat as a hedgehog in his frayed layers of tunics, the Mad Prophet stirred the ill-smelling brew intended for use as a dye.

  'We'll need to mark the culls,' Arithon was saying. 'My archers need field rations to carry them through the winter, and your high earl's share of the spoils won't improve if the breeding stock's butchered for jerky.'

  Across the fire, someone called a derisive comment. A log fell. The coals fanned up flame in a flying leap of sparks that lit the s'Ffalenn profile bloody red.

  The sight caused Dakar to stiffen. A horrible prickle doused through his flesh, chased by a chill like needled ice. Stark sober, no kindly veil of alcohol to blur his awareness, he had no means at hand to evade the onset of his spurious talent for prescience.

  A shudder rolled through him. Before he could make outcry, the next wave bent him double in a gasping fit of racked air.

  The stick he used to stir up the dyepot toppled from his slack fingers. He felt his knees buckle. The vague impression grazed him, of someone's grasp on his forearm and a yank that spun him clear of the embers.

  Then his senses overturned into vision.

  He saw no fire, no clan scouts, no stewpot. His flesh stung and his ears roared. He beheld the sweep of a wintry hillside razed brown by bitter frost; and felled in dead bracken, that same royal profile, racked by the agony of a death wound. The place was Vastmark. The season wept a dismal cold rain on the scene, and the water splashed lichened ground, stained from the blood that welled between Arithon's fingers. Around his prostrate, shuddering form, a fast-fading tracery of phosphor.

  Dakar's captive senses strained after the phantom glimmer of what might have been a dissolving chain of spell seals.

  Then the place where Arithon lay dying folded and spun into itself. Darkness followed, ripped through by another strand of augury: he received a whirled glimpse of Morriel Prime, matriarch of the Koriani Order, hunched like a web-making spider above the amethyst gleam of the Great Waystone.

  Then fey sight burst asunder, torn into sparks and white-hot, glass-edged pain. Dakar returned to himself with a choked-off cry. He lay on his side, hammered helpless by cramps and a nausea that ripped him like tissue. Somebody's hands supported him; the same fine fingers that had worried at a bloodied arrow a scant second before in prophetic vision.

  'Ath forfend!' Dakar ground out. He coughed back bile and squeezed his eyes shut.

  'Steady,' Arithon said above him. Another touch smoothed back the ruck of hair sucked against his locked teeth by his gasping. 'Steady. You're back with us now.'

  Dakar mewled through another wave of sickness. Helpless as a baby, mauled by the aftermath of a talent he detested, he struggled for command of his dignity, and lost. 'Morriel Prime's no friend of yours,' he managed by way of crude warning, though in truth, the paired auguries might not be connected.

  A soft burst of laughter came back. 'Well, that's no surprise. Can you sit? I've brought herbs. A tisane might settle your stomach.'

  Undone by wretchedness, Dakar allowed himself to be shepherded back upright and propped with his shoulders against a rock. Someone's blanket flicked over his shivering limbs. Above him, limned in the fire's glow, he saw Arithon's face trained upon him in a sympathy that confounded all hatred.

  That sight made Dakar weep curses. Pity he had no use for; all his life, his wretched fits had felled him as they chose, ever to the ruin of his happiness. At seven years of age, when he had foretold the fever that would come to kill his mother, his family had rejected him from fear. Maturity had brought him no succour. He had no way to avert the vision's burning grip, but could only flee into dissolute habits that blunted the impact and the pain.

  At least while drunk to incapacity, he could escape the vice of moral dilemma that prescience ceded to his conscience.

  Dakar flinched again for the future that awaited on that lonely, Vastmark hillside, where fate would resolve into happenstance.

  Arithon dead, with no mind beyond his in all Athera to glean warning of the time and the place. The posited event framed a precedence. Somewhere, an enemy existed, who would spell-turn an arrow with the power to negate the longevity binding engendered by Davien's Five Centuries Fountain.

  The Mad Prophet clamped his arms to his chest to still the waves of his shuddering. Not even Althain's Warden would expect the threat unearthed in the surge of tonight's surprise augury. Through fear and discomfort, a wicked thought bloomed: Dakar could have smiled through his sickness. For once in his born life, his wretched gift of prophecy had lent him an advantage he could act on. The power he had longed for, the means to escape an unwanted service, had been dropped at his very feet.

  The life of the s'Ffalenn prince he was spell-charged to partner lay in his hands, to cast off or spare as he chose.

  At a stroke, Desh-thiere's curse could be sundered. Another royal friend could be redeemed, his spirit won back from the meddling inflicted in the course of the Mistwraith's confinement. The tragedy of that hour could be reversed, when the Fellowship had chosen Lysaer s'Ilessid for the sacrifice to buy the fell creatures' captivity.

  Across the fire, surrounded by the jostling clansmen won through quick wit and competence, Arithon rummaged through his satchel for the remedies suited to ease stomach cramps. Dakar watched through slitted eyes. One way or another, he would know Rathain's prince for what he was: compassionate bard, or the guileful master of subterfuge. Upon Dakar's sole judgment lay the power to forewarn, when winter sleeted rains on the sere hills of Vastmark and the Shadow Master faced his last reckoning.

  * * *

  Deep in the night, the Mad Prophet lay wakeful, wrung limp and ill from the aftermath of his seer's trance. Arithon had not slept, but sat wrapped in a blanket against the hazed coals in the firepit. At each turn of the breeze, the embers flared. Hot light fanned over his die-cut features, and the fine, musician's fingers laced, in repose at his knee. The green eyes were stilled in fathomless thought, until Dakar stirred and ventured the question he had never before dared to ask.

  'Why not take Khetienn and slip off to sea as you'd planned? Why this furore with ransoms and abductions? Why bother to close with this war host of Lysaer's at all?'

  Arithon turned his head. He regarded his impertinent inquisitor, tucked into muddled bedding like a caterpillar lapped in a leaf. Then he sighed. His knuckles tightened against themselves, no longer content or relaxed. 'Your question has no straight answer.' A plangency to his tone suggested underlying anguish, as if the point circled to haunt him. 'There's a warhost, I could say, descended upon Shand and determined to wreak havoc to undo me. They'll march for their prince. They'll plunder bread from the villages and tumble farm girls whether I'm present or no. Could I sail on the tide and abandon hapless people to suffer their supply, and finally, the bloody price of their frustration?'

  'So,' pressed Dakar, remorseless. 'You would lure those misguided thousands into Vastmark and ruin more lives for the cause of disbanding Lysaer's alliance?'

  'Shand's villagers never asked to take part in this feud.' Arithon moved, reached, hooked a moss-grained stick of brush, and broke it in sharp, short cracks between his fists. He pitched the bits in fierce bursts at the firepit, and flames leaped up, greedy, to consume them. 'If you're wanting to weigh how much Desh-thiere's curse affects my decisions, I admit, to my sorrow, I don't know. I had friends at Innish and in Merior. Each one came to suffer for my acquaintance. Wherever I go, pain and trouble will follow. I can wear out my conscience trying to sort what's best until I've lost the wil
l to keep living.'

  Dakar waited, unrelenting; and the anger he expected bloomed finally and spurred the s'Ffalenn prince to his feet. 'Why not keep things simple,' Arithon said in that cutting malice that could jab, and distance, and raise hackles. 'Let's say when Khetienn sails, I'd rather know for certain just what sort of weapon I'll be leaving unsheathed at my back!'

  The Mad Prophet closed his eyes, euphoric enough to feign sleep. After years of being bullied and made wretched through his shortfalls, he had gained his sweet opening for revenge. His enemy's planned future lay proscribed by fate. Whether the brigantine built at Merior ever crossed uncharted waters to buy a reprieve from Desh-thiere's curse, she would never depart now, except through Dakar's personal leave.

  * * *

  The next morning, the sheared edge to Arithon's temper rousted comatose scouts from their blankets. The task of marking out the herd's culls was framed as a contest, the winning team to gain the task of delivering the prime breeding stock to specified tribesmen in the Kelhorns.

  'The losers will stay on as herdsmen until a task force arrives to relieve them,' Arithon finished.

  Eager for rough action after uneventful weeks away from clan sweethearts and family, the scouts scrambled to catch and bridle their mounts. They called jibes and brandished sticks tipped in rags, and laced sticky jacks of dye to their saddle packs. Insults flew freely as they divided into teams, then swooped screaming through the morning to roust their unsuspecting hoofed charges.

  Amid bawling cattle and choking dust, and more than one adversary unhorsed out of spite, many an animal received more than its allotted blaze on the rump. Several riders returned splash marked. While the ecstatic victors were engrossed in collecting wagers, and the losers paid up, grumbling, Dakar and the Master of Shadow saddled themselves fresh mounts. They departed over the hills toward the coast with forty choice mares from Alland and one stallion hazed before them in a bunch.