TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Aware of whose presence loomed at the entry, that one straightened up from close council. 'My lord!'

  'Duke Bransian s'Brydion, accept my welcome,' greeted the Prince of the West. 'You have my condolence. By your arrival, I presume you received my letter concerning your brother, Keldmar?'

  The royal candour caused the mercenary who knew the duke to cringe.

  Bransian strode nearer, the clink of his spurs marking time to a tautened span of stillness. 'A scribbled word of sympathy would scarcely draw me here. And your sentiment's wasted.' He ripped off his mail coif. As though the steel were featherweight, he tossed it in a jingling arc. The captain who trailed at his shoulder fielded the catch with long-suffering familiarity. Over the sour clash of links, the duke added, 'I came because of this!'

  He raked a crumpled square of parchment from his breast, impaled it on his unsheathed dagger, then hurled the weapon across the crowded tent.

  The yellowed page fluttered, impelled by its missile of angry steel. The men-of-war nearest the trestle jostled clear, while the blade impaled with a choked-off clang through the centre of the flattened map.

  'Go on, read,' Bransian snapped, while the pins and counters representing men tumbled in rattling disarray. The ducal face flushed over the wet pelt of his beard. 'Your men want to know why their supply train is late? You can tell them that murdering bastard of Shadow has trapped my three brothers as his hostage.'

  Lysaer slit the parchment down its length rather than work the dagger free. His eyes, hard blue, scanned down lines of bold writing that strung him to rage of his own.

  '. . . the well-being of your brothers now held as forfeit. If you wish them to live, you will cut the supply lines across Shand that sustain the great warhost in Vastmark.'

  Over the outraged, incredulous murmur of the gathered senior officers, Bransian shouted, 'By my very name and lineage, the insult to s'Brydion is one I'll not suffer to bear!'

  His fury clashed with Lysaer's tempered calm like the testing tap of crossed sword blades. 'Are you telling me eleven thousand dedicated men will be abandoned to hunger because of a threat to three lives?' The prince yanked the knife from the map, while the upright markers which outlined proposed patrols scattered in ironic retreat. 'You know if you give way to this, our last chance of victory will be ruined.'

  Every man in camp knew the politics: the s'Brydion clan name was all that held the Selkwood barbarians from plundering every wagon to cross the wilds of Shand.

  Bransian's eyes glittered like sheared iron as he shouldered his way to the trestle. 'You bear the blood of Tysan's caithdein on your hands, an affront no clanborn dares forgive. If your enemy is my enemy, that's no binding tie. The lives you would sacrifice are my brothers'!' The parked bulk of his frame set torches and candles into flickering eclipse. Amid the lick of wild shadows, his stance seemed as rock, implacable before royal sovereignty. 'Did you forget? Half of your vaunted eleven thousand are my own. How dare you presume my close family is worth less than the neck of one shadow-bending fugitive!'

  Lysaer faced that lion's burst of temper in outright, scornful censure. 'For Maenalle's just arraignment for execution, I owe no living man apology. And while I share sympathy for the plight of your kinsmen, to measure their lives against the death of the Shadow Master is a mistake that could threaten us all.'

  His hands locked to the dagger and parchment in restraint, Lysaer gave Bransian's hard-breathing ire no space at all to reply. 'This Teir's'Ffalenn's end is worth any cost, as your mercenaries here have stood witness. Even hungry, even abandoned by their lord, they will stay.' He finished in passionate entreaty to hook even the most grieving heart. 'Our effort must not fail here. Innocents rely on our protection to bring this fell sorcerer down.'

  'Oh, he'll die for his effrontery, never fear.' Bransian held out his huge hand, received back his knife, snapped it home in the sheath at his wrist. 'I'll kill the slinking spy myself, not only for Alestron, but to see my brothers safe. Yet before my arrow or my steel takes his life, or until Mearn, Keldmar and Parrien are won free of his hands, no more of your supply wagons will have my escort across Vastmark. No troops from Alestron will march alongside your banner.'

  'Add to our cause, or weaken us all,' Lysaer warned.

  Bransian spat. 'I'll take back our field troops and plough apart these mountains. What you've failed to accomplish with a warhost, I shall finish alone with Keldmar's remaining six thousand.'

  'Then issue your orders,' Lysaer flung back in brittle challenge. 'See if your fool's cause can draw them to abandon my side.'

  'His Grace is right,' ventured the mercenary captain in rooted, unnerving conviction. 'My lord, even for Keldmar, we cannot agree to desert.'

  'Desert!' Bransian bristled. 'What cant is this? Fiends plague! It's my treasury serves up your pay. Our people never joined this campaign for the pretty scruples! Take care how you speak. The one you pay lip service with royal title is no prince to command the fealty of any man born in Melhalla!'

  The captain held ground in granite calm. 'You were not here for the murder of twenty-eight thousand, nor did you see your own seasoned troops undone by illusion and sorcery. The Prince of the West sees a danger in this Shadow Master that runs beyond blood ties or kingdoms. His gift of light is promised to guard us. Any troop riding against this enemy without protection is begging a foolhardy end.'

  'Sithaer! You speak of the rockslide that mauled Dier Kenton Vale?' The tawny spikes of Bransian's moustache lifted into a sneer. 'Everyone knows this countryside's unstable. Your prince's warhost died of plain tactics. Any cornered fugitive would've chosen faulty ground to save his skin when a mass of armed might fit to flatten a whole kingdom came trampling in to seek his death.'

  'Nonetheless,' the captain insisted, 'Avenor's gold replaced our lost arms. We stand as the prince's men now.'

  'Starve with him then, for his morals.' Bransian poised, eyes glittering, and regarded the Prince of the West, who had not moved. Eye-to-eye, the pair faced off, Alestron's duke furious, and Lysaer, detached in regal sadness.

  'I see nothing I say will convince you.' Magnanimous, Lysaer creased the ripped parchment. To a sparkle of rings, he laid Arithon's missive across the rucked map on the trestle. 'Go in grace, my lord duke. Your brothers have my prayers for safe deliverance.'

  A laugh ripped from Bransian's throat. 'Don't trouble the creator over them. I can kill an enemy and spare my born kin without any plea to Ath's grace for assistance.'

  His captain of horse still hard at his heels, he stamped outside, immersed in rapid-fire orders. 'Tell my escort, and any of our mercenaries who might listen, to pack up now and resaddle. We've better things to do than to bed down with ninnies who breathe righteous principle and snivel in shrinking fear of shadows!'

  The noise and the shouting disrupted half the night, as the Duke of Alestron gathered up his banners and his men and clattered into the darkness. At the end, some four hundred of Keldmar's command broke away and rode with him. The cavalcade was lost from view before dawn, swallowed up by the mists and the drab rains of Vastmark as if they had never existed.

  In Lysaer's command tent, by the dribbled stubs of stale candles, the prince's scribe folded and sealed the last of a thick stack of dispatches. While the scent of hot wax curled through the reek of mouldered leather and the martial tang of oil and filed steel, the courier held waiting to ride scraped his stubbled chin with the back of a gloved knuckle. 'Do you think any of those deserters will survive?'

  Exhausted, immersed in deep thought, Lysaer speared his quill pen into the throat of the inkwell. 'They're not deserters.' Regret weighed his shoulders beneath the trim tabard, with its gold bordered edges and the embroidered star of Tysan tarnished a bit green from the damp. 'Any foe of Arithon's is our firm ally. Let no man dare make the claim that Duke Bransian didn't ride out with my blessing.'

  'You don't fault him for abandoning help with the supply train?' asked the guard by the door flap. He took liberty for the fac
t this prince never disparaged lowly rank, but would indulge his curiosity with clear answer.

  Lysaer smiled as though the sun had come out and tapped the sealed pile of dispatches. 'I've inherited some five thousand of Alestron's best mercenaries. Duke Bransian may have withdrawn his family banner. We'll just have to see that Erlien's barbarians don't hear the same men are now taking pay from my coffers.'

  To the courier's stifled awe, the prince laughed outright, a balm after hours of stiff protocol as officers came and left with terse orders. 'I'm assigning the mercenaries to resecure our supply lines from the coast,' Lysaer affirmed in that logic which could banish raw fear. 'What did you all think? That I'd stand down and leave because one old blood duke threw a tantrum? No. That would be a tawdry epitaph for the brave men who died, and small excuse to others who rely on us.'

  * * *

  Under the mists, as electrum veils of drizzle gave way to a colder, heavier thrum of rain, the Vastmark valleys crawled with armed men. For the shepherds under Arithon's protection, despite the hard-fought illusion of success, patrols were getting harder to avoid. Sheep and non-combatant families with young children were suffering under the strain. They slept in coiled nerves for the breathless word brought by scouts in the deeps of the night, then the hasty, rushed moves under cover of darkness, with babes muffled silent, and dogs nipping the skittish heels of panicked sheep.

  In an open ditch choked with gorse, Dakar swiped dripping hair from his eyes and numbered the aches of exhaustion. The unscrupulous urge became plaguing temptation, to abandon the tenets of the Law of the Major Balance. How he itched to conjure a forbidden set of seals, draw the separate parties of enemy scouts to mistake each other for Arithon's archers, and let them noisily demolish each other. Certainly if he had to spend another day seeking permissions of sheep to seal illusions to make them look like rocks; or the same for rocks, to make them wear the semblance of sheep, he would beg for a mad fit of prescience just to escape his miserable boredom.

  The clan scout sharing his guard post expressed the same sour view. 'Stubborn as a beggar's biting lice.' Below them, spread out like a stream of plugging ants, a line of troops scoured the gulches. Although worn and hungry on shortened rations, they ground on with their task in obdurate zeal, and unshaken belief in Lysaer's cause.

  Yet faith could not reduce their real suffering, or the rain, and each day with its grinding weight of losses. Four bands of scouts had been diverted from the insignificant, rugged seam that led to the glen Dakar guarded. He watched amazed as a fifth party laboured up the rise, a spatter of pebbled silver against the gloom.

  The leader's voice carried in surly complaint through the cleft. 'Damned rocks. Fit for nothing but turning a man's ankle.'

  'Pleased to oblige and the more fool you,' Dakar breathed on a whisper. For the nature of stone was to absorb and reflect the influence of its environment. The wards the spellbinder had left strung like latticed light across the hillside now compounded the boulders' propensity to align to their surrounding energies. They were keyed to awareness, letting malediction and injury become turned back in kind.

  Throughout the day, the switched-back little sheep track had become adept at shrugging off scouts who expressed their weary hatred of patrols.

  A second later, to a grate of slipped shale, the man-at-arms who maligned the ground where he trod lost his footing and sat. A high-pitched curse left his lips. 'Fiends plague! My leg's wrenched. This place is Sithaer itself!'

  'Better and better.' Dakar coughed back bursting laughter and wormed from his niche, neglecting to wince as the wet funnelled trickles down his hood. 'Best to leave,' he urged Caolle's scout. 'We don't want to witness what that harebrain's unleashed. Trust me, gravel never forgets an insult, and if iyats are near, they'll delight to play along for the malice. Nobody's going to use the path through this notch for a ten-day without risking a broken neck.'

  The Mad Prophet scrambled upright behind the ridge, soaked and dishevelled, and marvelling still for the newfound acuity to his mage-sight. With each passing day, he realized afresh how much earth and air had forgiven his clumsiness through the years he had studied with Asandir. The old platitude was no fable, that the world's luck walked in a Fellowship Sorcerer's shadow.

  More cautious with his oaths of displeasure, Dakar shivered under soggy clothing. 'How are we holding?'

  'There's fighting, northside of the fissure,' the scout admitted, his braid fallen loose and fanned in plastered ends to his leathers. 'Duke Bransian's guard,' which meant a show of muscle by men who were fresh and well fed. 'They shouldn't break through now. Arithon's there.'

  'To draw them, or maze them in shadow?' Dakar asked in concern.

  The scout shrugged. 'Whatever's needed. He promised the tribe.'

  'Take me.' Dakar skidded downslope over grass choked in gravel and loose scree. The day had become an exercise in frustration, repeated sweeps by foray teams blundering to penetrate a glen where a tribeswoman laboured in childbirth. Made helpless by her time, she was attended by two midwives in a herder's shelter. Until the babe was born and her condition could withstand a litter, archers and clan scouts had dedicated themselves to divert enemies and seal off the passes.

  That the affray had come to open fighting offered the worst of ill news. Bransian's company would press hard to gain ground defended by Arithon's allies. The duke's lancers had been scavenging the countryside like dog packs, shooting the wyverns off corpses and lying in ambush around springs in search of his captive brothers, to no avail.

  More archers could die in one hour, here, than on the slopes behind Dier Kenton Vale. That Arithon s'Ffalenn should spend lives for a promise to the young mother's kinsmen was a folly no one dared argue. The shepherd tribes of Vastmark might lie under Lord Erlien's sovereignty, as vested caithdein of Shand, but for their help against Lysaer's warhost, and the use of their pastures for his battleground, the Prince of Rathain had made them his personal trust.

  Dakar laboured through a gully, then started up the flank of the hill on the glen's farther side. 'If word reaches Skannt's patrols, his Grace could die for the sake of that mother and babe.'

  'I said so.' The scout hunched, face turned against a dismal slash of rain. 'Ath Creator can't make our liege listen when his mind's fixed.'

  'Then hurry.' Head down, Dakar ploughed through a hollow choked with stunted evergreen. Through branches crippled into tangles by the abuses of weather and poor soil, he heard arrows whine from the ridgetop, then the low, clipped accents as a clansman maligned a snapped bowstring. Past a crest of lichened boulders, the Mad Prophet collided with a herdsman whose dun frieze blended with the landscape.

  'We're friends!' he yelped, before a dagger thrust on reflex could skewer him. 'How can we help?'

  The offending blade tipped expressively up the slope, and its wielder said in dialect, 'Wish Alestron's stamina to Sithaer.'

  'That's his sister, in labour,' Caolle's scout informed Dakar. 'How much longer do we need to keep them off ?' He began to extricate his bow from his cloak, kept wrapped against his body to spare the string from the wet.

  'She's delivered an hour ago. A fine son. They're moving her now.' A clash of steel past the rise caused the shepherd to wince. 'Arithon's said he'll hold the lancers off himself so our people aren't pinned in the gulch.'

  'No.' Dakar shoved ahead. His hood blew back to free hair screwed in rings against the plump flesh of his neck. When an arrow creased the wind and just missed him, he flung himself flat and crawled. In a cleft of puddled shale the defenders grouped, beleaguered, the rain in their eyes, and the gloom falling fast, to rob their slim advantage of height.

  Arithon was with them, wrapped in someone's borrowed cloak. Where his own had gone was anybody's guess; Dakar had seen him strip his shirt to cover a man struck by a mace, that his kinswoman not be haunted in her grief by the memory of his shattered face.

  'You have to pull back.' Dakar shoved through the press and spoiled the aim of a bowman to
make his point. Through curses in tribal vernacular he insisted, 'Skannt's got patrols out. Use shadow, and they'll pin your location.'

  'Darkness is closing.' Arithon straightened, a strip of hide he had sliced off his boot cuff in hand. He tossed the leather to an archer who had welted his wrist on his bowstring, the result of a bracer clawed off in a climb. 'I can make the defence look like nightfall.'

  'That's a fool's risk and you know it!' Dakar need not belabour the frightening facts: Lysaer's encampment was scarcely a league down the valley, and any use of shadow would provoke the lawless forces of Desh-thiere's curse into play.

  The shepherd he had jostled knelt, drew, and loosed. Downslope, a man screamed to a sliding clash of metal while the Mad Prophet threatened, 'If you stay, I fight beside you.'

  'Dakar, you can't.' Arithon looked up, his dismay blurred in streamers of mist. 'Your talents are needed to clear the way to the pass. Caolle's sent word. There are headhunters entrenched to cut off our retreat to the high country.'

  'My duty to Asandir was to defend your royal life, and for no light reason.' The Mad Prophet met and strove to hold that fierce stare, then flushed and gave way before the obvious. Any sally by headhunters could create a vicious standoff, see their small force trapped between the blundering aggression of two disunited sets of enemies.

  'You do see.' Arithon dashed rain off his stubbled chin, then sheathed his dagger. 'For that, I owe you everything.'

  Dakar broke away, unwilling to speak. The storm was driving harder, and downpour raked the mountainside in sheets. Morning could see the summits sheathed in grey sleet, with the north face of the passes glazed in shining, glass ice. His mage-sight could sound the elements for what the most vigilant scout would miss. He would know if the trail lay safe to cross, or sense early warning of an ambush.