TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  'No choice.' Arithon looked sick white for the knowledge that his chance was now lost, to recheck and sound for a full set of sureties. For his trouble he held only one frail thread of hope behind a proposed action that courted the edge of cold murder. 'I have your scried proof. The tactic of terror alone will turn Lysaer. What are five hundred deaths in exchange for the lives of forty thousand?'

  'You take a great risk. The whole plan could go wrong.' Dakar pressed pudgy palms to his thundering temples, magnified and made worse by the pound of the ship's timbers, hurled working against contrary waves. He was too reamed with weariness to define nuance, that his auguries manifested two ways. The ones he saw as visions were always mutable, subject to change or reverses if subsequent circumstances intervened. Others came in blind fits of spoken prophecy, beyond his recall when he awoke. These alone held pinpoint accuracy, and if the content of their riddles held opening for change, only the Fellowship had seen proof.

  The vision of Lysaer recalling his troops had borne no such terrible certainty. 'Arithon, what if the purpose of your killing field fails?'

  Curled into a reaming fit of dry heaves, the Master of Shadow closed tormented eyes. He answered with no change of position as soon as he was able to command speech. 'I'd be forced to follow through, as you saw. Ath's pity has no part. By blood oath to Asandir, I'm charged to survive. If the ploy fails and I draw the wrath of that warhost into Vastmark, I can't let my allies come to die for it.'

  The Mad Prophet hung mute, unable to refute that tortured course of logic.

  As if the dread in that moment were shared and transparent, Arithon ended, 'I've made the issue no longer your concern. You haven't felt the change? You're no longer bound to me by duty.'

  And Dakar understood in wild exhilaration just what that desperate, last unbinding had achieved.

  Arithon had made a gift in return for his sacrifice: had broken his Fellowship master's geas and ceded back his unimpaired freedom.

  Except for Asandir's verbal charge of service, Dakar's free will was once again his own. He drew breath to speak, then coughed through his beard, crestfallen. For the issue was no longer simple. The changes to his person had been driven too deep; and an arrow's fatal role in the Shadow Master's affairs remained yet to happen in the winter.

  Dakar took stubborn hold, pushed himself to his knees, then shot a poisoned glare at his nemesis. 'You won't be rid of me so easily, and anyway, you're going to need a nurse who knows how to draw you clear of a tienelle poisoning.'

  He was Arithon's man, that much could not be changed, at least until after the campaign was turned in Vastmark. Only then could he measure the impact of what he had become. He had until equinox to weigh the warning impact of his augury and decide whether he should abandon Lysaer to fate and stay involved with the Master of Shadow.

  Strike at the Havens

  Summer's end saw Lysaer's proud warhost in their closing march upon Vastmark. They came from the north, through the passes beyond Thirdmark, under snapping pennons and sunlit lances and scudding clouds. From the walled city of Ganish, they came on by road, then by river, to march in dusty columns over the parched stems of the late summer grasses into the wilderness beyond. They skirted the lower foothills of the Kelhorns from Forthmark, the brilliant banners, polished armour, and glittering, gilt harness of pedigree commanders flung like hoarded jewels against the dusty landscape, bleached to the duns of sun-faded velvet by the pitiless southern latitude.

  Their orders were simple: to cordon the territory in a living noose, then to engage and clean out any ally of the Master of Shadow.

  Like the closing fingers of a gauntleted fist wrought of forty thousand dedicated lives, they came also by galley and fishing boat to crush out an enemy they well knew for an author of dangerous sorceries. Into the stiff, shifty winds that presaged the first change in season, uncounted small fleets nosed up the shadowy narrows of South Sea and through the twisted straits into Rockbay Harbour. Each had decks packed to the gunwales with armed men. On shores north and south, headhunters and town garrisons converged on the peninsula of Vastmark, to land on stepped shingle and ledges of moss-rotten rock, and to invade the high ramparts of its twin walls of mountains, arrayed like jutted battlements toward the sea.

  Among a hundred such landings, one was singled out.

  Flattened amid a fractured clutch of shale on the brim of a cliff, his black hair stirred to a clammy breeze off the inlet known as the Havens, the Master of Shadow lay cat still. He wore no armour, but only a grass-stained shepherd's jacket and tunic; on his person he carried no weapon beyond a knife. His intent study encompassed the cross-weave of rigging and yardarms of a fleet of merchant brigs and fishing sloops, recently anchored.

  'They're lazy as well as careless,' he murmured, for the haphazard way the sails on the vessels had been left brailed up to the yards.

  'Well,' said Caolle in sour censure behind his shoulder, 'you wanted a place where they'd play straight into your design.'

  'Killing is killing,' Arithon said, flat bland. 'Are you faint? I'm surprised. After all those murdered couriers out of Jaelot, I didn't think you had any tender spots left to offend.'

  The barb shamed Caolle to stiff silence; a contrary and difficult service he had of this prince, but one he was forced to respect. Bloodshed had never balked him for the sake of his clans in Deshir. If Arithon's proposed tactics lay outside his approval, there were headhunters' devices amid the town pennons which streamed from the mastheads below. Except for the odd fishing sloop out of Merior, these men marked as prey were not innocent or harmless, but professionals as dedicated as he.

  Reduced to black specks by height and distance, four companies of troops seethed up from the feet of the cliffs. They seemed insignificant as wingless insects against that vast landscape, but for the chance-caught glitter of sunlight on mail or the coloured threads of yarn that were banners. The occasional shouted order spiralled up, half-masked by the clicks of summer crickets in the broom.

  Minutes became an hour, with only the formless shadows of clouds fanned in movement across the upper scarps. To the invaders who toiled upslope, the scabbed old ridges their advance scouts searched seemed bare, tenantless; raked over by winds, and too steep to harbour any trees or small scrub, far less an outpost for ambush.

  What their maps did not show, and their legends had forgotten, were the caves stitched between the seamed ledges, for which the Havens had been originally named.

  A clan scout emerged from such a crack to pause at Caolle's shoulder. Words passed between them, low and hurried; then the scout slipped back into the brush.

  To Arithon, the clan war captain said, 'The headhunters' advance foray has given their officers safe signal. The garrison divisions have started up the rocks. If you're bent on going through with this, you won't be getting better timing.' Then, to shrug off the leftover sting of rebuke, he added, 'My liege, let me have the honour. I ask to fire the first signal.'

  'No.' Just that one word; royal claim to a responsibility no other would be suffered to share.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn slid back from the precipice. He took up the strung bow of black-lacquered horn set waiting against a rock, then chose the first of three marked arrows arrayed in a row in the dirt. The red streamers affixed to its head flicked over his shoulder as he knelt and nocked the first. Slight, thin-tempered, dwarfed by the bowl of the Vastmark sky, he made a drab figure against its surfeit of colour as he drew and took aim.

  The hammered look of anguish his features showed then gave even his war captain pause.

  Then the bowstring sang into release. The arrow arced up, poised, tipped into irrevocable descent. Ribbons unfurled behind in a snapping tail of bloody scarlet.

  Men tucked in concealment in the crevices of the cliffs saw the flagged shaft's passage. It plunged seaward like the fall of an evil portent, harbinger of an unnatural steel rain, and sure death for the troops below.

  The stakes were unrelenting: clan archers with longbo
ws and years of skill hunting game in the lean northern winters to feed their families; tribe marksmen with their powerful, horn recurves, unerring at bringing down wyvern, a prey they could spit through with pinpoint accuracy as it spiralled on the high thermal currents. The hundred and twelve bowmen chosen for this foray had been ruthlessly selected for steady nerves and unfailing obedience. As the red-tagged signal snapped earthward, all drew their weapons. They took aim, and shot from the sun-scoured cliffs into ranks who toiled in strewn formation over uncertain footing on the mountain's flanks.

  The wasp hiss of air over fletching became all the warning human targets received.

  Then the hail of barbed shafts struck. The first casualties wrenched and went down, sprawling, rattling, writhing uncontrolled in their death throes down the baked, stony slopes. Living companions flattened back against the rim walls, only to become transfixed as they stood, blades drawn in hand. They were helpless to strike back. The enemy who slaughtered was beyond reach, beyond view. In vain, townbred archers squinted upward against sun-glare to seek retaliation against invisible targets. Trapped helpless, they died, while flight after enemy flight sleeted in and pared their ranks, remorseless.

  The dust-dry stone became ribboned in blood. Broadheads took men seasoned at war and raw recruits with no discrimination. Men scrabbled to seek cover in terrain that showed them no mercy. They crumpled, buckled at the knees, or jerked over backward with arms outflung at the shock of impact, crying in pain and cruel rage.

  Ones not broken outright on the rocks thudded onto the shingle, where their blood ran and mingled and sullied the salt breakers which ruffled the shoreline, uncaring.

  On the clifftop, Caolle knuckled his fist to closed teeth, raked over by a sudden wash of cold sweats. He had seen war; had fought and inflicted ugly carnage in his time. This was not battle, but a living, tearing nightmare that made him want to cringe and block his ears.

  Below raged a chaos tripped off and arranged, coil within coil like a clockspring. Hazed beyond grief, officers cried orders over the screams of mounting casualties. The fallen were beyond hope to rally; the terrified had lost wits to heed. Retreat became a melee of panic, a desperate, zigzagging rush from cleft to outcrop that invited the slip, the missed footing, the rocking, final plunge into air. As many men succumbed to falls as to bowfire; smashed onto rocks and buttresses of shale like knives, no less agonized, no less dead for the fact the Wheel took them in accident.

  'Turn them back! Ath's pity, get them down to the boats!' cried a garrison commander from the beachhead. Erect in dedication, he wore the black-and-gilt surcoat emblazoned with Jaelot's gold lions. As a man who had once matched companionable bets over bows with the conniving imposter, Medlir, he knew beyond fear what he faced.

  Help came to his cry. In the narrows between the cliff heads, captains screamed for longboats to be launched; for crewmen to unbrail canvas and man capstans to weigh anchor. Headhunters and town troops alike were in flight, and still, the marksmen in the heights maintained their incessant barrage. This was not war, but unconscionable slaughter. Men shook their fists, or scattered and ran, or huddled in clusters under targes that failed to protect. Arrows raked the clear air and pinned their scrabbling, yelling figures like flies, whether they struggled in mad flight, or stood ground in a vain effort to cover their comrades' retreat.

  Jaelot's guard captain dropped in the shallows, clawing at an arrow in his thigh. Two sword-bearing headhunters leaped to assist, cut down on the next flight to share the watery cradle of his agony. The next crest dashed their dying convulsions against the pebbled shale ledges. Amid the heaving, shouting knot of survivors pinned under fire on the strand, boats were relaunched into surf. Men rammed the keels against the unravelling foam in frenzied haste, trampling over wounded and bumping over bodies to escape a rain of shafts no defending troop could hope to cut back with cross fire. Cries of terror and mortal pain rang thin over the screams and the echoes shot back by walling rock.

  'They're well beaten,' Caolle murmured. Another scout poised at his elbow, pale with raw nerves, his appeal sent by fellows who begged for permission to ease off the force of the attack.

  If Arithon was aware of the plea, he said nothing. Nor did he turn from the seething scene below as, made miniature by height and distance, oarsmen bent their bronzed backs and grappled their laden craft in toothpick strokes across waters lapped blue-green in shade. Bowfire harried their progress. The relentless rain of shafts clattered over rib and seat and gunwale to bite off white splinters from the wood. Live men used bristled corpses as cover, or cowered behind living shieldmates, moaning prayers to a deaf deity.

  The crack of sails being set and sheeted home rebounded from the imprisoning cliffs, then spiralled on the breeze to the heights. Every vessel in the anchorage turned her helm down to flee, but for the one plucky fishing sloop from Merior. Manned by a captain too dour to stand down, that one wore ship in a neat turn of seamanship and tucked up underneath the ledges. Shielded by rock, she launched off her dories, while her stubborn master bellowed orders to evacuate the wounded from the shingle.

  His bearing like a puppet chiselled out of ivory, Arithon plucked the second signal arrow from the earth, set nock to string and prepared to fire again.

  Chilled in his liege's shadow as he bent the black bow, Caolle urged the shaken scout, 'Go back. Now, I say! The wrong word will doubtless raise the royal temper. Let me speak in behalf of your men.'

  Horn and lacquer snapped in recoil. The arrow hissed out. A flight of yellow ribbons unreeled across the sky of the Havens.

  In the caves lower down, bound to obedience, the archers tipped the lids off ceramic pots of coals. They changed from broadheads to shafts tipped in tallow-soaked lint, then touched them aflame one by one. Their next shots were fired in high arcs across the water, their targets the billows of unbrailed canvas. The air rippled, first singed into distortion by brown smoke and fat-fed flame, then cut by hissing arcs and the heartrending, treble shouts of panic. The ships nearest to the shoreline sprang into fire like toys. Men jumped clear of burning rigging. They escaped the scything crash of fallen yard-arms into water, to thrash in frantic circles until they drowned. Or they swam back onto the blood-slippery beaches, into the directionless melee that drove the trapped garrisons hither and yon, while the arrows fell and fell and served lethal end to their struggles.

  The more fortunate ships on the outer line ran up headsails, and let their bows fall off toward the free waters of Rockbay inlet. Tiny figures scrambled up ratlines, packed the footropes on the yardarms to unbrail more sails to draw against the gusting onshore breeze.

  The lead vessel scarcely caught her wind when the Khetienn rounded the headland, tanbark sails like old wounds against the clean shear of the water, and her gear in fearful trim. An order cracked out. The arbalests mounted on her maindeck loosed more bolts, fiendishly tipped in fire. Other bowmen stationed in her crosstrees released strings.

  Inside of a second, the channel between the cliffs became transformed to a death trap. The narrows to the sea were bottled in. Outbound ships had the wind against their favour, their attempt to return fire robbed by the gusts of full range.

  The first flights snatched short, flames quenched in small plumes by the sea. Through the unreeling first billows of smoke, Lysaer's captains read their fate: no single vessel in the Havens was going to manage to claw free. They could wear ship and run, to slam aground on sharp rock, or they could hold course under barrage from the arbalests and burn with their vessels to the waterline.

  From the clifftop, the Master of Shadow watched his works, drawn like glass under heat, then hardened into a brittle finish subject to shatter at a tap.

  Caolle edged a step toward him, while urgency warred with reason. Every instinct of command that let him measure men shrilled an internal warning.

  The fool who intervened now might upset a dire balance, fragile as the tension in a water drop.

  'The Havens,' Arithon ground out
in a whisper. The peal of laughter that followed caused Caolle to stiffen. He raised a hand, decisive, to deal a swift slap to break hysteria.

  Moved by swordsman's reflex, Arithon spun to block the blow; and the icy, pitiless sarcasm fixed into his expression checked his war captain cold.

  'I'm not going to snap,' Arithon said, his tone incised like a sheared scrape of crystal over yelling and the harrowing echoes of the screams. 'My half-brother may. Pray to Ath, if you know how, that he finds the cost of his blighted justice high enough to break his princely nerve.'

  A choking drift of smoke fanned the defile. The wind-borne cinders from consumed wood and canvas arose in towering, tainted columns, incense from an evil sacrifice, to mask the too-bright gaze and features stamped still as chipped quartz. A gust tore through. Like an opening between a stage curtain, a tableau framed in carnage: the little sloop backed sail and bid for freedom, her decks laden down with prostrate wounded.

  'Dharkaron avenge,' swore Caolle. 'Give me the bow.'

  When Arithon made no move to comply, the war captain snatched the last signal arrow from the earth, the one with white ribbons for cease-fire. He reached to pry the weapon from his sovereign's grasp by main force and met a blinding fast recoil.

  A demonic flare of irony lit the depths of green eyes. 'Ah no,' said Arithon. 'No mercy. Not now. You'll spoil my intent. There are men down there alive still, and in no mood for charitable action.'

  'Daelion himself!' cried Caolle. 'Let the wounded go! Ath forbid, she's just a fisher sloop! This isn't war you wage now, but pointless slaughter.' He drew a scraping breath. Never had he foreseen the hour he must argue for mercy against a prince who, before this, had been too soft to sanction the necessary harsh measures.

  'You'll do nothing,' Arithon said, distant, tuned in to some altercation arisen on the water down below.