TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Burdened now by the need to avert the vicious stress which had nearly unstrung Prince Lysaer at Werpoint, Lord Diegan weighed his options, alone in the Vastmark night. Bluff and cleverness were entrenched s'Ffalenn tactics. No doubt the bloodshed at the Havens had been wrought as a weapon to tear the heart from the warhost. Worse, the strain incited by the horrific rout was expressly designed to chafe at Lysaer's moral conscience. Well warned that the nightmares and the driving remorse still suffered by his Grace since the fleet burned at Minderl Bay would make the affray at the Havens loom large, Lord Diegan measured his alternatives.

  By the time he threaded his horse through the mucky lanes between the bonfires of the war camp, he had determined tonight's news of an unspeakable carnage was a provocation his prince must be spared. Lysaer had been living on nerves and determination since his break with Talith at Ostermere. His mood had run sharp and brittle as eggshells, and through the nights he scarcely slept. The risk must not be taken, that the calculated slaughter of five hundred men might become the excuse to turn the army from its purpose in Shand.

  To avenge the cruel usage his sister had suffered, perhaps to mend her sadly scarred marriage, Diegan resolved to take fate in hand. By himself, he would make certain the campaign proceeded to corner and claim its due quarry. For the Havens was a bluff, a last brazen effort on the part of Arithon to buy escape. No man with a motley force of shepherd archers, even given the strengths of wielded shadow, could rout a warhost forty thousand strong.

  Settled by hard logic that the odds lay in his favour, Diegan dismounted before his tent, tossed his reins to his groom, and meted out swift strings of orders to the equerry on duty. His body servant arrived, wide-eyed and nervous, to strip off his surcoat and mail. Hard at heel came his secretary, rousted from bed by his summons.

  'I'll want privacy and the loan of your lap desk,' Lord Diegan said. Without another word, he stepped out of the rain, into the dense, clammy gloom of his command tent.

  The lanterns engaged in pallid war against the dark creaked and tossed on their hooks as the wind slapped over laced canvas. Water ran, dripping in broken arpeggios, from seams long since soaked through. A particularly virulent leak had sprouted over the blankets on his cot. Resigned to sleeping in puddles, Diegan rubbed a wrist stained in oil and rust across his brow, then threw himself down on a camp chair. He took the lap desk from the thin-shanked scribe, who trailed at his elbow like a hound. 'Come back for your things in the morning.'

  'Yes, lord.' The little man departed, tripping over his large feet in his haste.

  'Later,' Diegan barked in dismissal to the servant who hovered by his clothes chest, a towel in hand to clean his boots. He yanked open the lap desk, rummaged out pens and ink and two pristine squares of parchment.

  By the time Skannt's headhunters reported for their assignment, he had the necessary documents signed and sealed with his personal cipher.

  To the sinewy, weathered captain who entered the tent for instructions, he said, 'Outside of camp, due northwest, you'll find a pair of tents guarded by four Etarran scouts. There are twenty-five men with them, all deserters from a minor skirmish with the enemy that took place on the upper coast. They've been duly judged and sentenced. I ordered them bound. Your knife work should go quick and quiet.'

  Diegan arose. His hand did not shake as he proffered the ribboned, official documents, though even he was unsettled by the man he had engaged. The captain's presence carried a miasma like the reek of old blood; whether real or imagined, few would draw near enough to determine.

  'Here's proper writ for arraignment, and here, the order of execution.' The warhost's Lord Commander finished off, 'See the shirking dogs beneath the Wheel, then burn the bodies. We need no reminders lying about to undermine the morale of our other steadfast troops.'

  'Ath!' The steel studs on the captain's jerkin caught baleful light as he stuffed the rolled parchments through his belt, then peeled off a gauntlet to test the edge on his dagger. 'Should've guessed, at this hour, the duty'd be a messy one. We getting scalp pay to clean up your bothersome details?'

  'Ten silvers a head,' Diegan affirmed. 'Two of my servants will ride with you to inform me when the deed's been done.'

  The headhunter gave a silent, wheezed laugh as he snicked his steel in its sheath. 'Assassins' guildsmen?' He squinted askance at his Lord Commander, a sneer on his full upper lip. 'You know we don't need any pandering witnesses to make sure of our kills.'

  Diegan gestured his dismissal without comment. When the tent flap cracked closed after the headhunter's stalking stride, he bellowed for his servants to return and attend to his interrupted comforts.

  He was too hardened, too practical, too much the survivor of ambitious years of city politics. His dreams would be troubled by no screams at all, as Arithon's fell tactic was foiled, and the twenty-five died in cold blood.

  Endings

  As the sun rises over the pastel drum towers of Innish, and the light falls gold and pink through the sandstone arches of a portico facing the harbour, Jinesse and Tharrick stand with linked hands before the robed figure of an adept of Ath's Brotherhood; and as each swears the vow of marriage, their thoughts dwell with ambivalence and regret upon the enigmatic, black-haired prince whose fate brought their two lives together. . .

  In a purple-carpeted chamber in the Koriani orphanage at the coastal town of Firstmark, Lirenda lays the amethyst Great Waystone into the hands of Morriel Prime with the words, 'Matriarch, rejoice, for my mission to Althain Tower has brought the success you required . . .'

  In a high, guarded tower in the city of Avenor, Princess Talith sits on velvet cushions in a south-facing window seat to stare out over the sea, and through a weight of unbearable sorrow, she aches for the absence of her beloved, pledged to lead a warhost to kill a single enemy whose cursed destiny has come to poison everything in life she held dear . . .

  VIII. STRIKE AT DIER KENTON

  The dawn over Vastmark came in smothering white mist, threaded by intermittent rainfall. Against air textured thick as unpressed felt, and the eerie shrills of flying wyverns, the cluster of shepherds' tents set on the lip of the scree came and went from view, their primal, dyed patterns like an herb witch's talismans scribed in old blood and rust. Before them, furled in damp clothing where he crouched stirring peat embers with a gorse twig, Dakar the Mad Prophet brooded in silence, his hair and beard screwed into rings.

  Behind him, standing, the hood over his mail dull grey as the landscape, Caolle tested the edge of his newly oiled sword, a squint to his eye that boded trouble. Since the Havens, he had lost flesh. The skin pressed like cured leather over the craggy jut of his face bones, and his hands, never wont to pause between tasks, turned the blade in forced deliberation. 'The tactic last fortnight has failed,' he said, flat. 'Lysaer's warhost is coming despite us. Please Ath, don't make me be the one to break the news.'

  'His Grace already knows.' Dakar gave a particularly fierce jab at the embers and the sparks flurried, red-gold on the colourless air. 'Arithon said last night he could feel the stir of the Mistwraith's curse.' For Lysaer pressed his march forward, not back. His army had closed, and harried, and set cordons, until the vale of Dier Kenton lay bottled in, each goat track and pass leading over the peaks sealed off by hostile troops. 'Arithon said we have until noon before the pull of the geas builds to unmanageable proportions.'

  Caolle sheathed his blade without sound by wary habit, then flicked a swift glance at the tent. 'He's sleeping?'

  'No.' Dakar looked up, his pudding-round features all misery. 'But he's reasonable, and trying to rest.'

  'Let him bide, then,' Caolle said. 'We won't need his final orders before the mist starts to lift.' He strode off from the fire, disgruntled for the first time in his life by a bellyache before the onset of battle.

  * * *

  The mists that presaged autumn in Vastmark could hug the land like raw silk, impenetrable, then part without warning to some unseen caprice of changed air.
The vale at Dier Kenton emerged out of stainless, cloaking white like an uneven bowl draped in furrows of burlap left out and beaten by weather, then salted with dirty flecks of shale. Mountains arose around the rim. The mild range of hills which invited easy access from the west built ever higher as the pitch of the valley steepened. The east wall swept up, a sheer face of grim scarps that speared blue-green shadow across the knoll where Caolle stood. Around him, pitched as a decoy to draw Lysaer's main force, an array of steel helms set on stakes presented empty eyeholes toward the lowlands. Planted on a pole in their midst, the lazy slap of standards flicked a buffet of silk on leather against the war captain's shoulder. Clan custom dictated their arrangement: the purple-and-gold chevrons of Shand uppermost; then the black-on-grey wyvern, sigil of the principality of Vastmark; and lowest, the green, sable and silver of Rathain's royal leopard, symbolically set in deference to the sovereign rule of the southland.

  The irksome rains had ceased. Today's clear morning held a fresh crispness and tension like an indrawn breath. Across the saddle at the vale's far rim seethed the frontal body of the allied host to bring down the Master of Shadow, particoloured as sweepings from a tailor's shop, spiked like stray pins where early sun flicked the metal of a helm or a sword blade. The landscape was vast, and the men, an unnatural, living carpet a league and a half in width.

  'Such bother for one life,' Caolle murmured. 'It's not canny.' The nerve-fraught awareness he was surrounded by foes ranked many thousands strong made his skin feel harried by itches. He cleared his throat, then finished his instructions to the runner scout waiting at his elbow.

  The clansman slipped off. The knoll remained pressed in grim silence, while the mists ebbed and came in white-footed waves like ranked ghosts. The swirl of moisture and the presence of the peaks funnelled disjointed sounds in queer patterns. A rider's horn call might ring in deceptive, close clarity, or make some distant officer's snapped word to correct a laggard man in formation seem close enough to touch. Other times the breeze blew muffled in drifts, as if broken stone and desolation were all that had ruled since Paravian times.

  Then the fog would clear again to reveal the army's advance a disquieting furlong closer. The front lines were near enough now to mark divisions, each city's garrison ranked out in squares. Rowed pikemen trickled like ants around the boulders left strewn by old slides. The stream of ribboned banners, the snorts of fresh horses, the snatched strains of voices raised in song to hold the tempo of the march as helms bobbed, disappeared and crested the banks of gullies, formed an inexorable flow of greyed steel over uneven terrain.

  Easier to regard them as a leaden wave, Caolle thought, a mindless, cutting tide of sharpened weapons. Details only served to tear at the heart, that defined the ragged edge of the advance as single men who had lives and human fears.

  Caolle shut his eyes, aching inside for what must come. For the stakes were no longer malleable. Each side would kill in defence of its prince; the living would mourn and the slain would stay dead. As Arithon had most cruelly foreseen, the recent blood spilled at the Havens in the weight of this moment seemed a pittance. A man could stand atop the knoll at Dier Kenton where the trap would be sprung and wonder if five hundred planned casualties had been enough; whether more than one raid and a thousand more corpses could have stemmed the flood of tens of thousands. Then if not a thousand, how many more, until the goading question of if and if again caused the mind to shudder off its wretched track and embrace the plunge into despair.

  For the first time since childhood, Caolle felt haunted by his ghosts: from a few dozen caravan drovers and couriers in Jaelot livery with slit throats, to the wyvern-picked corpses on the shoreside ledges, to the current warhost still living, still marching in deafened belief of a just role in a grand destiny.

  A stranger to himself, to feel harried by a young man's uncertainties, Caolle found the prospect of drawing steel abhorrent. Nor did any cause under sky seem reason enough to claim another life. In the wrong place, years too late, he realized his pride and his skills as a killer led nowhere.

  'I have no one else I trust to see this through,' husked a quiet voice near his elbow.

  Caolle started, spun, and met a face as haunted as his own. His liege lord had arrived without sound at his side, the change in him since the Havens the very epitome of heartbreak.

  Too thin, too pale, too worn, Arithon met the mirrored anguish in his war captain's glance. Again he answered the unspoken shock for the changes to his appearance. 'It's as much Desh-thiere's curse and the draw upon my will as Lysaer approaches our position as any single burden from the past.'

  Caolle bunched helpless fists at his sword belt. 'Lysaer's a murderer beyond compare, to mislead so many for the effort of buying your life.' A sweep of his arm embraced the advancing lines, now darkening the vale's western end like an infestation of blight. 'Your tactic at the Havens was a mere pittance before this.'

  'No.' Arithon studied the overwhelming, massive deployment, unable to mask his expression. Or perhaps the strength in him was too self-absorbed to spare any token thought for privacy. While the wind flicked his loose sable hair, the compassion that in this moment lacerated him from within showed in scraped pain through his words. 'Lysaer's not yet blinded to mercy. I have to believe that. Our twenty-five survivors never got through, nor had their chance to deliver fair warning.'

  No argument remained; the weeks since the Havens had seen their shepherd archers surrounded. Nothing else could be done except embrace grim reality and follow the final step through.

  After one bitter lesson at Merior, Arithon's decision was fixed. He would abandon no ally to suffer the curse-twisted influence of his half-brother.

  Caolle regarded his prince with an uneasy mix of pity and wary apprehension. 'You have a will Dharkaron himself should fear to cross,' he said, then spun on vexed reflex to meet a scrambling disturbance at his back.

  Dakar crested the rise, wheezing like a holed bellows. Beneath his tousled hair and the wiry bristle of his beard, his complexion showed the blued pallor of half-congealed candle wax. 'Nothing alive should be standing here,' he gasped. An expressive roll of his eyes encompassed the surrounding peaks, this moment clogged under clouds. As if chased by a thought, his brows furrowed underneath his woolly bangs. 'Fiends plague, Arithon. So that's what you were doing mooning about, walking this place over and over again at night throughout the spring.' He turned an impossible shade paler.

  'Listening to the pitch of the stone,' Rathain's prince admitted, steady enough for all that he looked as if the touch of a finger might shatter him.

  'Dharkaron's tears!' Dakar cried. For since the seep of the autumn rains had rinsed the heights, even his limited mage-sight could detect how the shale was faulted. 'Don't anybody sneeze. I want for nothing except to be finished my work and hunkered down on high ground.'

  'Well, his Grace said the scarp would slide and close the passes,' Caolle said, never impressed with histrionics.

  'A bard's prize understatement,' Dakar groused beneath his breath. Then louder, 'Both of you, move. You're standing on the site I need to enhance my spell pattern.'

  Caolle edged aside as though faced by coiled snakes. Magecraft and mystery lay a rung below cheap trickery in his opinion, but he knew better than to waste breath arguing points of honour with a madman.

  'Dakar adheres to Fellowship teaching,' Arithon reassured. 'Any spell he works upon life or substance must be founded upon free permission.'

  'You say!' The war captain snorted his disbelief, dark eyes squinted down the valley out of habit to mark tactics as the warhost began its last stage of deployment. 'So, they're smart enough after all not to charge their light horse over stone. You'll face pikemen in squares with archers at the centre. Slow but sure. The gullies will hamper their advance, but not much.' The war captain paused to slice a glower up the rise, where Dakar paced off a slow circle around the banners and helmets, his head tucked in frowning concentration. 'And I don't believe yon soldi
ers all chucked you a grin and bent their stupid necks to be witched.'

  The Mad Prophet paused between steps, his offence expressed in a crafty glint of teeth that might have been a smile behind his beard. 'Not in so many words. But Lysaer's soldiers, to a man, allowed themselves to be deluded. The mesh I weave here will only cause them to see exactly what they believe they should find.'

  'A sorcerer, a vile killer, a corrupter of innocent children,' Arithon finished in shaded, soft sorrow. 'They will behold what my half-brother has led them to expect and react as they have been trained.'

  'Which means, prince, you'd better have distance between and a blindfold on when it happens,' Dakar retorted.

  Arithon did not respond, but held his regard on the warhost below in cat-eyed concentration. The Mad Prophet glanced at him, sharp, then spun to the war captain in a high-strung concern that was strikingly out of character. 'Caolle, for the love you bear Rathain, get your liege lord out of here, now!'

  * * *

  The sun climbed another two hours higher and the mists fled before warmth, leaving a sky matted in haze the colour of bleached bone. Ruled by perversity, the wind died until the banners of the royal warhost draped limp on their poles. The hemmed ranges at the head of Dier Kenton Vale reflected every sound back, until the snort of a horse, the dull plink of mail, the jangle of harness held a hemmed-in, unsettling intimacy.

  Puddles had dried, but the stubborn mud lingered, turning each step to sucking misery. The horses slid and sweated and cast shoes off damp-softened hooves.

  Grateful for the one coarse mount in his string too tough to pull up lame, Lord Diegan leaned over its unstylish, thick crest to tighten the strap on his helm. He lowered a sweaty wrist tinged in rust and swore. Armour polished inside of three days already showed attrition from the damp. No longer the dandy to fuss over appearances, the soldier he had become reviled the neglect to his gear.