TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Aware of shimmering danger in that single thread, Morriel Prime traced the span of coming happenstance with the delicate care of a spider spinning webs above a waterfall. Her augury took hold, unreeling in fierce energy to yield a scene set in falling sleet against the shadowy postern of a coastal city's back alley.

  There, the vision of Lirenda, lost in Arithon's embrace, a flush to her cheeks, and her hair a fall of spilled sable down the violet cloak of the order.

  For this startling glimpse of lapsed vows, Morriel was caught in blank astonishment. Before she could ponder, the sequence reeled on, inexorable, a lightning strike partnered by thunderclap.

  A fired burst of passion, then heartbreak stanched in ice, this followed in sequence by a second, clearer vision: in a bleak tower dungeon, and the same prince, bound captive in iron and spread-eagled upon a stone slab. The s'Ffalenn features were stamped to mocking irony. In contempt for his helplessness, Arithon spoke a phrase whetted to a glib stab of satire.

  Then an ugly revelation, a shattering break in continuity; the ongoing chain of future event overset to smash more than First Senior Lirenda's overblown pride. For Morriel, presaged ending came in a deranged explosion that built to a keening, savage force. Her will was milled under. Self-control ripped away, snagged into sparks and white agony. She saw the Wheel's turning; then the etheric veil; then the awful, sharp snap which would sever final connection to the withered husk of her flesh.

  The matriarch's outcry fell dampened by the muffling felt curtains as the stream of her prescient image impelled off its known course. Scalded in the mind, seared to blisters where her palms held contact with the great crystal, she gasped, crumpled over and shivering.

  Cast headlong out of disciplined trance, she opened her eyes, disoriented. Blackness imprisoned her. A burst of raw terror lanced through her until she cried out a cantrip and grounded her awareness in the stale, cold stone of the tower.

  The candle by her knee had knocked over or snuffed out. In darkness, she forced a steadying breath. The copper-tinged aftertaste of fear stayed with her, rank as the pound of her heartbeat. For branded in memory was the promise of her own sudden death.

  What circumstance she could garner from the shreds of smashed augury stabbed like old rust through her inner mind: because of Arithon s'Ffalenn she would meet her passage uncelebrated, unprepared, long before Lirenda's succession to prime power was transferred and sealed to completion.

  The instrument of her successor's downfall and her own annihilation was no mystery: beside Arithon's role, the Waystone itself would play a part. Morriel hissed through locked teeth. Her blood rushed through thin veins to the pressure of her rage.

  The chance was inconceivable that she should come to die through the meddling intervention of one mortal.

  Perspiration sealed her grasp to the faceted sphere of the Waystone. Its matrix remained roused. Spiked to dangerous, slipped vectors since her lapse in control, stray spurts of faulted power spun sullen patterns through the elements. The air sang with peril. Dissonance chimed from dead dust and rock like the wasp-thin clash of dropped steel.

  The Koriani matriarch forced control over terror. She steadied the crystal's riled focus. Adamant before an overwhelming surge of fury, she struggled and failed to regain either equilibrium or objectivity.

  In harsh fact, this one setback could hurt too much.

  For the imbalance was no longer so small as Lirenda's' starved craving, or her female fascination with male attraction. If Arithon s'Ffalenn was left a free hand with fate, Morriel faced a permanent failing. She could become the single matriarch since the first to break the chain of inherited power. The deepest of mysteries, the keys to prime inheritance itself, would pass the veil with her, forever lost from the Koriani Order's living store of knowledge.

  A moist brush of her palm and a steel-hard seal of binding severed the Waystone's roiled focus. While shivers of dread raked Morriel's weary flesh, she stroked the sweat-printed surface of the amethyst.

  Her choice was plain. Unless she risked an immeasurable disaster, she dared not suffer the Prince of Rathain to live.

  Beloved of the Fellowship of Seven he might be as the last of a chosen royal line, nonetheless he was born a mortal man. His days would have a thousand artless moments of pregnability. Morriel's forehead fretted into pleats as she pondered the thorns of her dilemma. The Koriani code forbade murder, an inconvenience she had ways to circumvent. Evading the Fellowship's interest would be harder. Any trap to take Arithon must be spun in dire subtlety to escape prying notice from Althain's Warden.

  An outside hand must act as her catspaw to accomplish the killing in her stead.

  Sealed in the icy chamber with the flat scent of dust and the taint of moth-rotten felt, Morriel Prime released a scratchy sigh. In her hands, the Great Waystone spiked a glimmer of cold violet against the masking darkness. Through its grand focus, she held the power to comb all Athera and align the precise junction of motive with its matching opportunity.

  Somewhere there lurked an unguarded mind with the passion to wish Arithon dead.

  Her task was to ferret out that individual, to assist just one bitter enemy to couple the means with the moment. If she spun her desire through subliminal suggestion, her bit of small meddling would never be traced to link her hand or her order to a plot of assassination.

  Interventions

  Hazed into deep-water swells by a scalding attack from a brigantine flying Arithon's blazon, Alestron's fleet of galleys is forced to jettison supplies of flour and hardtack to keep waves from crashing through the oarports; and as the last battered vessel limps into sheltered waters, their captains discover their proud flagship missing, with Mearn s'Brydion lost with her. . .

  As the autumn rains resume their dismal fall on Vastmark, and mists seep white through the valleys, a supply train out of Forthmark is waylaid by northern clansmen feal to Rathain, who strike in a whirlwind attack, leaving upset wagons and hamstrung oxen, and only when the officer of the guard seeks the duke's brother to deliver report of the incident does he hear that Parrien s'Brydion is nowhere to be found. . .

  In a chilly tent drummed by hard rainfall, surrounded by a war camp churned into thick mud, Lysaer s'Ilessid paces past guttered candles, his calm line of dictation closing a letter to be sent under seal to Duke Bransian of Alestron, 'You have my sincere grief, and my royal regret, that your brother Keldmar was not found among the living after your mercenaries became routed on the slopes behind Dier Kenton Vale . . .'

  IX. COUNTERPLOYS

  The rains returned colder, musked with the scent of dying bracken which presaged the dismal turn of season. Autumn came to Vastmark in shades of ochre and brown, then burst into a short-lived, false green as the hills sprang new shoots after summer's dry winds and drought. Each year, life in the low country seized one last frantic chance to throw off seed heads before the first killing frost.

  Like the doomed industry of the grasses, the remnants of Lysaer's brave warhost regrouped. Reduced to one-quarter of their original strength, wedded to their cause in grim tenacity, they drove on with their effort to send the Master of Shadow beneath the Wheel.

  The losses at Dier Kenton had convinced the last doubters of Arithon's broad-scale ability to sow ruin. If the Prince of the West could endure the decimation of his recruits from Tysan and Rathain and stay unshaken, his allies from Jaelot and Alestron, and the supporters garnered from Shand, took fire from his example. They poured out their hearts to meet his demands and match his unbending dedication.

  But now the shortening days turned the weather against them.

  Soaked peat made poor fires. The brick ovens for baking bread stayed dismantled, the wrapped iron pots corroded in mouldering canvas. Flour stores spoiled and cheeses grew rinds of sticky mould. The days dawned the same, dim under spun webs of mist that wisped and coiled through the corries; only now the fogs lingered, shedding silver drizzle and a miserable, pervasive clinging damp.

  Chain mail
and weapons lost their shine despite polishing, and the tents grew streaks of black mildew. Men slept on wet ground and donned byrnies splotched with rust to ride out and scour the uplands for the fugitive enemy.

  Arithon's motley force of shepherds melted before their patrols, elusive as wind. Or they lurked concealed in ambush, to rain down their killing flights of arrows. No day passed without casualties. If Lysaer still commanded a force eleven thousand strong, they were not enough to cordon off Vastmark's wild territory, with its seamed peaks and dim ravines and steep-sided, rock-scarred ranks of ridges. The best a scourging army could effect was a headhunter's aim, to pocket small groups of skirmishers, or scour the vales for flocks or unwary settlements, then close in and leave nothing alive.

  Against their armed numbers, the nomad tribes were pitifully few. Each death brought the Master of Shadow a loss he could ill afford, a life that left the shepherds one foothold less on the land to preserve family ties and survival.

  Lysaer laboured, tireless, to reforge the knit of troop morale. No matter what the hour, he arose to meet the sentries at every change of the watch. He heard each report from inbound scouts, unfailingly at hand to number their dead or credit their diligence, or acknowledge their smallest success. Thin and tired and regaled in soaked finery, he stood in chill darkness and engaged his gift of light to warm the garrison troops dispirited by the cheerless, dreary nights.

  Each dawn, while camp followers called coarse encouragement from damp wagons, the patrols rode out to sweep the mist-cloaked crags and comb the ravines for the sign of the Shadow Master.

  'He's out there,' Lysaer insisted, his confidence a balm to fuel faith. Nights he awakened to the tug of antipathy that bloomed into sweating, harsh nightmare: the sense of a step on the earth, or a current in the air, raised to a distinctive stab of awareness that warned of his half-brother's proximity.

  The hours when the feeling burned strongest, he dispatched Skannt's headhunters, backed by squads of Alestron's leaderless mercenaries. No few of these rode refitted to arms at his personal expense. Since the gear cast off in the rout behind Dier Kenton had vanished to tribal looters, Keldmar's divisions gave their loyalty in redoubled diligence to atone. No one berated them for giving way before a barrage wrought of sorcery. Prince Lysaer's direct word silenced any loudmouths who jeered. Still Alestron's men stung for shame that the enemy's escape had been accomplished through the break in their lines.

  They raked the hostile hills and splashed through the grabbing reeds of the bogs that spread like vivid stains along the bottomlands. At nightfall, most foray teams returned empty-handed, unblooded, chilled to the bone, and disheartened.

  Others suffered a lightning-swift attack, played through and finished before they could fight back. Their fallen died unavenged as they seethed in grim circles that netted them no target to strike back.

  For each paltry triumph garnered by the headhunters' tactics, shadows and sorceries claimed their ongoing toll. No matter how well-disciplined, the outlying skirmish lines became swallowed at random by unnatural dark. Arrows killed them. As often, the inbound supply trains straggled off their known route, bewildered and misled by illusion. Patrols later found them, bogged down in mud, or wandering lost, parted from their livestock and wagons.

  The sorry truth persisted as the cook tents thinned their gruel and shortened rations. Through a fortnight of blood and sweat and selfless effort, the manhunt launched after the Master of Shadow gained Lysaer no measurable results. By small nips and bites, his ranks were whittled by losses.

  Lord Commander Harradene of Etarra became a familiar sight, splashing from the puddled muck of the picket lines in his oversize boots and a cerecloth cloak which flapped off his broad shoulders like the hunchbacked plumage of a vulture. He was at hand to quell the upset when a pike rack beset by iyats brought a tent down in tatters, then sent the contents of the armourer's tool chest kiting through the high bracken, mallets and nails tumbling and tangling ahead of the men who raced to snatch them.

  'Your Grace, such misfortunes won't let up,' Lord Harradene importuned once the last errant tool had been netted in chain mail, and four shelterless men crouched on their hams in the rain, stitching up rents in soaked canvas. 'Any time troops suffer sour spirits, their angst will lure in the stray fiends. In this benighted country, Ath's adepts keep no hostels to drive the accursed creatures off. We could send to the Koriani hospice at Forthmark for talismans. But if our couriers drive their remounts any harder, they're going to break legs in the bogs. Another fortnight will pass before word of our need gets through.'

  Lysaer was seated on a camp stool sharpening a dagger. His hair beaded silver with wet, and his blue-and-gold surcoat a cry of unnatural colour against the unremitting gloom of wet hillsides, he looked up at the towering officer given rank as Lord Diegan's successor. 'You know such vexations are precisely how our enemy hopes to weaken us.' His mildness a mask over iron determination, he added, 'A whole lot worse than iyats will plague the five kingdoms if the Master of Shadow escapes alive.'

  Lord Commander Harradene gave back no comment.

  The Prince of the West laid aside whetstone and knife. He arose, snapped his fingers to his page, and received the cloak with Tysan's star over his shoulders. Then he waited, silent also, until the burly man of war who balked with folded arms could no longer sustain his level gaze.

  'Are you suggesting Etarra should withdraw?' asked Prince Lysaer.

  Flushed red by the implication that the allies from Jaelot and Alestron were more staunch, Lord Harradene gave way. 'Persistence is a credit, but it cannot stay the weather, nor lift the gloom of defeat off the troops. The hunger they suffer isn't helping. If this campaign's to win us aught but despair, our quarry had best be drawn and cornered quickly.'

  'See to your men and he shall be,' Lysaer pledged.

  An approaching jingle of steel, a man's bitten laugh, then the squelch of a fast stride through mud heralded the courier with the report from Skannt's last patrol. 'Mount a foray team,' the headhunter called, wringing out his cloak. 'We've seen more circles of flattened grass left by tents, and three pits of warm coals. Tracking dogs are out. There were tribesfolk watering a flock by a spring. By the sheep slots in the muck, they just barely departed.'

  'The men who take them get the mutton,' Lysaer promised on a smile as Harradene's gruff mood brightened to immediate enthusiasm. With the latest supply train three days overdue, the contest would spur chafing troops.

  In the dank flood of puddles, under misted wind and drizzle, the teams saddled horses and rode out in high heart.

  Although the lure of fresh meat spitting hot fat over their fires held the men to the trail through weary hours, the herders vanished into the crags, untraceable. Skannt's tracking hounds circled and sniffed for scent on rinsed gravel until their pads bled. Squads of riders charged up and down the foggy glens, lured on by the echoed barking of herd dogs, or the chance-caught glimpse of sheep filing through a break in the mists. They would arrive in sweating fury to find the site vacant. Whatever notched pass had let the herders slip by, the most diligent scouts found their war bands no path through the scarps to give chase.

  'Sorcery,' some of them muttered as they gave winded horses rein to breathe. 'The stones themselves could be witched.'

  Others argued over which routes were safe. The slides at Dier Kenton had undermined their trust in the steep-sided corries. The grain of high ledges rose grooved in wet like sheared lead, their walls etched in guano from eyries of wyvern, and their weed-choked, ruffled brown gulches gouged out by the scars of old rockfalls. Men took fair warning from the runes scraped by shepherds to mark where the ground was unstable.

  The more suspicious captains complained the placement was deliberate strategy. 'What are such signs if not decoys to divert us? Pay too close attention, and we'll ruin good mounts in the sinkholes or break our necks climbing boulders in the gullies.'

  On one point, weary men agreed in creeping, hoarse whispers behi
nd their officers' backs: Vastmark was a fiend's place, and the Shadow Master a genius in choosing the battleground upon which to break their hearts and spirits.

  That night, past firepits clogged with soggy ashes that had signally failed to roast any haunch of captured mutton, a rattling pound of hooves raised trail-weary men from their tents. The cry of Alestron from the sentries and the blazon worn by the outriders raised a swift flurry of expectations. But no wagons of supplies were forthcoming. Instead, a company of fifty lancers on sweat-lathered horses pounded into camp under the ducal banner.

  A splendid figure in his scarlet-and-gold surcoat, Lord Bransian s'Brydion vaulted from his saddle in a singing clash of war gear. He tossed his reins to a skin-wet royal squire and called in his boisterous bass, 'I've come to speak with Prince Lysaer.'

  A thin-faced equerry in Avenor's blue livery stepped out with a smoking torch. 'His Grace is in council with the division captains.'

  Duke Bransian ripped off his gauntlets, shedding wet in a pattering deluge to add to what drizzled from the sky. 'Which tent?' At the servant's fractional hesitation, he resumed in a blast of irritation, 'I don't give a damn if your liege is stark naked in his bath with six mistresses! I didn't ride forty leagues over Ath-forsaken gulches to stand in a downpour, waiting.'

  'I'll take you,' offered one of the sentries on guard before the drapes of the royal pavilion.

  Bransian grunted, then barked for his troop captain to stay at his side. 'The rest of you, commandeer a space and pitch camp. I'll join you when I've had my audience.' He followed the royal guardsman to what looked like a supply tent, then burst through its sagging entry without pause for a servant to announce him.

  The ongoing murmur of voices inside wavered into sharp silence. Lysaer s'Ilessid looked up where he stood at the centre of a torchlit trestle. His arms were braced on a tactical map, his pale hair and circlet a patch of brightness gouged gleaming out of the shadows. He was attended by his ranking senior officers, clad in splotched mail, or surcoats still mud-spattered from the field. The tallest and most imposing of these was Alestron's own commander of mercenaries.