TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  In need of a moment to resettle his nerves, the Mad Prophet measured his options.

  The imbalance required to tip the obstruction and cause it to skid out of place was infinitesimal. A busy sea surrounded him with inanimate energy his powers could tap without the encumbrance of permissions. Dakar reached out, borrowed force from the brigantine's laggard roll, then deflected a random twist of motion. The bracing map case clattered clear, which left the lock, a grim, black lump of opaque vibration stamped in the acid tang of wrought steel.

  Dakar cradled his head before a sharp flash of pain behind his temples. He had no skill with cold iron. The secret of its mystery always twisted through his grasp; chased reason into knots that left him gasping. Battered to a mood of monumental ill temper, he tried the unbinding anyhow. The guttural command to raise the signature of steel passed his lips. Then he asked the permission, and stunned himself witless when the lock sang back in vibration and answered.

  The mechanism turned; the bar slipped aside, and the door gave, creaking, and swung open.

  The lamp on the table within had burned down to a sickly red glow. Its faltering flame winnowed as the brigantine tossed her course through the swell, silting the blue gloom of smoke which overhung its glass cover. The pungency of narcotic spice stung Dakar's nostrils.

  Even spent to dilution, his first coughing breath spun a flick of raw fire through his nerves. The aches in his body incinerated with a scintillant flash of heat. His senses whirled, teased to a half-glimpse behind the veil of wider consciousness, not unlike the sickening plunge into vertigo that preceded his prophetic visions.

  But this was no moment of augury. Too well, Dakar recognized the wretched first kick of the drug that initiated a tienelle trance. Its perils at least framed a dance he was well schooled to master. He huffed the air from his lungs and grounded his senses, then closed down his mage-sight behind a blank barrier of will. He would see only what was traced out in common flame light, and hear only what sound grazed his ears.

  The confines of the cabin swam clear once again. The lamp panes glinted ruby gold. Fanned in hot light lay the stone pipe, discarded and cold, its crumbled ash scattered from the bowl. Black flecks remained where the strayed cinders had cooled, pitting scorch marks in the varnish. The canister rested open on its side, its treacherous dregs upset. A stipple of silver-grey leaves strewed in patterns across the board, winnowed and licked by the draught.

  Arithon's chair stood empty. The blankets on his berth were rucked into snarls, the sheets half-torn from the mattress. Chart chest, hanging locker, cabinet, and logbook, all were closed and still neatly latched, which left only the well of gloom on the deck, buried in attenuated shadow.

  Sweating through apprehension, Dakar resumed his search. He scanned past a jumble of upset quills, the smashed veneer of a lacquered coffer, beyond these, a hand in faint outline, spread out and locked, the tight-fitted bones of a face pressed into a cradling forearm. Arithon lay curled on his side beneath the bowed curve of the stern window.

  Too clumsy to move with the heave of the deck, Dakar crashed past the chart table and dropped to one knee beside the prince. His drug-heightened hearing drummed to the din of white foam off the wake, unreeling across starlit ocean a yard beneath the sill. He firmed his control against a dread that made him cringe, reached across darkness, and touched.

  The bared nape of Arithon's neck was ice-cold and beaded in sweat. A shudder jarred from the contact. Dakar heard the saw of an indrawn breath over the squeak of steering cables as the Khetienn's helmsman took up a spoke to ply the rudder to weather.

  Dakar gave the unresponsive shoulder a shake. 'Arithon?'

  No movement answered.

  The lantern flame on the table wobbled and dimmed, its spill of bloodied light tremulous in recovery. Opened to options by the narcotic in the air, Dakar extended his spellbinder's knowledge into a feather of inquiry; and power answered. The lantern wick spurted up in false brilliance, enough to let him measure the prince's life signs.

  Under their blued lids of flesh, his pupils were expanded black wells. Arithon's limbs were dangerously cool, the reflex that spasmed the muscles to burn off deep chill reduced to intermittent, thin shudders. His pulse was erratic and fast, his skin drenched, and his tissues scoured to a dangerous, toxic dehydration.

  The symptoms of tienelle poisoning were multiple and savage, a rigour no practising mage would undertake at less than the peak of mental fitness. Warmth and fluids were immediate needs. Given water, the body could flush some of the effects.

  Dakar scrambled to the berth, tore off a wadded blanket, and tucked it over Arithon's still frame. The lantern on the chart table started shuddering in wild spurts, its oil reservoir plumbed dry. The Mad Prophet let the flame go out. By touch and by mage-sight, he found the cask and the cup laid at hand to counter the tienelle's initial side effects. A brazier stood readied, but unlit, to prepare infusions of herbal tea.

  Afraid the debilitating symptoms had progressed past the reach of simple remedy, Dakar knelt with Arithon's fine-boned fingers cradled between his two hands. A pang rocked through him for the musical legacy Halliron had left Athera, set into irrevocable jeopardy.

  For the physical damage was not yet severe. A fatal poisoning by tienelle took hours to run its due course. Worse peril threatened the defenceless mind, spiralling uncontrolled through a visionary trance without access to sighted guidance to stabilize the vaulting flight of expanded awareness. The trained mage who offered help for the floundering spirit was as prone to stray and drown in the selfsame nightmare vortex.

  Here was proper work for a Fellowship Sorcerer, not for any bumbling apprentice who had wasted his centuries of instruction chasing whores and getting paralytic drunk. Dakar held no pretence. Since he lacked the practised skill to send a distress call over leagues of open ocean, the best he could do was seek contact with Sethvir through the earth link bequeathed by the Paravians.

  The Mad Prophet shoved his bulk upright, clawed open the lid of the chart table, and scrounged out the flake of slate kept for windy days to weight the pages of the brigantine's logbook. He rummaged through drawers for a candle and a penknife. The ritual he employed was simplicity itself: scribe a distress rune in blood on the rock, set the mark in new flame, then unlatch the stern casement and let the construct splash overboard into the sea.

  The rune, the blood, and the imprint left by fire on the extreme staid energies of stone would disrupt the patterned resonance of saltwater. If Althain's Warden was not too preoccupied, he would detect the anomaly and send aid.

  Crouched on his hams, his elbows jammed against the sill, Dakar waited, while the minutes crept past and the brigantine's wake unreeled like crochet on dark silk under starlight. The flake of slate by now should have settled to the sea bottom. Arithon's prone form lay unmoving, all but unbreathing, a discouraging sign. Dakar would rather have seen him thrash in nightmares. Convulsions, screams of delirium, the most unpleasant twitch of life would have been better than such stark, disoriented stillness.

  Dakar fidgeted, desperate. The wait had extended too long. Sethvir was not going to respond. Any of a thousand small crises might preoccupy the Sorcerer's attention; or he might hear clearly enough, but be hard-pressed with other trials, and have no discorporate colleague available to dispatch help.

  When a quarter hour passed, Dakar had no choice but to confront the dire prospect that the problem was his own, to master or fail on his merits. The ghost of Jilieth haunted him still for shortcomings he had not sought to remedy. Guilt racked him. The alternative was to do nothing, to risk Athera to the unleashed effects of Arithon's madness, whipped on to who knew what lengths by the driving hatreds engendered by Desh-thiere's curse.

  Dakar closed the casement and bent over the prone form at his feet. He firmed hold on his mage-sense and cast a shallow probe into the veils of unconsciousness to try and raise the Shadow Master back to primal awareness. His effort met and drowned in a velvet layer of darknes
s. He felt battened in shadow, adrift. The surface currents of Arithon's mind were untenanted, blank and reflectionless and still as an unrippled lake.

  Dakar roused and opened his eyes. Forced by need to an unkind choice, he cursed Daelion Fatemaster to be left alone at the crux of such crisis. With Khetienn at sea, he could scarcely engage the services of a herb witch to spin him small talismans of protection. If the volume of saltwater beneath the ship's keel would buffer his effort from the unshielded presence of the sailhands, the blessing came mixed. Bedamned if he would try a deeper sounding while wedged beneath the chart table, and the unkind roll of a following sea rattled his bones like a string puppet. Since Arithon was built small enough for even a fat man to heft, Dakar shouldered to the effort, half dragging the Master of Shadow across the deck.

  Movement and disturbance roused a flicker of tension in the unconscious man's frame. His lips moved in whispered entreaty, 'Are they safe yet!'

  A static flash of mage-sight closed the contact between them: some leftover channel from the link forged through the child's failed healing in Vastmark, raised active by the tienelle fumes. From Arithon, the Mad Prophet snatched the tattered image of trees burning. Against that flashfire rage of white heat, sword-bearing figures reeled and cried, entangled in the light-caught contortions of a desperate, killing struggle.

  Sickness shot through Dakar's belly. He knew what he saw: the memory reborn in Arithon's mind, of the war that had ruined eight thousand lives on the banks of the River Tal Quorin. The blank darkness encountered in his earlier probe had been nothing else but a Shadow Master's mesh of defences, set nine years past to smother all Strakewood and quench out the reiving flame loosed by Lysaer's gift of light-

  Overturned into dread, Dakar rolled his limp burden onto the wadded bedding on the berth. The tienelle visions had not led Arithon's awareness outside of himself. Instead, he was lost in relivings, damned by his own pity and unable to win reprieve from his burden of s'Ffalenn conscience as perception turned inward to unstring him.

  Dakar sat and laid the prince's sweat-soaked head in his lap. Nerves he never knew he possessed recoiled in trepidation as he steadied himself into balance. He had nothing in that poised moment to suggest the best way to begin. With a whimper of fear, he smoothed back damp black hair and closed his eyes. He let his awareness unreel into stillness, then turned down to plumb the racked depths of the mind beneath his hands.

  The last thing he recalled was a scream to pierce the Khetienn's very timbers; perhaps his own. Horror closed over him, worse than nightmare, for the pain he came to suffer in rapport with the Shadow Master became real with the impact of unalloyed experience . . .

  Dakar shared the fell massacre at Tal Quorin, not as retelling described it, nor even in the history rerendered by art to the majestic tragedy of Halliron's ballad. Instead, first-hand, he heard the screams spawned by rapine, as Pesquil turned headhunters loose to despoil mothers and young girls - he beheld the flash-burned remains of the women and children Lysaer had annihilated in one blast of cold strategy, to draw Arithon's allies in a hot rush of vengeance, to be entrapped and slaughtered in their turn. He cried in terror for the tearing forces that had burned through Arithon's hands, as the Master of Shadow undertook the unthinkable to achieve the impossible: as he bent his knowledge of grand conjury to kill to spare Deshir's clans from annihilation.

  The harrowing went beyond even this, as in wounding pain that could find no atonement, Arithon walked the battleground in the deeps of the night. Again and again over the corpses of slain victims, of townsman and clan-born, of woman and child, he called power through the Paravian ritual to reweave their violent deaths. Beyond the dregs of his strength, on the shining, wilful force of spirit alone, he had absolved the shade of each lost and grieving victim and set them free to find Ath's highest peace.

  Repulsed on a wave of untenable pain, Dakar reacted from reflex, cried Name to reaffirm self. Stunned separate from reeling confusion, he wove over torn thought a stinging hedge of screens to isolate the thread of his consciousness. His defences unfurled like sparkles of spun light, then shimmered before an answering counterforce.

  A blow hammered down out of nowhere. Dakar felt his fragile defences smashed and then winnowed like metal exploded under heat to a glittering, scintillant shower of spent force. In the instant before blackness roared over his focus, he realized his intrusion had raised Arithon's reflexive protections.

  Then, spinning, twisting, battered to sickening vertigo, he was flung off into rarefied, airless darkness that burned him all over in stinging pain.

  * * *

  Dakar came to retching, flattened on his side in the salt-musty cabin aboard the brigantine. He was weeping, wrung; scarcely himself. His back was wedged at a horrible angle against the leg of the chart table. Bruises and wrenched joints combined to a fiendish chorus of aches. Slats from the broken coffer dug into his thigh. A spilled bin of quills winnowed under his right cheek, tickling his nose at each breath. Warning viced over his tissues, prickling prelude to a violent reflex to sneeze.

  He batted the feathers away and sat up, engrossed in black curses. His glare pierced through darkness and found the Master of Shadow, roused now to jerks and small thrashes in the hellish grasp of nightmare where he lay, still unconscious on the berth.

  'Damn you, prince. Of course, you'd be guarded, even past the gates of unconsciousness.' Too late, in pungent resentment, Dakar recalled a comment of Asandir's that had outlined the very effect.

  A simpleton should have recalled. Arithon's was a brilliant and forthright discipline. While life lasted, and self-will, he was too much the trained mage to stop fighting to reassume his control. His grandfather's early schooling had instilled rigorous defences against possession, the telling, likely reason why he had managed to resist the wide-reaching effects of Desh-thiere's curse.

  Lysaer s'Ilessid had owned no such advantage of protection. First-hand, in sorry clarity, Dakar had to recognize why the Fellowship Sorcerers had chosen the fair-haired half-brother for the sacrifice through the Mistwraith's battle to confinement.

  Had Arithon been risked, had the wraiths reached and turned him, the result could have spun his very strengths and trained power outside of all sane restraint.

  Broken to fresh grief for old cruelties, Dakar sat in a cold sweat and chewed over the quandary ceded to his unwilling judgement. He could not heal this tienelle poisoning without inner consent from a mind that had already ranged far distant, vaulted on the drugged tides of vision to inflamed reliving of the past. Feeling battered, the Mad Prophet mumbled mixed lines of invective and self-pitying prayer. He lacked the stomach to suffer the private layers of Arithon's anguish. Yet his limited frame of knowledge allowed him no other means of access.

  For his moment of rapport had revealed what was wrong. He had traced the channels of Arithon's lost powers, seared first by misuse, then racked, forced, compelled to overextend beyond the wise limits of talent and strength. The scars of past experience had healed over time, but not into functional recovery. Guilt remained, a bleak, damning barrier locked fast by the royal s'Ffalenn gift of mercy.

  Dakar saw too clearly, and the damage made him weep. Too easily, the power to raise grand conjury for destruction might fall sway to the Mistwraith's directive to kill. Arithon feared beyond life to bear the result. The very compassion of his bloodline intervened, to blind and to deafen; to block off beyond even irrational reach all the fires of bright power born in him.

  The hour grew late. Silted in shadow, the stern cabin rocked in twisting violence as the brigantine plunged with a crash of spray through a trough. The swell was building. Jounced to the shudder and thrum of rising gusts through the rigging, aware of vibration singing down through the hull, Dakar sensed the first warning of ill weather.

  As if hazed by the creaking distress of his vessel, Arithon's fingers spasmed a tortured grip in the blankets. His head arched back, and he groaned. His nightmares of old bloodshed had begun to fray
into delirium and tear at his living spirit.

  The progression would grow worse. Dakar knew for a clammy, cold surety that the tienelle's effects had not peaked. He dared not try to face Arithon's devils, nor attempt to partner the blazing expanded consciousness of a drug vision unless he assisted his paltry perception as well.

  'Damn you to Sithaer,' he groused as he arose to grope after the discarded stone pipe. Being milled under by the wheels of Dharkaron's Chariot was a kindness beside the wretched discomfort of withdrawal from a tienelle trance.

  Dakar packed the bowl with the dry, silver-notched leaves, set the stem between his lips, snapped flint to striker, and inhaled.

  The next instant, the deck of the brigantine seemed to swoop and rock from beneath him. His senses smashed under a starburst of white fire and dropped him spinning into vertigo. Wherever Arithon had collected his plants, they were of rarely stringent potency. Dakar squeezed his eyes shut, alarmed through the unfolding climb of his higher awareness. Before he smoked, he should have counted the hours since the last time he had eaten, in punitive proportion, he would know how wretchedly he could expect to be sick.

  Then that detail whirled from his mind as the narcotic bit into the core of his being and vaulted him to visionary prescience.

  He steered back to the berth without stumbling because he sensed in advance how the wind would gust. Sucked into a multiple, overlaid perception, he could forecast cause and effect, every natural force laid against sail and bolt rope and frail wood. The tienelle's scouring coil showed him which way the deck would come to roll. In a scalding burn of clear sight, his mind spiralled outward to trace how wind and sea would braid and spin cloud into a cyclonic axis of black storm.